Legends 13: Hometown Legends

If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken couldn't get more golden, think colder!

Because new sweet and smoky special edition gold sauce is here.

Made for your chicken favorites.

I participate in McDonald's for a limited time.

Less carbs, more crushing eggs.

That's what you get with Egg Life Egg White Wraps.

When your schedule awakens from its summer slumber, turn every meal into a chance to level up your protein gain.

We're talking bring-it-on breakfast tacos, Ready to Roll Wraps, and Power Packed PBJs.

Egg Life Egg White Wraps, the winning play in your mealtime playbook.

Egg Life, Sneaky Protein.

Find us chilling in the fridge at Aldi, Target, Whole Foods, and more.

Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books.

So if you're ready, let's begin.

Over the years, we've talked a lot about ghosts, cryptids, and demons from all around the world.

And that's the thing about folklore.

It's everywhere.

It's one of the things that unites us and brings us together.

No matter where you're from, you've heard a story or two, and that gives us a bit of common ground.

But my team and I also pour a lot of ourselves into the work that we do, which usually means including a story every now and then from a place that's familiar to us.

Whether that's my home state of Illinois or other locations near and dear to my grim and mild teammates, there's a little bit of us in every story we tell.

But nowhere is there a more familiar place than the towns where we spent our childhoods.

We've all heard the stories, wild rumors about the old house at the end of the block, the local creek haunted by the spirit of a boy who drowned there 100 years ago, or maybe it was 200.

You get the idea.

These tales stay with us because they're a part of us, and the more we share them, the longer we keep them alive for generations to come.

And that's what folklore is all about, passing down stories that give color and depth to the places that mean the most to us.

Storytelling, though, is a team effort.

And because each member of the Grim and Mild team was raised in a place with its own legends and myths, we decided to devote an entire episode to their favorite stories: nine legends from the men and women who bring you this show each week: haunted hotels, ghostly pirates, satanic trees.

We've got a little bit of everything for you.

So, pull up a chair and get to know the team a little better and learn what keeps them up all night.

I'm Aaron Manke,

and this is Lore Legends.

Our first legend today comes from researcher Cassandra De Alba and takes us to the small New Hampshire town where she attended high school.

Durham is the home of the University of New Hampshire, built in 1866, although the town's history dates back further than that.

English colonists settled in the area as early as 1623, calling it Oyster River.

In fact, it wasn't renamed Durham until 1723.

Funny enough, the high school is still called Oyster River High School.

Thankfully though, their mascot is not an oyster.

The town has changed a lot over the past 400 years, but some pieces of the original settlement remain.

One of those reminders of the past is a house, which is also the oldest building in Durham and one of the oldest in the state of New Hampshire.

Today, it houses the Three Chimneys Inn, a restaurant and hotel on the banks of the Oyster River.

But back in the mid-1600s, it looked a lot different.

It was originally built by Valentine Hill, a businessman and property owner who ran the nearby sawmill and gristmill.

The house started out like a lot of other dwellings, with a single story and a cellar.

But in 1699, Valentine's son Nathaniel added two more stories.

This addition included a feature known as Indian shutters.

They were installed after an attack that had occurred five years earlier, when the French and local Native American populations from three separate groups descended upon the area.

They had killed or captured 94 British colonists and destroyed over a dozen houses in the settlement.

But Valentine's home survived.

Over the years, it was passed down through several more families, who all made their own modifications to it along the way.

In the early 1900s, for example, one owner added gardens, a stone wall, a swimming pool, and even tennis courts with the intention of turning it into a summer estate.

But eventually, the house fell into disrepair, and it continued to deteriorate for over 80 years until it was finally converted into the Three Chimneys Inn.

Of course, with such a lengthy history, it was only a matter of time before the ghosts of the home's past caught up with its present, quite literally.

You see, after the inn opened in the late 1990s, employees and guests started noticing some strange happenings around the property.

Muddy footprints began appearing on the dining room floor, even underneath the rugs.

A chef once claimed to have been wished a good morning by a ghostly woman wearing period clothing as he prepared the restaurant's menu that day.

Wine glasses have levitated off tables before shattering upon the floor.

Employees who have slept at the inn have also reported waking up to the sounds of footsteps that belonged to no one, and one person was startled out of her sleep when she felt someone playing with her hair.

When she looked around the room, there was no one there.

So who was responsible for all of this?

Well, if the stories are to be believed, it was the daughter of Valentine Hill, the man who built the house in 1649.

Her name was Hannah, and she had been a 20-year-old mother and wife who, according to the rumors, tragically drowned in the nearby Oyster River.

So the next time the silverware at the Three Chimneys Inn goes missing or the deadbolts lock on their own, don't assume there's a prankster on the loose.

It's probably just Hannah stopping by for a visit.

About 50 miles south of Durham, New Hampshire is Danvers, Massachusetts, better known as Salem Village, where the infamous Salem witch trials took place.

But Danvers is home to more than just a 17th century witchcraft panic.

In fact, Grimm and Miles Jamie Vargas has one particular legend from her town that isn't about witches at all.

It takes place at the Essex Agricultural School, established in 1913 in the Hawthorne area of Danvers.

Hawthorne was named for John Hawthorne, one of the judges who presided over the Salem witch trials.

The area carries his name because he once owned the land, including the spot where the school now stands.

And for those who are curious, he also happens to be the great-great-grandfather of author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Today, the facility prepares students for careers in everything, from agriculture and veterinarian professions to plant science and labor trades.

But for some reason, it also has a spooky reputation among students and staff alike.

For example, the animals on campus are known to get scared off without cause.

Random plants will appear as though they've been stepped on when no one else is around.

And there have been reports of sudden temperature changes changes throughout the building, with rooms turning from hot to cold without warning.

Witnesses have also spotted floating light orbs on the grounds, as well as locked doors that fly open out of nowhere, windows open and shut on their own, and blinds that have been drawn suddenly spring open.

Some believe these experiences could be tied to the death of a student many years ago.

The exact date is unclear, but the young man at the center of the story had been on the third floor of one of the buildings, standing near a window with no no one else around him, when he started screaming to be left alone.

A teacher standing nearby witnessed him swinging his fists in the air as though he was fighting off an invisible attacker.

Most frightening though, he seemed to levitate off the floor as if being picked up by an invisible hand.

Whatever had grabbed him then tossed him out the window.

As he fell, the teacher caught a glimpse of something in the window he'd been tossed from, a brief flash from a mysterious red light.

And that's the story that most people claim is the root of all the unusual activity.

Perhaps the student spirit lingers there, restlessly causing havoc all over campus.

Or maybe it's his invisible killer who has never left, searching for another victim.

Another member of our team, Jenna Rose Nethercott, hails from Brattleboro, Vermont, a small town with some big legends.

Among them is a facility once used to treat the state's most vulnerable residents.

At least, that was the idea.

Sadly, the reality is much darker.

The Vermont Asylum for the Insane was founded in 1834 on the philosophy of moral treatment, a Quaker model that focused on humane and respectful care for all of its patients.

At the time, the asylum was only one of 10 private psychiatric hospitals in the entire country, and it offered offered its patients a whole list of amenities.

For one, the campus spread out across 600 glorious acres of land and featured beautiful brick buildings, sprawling pond-filled meadows, and even a dense forest.

And it was there, deep in the woods on the asylum grounds, where a tower was built.

They called it the retreat tower.

It had been constructed by the patients in 1887, thanks to a belief among the faculty that manual labor was better than medicine at stabilizing a person's mental health.

So they were put to work building a 65-foot-tall stone tower that loomed large over the campus.

This gothic tower was made from locally sourced granite and quartz and looked a lot like the classic castle's turret, complete with a toothed parapet placed on top.

It offered stunning 365 degree views of the nearby town, and to get inside, one only needed to pass the large arched iron door.

which is exactly what the asylum's patients did.

Time after time, they climbed their way to the top of Retreat Tower, but not to take in those scenic views.

To them, it was a means to an end, their end.

Patients would leap from the top of the tower, falling to their deaths on the ground below.

As a result, the structure was sealed off to everyone.

But the asylum is still in business.

It's known today as the Brattleboro Retreats, and yes, even the tower is still there.

And once a year, the town opens that heavy iron door and allows visitors to ascend the rickety metal stairs to the top, all of which is done under strict supervision, of course.

But those on the ground should keep their eyes toward the sky because legend says that visitors can still see bodies falling from the tower's peak, their ghostly shadows plummeting to their deaths below.

Echoes, they say, of the patients who are still looking for a way out.

My teammate Harry Marks is something of an expert on his home state of New Jersey.

And while this next legend isn't from his hometown, it was a frequent stop for him and his friends during their high school years.

They would jump in their car and visit a number of locations highlighted in the popular independent magazine, Weird New Jersey.

One of those spots was located in Bernards Township, a 20-minute drive south of George Washington's headquarters in Morristown.

Bernards Township is made up of unincorporated communities like Baskin Ridge and Liberty Corner, with large homes and quaint downtown shopping centers.

It's small-town America in the middle of New Jersey.

But not everything is all apple pie and baseball in Bernards Township.

There is something darker there, a sinister energy that permeates the town, and it all comes back to one solitary tree.

It stands alone in the middle of a field, its gnarled branches spreading out like an eldritch circulatory system over the patchy grass.

It's called the Devil's Tree, and the origin of its name varies depending on who you ask.

Some say it was used by colonial farmers to hang any enslaved people who tried to escape their captors.

Others claim its branches held the ropes of countless suicide victims over the years, including one noose belonging to a farmer who killed his entire family before hanging himself from the ominous tree.

And there have also been rumors that the Ku Klux Klan, who once used the township as a base of operations, would lynch black residents at the Devil's Tree.

And it's easy to see why those stories have stuck around for so long, as several of its large branches hang almost perpendicular to the ground.

But all that death, regardless of its origins, has come at a cost.

For one, the tree is now believed to be cursed.

Anyone who tries to cut it down will face the grim reaper himself, and its trunk bears the axe marks of the dozens who have tried.

Secondly, it's been said that the souls of the men and women who have died there now reside within its branches, giving the bark a disquieting warmth to whoever touches it.

And of course, you're welcome to check it out for yourself.

Just watch your back, because there are those who say the devil's tree is more than just a tool of death.

It's rumored to actually be a portal to hell, and that portal is guarded by a mysterious figure in a black pickup truck.

Those who visit the tree at night have returned to their cars only to see headlights in their rearview mirror, headlights belonging to the ghostly pickup that chases them down the road until its lights vanish into the darkness.

There's a college in the community of Elmira, New York that is absolutely filled with legends.

And Elmira happens to be the hometown of my teammate Allie Steed.

Now, Elmira College was founded in 1855 as a women's college, although it started accepting men in the late 1960s.

Thousands of students have come and gone over the last 168 years, and in that time, the institution has collected a number of stories within its hallowed halls.

But two buildings have earned quite the reputation among the students, Tompkins Hall and Cowles Hall.

Tompkins Hall was built in the 1920s and remains an all-female dorm to this day.

Since then, students have reported hearing footsteps and doors randomly opening and closing on their own, even when the building is deserted.

Although most have never felt anything malicious in Tompkins Hall, a few have claimed that the the dorm is split in half spiritually, with one side being good and the other containing something darker.

Residents have heard a variety of unusual yet benign sounds on the good side, but have noted the evil side is home to a demon-like shadow figure along with ghost lights that move from room to room.

There have also been sightings of spirits on the fourth floor.

One is said to be the ghost of a nun who comes to surprise her sister with a visit, even though her sister is long dead.

The other is a former student named Mary who died in a tragic accident many years ago.

She's said to appear at night, usually in mirrors or windows, although some students have also reported hearing strange voices in the bathrooms and the hallways late at night.

Cowles Hall, on the other hand, is plagued by only one specter, the ghost of Edith M.

Stewart.

Edith was from Tuxedo Park, New York, and in February of 1927, the 21-year-old senior found herself invited to a party off campus.

Now, this was the late 1920s, a time when the movements of the female students were strictly monitored and controlled, so Edith had to get permission to leave campus.

She managed to do that, but she was forbidden from leaving the city.

Well, being a young, independent, modern woman, she broke that rule, traveling to Ithaca, about 45 minutes away.

Edith behaved perfectly at the party, but the college found out about her trip anyway.

When she got back to campus, the student council felt that it had to investigate.

She panicked, terrified that she was going to be suspended.

What would her parents think, right?

As it turns out, Edith happened to work in the office of the campus physician.

When they weren't looking, she stole a bottle of strychnine from a cabinet and used it to poison herself.

She died on February 17th of 1927.

And around that same time every year, students in Cowles Hall claim to feel cold gusts of wind accompanied by disembodied footsteps.

And it's not just the students who feel they've experienced this.

In fact, the facility closed down for 20 years prior to being renovated, and during that time, the only people inside were construction workers and students who had snuck in.

And everyone reported hearing knocking from inside the walls, along with finding strange symbols drawn in the sawdust on the floor.

But that wasn't the scariest part.

They also witnessed a woman in white beckoning them to follow her deeper into the building.

Our next hometown legend takes us to Knoxville, Tennessee, home of my teammate Alex Robinson.

And it was there, way back in 1817, that a new hotel opened, called appropriately the Knoxville Hotel.

It was a gathering place for the city's elite and was even a stopping point for several U.S.

presidents.

Now, the building changed names and owners over the years, eventually becoming the Lamar House Hotel in 1856.

From that point point on, it solidified itself as a part of American history.

Leaders who would come to be known as Confederates would often gather there and give speeches out front in the lead-up to the Civil War.

Once the conflict kicked off in earnest several years later, Confederate officers would stay at the hotel.

That is, until the Union took control of the city in 1863.

With the Southern soldiers out of the way, the building was quickly turned into a hospital.

But war was brutal, and many of the wounded died there, including Union General William Sanders.

Following the end of the Civil War, the hotel continued to welcome famous visitors, actors, artists, politicians, but it declined over time.

It also bounced from owner to owner until it was finally purchased in 1908 by the Auditorium Company.

After taking ownership, the company tore down a few of the hotel's wings, but renovated the ballroom to turn it into a theater.

And for the next few decades, the Bijou Theater welcomed both live stage acts and films through its doors.

Audiences could go see a vaudeville show one night and then the latest moving picture the next.

The hotel portion continued to operate until 1969 when it was shut down by the city, although the theater side kept running.

But the years were hard on the Bijou and it was almost lost for good until 2005 when it was rescued and restored.

Today it hosts operas, musicals, concerts, and other stage productions.

Oh, and quite a few ghosts as well.

You see, it's considered the most haunted building in all of Knoxville, with multiple reports from those who have witnessed the ghostly figure of a Civil War-era soldier wandering throughout the theater.

They often make special mention of the buttons on his uniform.

Others have felt hands tugging at their clothing while they visit the restroom.

Security guards patrolling the venue at night claim to have heard footsteps on the catwalk when no one else was in the building.

And those who have found themselves alone there have said that they've heard their names being called out by some unknown voice.

But one of the most blatant examples of haunted activity at the Bijou is also the most violent.

Upon occasion, handfuls of plaster, dirt, and wood have been thrown down from the rafters, often aimed at the employees below.

Are the ghosts trying to send a message, or do they simply dislike the act on stage?

We may never know, but on the bright side, at least they aren't throwing tomatoes.

Going through those stories from home can often work a lot like a photo album or our high school yearbook.

Revisiting them can help us relive emotions that we might have once forgotten.

Except in the case of hometown legends, those emotions are almost always fear.

But not all the stories we love are rooted in tragedy and pain.

One at least is a favorite for a different kind of emotion.

Wonder.

My teammate Sam Alberty grew up in Minnesota's Twin Cities, but one state legend made a 150-mile journey to him when he was a boy, and it has stuck with him ever since.

In 1898, in the town of Kensington, Minnesota, a block of stone was discovered tangled in the roots of a tree on a plot of land owned by a man named Olaf Oman.

Olaf was a Swedish immigrant who'd been removing stumps and trees from his field to prepare it for plowing when he stumbled upon the stone.

But this was no ordinary rock.

It measured about 30 inches long by 16 inches wide and 6 inches thick, and it weighed about 200 pounds.

But what struck Olaf the most about the stone was the ancient Germanic script or runes that had been chiseled into it.

Why?

Because the inscription was eventually translated and it told the story of eight Swedes and 22 Norwegians who had traveled from Vinland through the West.

They'd set up camp about a day's journey from the stone.

Later, after a handful of them left camp to go fishing, they returned to find 10 of their men dead and covered in blood.

Those ruins, by the way, were dated 1362.

Let that date sink in for a bit.

If the inscription was real, that meant that there were Scandinavian explorers who had made their way far, far inland more than 100 years before Columbus arrived in the Americas, and that they'd met their end at the hands of some unknown enemy.

Well, as you might imagine, Olaf's stone became the talk of the town.

Some believed it was the real deal, a genuine artifact of the Viking age, but there were also skeptics who thought it was little more than a hoax.

A number of scholars and experts, including archaeologists, linguists, and historians, reviewed the inscription and they deemed it to be a fake.

But in 1907, a Norwegian-American journalist named Hjalmar Holand acquired the stone.

He argued for its authenticity and remained its most ardent defender for decades.

Over the years, he developed the theory that Vikings had conducted an extensive inland expedition in North America via Greenland and Hudson Bay.

These mooring stones were used to mark their route.

Then in 1928, he sold the stone to some businessmen in Alexandria, Minnesota for $2,000.

But despite Holand's protest in the affirmative, countless experts who have reviewed the stone have rejected it as a forgery.

They've argued that the language of the runic inscription is much closer to modern Swedish than anything that would have been used in the 14th century.

On top of that, tests of the stone and the soil it was found buried in determined that it had been buried for only 25 years prior to its discovery.

Omen may have found it, but he probably wasn't the one who had buried it.

And yet, the dismissals of its authenticity haven't discouraged other runic experts who cite medieval manuscripts that contain many of the same anomalous characters as those found on the stone.

So, what's the truth?

Well, no one knows for sure.

As a result, the Kensington runestone has been a topic of hot debate for the last 125 years.

And it probably will be for a long time to come.

We all have favorite legends, often rooted in the places we were born and raised.

From coastal tales to inland treasures, these stories are a bit of home that we carry with us everywhere we go.

Sharing them is simply the proper thing to do.

So I hope you enjoyed this journey.

But I'm not done quite yet.

I've saved one last tale to delight you with.

And if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about it.

It's that time of year again, back to school season.

And Instacart knows that the only thing harder than getting back into the swing of things is getting all the back-to-school supplies, snacks, and essentials you need.

So here's your reminder to make your life a little easier this season.

Shop favorites from Staples, Best Buy, and Costco all delivered through Instacart so that you can get some time back and do whatever it is that you need to get your life back on track.

Instacart, we're here.

The Massachusetts town of Ipswich is a lovely coastal community that resides in the northeast corner of the state.

But Ipswich is known for for more than its ocean views and peaceful setting.

It's also the hometown of my teammate Robin Miniter and a man named Harry Main.

According to the stories, Harry Main arrived in Ipswich in 1671 with a companion named Andrew Diamond.

They had come from the Isle of Shoals, just off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire.

Both were fishermen, and they wasted no time getting to work.

Now, Diamond got rich in the shipping business, along with another business partner named Francis Wainwright.

But Harry, well, he went a different route.

He ended up taking on several less legitimate jobs, working as a smuggler, a pirate, and something called a mooncusser.

Mooncussers were particularly reviled, even by pirates.

They would set up decoy lights along the coasts and lure ships toward them at night.

The vessels would then wreck along the sandbars and breakers, and then Harry and his men would climb aboard, murder the crew, and steal whatever they could.

Harry Main and his fellow wreckers were eventually caught and tried for their crimes.

Harry received one of the worst punishments of all, too.

He was chained to the Ipswich bar, where he had carried out his awful misdeeds, and sentenced to shovel sand until he either dropped dead or drowned.

When the weather got stormy and kicked up the waves, he would yell and scream, causing the people in town to say things like, old Harry's growling again, or the devil is raising old Harry.

After his death, in a twist of bitter irony, his home was ransacked and plundered for loot, specifically the valuables that he'd stolen from all the ships he'd wrecked.

The trouble was, no one found anything.

It seems whatever treasure he may have had was long gone.

Meanwhile, a local man started having dreams, dreams of a specific place in town where someone had buried large amounts of money on a hill, and this man recognized the place instantly, so after his third night of dreaming about it, he decided to check it out for himself.

He snuck out around midnight carrying his Bible, a lantern, and a spade, with one thing on his mind, finding that hill.

And find it he did.

Right away, he started digging.

It took some time, but his shovel eventually clanged against something hard beneath the dirt.

He dug a little more and uncovered a large flat stone with an iron bar next to it.

Grateful for an extra tool, the man picked up the bar and began prying the stone from its position when he noticed something strange.

He looked up to see an army of black cats surrounding him, their eyes glowing in the darkness.

With a swing of the iron bar, he dispersed the cats, but his problems only grew worse.

Icy water began to fill the hole where he was standing.

Not wanting to drown or get stuck, the man climbed out and let the water consume the stone.

But he didn't leave empty-handed.

He was still holding that bar, so he took it home and turned it into a latch for one of his doors.

The man wasn't nervous, but most of you, with all the folklore you've heard over the years, probably see what's coming.

By bringing that artifact into his home, the man also allowed something else inside.

ghost of Harry Main, and it haunted that dwelling for years.

According to local legend, it took a visit from every minister in town to finally cleanse the house of that evil spirit, which soon found a new place to live on Plum Island as it searched for its missing body.

Soon enough, locals refused to go out during storms because they felt the ghost of Harry Main was still out there digging in the sand to find his remains.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Harry Marks and research by the entire Grim and Mild team: Cassandra De Alba, Jamie Vargas, Jenna Rose Nethercott, Harry Marks, Allie Steed, Alex Robinson, Sam Elberty, and Robin Miniter.

Of course, Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.

Don't like the ads?

I've got a solution.

There's a paid version of lore on Apple Podcasts and Patreon that's 100% ad-free.

Plus, subscribers get weekly mini-episodes called lore bites.

It's a bargain for all that ad-free storytelling and a great way to support this show and the team behind it.

And you can also follow this show on YouTube, Threads, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcasts all one word and click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always,

thanks for listening.