New England Nightmares

Keven Mcqueen

Description

New England is renowned for its quaint towns, beautiful landscapes, and busy ports. But it is also infamous as the setting for unexplained deaths, ghost stories, bizarre murders, and peculiar wills and epitaphs.

In New England Nightmares: True Tales of the Strange and Gothic, author Keven McQueen explores the darker and stranger side of New England and the Mid-Atlantic. With shocking and unforgettable tales from the tip of Maine all the way to the New Jersey shore, this eerie collection explores our fascination with death and the unknown, including tales of medical students digging up bodies to dissect, of a murderer's bones being wired together after death, and of Dr. Timothy Clark Smith, who requested that he be buried with a breathing tube and glass window so he could see the outside world.

An intriguing and frightful look into the odder side of the Northeast, New England Nightmares promises to send chills down your spine.

1. Nefarious New York

2. Nightmarish New Jersey

3. Vermont Vagaries

4. Recondite Rhode Island

5. Creepy Connecticut

6. Morbid Maine

7. Dreadful Delaware

8. Macabre Massachusetts

9. Numinous New Hampshire

10. Peculiar Pennsylvania

Sujets

• Unexplained Phenomena
• HISTORY
• Nueva York
• Nueva Inglaterra
• Nueva Jersey
• Nuevo Hampshire
• Pensilvania
• Body (disambiguation)
• True crime
• General officer
• Spirituality
• Pennsylvania
• History of the Americas
• Supernatural
• General
• NH
• United States
• New England
• ME
• MA
• Maine
• RI
• Halloween
• Pennsylvanie
• Vermont
• New Jersey
• New Hampshire
• Massachusetts
• Rhode Island
• Delaware
• Connecticut
• New York

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253034731
• Langue: English

Extrait

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2018 by Keven D. McQueen
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03470-0 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-03469-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-03471-7 (web PDF)
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18
Dedicated to Amber Rose Hughes.
(Uncle Kevvy hopes you won t be too badly spooked by the book when you re old enough to read it.)
If you wish to read stories of the human will and heart, the best place to find them is the newspaper. In the book you read fiction; in the newspapers you find a record of life. . . . [Newspaper stories] would make good fiction, and as fiction they would be preserved in volumes. As it is, they are simply truths, and as truths they will be forgotten in a day.
-Editorial, Louisville Courier-Journal, February 3, 1907
CONTENTS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
1 N EFARIOUS N EW Y ORK
2 N IGHTMARISH N EW J ERSEY
3 V ERMONT V AGARIES
4 R ECONDITE R HODE I SLAND
5 C REEPY C ONNECTICUT
6 M ORBID M AINE
7 D READFUL D ELAWARE
8 M ACABRE M ASSACHUSETTS
9 N UMINOUS N EW H AMPSHIRE
10 P ECULIAR P ENNSYLVANIA
B IBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
They helped outright or inspired:
Drema Colangelo; Gaile Sheppard Dempsey; Eastern Kentucky University Department of English; Eastern Kentucky University Interlibrary Loan Department (Stefanie Brooks; Heather Frith; Shelby Wills); Amy McQueen and Quentin Hawkins; Darrell and Swecia McQueen; Darren, Alison, and Elizabeth McQueen; Kyle McQueen; Michael, Lori, and Blaine McQueen and Evan Holbrook; Lee Mitchum; Marilyn Sargent Oppenheimer; Carolyn Picciano; and Mia Temple. Also: the seer of all.
INTRODUCTION
WHAT KIND OF STORIES ARE IN THIS BOOK? A FAIR QUESTION!
These tales have one thing in common: they all originate from the northern part of the eastern United States, including New England. (For the geographically fastidious, I realize that New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania are considered Mid-Atlantic states rather than part of New England.) The vignettes cover morally and spiritually uplifting themes, such as grave robberies, premature burials, ghosts, historical murders, idiosyncratic modes of death, body snatching, rat attacks, insane doctors, town eccentrics, cannibals, and sundry other topics.
Best of all, they are all true as far as I can tell. At least, they were originally reported as true. They are all part of a genre that I like to call real-life surrealism or historical horror-comedy. Or, if you prefer, consider them anecdotes that chronicle the staggering wonderment and strangeness of life.
Reading this book should be like taking a pleasant, relaxing autumn stroll through a haunted cemetery. Who knows, it could even be historically useful and the reader might acquire a moral or two, such as, Lock your doors at night and Don t do foolish things.

1
NEFARIOUS NEW YORK
Grave Robbers and Body Snatchers: New York
WE MUST MAKE A DISTINCTION BETWEEN YESTERYEAR S BODY snatchers and grave robbers. Body snatchers stole bodies . Why would anyone want to open a grave by the light of the moon and the screech of the owl and steal the corpse, aware that armed and angry relatives might be lying in wait? Because medical schools were desperate to gain corpses for dissection; they were allotted a limited number of cadavers-usually prisoners who d died of natural causes, the executed, and poorhouse occupants-but since there weren t enough to go around, there was a lively trade in the unlively.
Garden-variety grave robbers, however, had baser motives than body snatchers. Rather than steal a body for the ultimate benefit of science and humanity-and make a quick buck in the process-grave robbers were interested only in swiping valuables from their exhumed victims, as if performing a postmortem mugging. The northern states, like the rest of America, yield stories of intrepid ghouls who were not afraid of a little hard work and were not hampered with an irrational fear of the dead.
Ruth Sprague died at age nine in 1816 and was buried in Maple Grove Cemetery in Hoosick Falls, New York. Soon afterward, a medical student stole her body and took it to a doctor s office for dissection. Little Ruth s relatives located and reburied her remains and then erected a gravestone with the following epitaph, which records the outrage for posterity, names names, and ends with a piquant little quatrain:
She was stolen from the grave by Roderick R. Clow and dissected at
Dr. P. M. Armstrong s office in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., from which place her mutilated remains were obtained and deposited here.
Her body dissected by fiendish Men
Her bones anatomized
Her soul we trust has risen to God
Where few Physicians rise.

Judge P. s family vault in Binghamton was noted for being one of the most expensive in the state. On the night of October 23, 1884, five thieves entered it and got so far as to open Robert P. s tomb before grave watchers scared them off. Why were they out to snatch Robert? Some authorities speculated that they wanted to hold the body for ransom. There was a rival theory, according to the papers: A suit is pending for $5,000, the amount claimed by a physician for embalming the body, and it is thought by some that persons interested in this suit sought to ascertain how far the embalming process had been successful in preserving the body. And the only way to do that, of course, was to encounter Robert P. face-to-face.

In July 1881, a former body snatcher in Syracuse regaled a reporter with tales of his exploits in which he and his cronies raided rural cemeteries to feed the need for cadavers suffered by the medical colleges of Syracuse and Rochester. He remembered especially the time they stole the body of a young man belonging to one of the best families in Syracuse. The corpse was well dressed, and an impoverished but imminently practical medical student took the clothing. He wore the suit on graduation day.

Henry W. Livingston ( Fighting Harry ) was a famous general; his widow, who survived him by many years, became known as Widow Mary because of her undying fidelity to the memory of her husband. None of this made the slightest difference to the vandals who broke into the Livingston family crypt on the grounds of their Hudson manor on April 23, 1904. They opened nearly all the coffins within and scattered the occupants bones about the vault-including the remains of the general himself, whose winding sheet had nearly crumbled to dust. Two coffins were carried away for whatever nefarious purpose. One was the casket of Mary Livingston, who had died in 1859.

As war clouds gathered in Europe in the late 1930s, bronze became a valuable commodity among Americans, who would sell the metal to munitions factories-hence the rise of ghouls in search of scrap metal. During the weekend of December 17, 1937, thieves made a big score at Rockland Cemetery in Sparkill by stealing a 3,500-pound bronze statue from the grave of Dr. Alexander Skene, once president of the American Gynecological Society and thirty-seven years deceased. They also broke into the crypt of Major General John Charles Fremont and swiped two bronze Mexican War-era cannon. To accomplish these feats, the unsubtle ghouls brought a derrick and a truck.
Body Snatching, Part Two: When Schemes Went Awry
On occasion, graveyard expeditions did not turn out well when the stealers of cadavers became cadavers themselves. Relatives understandably did not appreciate the idea of their deceased loved ones being snatched, and sometimes they took up arms and kept vigil at gravesites.
Such was the cause of the sensation that gripped Syracuse on the morning of May 18, 1882, when Dr. Henry K. was found dying near the county poorhouse s graveyard at Onondaga Hill. He had a bullet hole in his left side and a bag containing two shovels wrapped in old carpet (to muffle digging noises). The doctor also had a satchel filled with a bottle of whisky, a hook, a rope, a lantern, and a screwdriver. In addition, Dr. K. carried a dirk and two revolvers in his belt. The obvious conclusion is that he went to the poorhouse cemetery in the dark of night to procure fishing worms.
Had the doctor been assassinated by someone who resented his attempt to grab a medical specimen from the potter s field? Perhaps, but wagon tracks near the body suggested that Dr. K. had a run-in with a rival gang of body snatchers. In any case, the good doctor s wounds were fatal, so the expedition was the last time he tried to pilfer a pauper.

Some spoilsports objected so strongly to having their relatives graves robbed that there was a thriving industry in planting booby traps along with bodies. In 1896, a coffin torpedo was patented. It was exactly what the name implies. If the unwary body snatcher tried to pry open the coffin lid, a spring would strike a percussion cap and explode a bomb that would send singed parts of the snatcher high into the air-and probably bits