Beyond The Bridgewater Triangle With Kristen Evans

The Devil's Footprints can still be seen today imprinted in a large boulder in Norton, Massachusetts. Photo by Kristen Good “As he turned up the soil unconsciously, his staff struck against something hard. He raked it out of the vegetable mould, and lo! a cloven skull with an Indian tomahawk buried deep in it, lay before him. The rust on the weapon showed the time that had elapsed since this death blow had been given. It was a dreary memento of the fierce struggle that had taken place in this last foothold of the Indian warriors.” The Devil and Tom Walker, Washington Irving, 1824. Who needs the tales of Washington Irving when you have the history of the “Leonard Family of Taunton”? The Leonard family history sounds like a Washington Irving tale, with its themes of pacts with the Satan, devil's footprints, buried bones, a man on galloping on horseback through the woods carrying a severed head…even sacred Indian land. Washington Irving, most famous for spinning the

“On still nights the evil glitter of fox fire or the demonic cackle of a barred owl sent chills up the spines of the early settlers. Hordes of crows rose each morning for the guts of the swamp to ravage farmers corn. And from time to time, young girls merrily picking blueberries along the fringes found themselves ‘drawn farther and farther along unfamiliar paths seduced by the increasing size of the berries until at last they were lost and claimed by the swamp forever." Native Americans named the swamp “Hockomock” hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago. Hockomock in the Algonquin word for “place where spirit’s dwell.” The Indians had tremendous respect and awe for the swamp and regarded it as a “magical” place. There being no swamps in England, the colonists had a different take on the swamp. They were terrified by it. The fear that Hockomock Swamp instilled in the colonists of the 1600s inspired the nicknames “The Devil’s Swamp” and “The Devil’s Bowl.” Hockomock Sw

Early on in my exploration of the Bridgewater Triangle, I spent a lot of time with one Joseph DeAndrade, Bridgewater Triangle researcher and alleged Bridgewater Triangle Bigfoot witness. DeAndreade and I spent hours talking on the phone about his experiences hunting for Bigfoot and discussing our theories on this strange area where we live. We took many hikes through Hockomock Swamp. One day, he said he wanted to show me something very special: "The Bridgewater Triangle Explorer's Tree." The tree is located off the Elm Street Hockomock Swamp path and for all means, is hidden in the middle of nowhere. It took us two trips back to the swamp to find it, but we did (with the help of a helpful young man who knew that area of the swamp like the back of his hand.) So there we were...at the tree. The over-sized Beech Tree was covered in carvings. The two most profound carving being "Welcome to the Triangle" and another, a very creepy looking carving that simply

I found this little gem of a ghost story last spring while scouring local newspaper archives for Bridgewater Triangle area ghost stories. This one--the account of a ghost known as the "Shadowy Screecher of Brockton City Hospital"--had police, doctors, nurses, patients and watchmen on high alert on Halloween night of 1926. But to everyone's disappointment, the ghost pulled a no show. The following article was published in The Boston Globe on November 1, 1926.   Hospital Ghost Spurns Halloween Fails to Perform for Brockton Watchers Old Tunnel Beneath the Building May Solve Mystery BROCKTON, Oct 31--Halloween, the time of ghosts and goblins, queer noises and gibberings, passed without any manifestation from the "Shadowy Screecher" of Brockton City Hospital. For a week "The Ghost" has made nightly visits to the hospital, and in the wee-hours of the morning patients, nurses and even members of Brockton police force were startled, and in some cases,

The craziness that ensues in the Bridgewater Triangle often happens in clusters. It seems one of those clusters is underway in the town of Bridgewater and it's next door neighbor, East Bridgewater right now. From the end of April to mid-May Bridgewater police have had to respond to 911 calls you would hardly expect from a quiet college town. A Bridgewater woman is drugged, restrained with wire and imprisoned in her own home for a month before being rescued by a family member on May 18th. In the span of two weeks, Bridgewater police respond to not one, but two threats of "suicide by cop" by people driven over the edge, yielding guns. And on May 16th, a bomb threat is called in to Bridgewater-Raynham High School. In East Bridgewater, a model citizen is exposed as a serial rapist whose been on the loose for years, disguising himself as a Massachusetts State Trooper, getting his helpless victims into his car by telling them they were in trouble. Sounds like the plot line

In April of 1942, a freak tornado dropped into the town of Swansea, causing almost NO damage. Affecting only a pavilion roof in its wake, what it did with the roof is nothing short of BIZARRE. The short- lived and weak stamina tornado was reported to have path of not more than 300 yards.  The five-ton wooden roof--measuring 65 x 20 feet--was carried "light as a feather high above the tree tops for 450 feet and then gently deposited intact..." ON IT'S OWNER"S LAWN! Witnesses claimed to have seen the wooden roof lifted vertically off the pavilion about 100 feet in the air before it "sailed" over a pasture. "It seemed to be held in air, they said, by an inverted cone of dust." The owner of the pavilion witnessed the entire event. She claimed the roof "sailed over the pasture travelling 200 feet, then circled back and passed over the roof of their house and came to rest on the lawn." "Witnesses said the wooden roof was lifted al