Joseph A. Citro - Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls & Unsolved Mysteries

Copyright 1994 by Joseph A. Citro

Illustrations copyright 1994 by Bonnie Christensen

Foreword copyright 1994 by Howard Frank Mosher

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Citro, Joseph A.

Green mountain ghosts, ghouls & unsolved mysteries / Joseph A. Citro; illustrations by Bonnie Christensen; foreword by Howard Frank Mosher.
p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-881527-50-3

1. FolkloreVermont. 2. FolkloreVermontGreen Mountains. I. Title. II. Title: Green mountain ghosts, ghouls, and unsolved mysteries.

GR110.V4C57 1994 94-25962
398'.09743dc20

e ISBN 978-0-547-52732-1
v2.0816

This book is for
Rod, Holly, Brian and Allison
my family.

W HEN I FIRST SETTLED IN V ERMONTS G REEN M OUNTAINS thirty years ago, I knew immediately that Id discovered a last New England frontier. Here were magnificent, unspoiled lakes and rivers, extensive forests still wild enough to become hopelessly lost in, some of the most independent-minded and self-sufficient people left on the face of the Earth, andbest of all, so far as I was concernedhundreds of wonderful stories just waiting to be written. Every hill farmer and horse logger and old-time hunter and trapper seemed to have dozens of spellbinding tales to tell. As an apprentice storyteller myself, I felt as though Id struck a bonanza.

Many of the stories I heard involved mysteries, and a good number of these mysteries touched on the supernatural. A week or so after I arrived in Vermont, my landlady mentioned to me that shed just learned of the tragic death in a car accident of her first cousin. Quite matter-of-factly, she added, I wasnt greatly surprised. Last night my closet door opened and shut itself three times. I knew right then that someone in the family was going to die.

Ill admit that I was skeptical. Yet how could I totally discount anything told to me by this intelligent, kind, tough-minded woman who, I would learn later, had saved her family farm during the Depression by working side by side with her husband in the barn and the fields for twelve and fourteen hours a day and then, under the cover of darkness, manufacturing moonshine whiskey to pay the mortgage?

Not long afterward, a boy from a neighboring farm took me trout fishing on a remote mountain brook. When we came to a deep pool at the bottom of a falls, he remarked that about a year ago, hed waked up in the night to see, standing sopping wet in an unearthly light at the foot of his bed, a strange young boy. The following morning, when he told his mother about the visitation, she turned pale, then showed him an old photograph of the same boywho, it turned out, was an uncle who had drowned years ago in the very pool we were fishing.

As time passed, I learned of stranger matters still: inexplicable disappearances in the big woods near the Canadian border, acts of violence and madness more bone-chilling than anything youd read in the wildest supermarket tabloids, mysterious sightings in Vermonts skies and waters. By degrees, I became less skeptical about some of these tales. Just maybe, there were more things in the Green Mountains than had previously been dreamed of in my philosophy. At the very least, it would behoove me, as a budding writer, to keep an open mind about such matters.

Now, in Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls & Unsolved Mysteries, the acclaimed novelist Joseph A. Citro has chronicled scores of Vermonts unique tales of the occult and much, much more. Born and raised in the Green Mountains himself, Joe Citro has, by his own admission, courted the bizarre, the grotesque and the mysterious for more than thirty years. The result is this splendid gallery of spine-tingling and original ghost stories, historical events as little-known as they are horrific, profiles of surpassingly outrageous Vermont characters, and numerous inexplicable happenings, from repeated sightings of a flying silo to the putative appearances, down through the centuries, of Lake Champlains own resident sea serpent, Champ. Little wonder that for many years, Vermont was a prime source of material for P.T. Barnums sideshows and Robert Ripleys Believe It or Not column.

Here, in one vastly entertaining wonder book are tales not only of haunted houses, but haunted colleges, bodies of water and even a haunted covered bridge; prodigies such as Zera Colburn, the 6-year-old mathematical genius from Cabot, and the Eddy brothers, Vermonts own pioneering spiritualists, who routinely baffled the toughest investigative reporters of the day; the fanatical Millerites, who donned flowing white ascension robes and clambered up to the tops of hills all over New England in glorious expectation of the imminent end of the world; not to mention Vermonts own elite corps of professional grave robbers.

Most frightening of all are Mr. Citros investigations into the realm of grim human events. Its all too easy to forget, in these days of miracle drugs, the terrible killer plague known as the White Death that claimed hundreds of Vermonters a year as recently as a century ago, and the resulting vampire scares in such bastions of Green Mountain respectability as Woodstock and Manchester. Then theres the almost unspeakably bizarre killing, unsolved to this day, of the hard-working Upper Connecticut Valley dairy farmer, and, in the mountains near Bennington, the vanishing into thin air of half a dozen persons from 1945 to 1950.

As those of us familiar with The Unseen, Dark Twilight and Joseph A. Citros other popular suspense novels have long known, Mr. Citro is blessed with a wonderfully distinctive storytelling voicelucid, speculative, gently iconoclasticjust the sort of reliable nonjudgmental voice youd want to tell you a ghost story. Some of the more outlandish tales in the book he demystifies with the pungent wit for which Vermonters are justly fabled. For others, he suggests possible or partial explanations. Still others he simply reports as he heard them in the hundreds of interviews he conducted from the Canadian border to the Massachusetts state line. Above all, the impression he leaves us with is that, yes, genuine mysteries still do lurk out there in those mountains, and many of them will never be fully explained.

When it comes to Vermonts tales of the occult, even the most skeptical of us can be given pause. One of my favorite chapters in this book recounts the tale of a grave in Middlebury containing a body laid to rest in. 18831883 B.C. that is! (No, it doesnt contain a Native American.)

Impossible? Thats what I thought, at first. But I was wrong. The story of Vermonts 3,375-year-old corpse is almost certainly true, and its perfectly well authenticated.

How can such a thing possibly be? Read on in Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls & Unsolved Mysteries. If you delight in the bizarre, the grotesque and the mysterious, youre in for a rare treat.

T HE FOLLOWING ARE TALES OF V ERMONTERS andas artist and humorist Francis Colburn once saidthe odd state that theyre in. Vermont-born myself, I have courted the bizarre, the grotesque and the mysterious for more than thirty years. In the process, I have collected enough strange-but-true and strange-but-maybe-true stories to fill this book; the spillover could fill a second volume this size.

And still I suspect Ive only scratched the surface of our Green Mountain mysteries.

This curio collecting is an odd hobby, I admit, and people have wondered why I do it.