Every October the local news here in Massachusetts tries to balance stories about Salem (aka Witch City) with haunted or spooky places in other parts of the state. Often profiled are:
Concord’s Colonial Inn, whose Rooms 24 and 27 might be haunted by the ghosts of Revolutionary War soldiers;
The Dover Demon, last seen in 1977 (also first seen in 1977);
The USS Salem, a haunted ship docked in Quincy;
Fall River’s Lizzie Borden House, where Lizzie murdered her stepmother and father with 18 and 11 whacks of an axe, respectively; and
The Hoosac Tunnel in the Berkshires, haunted by ghosts whose lives were lost in the constructing of it.
It’s easy to see why other areas want to get in on the Halloween fun. Being the Witch City has been intensely profitable for Salem, a town of around 44,000 people which draws nearly one million tourists during the haunted season. Salem is popular year-round. Dave and I visited it a lot when we lived north of Boston. Dave’s father ran his compass-adjusting business from an office in the downtown. In addition to the witch trials and witchy stuff, there are a harbor, historic buildings, an art museum, and restaurants, galleries, and shops, all a short walk from the commuter rail station.
The 2022 non-Salem local news smorgasbord included the Bridgewater Triangle, a paranormal vortex which is both new and near to me. The Triangle’s points are defined by three southeastern Mass towns: Abington, Rehoboth, and Freetown. It’s a tall, skinny thing, the shape of a witch’s hat. Loren Coleman, who terms himself a “cryptozoologist,” coined the name in his 1983 book Mysterious America, hoping to latch onto the cachet of the Bermuda Triangle. The spooky field’s been a profitable one for Coleman, who’s published more than 40 books on cryptids, folklore, mysterious places, etc. He even has his own museum, the Cryptozoology Museum, in Portland, Maine.
The Bridgewater Triangle covers roughly 200 square miles. Like any area of this size, there are plenty of places where terrible things have happened that could have left some kind of psychic stamp behind. Or so the believers say. One of the spooky places is the Hockomock Swamp. Hockomock means “the place where spirits dwell,” and it may have been cursed by the Wampanoag leader Metacomet, also known as King Philip, after a failed rebellion against the colonists in the 1670s. Visitors have reported sightings of thunderbirds and ginormous snakes, bigfeets, strange lights, etc. Other mysterious creatures of the Triangle include a spectral red-headed hitchhiker on Route 44 and pukwudgies, which are knee-high porcupine-trolls who dislike humans.
There are various abandoned buildings that may be haunted by wounded spirits, such as the Taunton State Hospital, which used to house mental patients, the one-room Hornbine School, and the Raynham-Taunton Greyhound Track.
There are curious rock formations. Solitude Stone, a rock with a poem carved into it. Profile Rock, an outcropping that looks like a thinking man—or did until the nose fell off a few years back. There are signs commemorating once-upon-a-time places. I’m partial to the one on the site of what used to be the John Selee sawmill, whose owner ran the nightshift at the mill using satanic imps. More power to him, I say; wouldn’t overworking imps be marginally better than overworking people?
There are true crime sites. The Lizzie Borden house falls within the triangle, and so does the Freetown-Fall River State Forest, a place where cult rituals and sacrifices were held in the late 1900s; it was also a place where some criminals disposed of their victims’ bodies.
Despite all the attractions and mysteries, I don’t think that the Triangle will ever prove as big a profit center as Salem’s Halloween festivities. There’s a lot to see, but you need a car to get around. By contrast, the whole of Salem is about 19 square miles, and the historic area’s just a couple of miles, end to end.
The biggest difference, to my mind, is that Salem has narrowed its focus by grounding its attractions in a historic incident about which most people agree, morally. The witch trials were a horror and a miscarriage of justice. The Triangle legends are all over the place, thematically. Some are scary, some are curiosities. There’s no common focus. Worse yet, many involve the conflicts between indigenous peoples and colonists. There’s not nearly as much consensus about the morality there.
I confess that in the matter of ghosts, spirits, and psychic stuff generally I incline to the philosophy of the Scooby Doo gang. Behind the mystery we’ll probably find a real estate developer or some other human who’d’a got away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids. Still, if the weather continues fine, I might go take a look at the Hockamock Swamp and see if I can spot a thunderbird or dodge a pukwudgie.
the jeanSpace 