Shownotes Transcript
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Okay, so make a right right up there. All right, got it. And if we follow this road north, it'll take us to where we're going. So we're driving on a road just northwest Rutland, Vermont. We've passed a couple houses, but they're pretty spread out.
Over to our right is a large wetland area called the West Rutland Marsh with the Castleton River right in the middle there. That's right. And there was a time, though, where this was all farmland and a large granite quarry. A lot of building materials came from this region to help construct various projects all over the Northeast. And more than a few headstones, I imagine. I'm sure you're right. Okay, you can pull over right here.
And we're here, Ray. Yep. There's some trees and a whole lot of marshland. Now, what are we looking for? Ray, we've come to the scant ruins of a village. A village, they say, has been haunted for almost a century. We're here to look for the ghost of Whipple Hollow.
I'm Jeff Belanger. Welcome to episode 391 of the New England Legends podcast. And I'm Ray Osher. Thank you for joining us on our mission to chronicle every legend in New England, one story at a time. We're always on the hunt for ghosts, monsters, aliens, roadside oddities, and all the other wicked, strange weirdness that makes New England so great. If you've got a story lead for us, please email us through our website. And we'll go looking for the ghost of Whipple Hollow right after this word from our sponsor.
What if your mind could trick your body into feeling sick? Or even worse? In Hysterical, I investigate the bizarre medical mystery that unfolds in a high school in upstate New York. It starts with one girl developing strange, violent symptoms. And then another. And then another.
Rumors begin to swirl. Is it something in the water, inside the school, or is it all in their heads? Hysterical is my search for answers, and along the way, I uncover surprising connections to unexplained incidents around the world, events that challenge everything we think we know about our bodies,
and our minds. Named podcast of the year at the Gambies, Hysterical is a mind-bending, unforgettable ride. Binge all episodes right now exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Start your free trial of Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
My guess it makes sense because we're on Whipple Hollow Road that this is where Whipple Hollow was located. It is. And today the area is just over 500 acres that's formerly called the Whipple Hollow Wildlife Management Area. It's owned and run by the state of Vermont, but its history goes way back. That it does. I was just looking it up.
Whipple Hollow got its start as an agricultural community back in 1786. Several families lived here, and they combined with some families from nearby Pittsburgh, Vermont, to form a religious order known as the Orange Society. The Orange Society. What an odd name for a religion. Yeah. These families were mostly Irish and Protestant. Okay.
The group formed because it was too far to travel to the meeting house in West Rutland. In 1788, they petitioned the state to formally incorporate their parish, but it was declined. Eventually, they managed to build their own meeting house that hung in there until 1797 when the pastor died.
The meeting house fell into ruins and was finally removed in 1820. So you've got this isolated religious group out here. What could go wrong? In 1807, the first granite quarry was set up here on the Brockway Farm. Other quarries came and went in the coming decades. One was called the Rutland Marble Company. Then the True Blue Marble Company took over operations in Whipple Hollow in 1884. In
In the coming decades, the company grew in size and would eventually be called the Vermont Marble Company. Eventually, they had a mill here with eight gangs at the quarry. A lot of rock was cut in this region, no question. But we're here for a ghost. So let's head back to the year 1938 and explore. ♪
It's late June of 1938 here in Whipple Hollow, Vermont. George Aiken is the governor of Vermont. A Tisket, a Tasket by the Chick Webb Orchestra is the number one song. For the past year, America has been in one of the worst recessions so far this century. But there are some signs things are turning around. For one, the Vermont Marble Company is getting busier. The production is up, which is great for the local economy. It's a good thing for sure. Now, when the quarry is busy, people are working and they're spending money.
The quarry is busy enough that there's even a night shift. It's about midnight when one of the second shift employees starts walking home down Whipple Hollow Road. It's not a bad night for a walk. No. It's early summer, so it's not too hot. There's a few mosquitoes around, but not too bad. Nope. Good night for a walk home.
What in the world is that? I don't know. We're looking at a large pile of marble off the side of the road, and there's this glowing white, kind of hazy form moving around the rocks right near the Whipple Hollow Brook. So the quarry worker's standing here with his mouth just hanging open like the two of us. I don't know what to make of this either. I mean, it's not a, you know, then what is it? Ghost? Let's get out of here!
Okay, it doesn't take long for the word to spread about a ghost sighting near Whipple Hollow Road. Ray, check out the June 29th Rutland Daily Herald newspaper. All right. What am I looking for? Right down here. Okay, got it. The headline says, quote, Ghost Stalking Whipple Hollow. The article goes on to say, Ghost hunting has taken the place of treasure quests, wiener roasts, and other similar forms of outdoor amusements at West Rutland.
According to those who have participated, there's an apparition that stalks forth between 12 and 1 a.m. Now that it's in the newspaper, even more people are coming out to look for ghosts. Well, I guess I know what we're doing at midnight. You're right. So it's just about midnight, the witching hour, and we're walking down Whipple Hollow Road. And we're not alone either. No, we're not. There's dozens of people out here along the road. Most of them look like teenagers. Then there's us too.
So I guess we'll just wait. Hey, look over there. Oh, I see it again. Yeah. The same cloudy form we saw before, right near the pile of marble rocks. This time there are many people to witness it too, though. And it's disappeared heading in the direction of Hanley Mountain. That was wild, though. I hear some of the kids saying that they think it's the ghost of a quarry worker who died here years ago. That's the holy grail, isn't it? To put a name to a ghost. So, all right, I guess we have some work to do.
All right, let's head into Rutland and search some of the old newspapers to see what we can find. All right, I'll look through this stack and you can check that one. All right, got it. Hmm. Well, look at this. What'd you find? It's an article dated January 31st, 1892. The headline reads, Marble Mill Burned. The True Blue Company at West Rutland suffers a loss of $35,000. Oh, wow. Were there any fatalities? Let me see. That's usually in the headline or sub-headline.
Okay, well, it says that they employ about 100 men, 20 of them live in Rutland. The fire is thought to have been started by incendiaries. So arson. Yeah. Hmm. Well, there's no mention of any injuries here. Just the loss of a large building. Yeah, that's tragic. But no mention of any injuries or death. Oh, okay. Wait a minute.
I may have something here. All right. What have you found? So the October 24th, 1874 Rutland Daily Globe, the headline reads suicide at West Rutland. A workman at Rutland Marble Company's quarry drowns himself in Whipple Hollow Brook. Well, that's pretty much right where we were when we saw that weird cloudy ghost. Yeah, you're right. Okay. I'm skimming the story now.
Okay, so there was a marble company worker named John Kopt who had been working here for about a year when he got sick with a strange illness. He'd been out of work for almost a week. His roommate urged him to see a doctor, but Kopt refused.
The story says he and his roommate went to bed around 9 p.m. At 2 a.m., the roommate woke up to find John Kopt wasn't in his bed. He didn't think much of it at the time. He figured Kopt was hungry or had to use the bathroom, so he went back to sleep. When he woke in the morning to find him still missing, he was concerned.
So the roommate told his coworkers at the quarry that John was in a bad mental and physical state lately, and they feared the worst. That sounds terrible. They even dredged the bottom of the quarry looking for his body, but found nothing. But then a young fisherman was fishing by Whipple Hollow Brook when he found a man lying face down in the water near the shore.
It was John Copt. The article said Copt was about 30 years old, an immigrant from England who was smart and well-liked by his coworkers. He had no spouse, no kids, and no family in this country. The death was ruled a suicide. So do you think that explains our ghost on Whipple Hollow Road? It's impossible to say, but it sure adds a fascinating layer to a legend. And that brings us back to today.
Today, if you look online, there's a few YouTube videos and stories about Whipple Hollow Row being haunted. Yeah, but no one ever said why. I saw those stories about a wispy white apparition haunting the ruins of an old quarry and along the road, but no one seemed to dig very deep into it. We found the story of the haunting made the newspapers back June 29th, 1938.
a quarry worker saw a ghost and the story spread. It's the story that's still alive and well today, but we kept digging and we found the story of the suicide from 1874. That's pretty amazing though. Maybe the ghost has a name. Yeah. A despondent immigrant named John Copt who took his own life right near this road in that stream right over there. Yeah. Sometimes when you know what happened and you're standing where it happened, that will haunt you.
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A Scooby-Doo mystery. I know. So it was cool. No one ever said who it was. The best we got was a worker who died at the quarry. It was Old Man Jenkins. It was always Old Man Jenkins. That guy got around. So that was always the story. And I was like, well, did anyone die at the quarry? Yeah. That's the next question you've got to ask. So I started digging through the news archives, and I found that suicide. Yeah. Like in the brook. Oh, my God. Suicide, too. That's a violent way to...
live your afterlife. Right. I would imagine. It's not an accident. It wasn't quick. Like it was intentional. He was despondent and, and did this sad thing, um, at a spot that's still there, right? It's still marshland. It's still swamp and stream and everything else. And, and that's, um, that's sort of powerful. There's a, in the paranormal, there's something that's been around a long time. They call it the stone tape theory. The idea that, um, uh,
especially stone with high metallic content, can record energetic events. Wow. The same way, remember, you remember cassette tapes, right? So cassette tapes were metal. Like there was metal in there and that recorded the music and you could play it back. So the theory was that a profound human experience, like a suicide or a murder or something like that, would literally imprint itself onto the rock. And for some reason, some people could pick up on it as they walk by it. They were able to read the tape. Yeah.
It makes a whole lot of sense when you put it that way. A little bit. Because I don't know how tape works. It's always been a mystery to me. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, it's just this little piece of thin material that records something. Something is on that. Yeah. And you can listen back to it. Again and again. Why wouldn't there be something natural out there that can do the same thing? Well, that's the theory. And so stone tape theory is the... You know, it's a movie that plays over and over. And we still talk about it. So maybe people are seeing something. And...
you know, we've talked about this plenty when, you know, the Lizzie Borden house is one we've brought up many, many times. You, you stand next to the couch, which though it's not the actual couch, it's the actual spot. Sure. Where someone was murdered. That floor. You're standing on that floor where it happened. You lay down on that floor. Yeah. Yeah. So like right there, you're like, Oh, someone died exactly in this precise spot. Yeah. Uh,
Just someone was murdered. And that, we think about that. We connect to it because you're just like, ooh, gosh, I'm in the spot right now. And so when you walk down the road, I think sometimes you feel something. You're like, oh, why am I uncomfortable right now? What am I at? Maybe you're just tuning into something that was sort of left behind, like this energy of like someone did a thing there. Right.
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, right? That is the number one place in the United States, second in the world for people who want to try to take their own lives. Have you seen that documentary? There's probably plenty of documentaries, but there's one famous one. Where they filmed it for weeks and weeks. They had cameras from far away trained on it. And they caught... And they showed people. They caught more than a few jumpers, yeah. Oh, horrible. And the reality is that...
I mean, if someone is in that horrible state, right? And by the way, please get help. Yes. We want you around. Read the sign at the start of the bridge. Yeah. There's one on the Cape Cod bridges too. Yeah. A sign from the Good Samaritans. Yep. Yep. Please ask for help. It's not a good solution. We need you. If you're listening to this, we need you. So if nothing else, we need you.
But so someone had this horrible inclination. This is a place where other people have been successful at it. And then other people go there and, you know, they do the same thing and the place gets an energy to it. I've never driven on the Golden Gate Bridge. I've seen it. I've been to San Francisco. I've seen it from a distance. I've never been in a car on it. Was it foggy when you saw it? It was foggy when we landed.
Because sometimes that bridge will disappear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't imagine driving over it into the fog. Oh, and knowing what happened there? Oh. Oh, forget it. I get freaked out about bridges to begin with. Because you think it's going to fall when you're in the top? I have issues, and there's something, it's a real thing, issues with big things.
like windmills, like when you patent, not a windmill, like a solar, what do they call them? The big ones. The big wind turbines. The turbines, yeah. Going to the Cape, there's a whole bunch of them. And for some reason, those things freak me out. So a big bridge freaks me out. Being that high and that...
um, I, there's a risk obviously, especially, you know, as America ages and what we built years ago are aging. Um, there's risk of collapse. Yeah. Uh, so yeah, I think those kinds of things scare me. Huh? Didn't scare me until just now. Sorry. Thanks for that. Um, no, I get it. Lots of people are afraid of bridges, but, um, but yeah, there's a thing. You feel the land around you. You get the sense of, um,
danger and whatever else. Right. So maybe that fear comes from people who have been injured or, or accidents that have happened on those bridges that I've been on. Maybe you've, you sense that maybe it's not a fear, uh, a unique fear within me. Maybe I'm absorbing that from something. Maybe. I mean, Oh gosh, we're getting deep here. Yeah. We're going into the weeds, into the marsh, into the marsh, into the swamps, the swamps where, uh, who knows what could happen. And, um,
Yeah, but I love that I've not seen anyone else put a name to it. I think we might have been the first. And not to promise you that that's who it is, but we did find something that happened right there to someone who did work at a quarry, but it was not a quarry accident. It was intentional because something was very wrong with him. So yeah, no, it's really intriguing when you can go back and you can find...
that something did happen. Yeah. You know, and, um, another clue, another clue for your, your Scooby-Doo mystery. We had a name.
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Thank you so much to our sponsors. Thank you to our Patreon patrons. And our theme music is by Jon Jed. Until next time, remember, the bizarre is closer than you think. What if your mind could trick your body into feeling sick? Or even worse? In Hysterical, I investigate the bizarre medical mystery that unfolds in a high school in upstate New York. It starts with one girl developing strange, violent symptoms. And then another. And then another.
Rumors begin to swirl. Is it something in the water? Inside the school? Or is it all in their heads? Hysterical is my search for answers. And along the way, I uncover surprising connections to unexplained incidents around the world. Events that challenge everything we think we know about our bodies,
and our minds. Named podcast of the year at the Gambies, Hysterical is a mind-bending, unforgettable ride. Binge all episodes right now exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Start your free trial of Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.