Published by The History Press
Charleston, SC
www.historypress.com
Copyright 2021 by Renee Mallett
All rights reserved
First published 2021
E-Book edition 2021
ISBN 978.1.43967.365.2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941610
Print Edition ISBN 978.1.46714.786.6
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This book is for Lyn, who was a good sport about having to go outside and spend time with her mother.INTRODUCTION
For the past I dont know how many years, I have traveled by boat to tiny Star Island, ten or so miles off the coast of New Hampshire, to work on whatever book it is that Im currently writing. But while working on this book in 2020the year of the plagueStar Island was closed to visitors. On a clear day, I could stand on the shore in Rye, New Hampshire, and see it, just barely, as a dark smudge neatly dissecting the sea and the sky, swirls of blue and white above and below it. But I could not walk its rock-strewn paths myself or idle an afternoon away rocking on the porch of the Oceanic Hotel, and I felt the loss keenly.
While I missed my annual retreat to the Isles of Shoals immensely, there is also something uniquely apropos about writing a book on ghost towns in the middle of a pandemic. Disease, of course, is one of many reasons why people throughout history have pulled up their lives and abandoned their villages. During the earliest days of quarantine, as more and more things closed one by one, including the schools my children attended, I trekked out into the wilds of New England to conduct research for this book. My oldest daughter, a teenager, came with me on these trips more often than not. Sometimes, we ended up taking wild side trips, going to closed amusement parks and crumbling cottages just for the sake of coming back with a good story to share with our friends via Zoom that night.
In those first few weeks of the pandemic, when it seemed like we knew nothing and nowhere was safe, Lyn and I were having if not the time of our lives, at least a period of time I know Ill look back at with a strange sort of fondness. My oldest daughter is an old soul. She reads good books, has an amazing group of friends who will someday take over the world and make it better for all of us, and is navigating those awful, confusing early teen years with grace and firewell, mostly. Im lucky that (knock on wood) weve made it this far into her teenaged years and are still friends.
The two of us would drive for hours up and down dirt roads, stopping at interesting cemeteries, looking at the shadows created by trees, trying to find the unmarked path that would lead to whatever collection of cottages and stone walls we were looking for that day. Some days, we couldnt find any of the places on our list, but I never felt the trip was wasted. The rest of the world was hunkered down at home, watching the news compulsively, while we cruised unnamed back roads, singing along loudly with the radio and talking about our favorite books. Other times, wed find our destination, and wed walk in a comfortable silence, just enjoying being surrounded by the forest and finding a little oasis of peace in what I hope will be the strangest time of both our lives.
People say she is the child of mine that is most like me, but this is not true. I have five children, and every single one is exactly like mejust in totally different ways. I think of it like a prism. My personality has been split into five distinct different paths of light, and each child is one of the separate colors. Lyn is, however, I will agree, the child that is most obviously like me. We both have the same kind of manic extroverted/introverted dueling personalities. Some days, wed chatter endlessly at each other as we hopped over fallen stone walls or pulled each other up over even larger boulders. Other times, wed walk in a companiable, easy silence, happy to enjoy the great outdoors and feeling no pressure to fill the silence with needless small talk. Wed think our own thoughts, take a casual pace, only calling out the necessary cellar hole warning every so often as was needed.
I dont want to give too much of an idyllic portrait of these trips. They werent all mother/daughter bonding in the wilderness experiences. This was early spring in New England. The weather could turn in an instant. Wed spend one day with our teeth chattering from the chill and rain, and the next day, wed come back stripping off sweat-soaked clothes. On one memorable occasion, I completely misjudged the depth of a gully and ended up soaked to the waist in fetid swamp water while my daughter shrieked happily, Theres something dead in there, right next to you! It was a smelly ride home.
One of the Star Cabins located along the edge of Route 1, near Peabody, Massachusetts. These little bungalows were popular places for travelers to stay in the 1950s. Photograph by Renee Mallett.
The interior of a Star Cabin (my teenaged daughter refused to pose in the ruins). Photograph by Renee Mallett.
I have now spent most of my adult life writing about haunted houses and abandoned places. Ive spent the night in rooms where famous murders have happened, walked the hallways of old asylums and spent more time in buildings with huge gaps in the floors and caved in ceilings than I care to think about. My tolerance for risk is higher than that of the average middle-aged mom. But theres a special kind of fear that comes with walking for an hour through the woods before stumbling on an off-the-grid trailer, apparently occupied, when you have your fourteen-year-old daughter by your side. Other times, I drove her crazy, asking her to slide in through a hole in a foundation or to climb up onto a rotten front porch for a photograph opportunity. She turned me down every time with the stern warning that her friends mothers did not ask their daughters to do these kinds of things.
But even the misadventures gave us both interesting stories to tell. In fact, when we started making these trips, I assumed she was just looking for Instagram content or a way out of the house during a pandemic. But slowly I noticed that every day, wed go to a new place, and shed ask, So whats up with this place? What happened here? Because the history behind an abandoned village is the ultimate interesting story, isnt it? Its strange enough when you consider the neglected house or two in your own town what could happen to cause an owner to dump a home? But then when you consider an entire town, what series of unfortunate events had to occur to make every last resident pack it up and leaveand for no one to want to come and replace them?
