FtV – Archer’s Pond Curse
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Welcome, legendary listeners. Thanks for tuning in to From the Vault, a second look at some of our classic episodes. Look for a new episode every week. Now, can you go back and listen on your own at OurNewEnglandLegends.com? You bet. But you won't get the added bonus of an After the Legends segment featuring new commentary about that episode from your old pals Jeff and Ray. So let's open up the New England Legends Vault and revisit another legendary episode.

Hey, kids, welcome to the vault. Welcome to the vault. This is our last vault. We'll be back with a new episode this Thursday. This is The Archer's Pond Curse, first aired October 11th, 2018. Enjoy.

So, Jeff, what brings us to Ossipee, New Hampshire today? Ray, we're on the hunt for a bunch of legends that are all centered on the area surrounding Archer's Pond. All right, so if we take a left here off of Polly's Crossing Road, we'll turn onto Archer's Pond Road, which should bring us right behind the pond. Okay. But what should we be looking for? Ray, we're listening for disembodied screams, and we're watching for ghosts all over these woods. ♪

I'm Jeff Belanger. And I'm Ray Ogier, and welcome to episode 60 of the New England Legends podcast. If you give us about 10 minutes, we'll give you something strange to talk about today. We love it when you legendary listeners reach out to us through our super secret Facebook group, from our website, which is OurNewEnglandLegends.com, or when you call or text us anytime on our legend line at 617-444-9683.

Also, I'm currently on my fall story tour all through New England and even some points beyond. So if you want to come see the show, maybe we could swap a few stories in person. Go to our website for the places and dates. And speaking of contacting us, this week's story lead comes to us through an email from Zachary, who was born and raised in New England, but is serving in the military, so he lives elsewhere now.

His email said, our podcast gives him a small connection to back home. That's nice, right? That is nice. That's very nice. We're happy to do it, Zachary. Thank you for your service, by the way. You stay safe, and we'll keep sending you stories from New England each week. So, based on this lead from Zachary, we're starting at Archer's Pond in Ospie, New Hampshire. All right, let's pull the car over right here, and we'll take a look around.

Alright, I see the pond over there, but what else are we here to see? Well, we're looking for signs of life, or I guess afterlife if you think about it. But first, I think we should set this up. I agree. So we started talking to folks about Archer's Pond, and man, did they have stories. I heard Polly's Crossing was named after this girl named Polly, who was hit by a train here. You can still hear her horrible screams in the woods at night. Yeah, well I heard from a friend that says she saw the lights of an old lantern in these woods at night.

But then it disappeared. So I heard this guy named Archie killed everyone in the village around this pond and then threw all the bodies in the water. So then Archie hanged himself from a rope outside of his house because he felt so bad about it. I've heard the rope still appeared on his property today.

And you can sometimes see Archie's ghost walking around the pond, still carrying a shotgun. A friend told me about these weird creatures that live out in the forest around the pond. And back in the 1950s, some guys parked their car by the pond to try to debunk the whole thing, but their car shook violently, so they ran away and never came back. Dude, I heard in the 1800s there used to be a whole village of people around this pond, but they all got wiped out by some plague or something, and they're all buried somewhere around here.

Okay, that's a lot of different stories to break down. Either the area around Archer's Pond is the most haunted and cursed place on Earth, or at least some of these stories aren't true. One phenomena that occurs around legendary places is that more legends kind of get sucked in. So something weird or dark could happen anywhere in the region, and over time, people start to associate it with this one particular spot.

It's almost like a legendary magnet. Yeah, exactly. All right, so let's take these stories one at a time. We drove on Polly's Crossing Road on the way here. So we know the name is real. Right. But was there a train accident? So if you look at the region from the sky, which we can do thanks to Google Earth...

Check out this long, straight line that runs right next to Archer's Pond Road. Okay, well that definitely looks like it could have been railroad tracks. I agree. And today the track is no longer used for trains, but it is part of this 21-mile trail called the Conway Branch that runs from right here at Polly's Crossing in Ossipee up to Conway, New Hampshire. People hike it all the time. So there was a train. Right. And so it's possible that there was an accident here. That's true. But when we searched newspaper archives, we found nothing. Maybe it was a train.

Maybe this is a case of the area being named Polly's Crossing, so people invented backstories as to why. Maybe. Maybe, yeah. Plus, if Polly was really killed by a train, it seems cruel to me to name the road Polly's Crossing. Right. And I mean, if the accident happened, she didn't cross. Am I right? Right. That's a good point.

So that brings up this guy named Archie who killed everyone around the pond and dumped their bodies in the water. Well, this one doesn't sit right with me either. Why not? I can't imagine a town would officially name a pond after a guy who murdered a bunch of people here. Okay, that would be a highly unusual move that I couldn't think of anywhere else in the world.

And plus, a massacre like that would make it into the newspapers and often into books and movies, you know? So speaking of the official name of this pond, we've seen it listed two ways. And this comes down to punctuation. And it's funny the difference an apostrophe can make. Oh, what do you mean? On a lot of maps, the place is listed as Archer's Pond. That's A-R-C-H-E-R-S with no apostrophe, which means we're either dealing with a person named Archers. Or the plural of Archer, meaning multiple archers or people with...

Bows and arrows. Exactly. Or, if you add in the apostrophe S, it becomes the pond belonging to an archer. Alright, considering it's not called Archie's Pond, I think we'll have to say the story of Archie killing everyone in the community is extremely unlikely. While I agree with you, Ray, let's not totally dismiss this one yet. Alright. I uncovered something that makes me think we can't totally toss this out just yet, but we'll circle back to it. Really? Yeah.

I'm intrigued now. Okay, well, what about the car fire in the 1970s? I mean, that wasn't so long ago. We should be able to find that out if it's true. Well, I checked the newspaper archives, and I found a newspaper column in the Boston Globe written by John Riley. It was published August 3, 1972. In the column, Riley mentions taking his kids fishing out on Archer's Pond.

Okay. But as he drove up the road towards the pond, he saw abandoned car after abandoned car rusting away on the side of the road. Oh, because this is a remote location, people have come out here to illegally dump their junk, including unwanted cars. Well, thankfully, that's not the case anymore. So you combine this former graveyard for abandoned cars with a story of a local kid found dead in the next town over, and suddenly the story lines up.

But that doesn't mean Archer's Pond or this area had anything to do with it. Got it. What about the guys in the car who all heard the strange creatures? Well, we learned from many of our past adventures that once a place earns a paranormal reputation, people will come out at all times of the day and night looking for their own experience.

And sometimes they get more than they bargained for. I mean, fear can be contagious. I know that from watching scary movies in the theater. Right. One person in the audience jumps, and pretty soon we all do. So you're parked out here in the car with your buddies. Someone hears a strange noise outside. One person jumps. The car shakes. Another person jumps. The car shakes some more, and then you're hightailing it out of here.

I could see how that could happen. Then those guys tell others and the legend grows. But what about a village getting wiped out around here? Well, that's something we can explore. If there was a village here or even some homes, we should be able to find something. So I think we should take a look around. All right. So what exactly are we looking for? We're looking for stone walls, signs of cellar holes, cleared land that looked like it may have been a road at one point.

Well, there's trails all around this pond. It looks like many a dirt bike and ATV have been out here. Yeah. Do you see anything yet? You know, maybe. Hey, check this out over here. Oh.

Oh, nice. That looks like a cellar hole. I'd say it does. And look over that way. That's another one for sure. If we look around, we should find even more cellar holes, which tells us people at one time lived around Archer's Pond. Suddenly the idea that everyone in the village getting killed seems to have a little more credence. Exactly. Imagine you're out here on your ATV and you keep seeing these cellar holes, you heard these stories. It starts to make sense. But if we head over to the town hall, I think searching burial records might help us discover what really happened here.

While searching records may not be the sexiest part of the work, it's often the most revealing. All right, we're looking through burial records in town, trying to find anything related to the area of Archer's Pond. I found an online database from the New Hampshire Old Graveyard Association. This group is working to catalog every known burial site in New Hampshire. I mean, we know where the cemeteries are, but this organization is working on all the other graves. Literally thousands of family plots, single graves, and so on.

Ray, are you finding anything? Well, there seems to be a large number of deaths in the early 1800s in this area, considering how few people lived here. Oh, man. Wait, wait. Look at this. Yeah. There are several graves located right along Archer's Pond Road and near Polly's Crossing, and they're all dated to the early 1800s. Oh, look at 1813. There's an unusual number of deaths that year. Okay, I think we found our smoking gun. Something big happened in this region in 1813. What do you think it was? First, let's go back out to Archer's Pond.

All right, I've got the map coordinates from the New Hampshire Old Graveyard Association. So if we head south of the pond just a bit through these dirt bike trails, we'll find the cellar holes and be really close to one of these graves. Okay.

Alright, so what is it that killed these folks? You ready? Yeah. Smallpox. Oh, man. So a plague of sorts came through here. That's exactly what I'm saying. Smallpox killed roughly 30% of the people who contracted it. It caused these fluid-filled bumps to form all over your body. You could look like some kind of monster. If you were lucky, it left you horribly scarred. But if you were unlucky, it left you dead.

You could contract the virus just by touching an object that an infected person touched. It was really contagious. Smallpox hit this region pretty hard around 1813. And if you died from the disease, often the body was not laid to rest in the local cemetery, but rather away from everyone because the fear was you could still be contagious even in death. So you're still an outcast and monster even in death. Yeah. That's sad, man. Yeah.

Some of these smallpox graves are located in the woods along Archer's Pond Road, and one is right about here where we're standing. The people who lived in these houses moved away, and slowly all that's left are their cellar holes and stories of monsters and death. Okay, I get it now. So in a way, Archie came through and killed a bunch of people here and left their bodies scattered. Exactly. Substitute Archie with smallpox, and we've personified a true mass murderer. Well, what about the ghost carrying a lantern? Oh.

I don't think you could blame an old ghost from the past to still show up now and then to check on their deceased loved ones.

Alright, that's just freaky. So much time has passed that you see the cellar holes and remains of train tracks. You know the names Archer's Pond and Polly's Crossing. And you heard about some sort of mass murder that took place here. And suddenly, any of those stories sound plausible. That's so often how all of this works. But I love that there's this element of truth in it. There were multiple murders here, in a way. And that will haunt us. It's a great story.

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Lots happening here. Sounded like I had a cold. It did, yes. I was a little nasally. I was probably getting over a cold. What episode number was this? This was 60 back in 2018. Which is still early on for us. Oh, October 11th? Sure, I had a cold because I was in the height of my fall story tour and shaking hands and getting colds. That's how it goes.

But you're right. This is a paranormal buffet. Yeah. I like that. They're all there, everything. I mean, we really probably could have broken it down to five different episodes. Oh, yeah. You know, five or six different episodes. But no, we threw them all in one. Ossipee, New Hampshire. So ghosts, curses, monsters, plagues. This is one that we figured out, I think, mostly, right, for the most part. So when you go to a place, a pond, and then...

And then there's cellar holes. You know people live there. Right. But they don't live there now. It looks creepy. The houses, they're always creepy. Houses are gone. Your mind goes to what happened here. Right. Not just the progression of things, you know. Civilizations move and houses are destroyed, whatever the case may be. I think if you see something like that in the woods, it's, oh my God.

I can't imagine what happened here. Yeah. They were just living their life. And then in the 70s, 80s, people were abandoning cars because it's remote and you could just leave it as junk. So you go there, there's cellar holes, there's rusted out cars. Now, I mean, what happened? Right. Right. What happened here? And then you start to pick it apart and then you start wondering, you know, is it, is it

archers pond like an archer? Is it, you know, a guy named Archer? Is it a last name or yeah, or Archie's or whatever? You know, we talked about a lot of these things and then and then the curse. But then smallpox, that'll do it. That is a curse. Yeah. I mean, it's a it's an affliction. It's an illness, you know, that that spreads. And so so yeah, but but so you don't have all the data, but you do have the remnants. Yeah. And so all we do this all the time. We create a back story.

And sometimes we're not far off. Right. You know what I mean? Well, sometimes there's enough facts, you know, but there's news stories. I mean, a lot of our more recent ones, I guess, from the 1800s when newspapers became a thing, we have the documentation that a person was involved in this situation or a civilization or whatever. So you have that story. You can look back in the archives. Yes. And then you go back even further and it's all speculation. Right.

But yeah, this is a lot. This is a lot of stuff going on. Was there a sea monster? I can't remember. No, I don't think... There was everything but, right? Everything... The lake... The water was fine. Yeah, okay. It was just everything else around it. But there's something too about water, right? That...

It adds a mystique. Well, I think we can thank Friday the 13th for that. Thank you, Jason. Jason popping out of the water. Coming out of the water. So we know waters is sort of inherent. We need water, but it's also inherently dangerous. I don't go in the ocean. Yeah, you said that. And not because of Jaws. Just because it's someone else's home. I don't need to be in there. Yeah.

I don't ask fish to come into my house. Fair. Yeah. So I stay out of the ocean. Okay. We don't have any business being in an ocean. What about a pond or a lake? Fish. Same thing. Fish and snakes and things at the bottom. Right. What do they call it where you reach under the rocks and you grab the fish? It's not spanking. Oh, oh. It's a thing. Not spooning. Not spanking.

Sponking? No. No. Okay, just keep talking. You have to look this up. Oh, because this is going to bother me. So those fish... Noodling. Noodling, it's the grossest thing I've ever seen. And those are the kind of fish that you could be walking around a dirty pond and step on something like that. Yes, noodling. And then it takes your foot off.

It's also known as hand fishing or grabbing. It's also known as stupid. And it's specifically for catfish because they're the only ones dumb enough to... It's catfish, yeah. Yeah. It's called what? Handling? What'd you say? Hand fishing. Grabbing, though? Was that a... Oh, my God. That is the grossest thing I've ever seen. There's a picture of this woman that just lifted up a catfish that's over her shoulder. It's absolutely huge. She's a keeper. Yeah. She's very attractive. Yeah. Anyway. I like... Did you say grabbing? Yeah.

I like how they didn't make up a fancy word for it. It's also known as just grabbing. Grabbing. Which fish do you want? I'll grab that one. Let's come up with some names here. What do you got, Phil? Oh, grabbing. Noodling. I grabbed them the other day. Yeah. Somebody smarter said noodling because I like that. That's good. That's almost cute. Like noodling your arm and then lifted it up. Yeah. I love that. Having your arm taken off by a catfish. By a catfish. No, thank you. I don't want to step on them. We went off topic. I'm sorry. It's not called catfishing, which is totally different. Yeah.

It's true. Not to be confused at all. Something totally different. But yeah, Archer's Pond, Ossipi. I feel like we had an email or two over the years as people, you know, what's cool about these episodes is they run and then they stay out there. And then so we do the vault here. We put them back out there. Someone discovers them down the road and then we get an email saying, I...

had that happened. I was there. I saw something. I feel like we did get an email on this one. If I was smart, I would have printed it and brought it while we talked about this, but I'm not. I have a lot of people tell me, I just started the podcast. It's great. I'm going to go back to the start. And I always tell them, why don't you start with a hundred? Start with episode a hundred. We were still getting our feet under us. And, um, I always get nervous when people say I'm starting over or I'm going back to the beginning. Oh, we just did a bunch of vaults all before a hundred. Yeah.

For the holidays. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We, you know. Got to get them out of the way. Rip the bandaid off. We get better. That's the plan. Yeah. We get better. So anyway, Archer's Pond, if you've been there and you had something happen, you know what you can do? On our website, every episode has its own page and you can leave comments. Oh, yeah. You can say, you know, you can go on there and comment and say, well, this happened to me there.

And some people have done that with some of the episodes. There's a few little discussions going. I'd love to go back and read those. I don't, and I should make a practice. They're out there for all to see. So, yeah. Well, see, the problem is we get comments on YouTube every week. We get comments on our website less frequently. People are less apt to leave comments there. We get comments on social media as we post the episode. But then you're not going to go back three years of Facebook posts and try to find that. It's just not conducive. Yeah.

So yeah, you got to kind of watch it as they happen. Anyway, Archer's Pawn Curse. And we'll be back Thursday. Brand new. Looking forward to it.