It’s funny, when you travel around like I do trying to hit different places every time you leave the house it pretty much ensures that someday you’ll forget where you have been and end up there again during one of those hazy deja vu moments I have become so familiar with. That was the case with the Freetown Fall River Forest. It had long been a source of fascination considering it is supposed to be the epicenter of all the weird happenings in the Bridgewater Triangle. I mean there are stories about this forest that include fairy lights, full ghostly apparitions, murders, UFO’s, bigfoot, a liberal dose of satanic panic and even the delightfully strange assortment of pukwugies – which are little anthropomorphic porcupine type creatures that shoot poisoned darts and lure people into the woods never to be seen again. They are from indigenous traditions in the area and as such are unique little cryptids.
I had a feeling I’d been here before but there wasn’t a Catching Marbles entry on it. Weird. Still, I suggested it as a place to go check out with a new travel companion who was here to meet me for a signed copy of my book. Sounded good to me so off I went…
Driving into the parking lot I remembered this place clearly. I had visited the previous autumn. We spent a few hours wandering the woods with a nonsensical trail map that neither one of us could make sense of, got lost, and eventually made our way back to the car. HMMMM. Perhaps this time would go better.
This time the park actually had quite a few other cars in it and I realized the weird parking lot actually went around corners and expanded a lot farther than I had thought. Even more interesting was a splash pad that was running with delighted children zooming through it. Still I parked near the entrance and after meeting with my hiking buddy we set off in the same direction I’d gone once before to what I now know is Bent Rim Trail. Mind you Bent Rim Trail is more of a road than a trail – no cars were allowed but we did see some cyclists.
We walked on Bent Rim Trail for awhile until we hit what looked like an actual non-road trail and we decided to try that one. There was no signs or markers but clearly this was a trail. I’d come hoping to find something weird, my friend had come hoping to find some cool plants to satiate her own special interests in biology. We were up for a brisk hike in the heat but luckily it wasn’t too bad beneath all these trees and the path was flat and easy to navigate. A few parts had rocky bits to scramble around but even that wasn’t bad. Unless you’re on a bike. Sadly, there wasn’t much in the way of plant diversity. It just seemed to be miles and miles of blueberry bushes. Although even that was kind of cool as many had blueberries on them.
Other than that the trail was pretty much a lot of the same. It was however very quiet and despite the parking lot being full of cars we didn’t hear any other people and didn’t see any either on the trip out. We continued down the path crossed the road trail twice before eventually hitting an actual road. The park is on 55,000 acres soooo how we managed to walk out of the park I don’t know. Getting back would be a challenge as we tried to get our phones to give us any clue whatsoever as to which direction we should take back. I was starting to see why this place had such a reputation for being a great hiding spot for bodies and ghost stories. Getting lost here is hideously easy and there is an odd sense you’re the only ones out here even if that’s not really true.
I have seen photos of this park that show water features and cool things. I don’t know where those are, only that we didn’t pass any. All we passed were several people walking dogs and a family taking a bike ride together who I sheepishly asked for directions from. We’d hoofed it at least four miles by that point and it was starting to get a bit dark so it was best to find the car soon. Luckily they told us vaguely where we were and how to get back. There were grid markers here and there reading numbers and letters… which would have been helpful IF THEY WERE ON ANY MAPS. Alas no.
We did end up back in the parking lot, somehow at the far side, where there was a random statue greeting people shirtless and proud. Bit weird choice but OK. Annoyingly we also found the trail maps on a bulletin board nearby which I had missed coming in, although I don’t think they would have helped much. In the meanwhile we both had a great time happily burbling about anything and everything under the sun and getting our exercise in! All and all a lovely time, even if it was super confusing and looked all the same. I can’t say I saw any bigfoot, ghosts, or UFOs but maybe you have to come at night for that?
It all starts with Colonel Buck, one of the town’s founding leaders. I was told the story went something like this: A long time ago there was a mayor named Colonel Buck who had an illicit affair with a woman about the town and when she threatened to spill the beans about it he had her burned as a witch. As she was engulfed in flames her foot fell out of the fire, flopped onto the grave stone of her accuser, and made a permanent mark after she cried out some curse involving said foot. It’s a marvelous story. Gruesome, morbid, full of intrigue… and a complete lie. This had to have been made up by some bored parent one day teasing their children walking by the cemetery. Still, it attracts visitors from all over who come to gaze at Colonel Buck’s Tomb, which isn’t a tomb so much as a pillar shaped gravestone that was erected six decades after he died. He also wasn’t the mayor, he was a justice of the peace, and if he had any illicit love affairs they’re not on record and neither is there any record of any executions of witches in Maine. In fact the only witches put to death in all of New England were hung or pressed to death with stones, not burned alive. There’s a sign saying all this, basically a big ol’ bulletin that might as well read, “Y’all full of shit.” but hey if it’s real blood guts and gore you’re after there’s a much lesser known stone with a much truer story a few streets away.
This is the stone of Sarah Ware. Her story is as weird as it gets up here in Maine. She was unusual in life because she was a divorced woman in the 1800’s, something pretty much unheard of. This had to have given her one hell of a stigma and maybe it was exactly that that got her killed. Life as a divorcee was not easy then and at fifty two years of age she was supporting herself by being a Jill of all trades babysitting, cleaning, and doing the odd job here and there. She was on her way home one evening when she disappeared. She was found two weeks later in a field viciously bludgeoned to death. She had been beaten so badly that when the body was removed her head fell clean off and her jaw was nowhere to be found. It was then kept as evidence as the rest of her was buried somewhere. Her head was kept in criminal storage as evidence for nearly a century before clerks discovered this gruesome artifact in 1983. The head was given a stone and laid to rest in the Oak Hill Cemetery, sans body.
