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Nutty New Hampshire

Mighty_Emperor

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Tales of religious fanatics, spirits, ghosts and more

May 02. 2004 8:00AM


Northern New Hampshire may be small, but it's home to a lot of weird stuff.

Strange goings on in them there hills, and Charles Jordan has chronicled some of the strangest in Tales Told in the Shadows of the White Mountains. Jordan, an editor and journalist, has spent a career telling north country stories as editor of Northern New Hampshire Magazine, Lancaster Herald and the Colebrook Chronicle. The lore of the White Mountains nourished his appetite for the odd, unusual and downright weird, and in this volume, he passes the weirdest stories on to readers. These are true stories, and Jordan has done the historical research to document their veracity. They are the kind of stories of which fiction writers say: "You can't make something like that up; nobody would believe it!"

Take, for example, the Sugar Hill Millerites, disciples of "the man who drove a million people crazy." In the 1830s, William Miller did some elaborate calculations based on the Book of Daniel and concluded that the world would end round about October 22, 1844. The faithful, dead and living, would be reunited and escape the bonds of earth, together ascending to heaven in a beam of light - sort of like what was supposed to happen on The X Fileswhen the no-face aliens fought the oily ones. Only on TheX Files, the faithful got incinerated.

The Millerites didn't ascend to heaven either. Though believers around the world climbed trees and waited on mountain tops for the end to come, it didn't. Not even at Millerite home base in Sugar Hill. Jordan writes:

Standing today amid the ancient burial grounds and looking up toward the hillside, it is almost possible to imagine them gathered there on that long-ago October day. Said to be dressed in white "ascension robes" (although this fanciful garb was disputed by former followers years later), they were positioned beside individual headstones of those who had already departed this earth, and the unwaveringly faithful believers cast their eyes skyward - waiting, waiting for the world to end in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire.

Another interesting fact: the first person admitted to the New Hampshire Asylum for the Insane in Concord was a Millerite.
Just a few weeks ago in reading Diana Durham's The Return of King Arthur: Completing the Quest for Wholeness, Inner Strength, and Self-Knowledge, I learned about "thin places," a Celtic phrase for "locations in the landscape where the two worlds merged, or where at least it was easier than elsewhere to 'cross over' into Avalon, or fairy land, or the other world."

Jordan's tales suggest that our own White Mountains, aka Crystal Hills, are, indeed, one of those thin places, like Stonehenge in England or Newgrange in Ireland - only with a lot more altitude. How else can you account for so many haunting native American legends about these mountains, including the belief that the Great Spirit lives among them, and that the "higher peaks were peopled with superior beings, invisible to the human eye, 'who had complete control of the tempests.'"

How else can you account for the miraculous apparition witnessed by 21 people "scattered from Titus Hill in Colebrook to nearby Columbia." In the South, the Civil War raged. But in the North Country on this day:

. . . farmers cast a weather eye to the sky and decided to quickly work to get in their hay upon seeing storm clouds rolling in. "Suddenly the clouds parted and there in the sky was a great battle in progress - hundreds of men, horses, and guns in a massive struggle."

How else to account for the plethora of mysteries with supernatural under- and overtones? What about the spirit writers of Stratford, the bleeding Jesus of Colebrook, and the ghosts of the Double S Restaurant in Lancaster? What could be weirder than the conehead ladies of Canaan? (Although though they might have been nurses in funny, pointy white hats.)

And talk about witches - Salem eat your heart out - the Whites boast plenty of those, including Granny Stinson.
. . . now here was a woman who could cast one heck of a hex. She was a small, lean woman who had become little more than a living skeleton just before her death. Yet it took six strong men to carry her coffin - so weighing were her misdeeds. One account asserts that "as they bore it to the grave, they were almost crushed to the earth by the weight of her sins and their shoulders were black and blue for a week.


Whether you're new to the state or a native, there are tales in this book that will astound you. And most of them are true. Truish.

Jordan, being an ethical historian, takes care to distinguish, best he can between fact and legend.

As a companion book, why not pick up the new edition of Hikers Guide to the Mountains of New Hampshire by Jared Gange. Gange describes 200 "classic hikes," rated for difficulty, that will lead you to some of the thin places featured in Charles Jordan's book. It's spring in New Hampshire, experience the magic for yourself.

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/...40502/REPOSITORY/405020366/1014/ENTERTAINMENT
 
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