Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls & Unsolved Mysteries

by Joseph A. Citro, Bonnie Christensen (Illustrator)

Overview

Take a chilling tour of spooky New England legends . . .
 
Visit Vermont with this comprehensive collection of tales, legends, folklore, ghost stories, and strange-but-true facts—and enjoy supernatural side trips to the surrounding areas of New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Quebec—with this delightful guide to the region’s haunted history.
 
From Chittenden’s Ghost Shop to the Hubbardton Horror to the Mystery of the Bennington Triangle, Green Mountain Ghosts is filled with local lore and characters more colorful than any fall foliage!
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547527321
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,026,393
File size:	657 KB

About the Author

Called the "Bard of the Bizarre" by the Boston Globe, Joseph A. Citro is a popular lecturer and public-radio personality.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Vermont's Ghostly Gallery

I SUSPECT EVERY TOWN IN VERMONT has at least one haunted house. And because we have 255 political divisions — 237 towns, 9 cities, 2 unorganized towns, 3 unorganized townships and 4 gores — telling the story of each ghostly residence would require a work nothing short of encyclopedic.

Consequently, in the following pages, we'll only be able to visit a few of Vermont's more notable ghostly haunts.

The first section, Communing with Spirits, introduces Vermonters who have held conversations with mysterious supernatural entities. In one case, the dialogue cost the individual his reputation; in another case, it cost the man's life.

In the second division, we'll visit a few Haunted Houses, just to get a sampling of what can lurk behind closed doors.

And in the last section, as a reminder that ghosts don't confine their activities to houses, we'll explore a number of Haunted Spots — parcels of land whose ethereal boundaries natives and visitors cross at their own risk.

To begin our journey, we'll travel to Chittenden, a little mountain town not far from Rutland.

The story of the Eddy brothers is one of the weirdest things ever to happen in Vermont. See if you don't agree ...

Most of us learned long ago that it's not a good idea to talk to strangers, and nothing could be stranger than the entities you'll meet in this section.

CHAPTER 2

Communing with Spirits

At last he was reduced, like the newly bereft mothers who came to wail at one last vision of babies doubly torn from the body, to belief at once grudging and enthusiastic.

— Seth Steinzor

Echoes of the Eddys

Chittenden's Ghost Shop

It was a case of nineteenth-century ghostbusting. The year: 1874. The investigator: Henry Steel Olcott, on assignment from the New York Daily Graphic. The target: highly peculiar goings-on at a remote Vermont farmhouse in the tiny mountain town of Chittenden.

The house was a shunned place. Some locals called it "the ghost shop"; others swore it was "the abode of the devil." It was owned by William and Horatio Eddy, two middle-aged nearly illiterate brothers, and their sister, Mary.

Olcott, renowned for his rigorous investigations of corruption in military arsenals and naval shipyards after the Civil War, had been awarded the title of Colonel.

But it wasn't bandits in uniform the Colonel was after this time — it was supernatural creatures, ghosts and spectral phenomena of such magnitude as to be unrivaled before or since. The events at the Eddy farm were so powerful and strange that people came from all over the world to witness them. In some circles, Chittenden, Vermont, became known as "The Spirit Capital of the Universe."

Olcott's job was to determine whether William and Horatio were villains or visionaries, humbugs or heroes. If they were gifted clairvoyants, he would tell the world there was some validity to this "spiritualism" business. If they were ingenious charlatans, he'd expose them and let public contempt do its worst. In either event, Olcott was determined to be fair.

In his comprehensive book, The History of Spiritualism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle describes the Colonel this way: "Olcott was not at that time identified with any psychic movement — indeed his mind was prejudiced against it, and he approached his task rather in the spirit of an 'exposer.' He was a man of clear brain and outstanding ability, with a high sense of honor ... loyal to a fault, unselfish, and with that rare moral courage which will follow truth and accept results even when they oppose one's expectations and desires. He was no mystical dreamer but a very practical man of affairs...."

Perhaps there was no better man for the job. But what about the mysterious Eddy brothers themselves? What type of men were they?

Sketchy records indicate they were descended from a long line of psychics. In Salem, their maternal grandmother four times removed had been sentenced to be hanged for witchcraft in 1692. She escaped with the help of friends.

Their grandmother had second sight; she'd often go into trances and converse with entities no one else could see.

Their mother, Julia Ann MacCoombs of Weston, Vermont, moved to the Chittenden farmhouse when she married Zephaniah Eddy in 1846. There she amazed and frightened the townspeople with predictions and visions. Her husband, an abusive, narrow-minded lout, discouraged further displays of her powers, convinced they were the work of The Evil One. After a while, Julia learned to hide her gifts.

But the unseen forces were impossible to conceal when the couple began having children. Inexplicable pounding resounded through the barren rooms of the ramshackle farmhouse. The parents and their visitors heard disembodied voices near the cribs. Sometimes the helpless infants were removed from their beds and transported elsewhere by unseen hands.

As the boys grew, occult forces strengthened to the point that spirits became visible. On several occasions, Zephaniah said he saw his sons playing with unfamiliar children, children that would vanish when he approached. Billy and Horatio couldn't go to school; their unobservable companions made it impossible. Loud hammering from nowhere disrupted the local one-room schoolhouse. There were tales of invisible hands yanking books away from terrified children. Objects — ink wells, chalk and rulers — were reported to fly around the room.

Zephaniah beat his sons, but the strange antics continued. He grew furious every time the boys fell spontaneously into a trance. First he'd accuse them of being slackers; then he'd declare they were in league with the devil. He'd try to wake them by punching or pinching them until their skin was black and blue. But the boys didn't waken.

Once, at the advice of a Christian friend, Anson Ladd, Zephaniah doused the boys with boiling water. When that indelicate approach failed, he allowed Ladd to drop a red- hot coal into William's hand to exorcise the devil. The boy didn't stir, but he bore a scar in his palm until his dying day.

Then, perhaps in a moment of twisted inspiration, Zephaniah realized he could profit from the "devil's" work. In exchange for a goodly sum of money, he released his sons to the custody of a traveling showman who took them on tour throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe.

They toured for fourteen years, performing their odd feats not only in front of audiences, but also before skeptics and self-proclaimed "psychic investigators" who tied them up to keep them from cheating, or filled their mouths with hot wax to prevent "ventriloquism." Punched, poked, prodded and pinched, they were left indelibly scarred and permanently misshapen — but their gifts were never discredited. The Eddys were mobbed in Lynn, Massachusetts, stoned in Danvers, even shot. William Eddy was irreparably disfigured by bullet wounds.

It is difficult to imagine a more horrible childhood. When the parents died, the brothers and Mary retreated to the family place in Chittenden. It is no wonder they grew into cold, suspicious, unfriendly men who, Olcott reported, "... make newcomers feel ill at ease and unwelcome."

Clearly, these were not glib and affable con men.

They were something else.

But what?

It is at this point in 1874 that Colonel Olcott's adventure begins. Picture Olcott arriving by train in Rutland during the height of August's heat. Imagine the bumpy, dusty, sweaty, seven-mile journey by stagecoach into a "grassy valley shut in by the slopes of the Green Mountains." Here, Olcott entered the "plain, dull, and uninteresting town" of Chittenden. From there, he made his way to "the ghost shop," Eddy's isolated two-and-a-half-story farmhouse on the road south toward East Pittsford.

And imagine meeting the Eddys for the first time. Somber, sinister and silent, they must have been an unnerving pair. Olcott wrote, "There is nothing about [them] to inspire confidence on first acquaintance. The brothers ... are sensitive, distant, and curt to strangers ... [They] look more like hard-working rough farmers than prophets or priests [with their] dark complexions, black hair and eyes, stiff joints, [and] clumsy carriage...." They also spoke in a thick Vermont dialect, which often made them difficult to understand.

But in the ten weeks Colonel Olcott spent with the brothers, it wasn't horrors that he witnessed. Instead, it was a fantastic display of mind-numbing spiritual phenomena that even now remains without explanation.

Nowadays, we're not used to spiritualist displays. We wonder just exactly what Olcott saw in that 17-by-35.5-foot "circle room" above the kitchen of the Eddys' mysterious farmhouse.

Apparently the seances progressed something like this:

Every night of the week except Sunday, guests and visitors assembled on wooden benches before a platform lighted only by a kerosene lamp recessed in a barrel.

William Eddy, the primary medium, would mount the platform and enter a tiny closet known as his "spirit cabinet." For a suspenseful moment, all would be silent. Then far-off voices would speak or sing, often accompanied by music. Tambourines came to life and soared around the stage; ectoplasmic hands appeared, grappling, waving, touching the spectators.

Tension mounted.

Shortly, from behind the curtained door of the cabinet, ethereal forms began to emerge. One at a time or in groups. Twenty, even thirty in the course of an evening. Sometimes they were completely visible and seemingly solid. Other times they'd only partially materialize, or remain transparent. The figures varied in size from that of an infant to those well over six feet (William Eddy himself was only five-foot nine). Although the most familiar ghostly visitors were elderly Vermonters or American Indians (the sprightly Honto in her beads and moccasins or the sullen giant Santum) a vast array of representative nationalities appeared in costume: black Africans, Russians, Kurds, Orientals and more.

Where'd they all come from? Olcott was well versed in the methods of stage magicians and fraudulent mediums. His detailed examinations of the spirit cabinet disclosed only plaster and lathe. No trap doors, no hidden compartments, no room for anyone but the medium himself.

Then the apparitions would perform, singing, dancing, chatting with the spectators; they'd produce weapons, scarves and musical instruments. In fact, the wondrous Eddy exhibitions included all the manifestations known to psychic science at the time: rappings, moving objects, spirit paintings and drawings, prophesy, speaking in strange tongues, healing, spirit communication, human levitation, musical instruments playing, uncanny hands appearing, ghostly writing, remote vision, clairvoyance.

But most amazing were the materializations. Olcott concluded that such a show would require a whole troupe of actors and several trunks full of costumes. With the help of carpenters and engineers, Olcott made a thorough search of the premises. His conclusion: there was simply no place to hide people or props.

And such a show would be expensive to put on every night. The brothers were poor; they, along with their sister, did all the housework themselves. Half the visitors didn't pay, the rest gave only eight dollars a week for room and board. No charge was ever made for the seances. So how could the Eddys compensate actors, researchers, costumers and the designers of complicated "illusions"?

Some of the spectators recognized friends and long- deceased relatives among the apparitions. One woman spoke at length, in Russian, to the specter of her dead husband. How was it possible? The illiterate Eddys hadn't really mastered their own tongue, how could they hold fluent conversations in no fewer than six foreign languages?

As part of his investigation, Olcott got the Honto spirit to agree to be weighed on a Fairbanks platform scale he'd brought along for the purpose. She appeared to be about five-three and, if corporeal, would weigh around 135 pounds. She was weighed four times on the same evening. The results were puzzling: 88, 58, 58 and 65 pounds. William Eddy himself weighed 179 pounds.

At the end of the demonstration, the forms would either reenter the cabinet or vanish into mist before the wide eyes of puzzled observers.

One account was told by an eyewitness — Franklin Bolles of Hartford, Connecticut — in a letter to the Rutland Herald dated June 1875: "... my wife's mother ... deceased March 1859, at the age of 78 years, appeared to us in white clothing, looking so natural that we recognized her instantly. She stood outside the cabinet curtain, leaned her body forward, and stretched out her arms to her daughter, as if she were longing to embrace her. Mrs. Prior asked if she could not speak to us, and she seemed to make a desperate effort to comply. But suddenly, as if she had exhausted all her power of materialization in the attempt, her arms dropped, and her form melted down to the floor, and disappeared from our view. The figure did not dissolve into a mist and disperse laterally, but sank down and disappeared, as if every particle comprising her frame had suddenly lost its cohesion with every other, and the whole fell into a heap together."

One investigator, Dr. Beard, a medical man from New York, attracted a lot of attention when, on the strength of a single visit, he proclaimed that the figures were all nothing but impersonations by William Eddy himself. Beard boasted that he could easily reproduce all the effects with "three dollars worth of theatrical properties."

Olcott's longer and more rigorous investigation suggests something far more complicated. So does sworn testimony by numerous witnesses. One example comes from a Doctor Hodges of Stoneham, Massachusetts, who, along with four other witnesses, signed a document saying: "We certify ... that Santum was out on the platform when another Indian of almost as great a stature came out, and the two passed and repassed each other as they walked up and down. At the same time, a conversation was being carried on between [spirits known as] George Dix, Mayflower, old Mrs. Morse and Mrs. Eaton inside the cabinet. We recognized the familiar voice of each."

One wonders how William alone could have pulled that off.

Olcott's ten-week stay at the farmhouse seems a tremendous feat of endurance considering the plain food, hard living and unfriendly hosts. He came away disliking the gloomy brothers. Yet at the same time, Olcott was absolutely confident of their psychic powers. He chronicled his experience in a series of articles for the New York Daily Graphic and in a remarkable book called People from the Other World. Reading these today, it is difficult to imagine any precaution this fair-minded researcher didn't take. The book is full of detailed drawings of the house and its construction, all of which illustrate the measures Olcott took to investigate and disclose deception. He also reproduces statements from respectable carpenters and tradespeople who examined everything for trickery.

In all, Olcott chronicled the appearance of well over 400 different supernatural entities. He collected hundreds of witness testimonies and dozens of sworn affidavits from laborers, lawyers, farmers, physicians, merchants, musicians, bankers, bakers, housewives and historians. All had personally observed the manifestations of men, women, children and even babies, most of which came from the spirit cabinet, then roamed freely around the "circle room."

Whenever a seance ended, the spirit cabinet and William were thoroughly searched. Both showed the same result: a chair with a man tied to it — and nothing else. No Indian buckskins, no costumes or clothing, no musical instruments, spears, daggers or pistols — -just a man in a deep trance.

Horatio Eddy died in 1922. William followed in 1932 at age 99. Now, unfortunately, so much time has passed that very few, if anyone, can remember the intriguing brothers.

In 1944, Alton Blackington interviewed several Chittenden residents for a radio show about the Eddys. One man recalled a visit to. William and Horatio. He found them working alone in a cornfield. After a few minutes, "... two other figures appeared out of nowhere and followed the Eddys wherever they went."

As recently as 1980, Burlington journalist Greg Guma interviewed two elderly Chittenden residents who had known the family.

Mabel Potter, aged 80 at the time of the interview, had moved into Horatio's house in 1924. She recalled how townspeople had perceived the Eddys: "... people here were scared to death of them. They thought they were witches, I guess. When we come up here, they spoke about them and everybody seemed to be awfully afraid of them."

Guma asked Mrs. Potter if she thought the Eddys were tricksters.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls & Unsolved Mysteries"
by .
Copyright © 1994 Joseph A. Citro.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Foreword,
Introduction,
Epigraph,
Vermont's Ghostly Gallery,
Communing with Spirits,
Haunted Houses,
Haunted Spots,
Vampires, Graveyards and Ghouls,
Whose Woods Are These?,
Here Monsters Dwell,
The Monster Hunter,
The Hunt,
Champ Scrapbook,
The Alien Aquarium,
Alien Skies,
Perchance To Dream,
Curses!,
The Vermont Character,
Lingering Mysteries,
Sources,
Vermont's Ghostly Gallery,