In the 1730s a plague began in New England. And by the 1800s, it was responsible for almost a quarter of all deaths in the Northeast, according to the Smithsonian Magazine.
While it was the cause of Mercy Brown and many of her family members, some began to believe she was actually a vampire — asking her father to remove her heart and liver, burn them and feed the ashes to his dying son.
This created the lore of one of one of the most popular New England’s vampire stories.
But New England has many ghost, vampire and witch stories.
New England legends has an app to help people find these spooky sites near them or to take a fun road trips. The app includes a map with information and a podcast about each haunted site. Jeff Belanger, author and paranormal investigator, hopes people use the map he helped create to go to some of these places and enjoy the podcast in the car while there.
He talked a lot about vampires during the COVID-19 pandemic, he told MassLive in 2020. As they are often said to came around during times of plague.
“When medical science didn’t have a good answer for you, when your religion didn’t have a good answer for you, folklore always has an answer,” he said. “It’s incredible the parallels that we can look at between then and now.”
But he has a lot of other spooky stories to share. In fact, scary stories that surround Halloween have nothing on Christmas.
Halloween, he explained, is the time when the veil is thin between the living and the dead. Typically that just involves ghosts meddling in our affairs, he said. But Christmas monsters can kill you, Belanger said.
“Like you could die from the monsters and folklore that surround yule and Christmas,” he said, talking of Krampus, Belsnickel and the Yule Lads. “Dear Lord, stay inside. You are not safe at Christmas.”
In one podcast, Belanger talks about the Cobble Mountain Critter, a Bigfoot-type creature located in Blandford.
“Could this be the same Sasquatch that’s been seen in the nearby Berkshires, or is it something weirder,” the website states.
In 1939, the North Adams Transcript newspaper published a photo of a possible ghost, who “came home after the war battered and broken to learn that life had gone on without him.”
Belanger and Ray Auger hiked Mt. Greylock in search of the ghost known as Old Coot, said to once have been William Saunders.
The pair talk about a sighting from as recently as 2018.
“Keep your eyes peeled, Ray,” Belanger said in the podcast.
But you don’t have to believe in ghosts to be haunted by these stories either. And that’s why people continue to talk about Lizzie Borden.
“Two people were murdered in that house. No one was ever convicted or punished for the crime,” he said. “We do not like people getting away with murder in our state, town, city, region, country, whatever. We don’t like it. It haunts us. And we know it could happen again.”
Plus, they’re all the key to understanding our world, he said.
“They’re a glimpse into who we were and who we are and who we will probably become,” Belanger said. “Because when you talk about ghosts, what you’re really asking is, ‘Is there life after death?’ And when you talk about aliens, what you’re really saying is, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ And when you talk about Bigfoot, and lake monsters and things like that, you’re really asking, ‘Do we know every creature that walks the earth with us?’ These are the big ones. Those are the big questions humans have asked for thousands upon thousands of years.”
