A Visit to Dark Swamp

The edge of Dark Swamp.

 Out east on the Putnam Pike in Glocester, Rhode Island, on the border with Connecticut, there is a neglected patch of wild land with an eerie reputation: Dark Swamp. In November 1923, H.P. Lovecraft and fellow horror writer Clifford Martin Eddy Jr. attempted to travel to the swamp to investigate local legends of supernatural occurrences and nameless creatures. Although the authors never managed to find their way into the swamp itself, the lore and the atmosphere of the area may have helped inspire stories like The Dunwich Horror and The Colour Out of Space, and Lovecraft's letter about his trip to the vicinity of Dark Swamp is the main conduit through which knowledge of the legends of the swamp has survived to the present.   

Dark Swamp is located near the western edge of Glocester, RI, between Reynolds Rd and Willie Woodhead Rd, on state forest land associated with the Durfee Hill Management Area. I visited in December last year, starting on foot from the small parking area at the end of the paved northern section of Willie Woodhead Rd, and seeing the sights of the swamp from the maze of footpaths and wood roads west of W.W. Rd, with some bushwacking into interesting-looking locales. Logging and hunting takes place in the state forest, and a sign suggested that wearing blaze-orange is required for entry during hunting season. 

The inexplicably named, semi-impassible unpaved middle section of Willie Woodhead Rd, east of Dark Swamp. 

 The rough, hilly landscape in and around Dark Swamp is pretty typical of southeastern New England. The bedrock is the hard, pale granite of Avalonia, an ancient island arc pasted onto parts of coastal North America during the formation of Pangea. The soil is thin and acidic and mostly made of rocks. The uplands support a stunted, scraggly forest of White Pine, Pitch Pine and a half a dozen different oak species, with an understory of various blueberries, huckleberries and shadbushes, with mountain laurel and impenetrable tangles of catbrier here and there. This vegetation type is known as Oak-Heath Forest, and is found on poor, well-drained soils in the eastern US, mostly not too far from the sea. Low-lying areas are dominated by Eastern Hemlock and Red Maple, with an understory of highbush blueberries and Sweet Pepperbush. Lovecraft found the landscape of the rural Glocester hills, woods and isolated farmsteads to be uncommonly beautiful, and it still is lovely, but good lord imagine trying to make a living from agriculture on soil like that, in an era before powered equipment and chemical fertilizers.     

Grave of the infant Eliza Ann Bowen.

Cellar hole just east of Dark Swamp.

 Dark Swamp was not quite as shunned by humanity as Lovecraft suggests, and there are remains of 19th Century inhabitation on the eastern margins of the swamp. A small but still regularly maintained cemetery has graves from the Bowen family from the mid eighteen-hundreds. A little further south there is an early fieldstone cellar hole from a farmhouse, including the base of a massive central chimney, with surrounding stone walls and the remains of outbuildings. The buildings were electrified at some point in the 20th Century, and probably would have been standing and occupied in the 1920s for Lovecraft's visit, if he had managed to reach the area. 

A deep dug well next to the farmhouse ruins.

Flash photo down the well. 

Next to the cellar hole there is a deep dug well, lined with stone and with a pool of clear water at the bottom, maybe 20 feet down. It was strongly reminiscent of my image of the contaminated well in Colour Out of Space, but of course every lonely farmhouse in New England in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries would have had something similar. This particular example was quite well-preserved and deep; they are often shallow and collapsed or choked with debris when you run across them in the woods. 

Large cairn near Dark Swamp. 

Group of big cairns in a hollow between low ridges. 

One of the peculiar features of the Dark Swamp area is the unusual prevalence of cairns, or lithic sites. There was a striking group of about 20 large cairns, some almost as tall as me and 12-15 feet across, deeper in the forest in the vicinity of the farmhouse ruins, scattered around the floor and sides of a small hollow. These sorts of things could be prehistoric ceremonial grounds from Native Americans, or the product of the land-clearing efforts of settlers, or something else, but the large number and size of dry fieldstone structures at this spot was odd.   

Barren field of sand near Dark Swamp. 

 Another peculiarity of Dark Swamp is a rounded patch of barren sand, about an acre in size and easily visible in satellite photos of the swamp, with almost no living vegetation within its perimeter. This will immediately bring to mind the "Blasted Heath" in Colour Out of Space, though Lovecraft did not mention having heard of this particular sand field, if indeed the site existed in its blasted state in the 1920s. Could this be a place where blasphenous sacrifices to the Old Ones have been performed on May Eve, and the veil between worlds is worn thin, and malign influences from beyond the stars seep into our sphere, such as naught that is of our world may long endure? Or, might it be that, since time immemorial, drunken Swamp Yankees have gathered at an old sand pit, on May Eve, to drive their ATVs around in circles, thus killing anything that starts to grow in an already challenging micro-environment for the establishment of vegetation? One shudders at the mere contemplation of the possibilities.  

Dense stand of Atlantic White Cedar in Dark Swamp. Now that, my friends, is a dark swamp. 

 Much of the actual Dark Swamp is not dark at all, at least not now. There is a whole complex of wetlands that make up what I suppose is the Swamp, with watery low areas separated by hillocks and eskers of glacial outwash sand and gravel; most of these wetlands are sunny and open, with cattails and sedges around shallow pools. There are a lot of dead trees, sun-bleached and bark-less, both fallen and standing, in the open marshy areas, though, and it is clear that 100 years ago the majority of the swamp was shaded by thick growths of pine, hemlock and Red Maple. Likely what has happened is that beavers returned in the mid-twentieth century--after having been hunted to local near-extinction in colonial times--building dams and raising water levels in parts of Dark Swamp, either drowning or straight-up eating the trees that had made the swamp dark. There are still some suitably dismal corners of the Swamp with dense tree cover, though, including a cedar swamp with some real old-growth looking specimens of Atlantic White Cedar and a deep spongy bed of sphagnum moss, which hint at how this half-forgotten corner of Rhode Island earned its name. 

Halloween Corpse Flower

 Just in time for Halloween, a Corpse Flower (Amorphophallus titanum) bloomed last night in the greenhouse at Eastern Connecticut State University. The teaching/research greenhouses there are not usually open to the public, but Prof. Bryan Connolly was kind enough to allow people in to see it on a Sunday evening. 

Here at UConn Storrs, we have a few A. titanum plants that are getting to be fairly large, but are still immature. It may be a couple of years before we get flowers.

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There was a short article about the ECSU Corpse Flower in the Hartford Courant.

Mystery Stone Structures in Connecticut

Fieldstone cairns at the Werge Easement, Thompson, Ct. November 4, 2017

 Much of the landscape of Connecticut is pretty abundantly supplied with rocks. During the nineteenth century, after the primordial forests were for all intents and purposes completely cut, farmers clearing fields for crops or grazing would use the stones for walls and foundations. 150 year old stone walls are a ubiquitous feature of the Connecticut woods today. The eastern part of the state is also famous in certain circles for other, more puzzling fieldstone structures: cairns, piles, small towers, niches and even a few underground chambers, old but no one knows exactly how old, built by unknown people for dubious purposes. I recently got out for a tour of one of these "lithic sites," organized by The Last Green Valley and led by Joe Iamartino of the Thompson Historical Society, who tempted hikers with a quote from researcher J.P. Whittal: "There are more unexplained crude stone monuments in Thompson than anywhere in New England."
 

Hillside with about 10 cairns visible among the trees.

 After a slide show at the old Thompson town hall, a group of about 40 adjourned to the Werge Easement, a tract of private land set aside for conservation purposes and not normally accessible to the public. Anyone who has spent much time at all in the Connecticut woods has come across piles of loose rocks, in addition to the usual stone walls, in situations where it seems likely that a farmer was just disposing of stones picked from a field. The cairns in Thompson definitely looked more purposeful than that, more carefully put-together, and there were dozens of them dotting a ridge and an adjacent valley. I haven't run across anything remotely like it before.

Somewhat tumbledown stone pile with a niche at ground level.

 Several of the structures have niches in their bases, but nothing large enough for a person to get into. These seem like they might have been used to store something, but what isn't clear. Colonial records indicate that the native Americans built root cellars and underground sweat lodges, which could explain some of the larger stone chambers found elsewhere in New England, but not these dorm-fridge-sized cubbyholes. Cairns in the area have been excavated (often by looters and treasure hunters, unfortunately), but it seems that very little in the way of artifacts have ever been recovered.

A small stone tower

 There is one stone tower on the site, or perhaps a particularly tightly-constructed, skinny cairn. This was only about five feet tall, but another locality in the area has several towers of similar construction, but twice as high.

The "whale," an immobile boulder or bedrock outcrop with piled stones trailing behind it.

 A few of the structures, perhaps somewhat fancifully, might be said to represent animals, possibly turtles or whales. This struck me as a bit of a stretch.

Stone pile in poor condition, with trees growing out of it.

 A mature White Oak growing on top of a fallen-over cairn provides some indication of the age of the lithic site. I'd guess that the tree sprouted more than a century ago and could be 150 years old. The cairn, which looked like it was being overgrown by the tree's roots and not simply piled up against an existing trunk, should be older than that at a minimum. One New England stone chamber has reportedly been determined to be at least 800 years old, based on carbon dating of material found within, but in the absence of any surviving organic artifacts like bone, charcoal or wood, it would not be possible to carbon date the Werge Easement structures.

Stone pile arranged atop a large glacial erratic (the whale stone is in the background).

The majority of the crude stone monuments seemed to built on open ground, but a few were constructed on top of large boulders, the boulders being of such a size that they themselves probably were never moved. There were only two or three cairns built like this, out of the dozens that I saw on the walk.

The smaller boat-shaped stone structure at the Werge Easement.

The site has two examples of another type of mysterious stone structure: boat-shaped mounds, the size of mobile homes, with larger stones piled to make walls around the perimeter and the interior filled with a mix of smaller stones, creating a level, raised platform, three or four feet high. The two "stone boat" platforms, one large and one smaller, are fairly close to each other, but on a different part of the property than the majority of the cairn-type constructions. 

The "prow" of the larger boat-shaped platform.

As to what the Thompson lithic sites actually are, when they were built and by whom, that seems to be very much up in the air, without much indication that definite answers might be forthcoming. Our guides favored the theory that they are largely or entirely the work of Native Americans (the Nipmucs), and date to before European contact or the earliest colonial times. In this interpretation, the cairns are ritual objects or memorial markers, and may indicate the location of deaths in battle or other notable events. Some Native American tribes apparently had a tradition of marking the location of the death of an ancestor with a pile of stones, which subsequent generations would add to when they were in the area. The stone platforms could also be ritual sites, or they might be the foundations of raised wigwams. 

The view across the "deck" of the larger platform.

Another explanation that is maybe not as romantic, but at least as viable, is that the site is a sort of rustic art installation constructed by bored Yankee farmers, less than 200 years ago. Farming in New England is a difficult business and early efforts at cultivating fields or improving pastures involved a lot of moving rocks out of the way. In general, fieldstone was used to make walls, or sometimes thrown into heaps in out of the way spots or at property lines. But, there wouldn't be anything stopping a farmer with a more creative disposition from sequestering his extra rocks in neat little cairns and towers around his property.

 It is interesting to note that the Werge cairns and platforms occur in the neighborhood of perfectly ordinary stone walls from the 1800s, and sometimes the walls and the mysterious lithic structures are practically on top of each other, separated by just a few yards. So, if one contends that the lithic site is an ancient survival from pre-contact times, one also has to reckon with generations of nineteenth century Connecticut sheep farmers carefully working around the old monuments, and not deconstructing them for wall material or to get them out of the way. Which is entirely possible, but maybe not much more probable than imagining a farmer with a funny aesthetic sense building the stone monuments himself.

A Thompson, Ct lake in late autumn.

Lots of what might charitably be called exotic theories exist for Connecticut lithic sites, of course: they were built by wandering Celts on ley lines, or they were left by Vikings and the boat-shaped platforms are symbolic long-boat burials, or they're evidence of Phoenician sailors navigating the Quinebaug River. I'm not sure if anyone has claimed that they're the ruins of Sasquatch encampments, but that would probably be at about the same level of likelihood.

Ultimately, much of the interpretation of the Thompson stone monuments depends on their age, but there doesn't seem to be any obvious way of telling how old they are. I vaguely suspect that the structures are not ancient (multiple centuries or millennia old), or if they are ancient they received ongoing maintenance and reconstruction. The cairns look like they would be fairly fragile over the long term in a heavily wooded environment such as has existed for most of the past thousand years in southern New England; sooner or later they would have an oak grow up inside them and break them apart, or a three-foot diameter chestnut trunk would fall on them, or frost and ice would push the stones out of place. In the absence of human intervention, the structures would have a half-life, and if I had to guess I would put that half-life at much closer to 100 years than to 1,000 years. But for now at least, that is only a guess, and there seems to be a good amount of real mystery surrounding the lithic sites of Connecticut.

A Trip to Boston Hollow

Westford, Connecticut

I'm located in a more or less suburban neighborhood close to the University of Connecticut, which is practically a small city. The northeast quadrant of Connecticut is called the Quiet Corner for a reason, though, and if you travel just a few miles to the north and east, the landscape becomes pretty rural for the Nutmeg State. Westford, Connecticut is a tiny cluster of nineteenth and eighteenth century houses and a church within the town of Ashford. Taking the road east from Westford, the houses thin out and you enter an almost unpeopled landscape of swamps, overhanging cliffs and dark hemlock groves: Boston Hollow.

Campaign sign spotted by the road in Westford. "Sunken R'lyeh has the best leaders, tremendous, not like we have in this country. Great Cthulhu says nice things about me, folks, nice things, believe me. A strong leader, I hear him in my dreams, not like the dishonest media says. The Old Ones don't win anymore. Sad."

New England horror author H.P. Lovecraft's most famous creation is probably the invertebrate deity-whatzit Cthulhu, who is also a perpetual third party candidate for president (slogan: "Why settle for the lesser evil?"). Lovecraft was a Providence native, and his decadent hill towns with terrifying secrets were based mostly on certain backwards settlements around Springfield, Massachusetts. But he certainly was also familiar with eastern Connecticut, and parts of Ashford have a definite Lovecraft Nation feel about them.

Ashford was a prosperous farming community in the early nineteenth century, with 2661 residents in the 1830 census. It entered a steep decline in the mid-1800s, however, and was down to less than 700 residents around World War I. The region might have been very nearly abandoned in the early twentieth century, if it hadn't been for an influx of Eastern European immigrants looking for cheap farm land. The town has made a comeback since the mid-twentieth century, but as late as the 1970s, there were houses without electricity or indoor plumbing in the area, and some old-timers made a living with activities like burning piles of logs encased in earth to make charcoal, and cutting Witch Hazel branches for medicinal preparations.

Road through Boston Hollow

The history of Boston Hollow has also followed a Lovecraftian trajectory, from bustling center of activity, to nearly forgotten backwater. An important Native American route, the Old Connecticut Path, passed through the area, and the Hollow was part of the Center Turnpike, a major thoroughfare between Boston and Hartford at the peak of Ashford's first period of prosperity in the 1830s. Today Boston Hollow is part of the Yale Myers Forest, the road receives barely any traffic at all, and the Hollow is probably about just about the quietest corner of the Quiet Corner of Connecticut.

Not-quite the Old Man of the Mountain, in Boston Hollow.

Hemlock forest on the steep sides of the Hollow.

The deep, shaded ravine in the heart of Boston Hollow is cooler and damper than surrounding areas, and just about all available surfaces on the forest floor seem to be covered with ferns, mosses and lichens. Striped Maple, an understory shrub or small tree that is common in the north woods of New England, occurs all over the steep slopes of the Hollow, but is otherwise an uncommon sight this far south.

Peligera cf. canina, Dog Lichen

Umbilicaria mammulata, Smooth Rock Tripe

I noted a couple of interesting lichens on a recent foray into Boston Hollow. Rock Tripe is large and impressive (as lichens go) lichen that is not uncommon in the right sort of habitats in Connecticut: shaded and undisturbed rock faces and large boulders. It gets especially abundant and luxuriant in Boston Hollow, though, along with Rock Polypody (Polypodium virginianum), a poikilohydric or "resurrection" fern, which can dry to a crisp in drought, then rehydrate and reanimate itself when rain returns. There were also some blackish patches of Dog Lichen, with reddish sporocarps (fruiting structures), which I haven't seen very often, but which does also grow in a bare spot in my yard, for some reason.

There is a lot to explore around Boston Hollow, with close to 8,000 acres of forest preserved for research by Yale, a number of nearby state parks, and large additional parcels of forested land owned by a local timber company. But, and maybe it's just because I'm originally a New York City native, it's hard to shake the feeling that the place is just a little too far from the madding crowd, and decidedly not the sort of woods where you would want to be caught after dark on Halloween.

Connecticut Vampires

The Jewett City Cemetery, Halloween 2015. The grand old sugar maples in the background would have been spectacular a week ago. 

Every autumn, the Last Green Valley organization runs series of "Walktober" events in northeastern Connecticut and the adjacent Sturbridge, Mass. area. I've been on a number of hikes and local history walks during Walktober in past years, but I had never been able to get into the famous reservations-only Vampire Folk Belief tour before. This time, I managed to secure a couple of spots for this Halloween tradition.

The walk takes place in Jewett City, the site of two different 19th century vampirism occurrences. Retired state archaeologist Nick Bellantoni lead the tour, which was organized by the State Museum of Natural History and the Griswold Bicentennial Comittee. Bellantoni was personally involved in unearthing the evidence of the earlier event, which took place around the year 1800, and which apparently went unrecorded at the time and is known only from the archaeological record.

Connecticut State Archaeologist (retired) Nick Bellantoni leads the Vampire Folk Belief walk.

About 25 years ago, some children playing in an active gravel pit on the weekend after a rain discovered a pair of human skulls. The police called in the state archaeologist, and Bellantoni and his students uncovered 29 graves that had been part of a forgotten farm cemetery, which was indicated on the surface only with some fieldstones set upright but without any carvings.

One of the coffins, inside of a crude stone crypt, was marked "JB 55" with brass tacks, probably indicating the age of death and initials of the otherwise unidentifiable occupant. The skeleton inside was in a very strange state, with the skull removed and turned around to face the wrong way, the rib cage forced open and the thigh bones crossed over the chest. The ribs were scarred from tuberculosis. Evidence indicated that the body was rearranged several years after its initial burial. The oddities of this grave were best explained by early 19th century New England anti-vampire practices.

At the time of the vampire panics, the germ theory of disease hadn't been fully developed, let alone filtered down to the heart of Swamp Yankee country in the quiet corner of Connecticut, and effective antibiotic treatments were more than a century off. "Consumption" (tuberculosis) was a mysterious and terrifying affliction, and on isolated farms, desperate families trying to stop its spread latched on to the idea of victims becoming undead and returning to draw the life from their relatives. Otherwise inexplicable disruptions of graves seem to have been attempts to stop corpses who had become "vampires" from creating more victims.

Lemuel Ray's headstone.

 The second Jewett City vampire event occurred relatively late, in 1854, and unlike the gravel pit crypt case was documented by nineteenth century writings and clearly marked graves. The Ray family was plagued by tuberculosis, starting with the death of Lemuel Ray in 1845, with three more victims following over the next decade. The family eventually exhumed the bodies of Lemuel and his brother Elisha, set fires in the graves and burned the corpses, in hopes of stopping what they supposed to be the depredations of the undead. All in vain of course, and there was at least one more TB death among the Rays in 1854.

Elisha Ray's headstone.

 The Jewett City vampire walk is highly recommended, if you can get yourself on the guest list. Nick Bellantoni is a wonderfully informative and entertaining speaker, who draws on decades of stories investigating tombs and cleaning up after grave robbers, as well as the polished manner that comes from his long experience as an educator. He stressed that the Connecticut vampire hunts were really a misguided public health measure born of understandable ignorance and completely rational fear, and that the familiar romantic supernatural and macabre trappings of vampire legends only took hold later in the 1800s. Bellantoni concluded with a saying among archaeologists, along the lines of "Everything that people believe in is real, because beliefs determine human behavior and human behavior creates the archaeological record," relating a more recent story of a man who was frightened of vampires, and slept every night with cloves of garlic in his mouth. One night, the man inhaled a clove and choked to death. "They got him. In the end they got him."

The Tale of the Red Hand

The Old English Cemetery, Sutherland. Photo via Kambrokind Guest House.

One of the few “true” ghost stories that I know happens to have a botanical and succulent plant theme. As with all true ghost stories, it happened to a friend of a friend who shall remain nameless, many years ago, and has certainly changed with each telling, probably in significant ways, to turn it into a satisfying narrative, and to make it more frightening and inexplicable. I don’t for a moment think that the cold, high veld around Sutherland is really haunted by a shambling lich or some other, less describable terror from beyond. But still, I will be tempted to double-check the windows the next time I park my car to take a nap after a long drive.

Sutherland is far back in the mountains to the northeast of Cape Town, South Africa. I recall flying over the area on the way to the Fairest Cape one July—at the height of the southern winter—and glimpsing a dimly lit, snow-covered landscape through a break in the clouds. The sight was unsettling, ghosts or no, for someone fresh from summer in New England and contemplating a month of camping in the desert. Sutherland is one of the coldest places in Africa, with rocky plains in every direction sparsely vegetated with low scrub and hardy little succulents.

A certain respected South African botanist was doing fieldwork around Sutherland in the middle of winter. At the end of a long day of driving, hiking and collecting specimens, he found himself on a little-used road, miles from nowhere, and decided to park, get some rest and continue plant hunting in the morning. After supper out of a can, heated on a camp stove by the side of the road, he decided that the weather was going to be too frosty for sleeping under the stars. So, he got into the car, reclined the seat, and got settled in his sleeping bag.

The temperature was bitterly cold that night, by African standards if not by the standards here in Connecticut, and the botanist closed the windows tight, and wore his jacket inside of the sleeping bag. The chill was still uncomfortable, and he was awake for some time before falling into an uneasy sleep.

Some time after midnight, he awoke with the feeling that he was no longer alone. Nervously, he looked around the car, and saw a disembodied hand—emaciated, deep bloody red and faintly internally phosphorescent—reaching for him from out of the dark, right inside of the cab with him. He just about leapt out of his sleeping bag in a panicked attempt to escape the hand, but the spectral visitor vanished almost as soon as it was seen.

There are a number of possible explanations for the Red Hand: certainly, people commonly experience strange and sometimes realistic hallucinations when emerging from troubled sleep. One can’t entirely rule out the actions of living humans, though the area was very remote, and the blasted, treeless landscape didn’t offer many places where a thief could have hid when the frightened botanist searched the area around his car. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the incident was this: the night was frigid and the botanist was certain that he had closed the windows to keep out the wind before going to sleep. But afterwards, he found that the window in the direction from which the hand had approached was rolled down part of the way.