(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[E]lbert Stevens made a startling discovery one day in 1939. Sorting through possessions of his late mother, Stevens happened upon a yellowing newspaper clipping.
That this story caught his mother’s eye, and later Stevens’, is understandable: It told of how in one poor Vermont family the elderly and infirm were put into a sort of hibernation so that others would not have to care for them during winter. The tale was so fantastical that it had to be some sort of joke. But the newspaper story gave no hint that it was.
Adding to the mystery was the fact that Stevens’ mother, who was a compulsive newspaper clipper, had neglected to note when or where the story had been published.
Stevens took the mysterious story to the Rutland Herald, which published a report, including a complete transcript of the clipping, in May 1939. The Boston Globe, Yankee Magazine and the Old Farmer’s Almanac followed up with their own accounts. No one knew quite what to make of the tale, though some reputable big-city researchers wondered whether this folk medicine from the hills of Vermont might someday help cure such killers as cancer and heart disease.
The story’s author, who was identified only as “A.M.,” had started his story by declaring, “I am an old man and have seen some strange sights in the course of a roving life in foreign lands as well as in this country, but none so strange as one found recorded in an old diary, kept by my Uncle William” and which A.M. had inherited.
A.M. wrote that he was initially skeptical of Uncle William’s account — which apparently chronicled events from the 1800s — but became convinced of its truthfulness after visiting the town where the events occurred and verifying the facts with a witness.
After Uncle William’s own visit to the town, which he said was about 20 miles from Montpelier, he had written that “(i)t seems that the dwellers there who are unable either for age or other reason to contribute to the support of their families are disposed of in the Winter months in a manner that will shock the one who reads this diary.”
Arriving one day in January in this poor town, William saw that “(s)ix persons, four men and two women, one of the men a cripple about thirty-years-old, the other five past the age of usefulness, lay on the earthy floor of the cabin, drugged into insensibility.”
The men and women were then stripped down to a single garment and carried outside into the snow. William watched as the bodies began to lose their color. When he re-entered the cabin, he was shocked to find his hosts engaged in everyday conversation, as if something strange and ghastly weren’t happening just outside.
“(S)eated on a single block, (I) passed the dreary night, terror-stricken by the horrible sights I had witnessed,” William wrote.
The next morning, he watched as his hosts lay the frozen bodies, with a cloth over each face and a layer of straw over the entire body, in stacks inside a wooden crate, which was intended to protect the bodies from animals.
Then, using a sled, the townspeople dragged the crate to the foot of a ledge, where during the winter it would be buried by a 20-foot-deep snowdrift.
“I left the mountaineers, living and frozen, to their fate, and returned to my home in Boston, where it was weeks before I was fairly myself, as my thoughts would return to that mountain with its awful sepulcher,” William wrote.
Flipping through his uncle’s diary, A.M. learned that William had returned to the town the following May.
William watched as townspeople removed the bodies from the crate and immersed them in lukewarm water in troughs fashioned from hemlock trunks.
Nearby, cauldrons of water, tinged red by steeping hemlock boughs, boiled over a fire. This water was then used to raise the temperature in the troughs. As the color began to return to the bodies, people kneeled and tried to rub the life back into them.
“(S)light twitching of the muscles of the face and limbs, followed by audible gasps showed that life was not quenched,” William wrote, “and that vitality was returning.”
The once-frozen people were given shots of liquor, and gradually they began to mumble, then talk and finally sit up in their troughs. They were then led to the house for a springtime feast. To William, they appeared no worse for their winter’s hibernation.
The press accounts about the mysterious clipping were too much to ignore for Roland Wells Robbins, an archeologist. Robbins, with the help of Vermont State Library staff, figured out that the clipping came from an 1887 edition of the Argus & Patriot, a newspaper in Montpelier. Oddly, Robbins noted, the bizarre story hadn’t elicited any letters to the editor in the weeks that followed its publication. And Robbins still didn’t know who A.M. was or why he or she had written the story.
Robbins wrote what he did know in a 1949 article for Vermont Life. That article drew at least one important letter from a reader.
Mabel Hynes, writing from Florida, managed to fill in major gaps in the story. She explained that A.M. had been her grandfather Allen Morse.
Though Morse had once told the story, he had had nothing to do with having it published. Morse’s daughter, Alice, had asked him to write down the tale but hadn’t told him why. Alice, who worked for the Argus & Patriot, arranged to have it published as a surprise 52nd birthday gift to her father.
The newspaper editor’s only condition had been that Alice set the type herself.
Perhaps she signed the piece with the initials A.M. because she shared them with her father. Or perhaps she realized that signing the article with her father’s name would tip off many readers that the story was a hoax, because Allen Morse was a well-known teller of tall tales. If Argus & Patriot readers understood that this was just a wild yarn, then that would explain the lack of letters to the editor.
Allen Morse originally spun this story at a family reunion at Curtis Pond in Calais, where he lived. Legend has it that he hadn’t planned to tell the story, but decided to do so after the dramatic arrival of his cousin at the reunion.
Benjamin Morse and his wife had arrived with an amazing story to tell. As the couple were riding north from Montpelier to the reunion, they had glanced over at a cemetery they were passing and saw a blue flame burst from one of the graves.
People surrounded Benjamin Morse, barraging him with questions. This was more than Allen could stand. “That took the attention off him, and he had to do him one better,” said Robert Morse, (a distant relative of Allen Morse), who grew up as part of the well-known Morse family of the Montpelier area. “Allen was supposed to be the storyteller in the family.”
When I reached him by phone several years ago at his home in Colorado, Robert Morse said he learned about the story in the 1950s from Hynes, who was an elderly woman at the time. He also added a new wrinkle to the story.
Robert Morse said he was told that Benjamin Morse wasn’t making things up when he reported seeing that blue flame in the cemetery. Others at the reunion said they’d seen the same thing before. But they didn’t ascribe anything supernatural to what they had seen.
They figured it was from bodies buried without caskets. As those bodies decomposed, they said, gases escaped and worked their way up through the soil and burst into flame when they met the atmosphere.
Or perhaps that’s just another folktale.
