Vermont - Travel, Eastern United States - Travel Essays & Descriptions

Green Mountains, Dark Tales

Name: Green Mountains, Dark Tales
Author: Joseph A. Citro
ISBN: 9781584651345

by Joseph A. Citro

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Overview

In this collection of tales, classic legends, and long-forgotten lore, best-selling compiler and investigator of the supernatural Joseph A. Citro takes us on a tour of every haunted corner of his native state. Combining the skills of a scrupulous researcher and masterful storyteller, Citro expands the terrain covered in his earlier books, venturing farther than ever before into the realms of the mysterious, the paranormal, and the just plain weird.

We tour a home designed by otherworldly architects, pass the night in haunted hotels, visit an antigravity spot, and search for demon-protected treasure.

We take a ride on Vermont's only ghost ship, visit tiny fairyland castles, and see a city in the sky. Then we try to determine who -- or what -- is buried in a mysterious grave in Cambridge.

We meet the last woman to be hanged in Vermont, explore the strange fate of a girl who heard the music of the spheres, and consider the bashful prophetess who saw God but was too shy to tell anyone.

Along the way we encounter villains and visionaries, misfits and monsters, in a state full of egotists, oddballs, and spiritual eccentrics. Skeptics and believers alike will delight in these strange but (maybe) true stories that can be read as regional history, folklore, or simply as entertainment. Guaranteed to amuse, tickle, and terrify!

Synopsis

Vermont's best-selling collector of the odd and the arcane outdoes himself with this assortment of Green Mountain marvels, mysteries, and mayhem. Can such things happen in Vermont?

Vermont Life

Citro's second collection of Vermont supernatural stories includes tales of haunted inns, haunted houses, even a haunted state office building! Whatever your taste for the supernatural, many of Citro's stories come directly from local tale-tellers and his books are thus lively collections of local folklore, just the sort of thing to read on any dark and stormy night.

About the Author, Joseph A. Citro

JOSEPH A. CITRO is author of The Vermont Ghost Guide (UPNE 2000), Passing Strange (1996), and Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls, and Unsolved Mysteries (1994). He has also written five novels on supernatural themes, including Lake Monsters (1991 as Dark Twilight, UPNE 2001), The Gore (1990, UPNE 2000), Shadow Child (1987, UPNE 1998) and Guardian Angels (1988, UPNE 1999). A popular lecturer and teacher, his commentaries are also heard regularly on Vermont Public Radio.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"Just the sort of thing to read on any dark and stormy night." --Vermont Life

Vermont Life

Karen Wyckoff

Like a Chamber of Commerce sideshow, Green Mountains, Dark Tales lifts the curtain on a host of regional folklore retellings as well as first-time publishings of the near-forgotten rumors, oddities and horrors Vermond has harbored and hidden with time.... Green Mountains, Dark Tales cleverly invites itself into the reader's mind, where pale faces of the past breathe new life. The retelling of each tale warms the lifeblood of folklore while one finds, perhaps not coincidentally, ones own surprisingly chilled.
— ForeWord Magazine

Publishers Weekly

A hybrid of journalism and legend, this wide-ranging, well-researched collection of Vermont folklore consists of 31 tall tales, peculiarities, stories of the supernatural and modern mysteries. Spanning from the early 1700s to contemporary times, the book is divided into three categories--"People," "Places" and "Things"--all of which Citro, author of five suspense novels (The Unseen, etc.), classifies as Vermont's "dark tales." Straightforward, brief sketches feature such unique Vermont residents as James Johns, a newspaper publisher of the 19th century who put out his own hand-lettered, one-copy-only newspaper five days a week for over 40 years, or the "Queen of Cupidity," mean, niggardly Hetty Green, who "railroaded" her husband into a poorhouse yet died at age 81 worth over $100 million. Among the haunted places Citro covers are the University of Vermont, where ghosts have allegedly been sighted in 11 of the buildings; the Vermont Police Academy in Pittsford, once a tuberculosis sanatorium that is now said to be haunted by one of its former nurses; and the Inn at Long Last in Chester and Manchester's grand Equinox Hotel, both hosts to ghosts, including one suspected of being Mary Todd Lincoln. Accounts of witches, mirages, eccentrics, monsters and mysterious creatures, such as Northfield's Pigman (a being with a man's body and a pig's face) are, like all the tales in this book, carefully detailed short pieces told in the same accessible, if at times bland, style. Some of the segments are engrossing, others patchy and incomplete; overall, Citro's rugged morsels make for quirky amusement. (Apr.)

Kirkus Reviews

Vermont is a region of enchantment for these several dark tales collected by Citro (Shadow Child, 1998, not reviewed) from every county in the state. The author declares his stories to be strange but mainly true, though they're taken from older Vermont collections, archives, libraries, journals, periodicals, and newspapers—and thus are recycled, or even paranormally refurbished, yet Citro tells us that many are seeing print for the first time. His first alone is enough to make you a doubter of the rest: in 1887, five elderly Vermonters, crippled and past the age of usefulness, were drugged, stripped naked, frozen for the winter in a big wooden box, then revived the following May and fed a hearty meal. Implied is the idea that their infirmities were somehow overcome. Retold also is the story of Hetty Green, wicked witch of Wall Street, who enjoyed destroying people and who, as a result of her obsession with money, became the richest woman in the world. Too tight to rent an office, Hetty worked out of a pile of crates and boxes on the floor of New York's Chemical and National Bank. Vermont also produced a great mental oddity in Truman H. Safford, who once correctly computed in his head a 15-digit number multiplied by itself. Citro narrates his own overnight stay in "The Dickens Room"of the Inn of Long Last in his hometown; he was kept awake, he says, by what may have been the scraping of Marley's chains. Other tales concern digging for Captain Kidd's long-lost silver, and the Green Mountain State's cryptozoological jungle provides for other curious encounters. Deserves an ad in National Enquirer, where there must be an audience waiting for it. .