More New Hampshire Halloween Haiku

Kids swarm my front door
Demographic problem
Fewer homes to hit.

Things That Go Bump in the Night in NH, Part IV

My wife called me frantically. It was the middle of the day, and I was at work, which is to say I was a wee bit busy, but her call was urgent. "Tell me what happened at Bretton Woods!"

I always joke that some day, I'll be in a crowded theater and the lights will suddenly be flicked on, and someone from management will come out on the stage, wringing his/her hands, and ask aloud in an urgent tone: "Is there a historian in the house?" OK, I'm only an amateur historian, but still, ya gotta dream. Anyway, for all the wisecracks I get from my wife about "hysterians", as she calls them, I still do get the occasional frantic phone call with a historical question from her. In this case, the urgency was prompted by the fact she had her visiting father with her and they were approaching the Bretton Woods exit at about 70 mph, and needed to make a decision, quick. I informed her of Bretton Woods' grand past as a resort hotel for the rich, and of the famous post-World War II economic conference that took place there which established a global financial system that lasted until the early 1970s. Though the first part probably was the deal-maker, they decided to go for it. Afterward, she related the following to me, which she swears is true. It's actually not that big of a deal, really, but it impressed her, and it's late on Halloween night and I'm short of material otherwise, so here goes:

They took the tour of Bretton Woods, an din the midst of that tour, they discussed some of the hotel's paranormal attributes; like any good self-respecting hotel nowadays, Bretton Woods is apparently haunted. There was a time when being haunted was a bad thing for business, but nowadays, that's just part of the charm of staying in an early-20th century luxury resort. So in any event, the tour guide mentioned while they were transitting from one room to the next some of the hotel's ghost lore, when the group entered a stately conference room. One of the tour group asked the guide a question about one of the ghosts, some lady who met an untimely demise, and just as she finished her question the large, elegant chandelier over the table in the room began to sway several inches back and forth, seemingly without rhyme or reason. The entire group saw it and gasped in unison. I probably would have soiled myself had I been there. The guide apparently sputtered nervously that she had no idea what could be making the chandelier swing.

So there you have it, my wife's NH ghost story. Not very dramatic, but authentic, nonetheless. Have a good Halloween, and try not to load up too much on all the Halloween leftover candy your coworkers will be bringing into work tomorrow.

New Hampshire Halloween Haiku

Staring at North Star
Sniffing hot cocoa, autumn
The pumpkin's on fire.

Driving in New Hampshire, Part IV

I have a theory. New Hampshirites worship Dunkin Donuts -- that much we've established. However, I think this obsession went from quaint, benign trait to life-threatening behavior the moment Dunkin Donuts -- or possibly, some other entrepreneurial soul -- invented cup holders. Now again, this is just a theory, but stay with me here.

This invention, the cup holder, forced New Hampshirites to make a decision, often while doing 85 mph in the midst of traffic. Indeed, traffic may be the important variable here because as the state's population has grown so quickly over the past couple decades, New Hampshirites have suddenly had to start dealing with other cars on the road rather than just the occasional skittish moose. That cup holder was the clencher, though -- it forced New Hampshirite drivers to divide their attention for a split second, a crucial split second. In the midst of traffic on a one-lane highway, with a large one-ton Chevy flatbed with several old engine blocks loosely chained on the back coming right at them in the on-coming lane, and a moose standing pensively off to the side on the shoulder, surrounded maybe by a flock of kamikaze turkeys loitering threateningly at the moose's feet, the New Hampshire driver has a decision to make: the cup holder for a fresh hit of java to help get them through this, or the turn signal.

Folks, I am here to tell you that the cup holder wins every time. Consequently, when driving in New Hampshire, you cannot and should not expect the drivers around you to signal their intention. As far as they're concerned, the fact that they are turning should be heads-up enough for you to discern that they intended to turn anyway, and they make that contention with full clarity, having just sipped some of the bitter black stuff.

Message in a Bottle

New England for many outside the region is analogous (=) with antiques, and New England -- New Hampshire included -- does its best to help foster that image by putting an antique shop every 50 yards, nestled in between Dunkin Donuts and Walmart. If you're in some of the trendier tourist-focused parts of New Hampshire like the Lakes region or Portsmouth and the coast, you'd be hard-pressed to be able to throw a stone in any direction without hitting an antiques shop. Now, that's part of the New Hampshire charm, so I'm not complaining and indeed, it's fun to walk Portsmouth's winding 17th century streets and explore the many little shops and boutiques and art studios, but still, I am issuing a word to the wise.

A couple years back, a fad of collecting colonial-style antique New England-ish colored glass bottles swept New Hampshire, and many shops loaded up on these things, some with a very rustic, rough-hewn twine tied around the bottle neck for convenient hanging in a window. Now, there are professional collectors out there, but these colored bottles suddenly popped up all over Portsmouth. These things just oozed old New England and seeing them hanging and reflecting the sun in wooden-grilled windows immediately invokes sentimental images of the rural New England childhood you never had. One can only wonder if the Chinese workers who manufactured those bottles felt any tinge of New England nostalgia either.....

Things That Go Bump in the Night in NH, Part III

Actually, it was midday, and a nice one, too, this afternoon in fact. The sun was high, the leaves are just past peak in color, and the temperature was cool enough to require a thin sweater but warm enough that you felt comfortable outside all day long. We had been in errand mode this morning, running all over the place, and we were almost on the last leg of our journey when we decided to try to find the local "sugar shack", the common New Hampshire term for maple syrup maker/vendor. We usually buy ours from a guy whose place is along my route home from work, but we'd heard of a place very close to home, and wanted to try it. We knew it was somewhere close by as we wandered down a typical New Hampshire slim, twisting and turning rural road, and after a few around-the-bends we finally came upon a sign announcing the place. The sign was fairly new and in good condition, and seemed professional -- in other words, wasn't written with a heavy black marker on cardboard.

So we pulled in next to a large, late-19th century New Hampshire farmhouse with the barn attached out back, and the dilapidated sugar shack on the other side of the driveway. There was no obvious entrance, however. My wife went up to one of 3 doors facing us on the side of the house, one of which had an old sign asking delivery people to use the other door -- though there were 2 other doors. She knocked, with no response. She then tried the door that had the sign on it, again with no response. We both sauntered down the driveway a bit towards the barn and the sugar shack, and while we saw maple syrup products in the window, the shack was empty of people and the floor was strewn with chopped wood and mechanical equipment parts. I looked into the barn from the open door closest to the house but saw no one, only stacks of hay -- which brought back lots of memories from my youth, when I used to work as a farmhand -- but I could also see there were no animals, though the hay was fresh. I wandered towards the other open barn door and saw that this part of the barn was completely strewn with electrical tools and mechanical parts. I cracked a joke to my wife about how they needed some space management skills and began to turn my attention back towards the sugar shack when I heard a male voice fairly close by, just a word or two which I didn't catch but which told me someone was nearby. I looked in the barn again and couldn't find anyone, and looked around out back but again, no one.

Puzzled, we both walked up towards the house again and we both took a door and knocked, but to no avail. However, as we each both stood in front of a door, we both heard a door open wide, with a very typical sound of a noisy weather-exposed hinge. We both looked at one another because to each of us, it sounded as if the other had opened their door. Neither of us had. We looked around again -- maybe the wind had blown one of the barn doors? -- but they were on sliders and seemingly hadn't moved. I walked around to the front of the house to read the sign again to see if it mentioned any instructions I had missed earlier like "Knock hard" or "Ring the bell on the barn", or something along those lines, but it just plain announced the sugar shack, with the business name. It was a well-made sign and seemed in good condition.

At this point I thought out loud that maybe they'd just taken off to grab some lunch, but my wife interrupted me to say that she wanted to go. This was kind of unusual; my wife is not the "touchy-feely" type who indulges in fantasy. She told me as we were driving away that she had the distinct impression that we were being watched, and she had a mounting sense of alarm, a feeling that someone didn't want us there. I admitted, strangely enough, that I also felt we were being watched, but to me it felt more like whoever it was feared us, and I chalked it up to maybe a child or elderly person being home, someone who doesn't deal with the business and was afraid to deal with strangers.

So there you have it. Might be nothing but a pile of circumstances and coincidences.

Of Warm, Comfy Homes and Explosions

When you see other parts of the country you begin to appreciate just how different life can be, as we've adapted to the reality of life in places like Tuscon, Arizona or St. Augustine, Florida. They each have their peculiarities. I am originally from the northeast so I didn't expect a lot of difference when I moved to New Hampshire, and indeed, most of what I grew up with and saw as "normal" in my home state is transferable to New Hampshire: Snow shovel? Check. Hot chocolate? Check. Farm houses? Check. Wood-burning stoves? Check. Heavy, woolen socks? Check. You get the idea -- moving here didn't inspire much in the way of culture shock, certainly nothing compared to that very miserable summer I once spent in South Carolina. (<<< The two operative terms in that last sentence are "summer", and "South Carolina".) There are some differences, however, and I learned one of them when I was house-hunting here. Where I come from, there is plenty of top soil, often going down 40 feet or more. Bedrock is something you have to do lots of digging to see. New Hampshire, however, is the Granite State, which is one way of saying, "We don't need no stinkin' top soil."

Now, New Hampshire is a beautiful state and I'm not going to criticize its unpolished granite surface for even a moment. Still, one of the advantages of having, you know, some dirt and clay between you and bedrock is that you can bury stuff. Without having to use dynamite. One of the convenient ways this manifests back home is the ability to bury gas lines. There, most folks use natural gas to heat homes for their clothes dryers, stoves and hot water tanks. Here in New England, propane is prevalent -- fair enough. Supply and demand, and all that. However, as I discovered for the first time when house-hunting in NH, since it is very expensive to deliver propane by buried lines in the Granite State, they store the stuff in large tanks -- some 5 feet high -- which often just lean against your house. When I turned the corner at the first house we were visiting and saw this, my first reaction was along the lines of "OH MY GOD, THERE'S A BOMB LEANING AGAINST THE HOUSE!!" It turns out I was overreacting a bit, but it's something that still, many years later, makes me nervous. New Hampshirites who grew up with this are used to it and ignore it as just another fact of life, like so much of the technology we all depend on. Still, I'd swear sometimes I hear those things ticking......

The Road Well-Trampled: Writers in New Hampshire

What is it about this state that makes a guy (or gal) whip out a pen and start writing? Mind you, as I've always maintained, New Hampshire is one of the most beautiful states in the Union, so the New Hampshire-as-Muse is at least partially understandable, but still -- this place is absolutely crawling with writers (which in some circumstances can be understood to mean, "competition"). It's probably sufficient for publishers when they receive a manuscript to see that it's post-marked New Hampshire; "This one's a shoe-in. Publish it!" Do northern Yankee farmers have some hidden well of angst somewhere beneath their granite, beating hearts that compels them to grab paper and quill and start pumping out prescient prose and poetry -- or, in the case of native New Hampshirites Adam Sandler and Sarah Silverman, fart jokes? in England, farmers go mad and start faking alien crop circles in their fields, but in New Hampshire, they start writing haiku about stone walls. I, myself, am a victim of the New Hampshire muse, having already penned a book and planning for more, but I'm just a pedestrian writer -- New Hampshire has driven otherwise productive and happy citizens such as J.D. Salinger, Jodi Picoult and Robert Frost to forsake practical employment for the pen. The ultimate litmus test for this writing compulsion is whether the greatest American writer ever visited New Hampshire, and indeed, Mark Twain had a series of pictures taken in 1906 while visiting in Dublin, New Hampshire, in the state's southwestern Monadnock region close to both the Vermont and Massachusetts borders. I guess the question is, who left a greater stamp on whom, Mark Twain or New Hampshire...?

Things That Go Bump in the Night in NH, Part II

So there I was, turning in to my driveway from the main road. Now, this was late in the evening, well after dark. There are some lights along the road I live on, but as this is New Hampshire, the woods come right up to the road and the road twists and turns, minimizing the effect of artificial lighting. Essentially, except for a few oases of light here and there, driving on this road at night means driving in the pitch-black darkness. My driveway is a very long and lonely road, about a quarter mile long, in fact, and runs straight through a swamp, giving one the effect of entering some deserted Louisiana plantation. My home is out of sight from the driveway, being up and off to the left from the driveway. There is one house on the other side of the road, and another down the road a bit, but neither are within shouting distance. You could scream bloody murder all you wanted on my driveway, and the only ones who would hear you are the peep frogs in the swamp.

So there I was, as I mentioned, turning into my own driveway. The headlights panned slowly across the thick swamp vegetation as I made the turn, and I started up the long drive to the warmth and safety of home. I think you'll understand why I laid on the gas pedal perhaps a bit more than I should have, this being a cool October evening. I swear, I just wanted to get home; I don't usually indulge in flights of fancy. I certainly never expected what came -- but there it suddenly was, and I grabbed the wheel with both hands and slammed on the brakes.

Despite the shock of the moment, I can remember what I said -- no, shouted -- at the time: "Who the !)&*^%$#@! put that (*&%%$#!@@! speed bump there?!?" I own a condo, and if you don't, then you may not be familiar with condo associations. Condo associations are like small South American banana republics with a dictator of the week, with each person in "power" wanting to leave their mark to prove their leadership prowess. Thus was born the idea that a bunch of condos located in a backwoods New Hampshire swamp would need a speed bump, resulting in my achieving air-born status for a few seconds that night. Live free or fly.

Things That Go Bump in the Night in NH

In keeping with the general Halloween theme of October, we'll explore one of the country's most famous ghostie stories, Ocean-Born Mary. In the mid-18th century, as Mary's mother was crossing the Atlantic from Scotland to the New World -- a fitting subject for Columbus Day, as I suddenly realized -- her ship was overtaken by pirates. The pirates gave the ship a pirate makeover; pillaging, stealing and looting until the pirate captain, one Don Pedro, discovered one of the passengers -- Mary's mother -- had just given birth to a baby girl. His salty pirate heart thus moved, Don Pedro halted the looting and pillaging and ordered one of his men to fetch a bolt of fabric they'd swiped from someone else. He gave this bolt to Mary's mother and spared the ship, on the condition that Mary's mother name the newborn after Don Pedro's mother -- you guessed it, Mary. Hence, Ocean-born Mary.

Mary's family settled in first Boston, then moved to New Hampshire in the 1750s, where Mary grew up and eventually married and had kids of her own. Her husband soon died, however, but to the rescue came Don Pedro who had apparently kept tabs on Mary, and he built a big house in Henniker, New Hampshire to which he and Mary retired to. One evening, however, some of Don Pedro's old mates showed up for a visit, and in the midst of an apparent financial disagreement, Don Pedro was run through with a cutlass. In his last dying gasps, he told Mary where he had buried the proverbial pirate treasure on the property. (Why pirates didn't just use bank deposit boxes or Swiss bank accounts beats me. Seems much less work than digging deep holes all over the place.) Anyway, Mary had Don Pedro buried beneath the fire place, and the days turned to weeks, then years, and in the early 19th century Mary finally died herself in the house, and as all ghostie stories go, she apparently has never left. There have been stories ever since the 19th century stretching right up into the 21st century of people claiming to have seen Mary, who apparently was distinctively tall -- 6 feet high -- and severely red-headed. (Having distinctive features helps with identification of ghosts, so if you plan on haunting after your time has come, be sure to look as unusual as you can beforehand.)

The legend is jam-packed with different accounts of the ghost, although fact-checking deflates some of the story. Ocean-Born Mary did indeed exist as Mary Wallace (nee Wilson), and the whole bit about the pirate is claimed to be true in a few sources. There is a bolt of fabric in the Manchester History Association's Millyard Museum which is claimed to be the one Don Pedro gave to Mary's mother on the ship. Mary also did end up in Henniker -- her grave is still there, along with an 'Ocean Born Mary' marker -- but there are discrepancies about which house - the one we believe she lived in, and one owned by her son, Robert -- Mary's ghostie allegedly haunts. The 20th century saw a lot of famous psychics and ghost hunters like Hans Holzer and Ed and Lorraine Warren weigh in on the story, with as usual only muddier results. Ah, well, it's still a fun story, and Henniker is a beautiful town to visit with its bridge (pictured above).

She's a witch!

Halloween is coming, so I guess I'll pick up a festive holiday theme. Salem, Massachusetts is only 15 miles from the New Hampshire state border, and indeed there's a Salem, New Hampshire just across the state border off Route 93, a major north-south artery in the region. The mass hysteria that gripped Salem -- the Massachusetts Salem -- in 1692 is infamous, and even managed to spill across state borders as Margo Burns reveals on her well-researched website dedicate to the Salem witch trials:

To Jno Partredg ffield Marshal


You are Required in their Majsts names to aprehend the body of mr George Buroughs at present preacher at Wells in the provence of Maine, & Convay him with all Speed to Salem before the Magestrates there, to be Examened, he being Suspected for a Confederacy with the Devil in opresing of Sundry about Salem as they related. I haveing Receved perticuler Order from the Governr & Council of their Majsts Colony of Masathusets, for the Same, you may not faile here in. Dated in portsmouth in the provenc of Hamshire, Aprel . 30th . 1692 .

*Elisha Hutchinson* Majr

By Virtue of this warrant I Apprehended sd George Burroughs and haue Brought him to Salem and Deliuered him to the Authority there this fourth day of May 1692

*John Partidge* field
marshall of the Prouins
of new hansher and maine.

Margo's research has uncovered several New Hampshirites who were accused of witchcraft in the 17th century, but while these accusations likely made life fairly miserable for these folks, at least there is no equivalent to the Salem trials in the Granite State; no New Hampshire witch has ever been executed.