Lore - Episode 67: The Red Coats

Episode Date: August 21, 2017

There are some locations that seem to draw humans closer. Places that are away from the bustle of everyday life, that almost seem part of our soul. We go there for solitaire, or for rest, or recreation. Sometimes, though, we don’t return. * * * Official Lore Website: www.lorepodcast.com Extra member episodes: www.patreon.com/lorepodcast Official Lore Merchandise: www.lorepodcast.com/shop Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support

If you live there, you just sort of accepted the fact that at some point, things were going to disappear. But of course, that was the price you had to pay if you wanted to live in one of the most beautiful parts of Maine. It was a vast expanse of old growth forest, just 20 miles north of Augusta, Maine's capital city. Those miles and miles of deep green treetops are only broken by the occasional lake. Great pond, east pond, the narrows.

And for as long as anyone could remember, if you had a cabin in that area, you'd be wise to lock it up because things had a way of going missing. Then on April 4th of 2013, a police officer responded to a silent alarm in a cabin at Pine Tree summer camp. Minutes later, he arrived and caught the thief. His name was Christopher Thomas Knight. He'd lived there in the forest for nearly 30 years, subsisting entirely off-nature and stolen supplies, and he'd been perfectly happy doing so.

Until his arrest, though, he was just one of hundreds of people who step into America's forests each year and just vanish. After he went missing, everyone just assumed Knight was dead. Because when you slip away like that into the dark embrace of the wild and wooded back country, your chances are pretty slim. Many humans have tamed much of the world with our roads and maps. There are still a lot of unknown places out there, and the unknown always has a way of inspiring fear.

Add in the chance of disappearing and never coming back, and the woods can be downright terrifying. Some locations, though, seem to attract a disproportionate amount of mystery. They act like magnets for tragedy, or a dark beacon designed to lure people to their doom. And one of the most mysterious places of all is right here in the wilds of New England. So let's take a walk. Let's wander along the trail and explore the shadows within the trees. But watch your step.

You never know what's waiting for you just beyond the edges of the path. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Benning Wentworth was a greedy, egotistical man, which made him a perfect fit for the age of British colonial expansion into the New World. In 1741, at the age of 45, he was appointed governor of the colony of New Hampshire. Eight years later, the crown gave him the power to distribute land grants. In 1761, he drew up charters for new territory in what would one day become Vermont, arbitrarily drawing township squares all over the map.

One of those random boundaries was drawn around a mountain in the southwestern corner of the state, just northeast of Bennington, a town, of course, named by Bennington Wentworth after himself. And this mountain and the township around it borrowed a magical name from England, Glastonbury. This mountain is an interesting piece of folklore jutting up from the landscape. Long before the British began to spread into the region, the land there belonged to the Algonquin nation of Native Americans, specifically the Abenaki tribe, and they have stories about the mountain there, stories that are not tourist friendly.

The Abenaki stayed away from the top of the mountain because they believed it was cursed. Hunters would frequently get lost there, thanks in part to the erratic wind that seemed to change direction every few minutes. But the biggest reason for staying away was the legend of the enchanted stone. They say it looked like any other boulder on the mountain, but if you were unlucky enough to step on it, you would vanish into thin air. So quickly, in fact, that you wouldn't even have time to scream. Because of all of that, when the first settlers arrived in southern Vermont, the Abenaki strongly

urged them to avoid settling on the mountain, which, of course, they did anyway. In 1791, at the time of the first state census, Glastonbury township had a total of six families living there. But it wasn't until after the Civil War was over that the population broke 100. That's when people started to realize, hey, there are a lot of trees here. So they built a sawmill, and then another, and soon they were building kilns too, dozens of them all running nonstop to create charcoal that was then exported to places like New York for use in iron production.

And with all that economic growth, came a lot more people. In 1872, the Bennington-Glasdenbury Railroad was constructed as a way to move the charcoal down the mountain faster and to bring settlers back up. But wherever humans gather in large numbers, so does darkness. It's like a cloud that follows us around. Wherever we build communities, tragedy and loss and death just sort of come with the package. In 1892, a sawmill worker named Henry McDowell attacked another man, John Crawley, by picking up a rock and beating him to death.

Before the authorities could capture McDowell, he skipped town and headed south. He made it as far as South Norwalk, Connecticut, before he was taken into custody. But it only got weirder from there. He confessed to the murder, but blamed it on the voices in his head. They wouldn't stop, he said, and they wanted him to kill again. So he was returned to Vermont and placed in the state asylum there. For a while, at least. The local legend says that McDowell escaped the facility and made his way back to Glastonbury

by hiding on one of the train cars that headed up the mountain. If the legend is true, he lived out the rest of his days right there in the forest. Five years later, in 1897, John Harbour and his brother, Harry, were out hunting just south of Glastonbury Mountain. They had separated a bit, although in the forest all you really needed was a few dozen feet of distance before you felt isolated and alone. At one point, Harry heard a gun go off and then a cry for help from somewhere nearby. I've been shot, the voice of John had shouted.

Harry searched the area, but he couldn't find his brother. He gathered some friends to help, but still they had no luck. It wasn't until the following morning that they finally stumbled upon his body, but there was something not quite right about the scene they discovered. First, John's body was found laying under the wide branches of an old cedar tree with his rifle laying beside him. But the gun was loaded and seemed to be just out of reach as if someone else had placed it there later.

And there were also drag marks in the pine needles and dirt indicating that John had been dragged to the tree. No one ever figured out how John Harbour had been killed. No other hunter came forward to confess they accidentally shot the man, and no other clues came to light. It was murder. That much was clear. But it would forever remain a tragic cold case, which in most other towns might stand

out on the pages of local history as a major story. The Glastonbury wasn't like most towns. The people there were no stranger to unusual occurrences. Yes, John Harbour's death was mysterious, but it also wasn't the first time something unexplainable had happened. And tragically, it wouldn't be the last. There's a story about something that happened near Glastonbury, way back in the middle of the 19th century, a few decades before the murders of John Crawley and John Harbour.

If it's true, though, it paints a frightening backdrop for a lot of the events that followed through the years. Before the train route was constructed between Bennington and Glastonbury, people who didn't want to hike all the way up the mountain were transported by stagecoach. This particular trip departed Bennington late in the evening, and by the time they were halfway to their destination, the skies had opened up and a torrential downpour had begun to fall. Which wasn't a great place to be.

Glastonbury Mountain is steep, rising an average of 250 feet every mile. But the stagecoach would have been making that journey on a wide dirt path, dirt, mind you, that would have quickly transformed into mud as the rain continued to fall. At first, the driver slowed down, but then he was forced to pull over and stop. Despite the rain, he picked up his glass-covered lantern and climbed down from his seat. Then, careful not to slip, he began to inspect the wheels and the depth of the mud they were buried in. And that's when he noticed something odd.

There were footprints in the mud around the coach. That were much larger than his own. And if the impressions were any indication, the feet that made them weren't wearing shoes. So like any expendable extra in a horror flick, he turned and followed them, only to discover that they vanished into the forest. That's when something large and powerful slammed into the side of the carriage. Passengers began to exit the coach, spilling out into the mud and rain. A moment later, the stagecoach toppled onto its side.

Then, slowly emerging from the darkness at the side of the road, a shape stepped into the weak lantern light. They say it was tall, perhaps two heads taller than a grown man. The thing, whatever it was, was covered entirely in wet, matted hair, and its eyes seemed to reflect a yellow light back from the lantern. For a long, tense moment, the creature stood there, beside the wreckage of the overturned stagecoach, before turning away, blending into the shadows once again. Life in Glastonbury was certainly never boring.

Between the nighttime encounter with what would become known as the Bennington Monster and the murders to follow a couple of decades later, people in the area never really felt completely safe in their isolated Woodland community. But there was more to worry about than mysterious creatures. Glastonbury, you see, was dying. It was inevitable, really. When your only business is cutting down trees, chopping them up, and then burning them, it has a way of transforming a place.

By the late 1880s, all the local forest was gone, stripped away by the economic greed of the town. They tried to fight it, though. Beginning in 1894, everything was reinvented with an eye toward bringing in summer tourists. The local coal-powered train was converted over to electric passenger trolleys. Buildings in town were gutted and remodeled to serve as hotels and a casino. It was expensive, sure, but it was also their only hope. If they could no longer sell the forest, they had to market something else to the community.

And for one season, it worked. During the summer of 1897, scores of people traveled far and wide to experience life in a frontier resort town. The hotels were full, and the casino offered ample entertainment. But a mountain stripped of its forest is a mountain ill-prepared for spring, and when the calendar rolled around and the snow began to melt, something happened. A flood. The technical term for it is a fresh it, when snow and rain overfill a river and cause flooding.

And in the spurring of 1898, a powerful flood rushed down the mountainside and washed away the trolley tracks. In one tragic moment, the town's new lifeline had been severed, and like a garden without water, everything began to dry up and die. Over the years to come, Glastonbury all but vanished. The hotels and casino fell apart. Homes disintegrated until nothing but their foundation stones remained. By the 1930s, the entire population of Glastonbury consisted of just three people, Ira Madison,

his wife, and his mother. In 1937, Glastonbury became the first town in Vermont to be officially disorganized. And then, for the next two decades, empty. Well, not entirely. You see, the trees eventually returned, and with them came that sirens call that lures people into the woods. Except, these were probably not the best woods to wander around in. The Abinaki tribesmen had been pretty clear about that, after all.

Despite all of that, people returned to Glastonbury Mountain. But when they did, they discovered a very difficult truth. It seemed that the darkness that inhabited the mountain had never really left. On November 11th of 1943, two men went hunting just north of Glastonbury Mountain. There was a chill in the air that morning as Carl Herrick and his cousin Henry set up their camp, and then the men grabbed their rifles and headed out into the woods. It was deer season, and they wanted to make the most of their time. During the hunt, the men split up.

It was a common thing to do, even though it left each of them alone in a forest full of dangers. By afternoon, Henry had given up and wandered back to camp, but Carl wasn't there yet, so he waited. When daylight had faded into that gray, hazy twilight between day and night, Henry finally decided something was wrong. So he hiked his way back out of the trees and ran to the police. After gathering some help together, everyone returned to the woods near the campsite to

begin their search for Carl. It took them three days. Three days of slowly walking through the trees, three days in the snow and cold, three days of worry. But in the end, they found him. Carl's body was laying flat on the ground, and his rifle was nearly 100 feet away, just leaning against a tree. Interestingly, the ground around his body was covered in enormous footprints.

The hunters who found him weren't sure what sort of animal had made them, but they guessed it had been a bear, which was odd because Carl Herrick hadn't been mauled or injured in any way consistent with a bear attack. He'd been squeezed to death. Sadly, Carl wouldn't be the last to experience the dangerous nature of the woods around Glastonbury Mountain. Just two years later, in 1945, a 74-year-old hunting guide named Middie Rivers was leading a group of visiting hunters through the trees when he slipped out of view ahead of them.

One of the others hurried to catch up to Rivers, but he wasn't there. After searching for over a month, locals gave up hope. No one ever saw Middie Rivers again. Paula Weldon was the next to go. A year after Rivers vanished into the unknown, Paula left her college dorm in Bennington to go for a hike. At 3 p.m. on December 1st, she pulled on her bright red jacket and hiking shoes and set off on the well-known Long Trail, where many people remembered seeing her.

But she never returned. One elderly couple that saw her that day claimed that she had been about 100 yards ahead of them, but they lost sight of her when she rounded a bend where two trails intersected. When they reached the same crossing, they were surprised to no longer see her. She'd simply vanished. There was a massive search effort. There was a large cash reward. They had helicopters, dogs, and over a thousand people.

Everything that could have been done was done to find her. And with that bright red jacket on, you'd think she'd be easy to spot. But after three long weeks of fruitless searching, they all went home empty-handed. Four years later, on October 9th of 1950, Paul Jepsen was out with his mother in their truck. She read that the Jepsen's ran the town dump, or were maybe pig farmers, so I'm not exactly sure what Paul's mother was doing that day. But she pulled over there near the tree line and got out of the truck for a moment, leaving

eight-year-old Paul inside. When she returned, he was gone. She shouted for him, but no one answered. Overcome with panic, she called the authorities for help, and soon a whole team of rescue workers began to scour the woods there. It also might be worth pointing out that, like Weldon, little Paul was wearing a red jacket. But it wasn't meant to be.

Paul's scent was followed by bloodhounds all the way to an intersection where it vanished, the same intersection, according to some locals, where Paula Weldon disappeared in front of the elderly couple. The Glastonbury Woods, it seems, had claimed another life. After that same month, Frida Langer and her family were camped on the east side of the mountain. Frida was 53, incredibly knowledgeable of the area around the mountain, and a skilled hiker. So when she and her cousin Herbert Ellsner headed out for a hike on October 28th, they

expected a good workout through some beautiful scenery, and nothing more. About 10 minutes into the hike, Frida slipped while crossing a small stream. He wasn't hurt, but the fall had soaked her clothes and shoes, which she knew was not going to make for a comfortable hike, so she told her cousin to hold tight and ran back toward camp to quickly change. After waiting for almost an hour, Ellsner started walking back toward camp. He wasn't sure what had been taking Frida so long, but he assumed he would bump into her on the trail at some point.

But he didn't, and when he stepped out of the trees and into camp, no one else had seen her either. Over the decades since all of the disappearances occurred, there have been a lot of theories tossed around. Perhaps that creature witnessed in the rain that night near Long Trail was still active and alive, or maybe other humans are to blame, even a local serial killer. Some have even suggested that after Henry McDowell escaped from the Vermont state asylum, he took up residence in the forest right there, and was somehow still alive and healthy enough

in the 1940s and 50s to kidnap and kill people. It's all guesswork, though, unclear and open to speculation. What is clear is the historical record. Real people have stepped into those woods and vanished, people with lives and families and futures that all came to an abrupt end in the shadows between those trees. And all of that loss comes with its own fair share of real pain. It's a sobering thought. The one thing we all wish would vanish into the woods.

All of that loss and pain and grief seems determined to stick around. The woods have always been a dangerous place, but we can hurt ourselves there. We can get hurt by other things. It's wilderness after all, so it's about as far from safety as we can get. But when you take all of the stories into account, it feels like there's something more than dangerous about Glastonbury Mountain. Some people believe that wearing the color red is a surefire way to guarantee your disappearance, as noted in some of the cases.

But I can't find any evidence that Frida had been wearing a red coat the day she disappeared. The same for Midi Rivers. Sometimes coincidence is nothing more than that. Random details that appear to line up in a neat row when maybe they really don't. Our brains like to connect the dots, though. We look for patterns, like red coats or geographic epicenters. These are like tire tracks in a dirt road because they're easy to slip into and hard to avoid.

They feel significant, even though they often aren't. Rationally, all of these disappearances could be viewed as nothing more than pure coincidence. These are dense woods after all, and hikers go missing all over the world every single day for a variety of simple reasons. They lose their way, they get hurt, or they encounter a wild animal. Whenever that happens, their chance of survival drops below 100%. The truth is a bitter pill. Sometimes people just don't come home.

Still, we whisper stories. Local Vermont folklorist Joseph Citro was the first to call the area the Bennington Triangle, drawing comparisons to the more famous Triangle off the coast of Bermuda. But rather than ships and fighter jets, the Bennington Triangle just seems to be interested in people. And the name has stuck, probably because it feels like such a good fit. Some people think it's all because the mountain is cursed. Those enchanted stones, the ones the Abinaki claimed would swallow people whole, are like

supernatural fly traps, and the hunters and hikers who encounter them can never return. Interestingly, a number of small cairns, stone mounds or towers used to mark special locations, have been found on the mountain. The local Native Americans won't take credit for them, and they're too high up to have been built by the loggers and farmers who once inhabited the town below. No one knows where they came from. It's just mysterious enough to make you wonder, isn't it? That wonder has a way of inspiring us.

The legendary horror writer Shirley Jackson connected so deeply with the story of Paula Weldon that she included elements of the disappearance in her 1951 novel, Hanksiman, and then again in 1957 in a short story called The Missing Girl. To Jackson, there was a disturbing beauty in a life that was alive and thriving one moment, and completely gone the next. Others though are drawn to the story of Frida Langer, and for good reason. But the thing that makes her disappearance so different from the others isn't some small detail in what happened, or how, or where, it's the conclusion of it all.

You see, long after the search and rescue teams had given up and gone home, after autumn and winter and well into spring, someone finally found Frida Langer. Her body was discovered in a wide open area that had been thoroughly searched by hundreds of volunteers seven months before, just lying in the grass in plain sight. No cause of death could be determined. This episode of lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey. Lore is much more than a podcast. There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season

of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place.

The World of Lore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next one.