Estimated reading time — 18 minutes

Let’s take a step back from the quasi-cosmic ramifications of the Great Mouser. Let’s talk about UFOs today. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that Darabont County is the Bridgewater Triangle of Vermont – it seemingly has everything a budding paranormal investigator would want (all unverifiable, of course): UFOs, bigfoot, wendigo/skinwalkers, disappearances, murders, ghosts, giant birds, sea serpents, the list just goes on and on. I’ve only touched on some of the things that I’ve discovered in the archives and that will continue, but I’m learning so much fascinating gossip from Miss Angie and Tall Jim it would be a disservice to everyone if I didn’t talk about some of the weirder things they’ve said…

So the child disappearances and the Witch of Precipice Bay started me down this rabbit hole but along the way I’ve picked up wendigo, gracklins, cats, and a whole bucketload of Abenaki myths. Tall Jim has been indispensable in giving me some background I couldn’t get from Miss Angie and the archives but here’s some interesting facts about UFO sightings in the area.

From 1983-1999 over 90% of the UFO sightings in Vermont came from Darabont County. On the evening of September 2, 1988, there was a rash of sightings of strange lights in the sky from Precipice Bay all the way down to New Stickney. Two sets of three lights in a triangular pattern danced across the sky back and forth for over four hours. The Precipice Bay Beacon, Hollows Gazette, Frazier Lake Crier, and The Stickney Times reported that sightings stretched as far North as Montreal and as far South as Berlin and Montpelier. ABC, NBC, and even CBC in Montreal carried stories the next morning of the lights and some people reporting burned fields and scorched forests. There were about twenty cases of people with mysterious skin lesions/burns from hospitals across the area. Golden Boughs Medical Center reported five of those cases and the Stickney Times reported that the victims showed signs of radiation burns but the story was immediately redacted in the evening edition. On September 3, CBC Montreal reported that the cause of the lights was a test flight of US military assets from Burlington Air National Guard base but that story was never reported by any of the local papers or news stations in the US.

On the morning of June 6, 1985 a massive aerial explosion shattered windows in Petersham and at least three people from Attatuck were admitted to Golden Boughs for burst eardrums. No one saw anything even though the incident occurred during the morning school commute.

Around 7pm on November 1, 1991, residents of Lynchburg and Chatum called the sheriff’s office in Morgan Hollows to report a suspected forest fire behind Mt. Warren. They unanimously reported a red glow pulsing and flickering on the other side of the mountains with a faint scent of smoke. Authorities called up to Sky Dells on the side and Frazier Lake at the bottom of the mountain – neither town could find any indication of fire but alerted the Sheriff’s Department to a possible forest fire on the other side of the mountain. They dispatched a car to Chatum and the deputies reported the same phenomena. Abruptly, all sightings stopped at 11:48pm but the burning smell lingered for two days afterward.

Finally, at 1:17pm on August 2, 1998, Brahms was witness to a streak of burning light cascading across the sky. Witnesses stated that it was like a dirt-clod rolling along the road, as it moved it was slowly whittled away as pieces broke off and scattered in its wake. Golden Boughs and Morgan Hollows reported the same sight and it continued for twenty-three minutes before disappearing completely. At 4:58pm that same day a minor tremor registering a seismic magnitude of 2.6 shook the area encapsulating Brahms, Morgan Hollows, Petersham, Golden Boughs, and Attatuck; cracking windows and splintering the foundation of the Darabont County Sheriff Station. No other cities or towns reported the phenomenon in the sky.

These are just some of the verifiable sightings that I could dig up in the newspaper morgue. Unreported or unpublished sightings abound in the area. From 1989-1991 there were an estimated average of three sightings per week called into the Sheriff’s Department. This area clearly is a hotspot for UFOs in the present but Tall Jim explained that things have always been this way…

“I told you that the One Sights were the reason we fear The Tall Men but it wasn’t always so. Long before the cult and long before the white men came across the Lake local tribes revered The Tall Men but also feared them under the belief that great evil slept under the mountains. This story has no time period, it exists in the between times when animal and human were indistinct, but there was a great calamity that threatened to sunder our world.

“Gichi Niwaskw, The Great Spirit, created the world and all the spirits. From these spirits sprang Gluskabe, who taught the people of the land the ways of farming and hunting and how to shape the world. Some stories include an evil ‘brother’ named Malsumis who sought only to undo what Gichi Niwaskw created but that’s not part of the story I heard so I’m going to ignore it. Additionally there was another, Ojihozo, or “the man who came from nothing” who created the mountains and Lake Champlain by dragging his legless body across the earth. For a time it was only these two beings and all the creatures of nature who they used to control the winds, water, etc. What’s important for this story is that these two powerful beings existed and created the world we now know. You see, our myths hold three distinct periods, the Ancient Age, the Golden Age, and the Present Age. Roughly speaking, the Ancient Age is akin to your Garden of Eden where everything lived in harmony but spirits controlled all the aspects of the world. The Golden Age is where man and animal began to separate as man’s control over the environment grew. And the Present Age is where man is man and not animal at all through knowledge bestowed by Gluskabe.

“This story takes place at the end of the Golden Age and the very beginning of the Present. One day a fiery bird appeared in the sky from ‘another place’ (we’ve understood this to mean space) with a deafening roar that snapped trees and killed countless animals and humans. When I was little my mother called it Nowitebakad or “midnight” since it ends one age and begins the next but lately some people have been calling it Ask-wee-da-eed, which isn’t any word I know but somehow became known as a fiery bird. I don’t know where it came from but I’m going to continue using Nowitebakad.

The world turned and ate and grew under the tutelage of Gluskabe for untold time. The animals and humans lived in harmony and balance with many wonderous things created by the power of Gichi Niwaskw. However, as the age grew old and the stars turned in the sky The Great Silence saw fit to make itself known once more. With the crash of a thousand thunderstorms a great bird wreathed in flame roared into existence at the border of land and sky. Not born from Gichi Nwaskw or Gluskabe, indeed not born of anything more or less than the end of all things, it burned the sky and singed the earth.

The bird sat high in the sky for twenty days and twenty nights, causing even the sun and moon to hide in fear, until Gluskabe flew up to speak with it.

‘Why have you come to kill the earth and trees?’ He asked.

‘I have come to sunder all beneath me and spread my wings across the world,’ it replied. Knowing that this would mean the end of men and animal and world alike, Gluskabe begged the fiery bird to pass in peace to no avail. ‘I will smite this land in the dead of night three days from today,’ the bird warned him before Gluskabe retreated to the ground.

Knowing that even he could not prevent such a disaster alone, Gluskabe sought out Ojihozo who had become a stone after creating Lake Champlain.

’Wise Ojihozo, I wish to speak with you, will you talk?’ The stone did not answer. ‘The fiery bird in the sky threatens this lake and everything you have created! I need your help.’

At this the stone shrugged and legless Ojihozo waded across the lake to where Gluskabe stood on the shore. ‘Why do you wake me just as I was falling asleep? I care not for the dangers of the fire bird – my mountains and lake will survive long after we are both gone.’

‘The fire bird will not allow your works to survive, it will destroy all it can touch and beyond. Already it has burned the land and it flies nearer each day.’

Ojihozo was impatient as always. ‘If I help you, you must give me your tobacco so that I may pass the time and look upon my lake until the Great Silence.’

An accord was made over the day and the two quickly made a plan.

At the darkest hour of night on the third day Nowitebakad landed on the earth. Its wings scorched and scarred the ground, fire burned all the animals and men in the area to ash, and it’s cries tore the sky. It gleefully cut the edges of Lake Champlain with the tip of its wing and sundered the mountains to the North into dust. It laughed as it destroyed and reveled in the power to undo everything Gichi Niwaskw and Gluskabe built.

Suddenly, a great rumbling began all around. Confused, Nowitebakad ceased its destruction and put its head to the ground to hear the cause of the noise. No sooner had it laid flat against the blackened earth than the trap was sprung and miles of earth on either side rose up to swallow the death-bringer. Confused, surprised, frightened, it pushed off the ground and took flight, shattering the ground under its feet. But as powerful and fast as fire is it could not move fast enough for as it reached the sky the very ground on either side rose up and swallowed it whole.

The earth quaked and shuddered as the fiery bird attempted to escape but the rock was too thick and the space too small for it to do more than turn around. Without the use of its powerful wings it was trapped until, like all fire, it exhausted itself and turned to cinders. Silence lay upon the land for one day and one night before Gluskabe and Ojihozo were satisfied the threat was over. The pair looked upon their work: a long line of tall mountains cutting across the area stretching from Lake Champlain down to the dark forests to the South.

‘I’m tired,’ said Ojihozo, ‘I want to relax in my Lake and go to sleep. Will you make sure I get my tobacco?’

‘Of course,’ replied Gluskabe, ‘I will have it brought to your rock so you need not move again. I am also tired but this beast is not truly dead – just as burned wood becomes charcoal, so too can its ashes cause trouble. I will watch over it and tell you if it returns.’

Ojihozo yawned and returned to his lake, entombing himself into stone to gaze upon his work while Gluskabe whispered to the new mountains. His breath brought the stone to life.

‘You who have swallowed the calamity must hold fast and guard your prison. Our age is ending and so I must travel far but you will remain and weather but never disappear – emtombing forever the destructive adversary for the survival of the world. This sacred task I bestow upon you, Tall Men of Stone, until the Great Silence prevails and the stars go out. If the fiery death-bringer awakes from its slumber deep within you must call me back and I will protect this land again.’

The Tall Men of Stone accepted the appointment gladly and Gluskabe left the land to search for answers to unfathomable questions. The mountains still remain on guard against the restoration of Nowitebakad and if it were to break free we know that Gluskabe would return.

So The Tall Men were guardians of some great evil, an evil that Tall Jim believes was a meteor. Or perhaps something stranger if all these stories about UFOs are true. I can’t find any evidence to substantiate the One Sight cult or their massacre but all oral history has some basis in fact and the details of the story don’t point towards it being created as a warning like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Tall Jim believes there’s some truth to the story since variations of it exists not only within his tribe but also among the Micmac and Wampanoag tribes of the area. I’m inclined to believe him – I mean is that story any weirder than anything else I’ve discovered already? But what if there’s a connection between this story of Nowitebakad – the undying fire bird – and the unknown god of the One Sights? Tall Jim says that the Abenaki have always told stories about UFOs or strangely moving stars. The screaming, burning heads streaking across the sky? Yeah, those could be meteors but Jim says that some versions of the story include giant flying heads that shot blinding lights from their mouths and used burning tongues to swallow people.

It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from firebreathing light shooting flying heads to extraterrestrial war machines like the tripods from War of the Worlds…

So we have some sort of ancient precedent for meteors or UFOs in the area, a lot of Native American folklore surrounding odd colors and shapes in the sky, and a host of sightings in the present. Well, for those of you questioning if there might be something about UFOs in the archives; yes, there are reports dating back to the mid-1700s.

Now some of these are mere speculation. First, as I stated before it’s hard to date some of the archives because most people at the time didn’t date IOUs or payment receipts; second, some of these ‘sightings’ smack of the kind of UFO eyewitness accounts you’d find on Ancient Aliens. Anyway, here’s what I could find:

Undated grain report (presumably pre-1700s): “falling stars in the middle of the day set the woods ablaze”Undated constabulary report (presumably 1700s): “loud explosion overhead shattered windows in farmhouses across the bay. Small fires cropping up in Southern woods”Farmer’s journal dated 1768 (translated from French by the MILF): “loud ringing in the mountains caused goats to run away, pigs bled from ears, dogs locked in barn. Bright flashes in the sky for hours afterward”British watch log, Fort Ticonderoga, 2/3/1775: “explosions above forest. Loud noises like artillery shells overhead. General quarters called, alert raised. No sign of perpetrators. Alert rescinded. Sky alive with shooting stars”Undated Crown Point merchant log: “glowing in forest like fire, smelled smoke, went different route South. Artillery fire from Fort, fled into forest”Undated Continental Army log: “shooting stars overhead all night. Explosions during the day. What madness are the Red Coats plotting? No contacts for 3 days. Forest fire flushing animals through camp. Dinner was good”British personal diary, dated 5/23/1796: “Leaving Dutchman finally. Glad to see the back of this godforsaken place. Screaming stars kept the garrison up all night”Undated surveyor’s report: “Eager to return to Charlotte [presumably the town of Charlotte]. Strange things happen in the North, the Captain [Barnes] warned us not to pay it no mind but the area stings with smoke but no fire. Cannons fire all night, and the moon never rises”

I haven’t made it through the strata of documents dealing with the period around the War of 1812 so this is all I was able to glean from what’s already been sorted. I did visit the newpaper morgue, though, and was able to find – with the excellent assistance of Francis Berry, the archivist, many newspaper reports of the same phenomena from 1900 to the present. ‘Sources’ in the later articles (post 1940) frequently posit that deposits of swamp gas and methane are the causes of the glowing lights and spontaneous fires but who really believes that crap?

The last thing I’ll leave you with is the curious account of noted miner and local crackpot, Johannes Letartre. Letartre (1855?-1917) was born in Canada at an indeterminate location (variously self-reported to be Quebec, Montreal, some backwater in France before his mother got on a boat, the usual) and first appeared in the US records after being arrested for public intoxication and indecency in 1872. Somehow he had a wife and two children, although their birth certificates don’t list him as the father, and he was never naturalized – no doubt due to the fact his marriage to a Marguerite Turnbow, a US citizen, was never official – but his behavior was consistent enough that employment and correctional records paint a broad enough picture…

Letartre started working for the Thibideault Textiles mill shortly thereafter until it closed in 1890, then pivoted to mining, working for the Tal-Mor Mine Corporation.

Genevieve Talbot was heiress to the Talbot Shipping empire and a fiercely independant woman. After her father’s death she single-handedly oversaw tremendous growth when she pivoted to heavily invest in the Panama Canal. Unfortunately, as was the way of the world, she had to marry and ended up betrothed to Albert Morton, son of Thomas Morton of the Morton Textiles empire.

Also, unfortunately, Albert Morton was a pig. Obese, slovenly, lascivious, and crass were the lighter ways he was described in the press at the time. Sure, puff pieces abounded about how their love was fated and how excited Genevieve was about their nuptials, but looking at photos it was clear she was less than enthusiastic about having her autonomy usurped.

So, whether through sheer happenstance or furtive meddling, Albert was outed as a homosexual and the scandal brought an end to that arrangement. As a conciliatory measure, Thomas Morton agreed to a business venture between the two organizations and the Tal-Mor Mining Coporation was born. As Genevieve preferred to live in the remote and clear air of Vermont, the venture’s first site was on the North side of the Tall Men, into a mountain that eventually came to be known as ‘Talbot’s Hubris’.

What started as a drift mine in 1886 had added both a slope and pit/shaft mine by 1892, pulling lithium, iron, lead, and copper. Letartre worked in the slope mine and was apparently a hairs-breadth away from being fired if the number and frequency of complaints and reprimands were true. Fortunately for him, but unfortunately for Tal-Mor, the unpleasantness of 1900 happened with a mine collapse and explosion.

On the morning of Monday, January 8th began as normal; the mines had been closed since Christmas Eve, 1899, for the New Year in a very out-of-character holiday, so a lot of work had to be done to clean-up and tidy the shafts. It turned out that a blizzard had hit the area, necessitating extensive draining and snow removal that made operations impossible, so while the workers preened at working for a company that valued them and gave them a fortnight holiday, the head of operations was getting chewed out by the board for losing a fortnight of profit. The first shift back began at 6:43am for the slope mine, 4:24am for the drift, and 9:13am for the pit.

Somewhere around 11:30am the drift and slope miners felt a rumble and began evacuation. At 11:33am the rest of the miners were caught in a massive explosion that shot out of the slope mine shaft, spraying debris for a mile East towards the town of Albamarle. Both above-ground shafts collapsed with the explosion and a massive eruption of fire and plume of rock fired out from below the rock pile. At 11:54am a massive lump of stone and metal hurled out of the ground and disappeared into the air; none of the witnesses could tell the direction, only that it had an arc and no one heard an impact.

Rescue efforts lasted three days before conclusive evidence or bodies were discovered for the over thirty people missing in the rubble. Due to ‘bad’ record-keeping, its unknown if more still lie entombed to this day as Tal-Mor had a habit of employing…let’s just say the unemployable…so there ARE probably still recordless workers’ remains still in the deepest parts of the mine.

You know, in case you needed another reason not to go trespassing in an abandoned mine. Not that you’d be able to get anywhere near there today; the government bought the mountain and a parcel of land around it in the late 40s-early 50s – all strictly hush-hush – and still maintains a fence and guards now so the chances of getting anywhere within a mile are infinitesimal. So don’t get any ideas…

Anyway…

Nearly ten days after rescue efforts ceased, Letarte appeared at the mine offices bleeding, naked, and completely insane. It came as quite a surprise to the managers as his helmet and pickax were recovered from the rubble coated in blood so he had been listed as ‘killed’. His bare feet were gangrenous and some accounts at the time report that he had a red rash on his chest and arms consistent with what we would now recognize as radiation burns…but the validity of the accounts are up to interpretation. It hasn’t stopped some people from pointing to the records and smugly declaring that they prove Letarte wasn’t lying and he did encounter something alien under the mountain – but I’m getting ahead of myself!

For two weeks Letarte was laid up, sedated so his raving wouldn’t interfere with treatments; Tal-Mor covered the medical bills since they needed answers more than anyone, but the butcher’s bill ended up being severe malnutrition, burst eardrums, Letarte’s left foot amputated, three toes on his right, and his last three fingers on his right hand removed. The burns faded during his time in the hospital but shiny, thick, keloid tissue covered the top of his chest and upper arms for the rest of his life.

Thankfully, he was lucid when he awoke, but everything he said was dismissed as mere nonsense.

According to his story he’d been dragging a fellow miner out from underneath a section of collapsed ceiling, leaving his helmet and tools behind in the tunnel, when the floor gave out and he fell into the dark. He awoke to pitch blackness in a tight crevasse. After some time he managed to squeeze himself out of the space and reach a flatter slab of rock. Unfortunately, that slab of rock ended up being where a good portion of his fellow miners had died.

All he’d had to start was his pipe, tobacco pouch, and two boxes of cheap matches. Uncaring or unknowing that it would eat up oxygen, he’d used his lit pipe as a torch, scavenging more from the corpses of his dead companions and mapping out the cavern as well as netting himself a watch and a broken lamp.

The slab was the bottom of a rough basin with the black, bottomless crevasse running along the bottom edge. Water was dripping from the fallen ceiling so he at least had something to drink but food quickly became a problem.

On the fifth day he started on the bodies of his fellow miners. See? I told you that everything comes back to the Wendigo around here! But Letarte didn’t go mad and crave human flesh like the denizens of The Basket, in fact, all records and anecdotes I’ve been able to find agree that he became a vegetarian following the mine incident, so maybe the hungry spirit just wasn’t in the mood for French-Canadian? Or maybe it had something to do with the fact he was alone and trapped? Or maybe it was because the human/humans he ate were already dead? I’m getting into the weeds here…in any case…

By the seventh day the tobacco had run out and the water was beginning to wane. In a mad belief, he began digging with the discarded tools littering the space in a random direction. He didn’t know how long he dug into the walls but he was sleeping more and more and the temperature as he got further in whatever direction he’d been digging was rising. At some point – by now his sense of time was seriously distorted – he broke into another cavern.

Naked, starving, dehydrated, and blind, he crawled into the new space. Since everything was dark he couldn’t tell if he slept or passed out or was awake, but eventually something touched him.

At first he thought it was his imagination – apparently he’d been having vivid dreams or waking hallucinations for some time before he reached the cavern – but it soon became clear something definitely was touching him as after some palpating of his weak form he was lifted bodily high into the cavern.

What followed was a fairly standard alien abduction scenario: painful probing of his bodily orifices, strobing lights, painful sensations of hot and cold, unintelligible noises; it was a literal smorgasbord of abduction experiences that pre-date any other accounts by, you know, almost seventy years! Letarte maintained through the rest of his life that he’d felt wires or cables writhing inside his veins, leading to several verified cases of self-mutilation wherein he was found publicly rooting around in his body for ‘metal worms’.

It’s unknown, even to him, how long the procedures lasted. He frequently said it felt like weeks but without light or his scavenged watch it was impossible to tell exactly how long he endured. It ended when his restraints went slack and he fell to the stone floor. A high-pitched whine erupted, deafening him, before a tremendous heat blasted him in the face. He raised his arms to protect his face but no sooner had he reacted than the fire disappeared. A rumble shook him and he opened his eyes to sunlight for the first time in he couldn’t possible know when, which was precisely the moment he passed out.

He awoke in terrible pain to a snow and trees. Stumbling in the forest he made he way towards the Tall Men in the distance and eventually made it back to the mining office where he was found.

Now let me pose a question: how long was Letarte trapped? His account is actually consistent, seven days in the cavern before the light gave out and he couldn’t see the watch face. It’s possible – actually quite likely – that he was passing out between these periods of lucidity so that seven days might well be in excess of ten; then add on the days spent blindly digging and more ‘days’ under torture. It amounts to a tremendous amount of time no matter how you cut it!

Now ask yourself: what was the explosion that he felt after the torture ended? As far as all eyewitness accounts go, there were only two confirmed explosions during the entire affair: the first was the fireball that forcefully evacuated the slope mine at 11:33am and the second was the massive detonation that threw an unidentifiable chunk of metal high into the sky at 11:54am. In that intervening period between the mine disaster and Letarte wandering back into camp there were no reported explosions or fires anywhere nearby.

What happened to him after the initial explosion that cast him into the depths? Then, what happened after his forceful probing that threw him into the woods days away from camp? He reportedly wandered for all ten of the days between the explosions and his reappearance at camp. So how do we account for his seven plus days trapped under the mountain?

During his life he voraciously defended his account of events, fighting naysayers, and publishing a missive in the Albamarle Clarion – the local newpaper – attesting to the truth of his very loud public statements. No one believed him. Stress, injury, head trauma, hallucination, were the usual responses to his story from contemporary accounts. What medical records survive provide no evidence for any sort of forced medical experimentation or probing – and why would they? I doubt doctors paid much attention bruising or injury to any of his orifices…

Johannes died of exposure at some point between February 2 and February 9, 1917. He was last seen stumbling out of Lucky Jack’s illegal drinking hole on the outskirts of Albamarle at about 9pm on February 2nd to ‘take a piss’ as, from what Mr. Berry was able to gather, Lucky Jack’s was a lean-to addition to Mr. Jack Lawrie’s livingroom that acted as an outlet for his bathtub gin business. Apparently, Jack’s wife, Ethel, refused to allow his ‘friends’ to use the house’s toilet. Johannes Letarte disappeared into the night on crutches and was found frozen solid by hikers near The Fang on the morning of February 9th. It should be noted that it had been a mild winter and the temperature wasn’t nearly low enough to freeze a human body even given the extended duration.

Now there are a lot of theories surrounding Letarte’s account and death. Those who believe what he said ernestly believe that he had a legitimate UFO experience and that his burns and tale solidly match current abduction narratives. Others believe that he hallucinated the entire affair to cope with cannibalizing his fellow miners and that the fantastic stories were a way to cover up his heinous crimes. I’ll leave that to the reader to decide, mainly because of the age of the story and records, nothing really supports one version versus the other, and also because one tale matters little compared to the breadth of historical context.

So here are the facts once again: Johannes Letarte worked as a miner for the Tal-Mor Company and was the sole survivior of a catastrophic collapse. He wandered in the forest for at least ten days after the disaster and returned to camp with horrendous wounds. At the time of the collapse, a massive chunk of…something…shot out of the ground on the far side of the mountain and there is no record of it landing anywhere. Letarte, lame and crippled, disappeared from town one night and his body was found a preposterously long ways away in a manner simply impossible for the time.

What do you think happened to him? Even after going through all the records and sitting with Mr. Berry as we scrolled through the microfiche archives, I don’t know what to think…Occam’s Razor would be that Letarte just made the whole thing up – not purposefully, mind you, but as a way of dealing with the trauma. But his scars definitely weren’t caused by normal fire. The skin was burned uniformly and presented with sloughing during healing, with descriptions in the medical records eerily reminiscent of radiation burns following Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I’ve got some (hopefully) major investigations coming up in the next couple of weeks so all this UFO stuff will have to be put on the back-burner. It’s back to ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night!

Credit: Jenni Kinoshita

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