Estimated reading time — 11 minutes

I took a digital archiving job with the van der Voort Estate Historical Society. It’s an old manor home dating back to the 1800s on a soft cliff overlooking Precipice Bay in upstate Vermont. I’m majoring in Library Science with an English minor at Castleton University but was feeling pretty burned out so I took a year off and a job way out of my comfort zone – meaning about half the state away from what I’m used to…

The place is pretty, if you like nature, I guess, but my only co-worker is a real asshole. 70 years old if he’s a day, bald as a buzzard with a long scraggly beard I only thought possible in fantasy books and movies! I mean he literally has it so long he tucks it into one of the pockets of his tacky polyester cardigans! Anyway, the guy is as anal as you can get and doesn’t want ‘superfluous clutter’ interfering with his stacks and pristine tables. Thankfully he’s only in the office Wednesday and Friday (free pizza lunch in the cafeteria and payday respectively). The head of the Historical Society is a gorgeous MILF (if you don’t mind me saying) but I’m not sure why she’s working for the society since she doesn’t seem to do much although she apparently works 7 days a week. I only know this since my hours were supposed to be 9-5 Monday-Friday but I’ve been tempted into coming in on weekends, more on that in a minute.

I guess I should tell you what the job is all about and a little more about the Historical Society. Darabont County is at the furthest northern edge of Vermont and Precipice Bay is one of the oldest trading ports on Lake Champlain. The area is famous for The Hollows National Park and offers better skiing than any other location in New England (these are direct quotes from the tourist pamphlets, BTW). Anyway, I grew up in Lyndon and was planning on going to Northern Vermont University on early acceptance…and that didn’t work out. So yeah, Precipice Bay was way out there but the pay was really good and room and board were included since they needed a lot of specialized work. They have about 200+ years worth of unsorted documents they want to scan and categorize so its slow, tedious, technical work – room and board was the least they could do. So I did 2 phone interviews then trekked up for a period TBD.

The Historical Society has only been around for about 5 years although the Manor has been a museum since the 50s. There are 3 sub-basements stuffed to the brim with piles and piles of boxes, suitcases, chests, and crates filled with papers. Way back when the basements were used for storage, pantries, wine cellars, you name it – the van der Voorts were apparently filthy rich when filthy rich meant Rockefeller and Carnegie rich. The Buzzard is in charge of the above-ground library so even when he’s ‘in office’ I’m usually downstairs.

I figured that it was probably best to sort everything into piles day-by-day then scan through it all once a week so my ‘superfluous clutter’ (scanners and laptops) doesn’t enrage the Buzzard. The MILF decided that I could get overtime and come in on weekends if I wanted under the condition that I don’t go over 50 hours a week. I agreed at the time since it meant more money. The first few weeks went fine and I seemed to settle in easily. Most of the oldest papers were crop updates, IOUs from farmers to the landowners, and colony receipts so that stuff was easy. As the area got larger constabulary notes, manor inventories, trade receipts, and tariff notices joined the mess (I’m just going to tell you now before the archivists among you decry my methods that after I’ve scanned the documents they’re taken to an archivist who does…whatever archivists do to preserve paper. I wear gloves and everything when handling and have to use forceps on the really brittle stuff).

I’ve been here about 3 weeks now, made a couple of acquaintances who’re mostly townies who show me the ‘cool’ places tourists aren’t supposed to know about. But now let’s get to the whole reason I’m even on here: weird fucking shit I’ve found.

Yeah, I know, weird things in backwoods New England towns are like a dime a dozen and I’m not saying that anything I’ve found is like earth-shattering, break-your-perception-of-the-world-level shit but it’s just a lot of odd stuff floating around that I think would be cool for other people to know (and just for any reader’s reference I’m not going to bother putting these in chronological order, just putting them up as I find them).

So let me start with child disappearances.

This isn’t strictly from the archives, it actually started when one of the guys I met here, Steve, mentioned it in passing when I told him I walk alone from the Manor back to the B&B on Fleet Street at night.

‘You should be lucky you’re over 12,’ was all he said before he changed the subject. It seemed like such a strange non-sequitur that I filed it away. It wasn’t for another couple of days that I confronted him about the comment. He said that it was local superstition that children under 12 had to be accompanied by an adult if they walked after dusk. I think he said it was a joke since I look so young but his eyes flicked back and forth. He was nervous. I left it at that.

I forgot to mention that the woman who runs the B&B is a kind of unofficial historian for the town. It’s really contentious between her and the Buzzard, a schoolyard feud that just grew and grew over the years, the entire town knows about it and even chuckles when the two cross paths in the street. He can get really amped up over the smallest things but seeing Miss Angie throws him into a whole other level of batshit insane!

And don’t think that Miss Angie isn’t just as quirky and mad as the Buzzard! She’s normally a vivacious septuagenarian who acts and dresses like a thirty-year-old with embarrassing results but get her within ten feet of the Buzzard and she’ll start swearing like a sailor and hollering at the top of her lungs.

Anyway, if you have questions about ‘off the record’ goings-on (i.e. gossip) you talk to Miss Angie. She’s lived her whole life in Precipice Bay and she knows a lot of stuff to fill in the gaps of the Historical Society’s records. So I asked her.

“Which ones, dear?” Was her response. Like WTF? Of course you don’t cuss at Miss Angie so I swallowed my outburst and briefly told her about my friend’s comment.

“The dear is probably talking about old Ericka Martel. She’s kind of a legend in these parts.”

So from what I’ve been able to piece together from Miss Angie’s story and the ‘official’ records is that Ericka Martel (the records spell her name as both ‘Ericka’ and ‘Arica’) was a landowner’s daughter who fell in love with a fisherman. She got pregnant and was disowned by her family but she and the fishman lived (‘IN SIN’ as the records show) in a cabin on the outskirts of the Bay near a forest the locals call ‘The Javelin’. The fisherman apparently died in a freak waterspout (this is information added by Miss Angie) and a traveling crone appeared to offer Ericka the fisherman’s life for that of her child. Ericka didn’t believe the witch and cast her out but the very next day other fishermen brought up her lover’s corpse, bloated and fish-eaten. Heartbroken, she wandered the forest at night beseeching the witch to return, offering up her unborn child’s soul to the spirit (or spirits) living in the forest. Bad things began to happen in the town, fishing petered out, cattle died, and still Ericka pleaded in the forest. The town apparently blamed her for their misfortunes and shunned her, leaving her to starve to death in the forest even though she was pregnant (I’ve found some oblique references to ‘the starving wastrel’ in municipal records from 1683).

According to Miss Angie, Ericka wandered far into the forest to the base of ‘The Tall Men’ (what is now known as the Sarkesian Mountain Range) and collapsed before the crone reappeared. Ericka made her deal and was shortly back in her cabin, healthy, with her revived husband by her side. The townspeople kept far away from Ericka and the area surrounding the cabin, citing a foul smell, but records do mention that she was seen enormously pregnant (‘the cursed harlot was seen walking the fields today, grossly heavy with the devil’s spawn’ was how a farmer described it although no names were given).

Now everything is conjecture or rather folklore that Miss Angie warns has been mutated, altered, or (using her favorite term) bastardized over the centuries. Legend tells that the crone returned on the eve of birth in the form of a matronly midwife. The labor was hard and bloody and apparently lasted all night and day until finally the baby was born. Stillborn. The midwife cursed and spit, revealing herself as the witch, enraged at being cheated. The witch’s wrath was so great that Ericka’s husband vanished and everything in a mile rotted down to the ground including the cabin. Bleeding internally, Ericka lay dying as the witch took the dead child and walked back into the woods. Ericka cursed the witch, cursed the townspeople, cursed God, and died. No one was brave enough to recover her body for 3 seasons and when curious boys did wander to the dead zone there was no body to find.

Now Miss Angie made it very clear that the story was total hogwash although she’s certain that Ericka Martel was a real person and that she did get pregnant by a fisherman (all details that the historical record verifies) but all the ‘nonsense’ about a witch is just window-dressing (Miss Angie’s favorite term for tall tales) that grew and grew over the years. She told me that across the mountains in Cold Spring they say that Ericka Martel wandered over the Tall Men in her search for the witch and drowned herself in Frazer Lake. Cold Spring’s version says that her ghost haunts the shores of the lake searching for her unborn child and will snatch any child walking alone, dragging them down into the lake to stay with her forever. The Micmac and Abenaki have another version where they believe Ericka became a Skadegamutc, or “ghost-witch”, cursing all who hear her cries of sadness in the forest. Or at least that’s the reason they gave for why they didn’t hunt in the forest.

Now we get to the real creepy stuff…

It’s true that children have gone missing in Precipice Bay. Miss Angie told me that disappearances date all the way back to Ericka’s time. At first I thought it was just the normal rural dangers of coyotes and bears and the like that plagued colonial America along with window-dressing but there seems to be something far more insidious going on.

Records dating from 1720-1876 describe a series of disappearances around ‘The Javelin’ (an area of the woods that narrows to a single tree giving it the appearance of a javelin point when seen from above). Boys and girls under the age of 12, mostly farmers’ children, disappeared under the cover of night from their homes. No investigations, no bodies, just a series of search records and small notes in the constabulary ledgers. Once again, easily dismissed as coyote or bear attacks or even just absent-minded parents. In fact, one isolated record from 1721 listed a child’s body found ‘befouled by wolves’ outside of town; it doesn’t seem that much of s stretch to assume that people at that time thought the 1722 disappearances were just more of the same. A tragedy, yes, but natural in a rural area.

I was discussing the disappearances with Miss Angie and she just went silent and put her teacup down.

“Oh dear,” she always called me ‘dear’, “that was a bad business I didn’t know about. I was talking about the ones in 1893 and 1961.”

I felt like everything suddenly turned cold. I don’t even remember leaving Miss Angie or ending up at the library.

The library was downtown across from the Town Hall, a fairly modern building by Precipice Bay standards built in the 1950’s after the original one (an old church) burned to the ground. It had the last 178 years of newspapers on microfiche and hardcopy. I’d only been there a few times talking with the archivist but the advantage of being in library sciences meant I at least knew what I was looking for and where to find it…

Whoo-boy…

The Precipice Bay Lighthouse (the town paper from 1863-1913) reported a series of 12 disappearances in Precipice Bay proper – not the outlying farmland – between March 1 and July 26, 1893. All disappeared from their homes but at wildly different times of day. 2 siblings were taken in an afternoon by the seaside, another at dusk on the outskirts, some were blamed on drownings and others on that old standby: animal attacks. Police did routine searches, boats dredged the bay, parents begged for information, but by the winter the disappearances were forgotten. At least in the public consciousness.

The other series of disappearances that Miss Angie mentioned had the most news coverage. Between July 24 and 27, 1961, 10 children disappeared from in and around The Javelin. They were dubbed ‘The Javelin 10’: Alain & Agnes Levereau, Astoria & Russet Hemple, Thomas Potter, Mathias Jones, Bertha Jergins, Helen Knell, James Torkin, and Henry Semp.

It had been a period of excellent weather and the area was enjoying a rapid influx of tourists hiking, kayaking, and camping. All ten were out-of-towners camping beyond the cordon in the darker parts of the forest. Now the Javelin 10 got a lot of media coverage at the time but nothing else came to light. No bodies, no signs, and volunteer searchers went all over the mountains but nothing to indicate where the children went – they literally vanished in broad daylight. The press continued pursuing the story for about 6 months with no witnesses but a lot of crackpots. At least 4 stories ran touting that the kidnapper was found before being swiftly debunked within days by police and rangers. Finally, a 1 year memorial capped off the incident although it remains in the local gossip and conspiracy circles bolstered by a permanent cordon erected around the site by the ranger station. Miss Angie later told me that 2 families, the Hemples and the Jergins, moved to the area simply to continue searching. Apparently one of the Jergins is the manager of the Four-Points Lodge in town now. Maybe I’ll see if I can speak to them if I ever get the courage to open their wounds…

And let me say that these are just the disappearances in Precipice Bay, apparently a whole village disappeared over the mountains in Morgan Hollows and Miss Angie obliquely mentioned something about even more children being killed down the river in New Stickney around the time Precipice Bay was forming around French-Canadian/Native American trading camps. Something seriously strange is going on around here and I’m thanking my lucky stars I didn’t have to grow up in the area. I mean, there are plenty of children that grew up in The Bay and gone on to live long and peaceful lives so it’s not like no children in Darabont County live past 12 but these so-called “isolated incidents” and the fact that Steve mentioned it at all lead to a truly awful conclusion: that the authorities don’t know who or what is causing the disappearances and have taken steps to minimize the pool of potential victims. Why else would a mandatory curfew be in effect for children under the age of 15 for the last 70-odd years? Why cordon off the Javelin Point area indefinitely? I’m keeping an eye out for anything in the archives about either the Morgan Hollows or New Stickney incidents.

Miss Angie wouldn’t go into any detail about either incident – saying that she’d just heard about them from friends and didn’t know any details – and I’m not going to press her. She did say one thing that really chilled me. In fact, it’s what made me type this all up:

We were talking about the Javelin 10 and after she told me about the families moving to the area she told me about the cordon. “It’s all just window-dressing, mind you, but I’ve heard more than a few rangers over the years say they hear children’s voices in The Point. Poor men just couldn’t get over the fact they found nothing after all these years. The Witch’s Children don’t want to be found.”

‘The Witch’s Children’, that’s what the disappeared kids are called in The Bay. Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up here, maybe every small town has these kinds of dark secrets, but everything about this window-dressing is painting a picture of a community that takes folklore very seriously. I asked Steve about it, not mentioning that I’d been researching the disappearances, and he knew all about The Witch’s Children. In fact the whole group of people I’d met here in town know and seemed to take the fact that Miss Angie explained the situation to me as carte-blanche to talk candidly. Common belief among them is that The Witch (none of them could agree that it was Ericka/Arica, it’s just an amorphous adversarial ‘witch’) collects children in the forest where they live forever in the shadow side of the trees. None of Steve’s group would go anywhere near the cordon and pointedly asked me if I was stupid for even suggesting it.

So yeah, weird things happen in this neck of the woods. The child disappearances seem to just be the tip of the iceberg.

Credit: Jenni Kinoshita

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