The Hobgoblins of Springvale
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All right, now we're in a rural section of Springvale, Maine. Springvale is technically a village of Sanford, Maine, whose downtown is just south of us. And we're about 30 miles southwest of Portland. Now, this used to be mostly farm country, and within that farm country was a farmhouse owned by the Garvin family. And is that what we're looking for, the old Garvin house? We are. Now, the house used to be a rental property. During the mid-1800s, for a period of about 12 years, they couldn't seem to keep a tenant inside.

Tenants included families, people with rock-solid reputations, even a preacher. All of them were really uncomfortable inside this house, and it didn't take long for word to get around as to the reason. And what's that? Well, everyone in town knew the Garvin house was haunted.

Hello, I'm Jeff Belanger, and welcome to episode 382 of the New England Legends podcast. And I'm Ray Ogier. Thank you for joining us on our mission to chronicle every ghost, monster, alien, UFO, roadside oddity, and other wicked strangeness in New England, one story at a time. Please hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts, because it's free. It would also help a lot if you posted a review for us, because that's how we grow. And a quick reminder that tickets are on sale for our annual charity zombie prom on Saturday, February 22nd.

the Double Tree Hotel in Milford, Massachusetts. All proceeds benefit Community Harvest Project. You can find a link to buy tickets on our website or in the link in this episode description. Now, this is exciting. This week's episode is sponsored by something brand new from Jeff. What do you got there, Jeff? Ray, I'm holding the very first issue of my new print publication called Shadowzine.

A zine? What is this, 1990? Yeah, I'm going old school. Analog, print. Each month, Shadowzine is going to bring you in-depth stories of strange and paranormal topics from some of the best researchers out there. Issue one is called Mysteries of the Bridgewater Triangle, and it's by yours truly. I explore 200 square miles of weirdness in southeastern Massachusetts, where I'm going to be talking about the mysteries of the Bridgewater Triangle.

from haunted places to Bigfoot sightings, a Thunderbird, Puck wedgies, UFOs, cult murder, and more. And can people buy a digital copy of Shadowsine too? No, print only. You can buy it from the website or from me in person at my events. I have great concern how only a tiny handful of people are controlling most of the internet. And we already distrust mainstream media, so I'm going back to where I all started in all of this—

Well, I love it. And I'm holding the first issue of Shadowzine right now. It's full color, glossy. It looks amazing. Thank you. And you can get a copy right now through our website, shadowzine.com, or click the link in our episode description. If you buy a copy online, it'll be autographed when it arrives. Very, very cool. All right, so we're on the hunt for a haunted house in Maine. A house the newspaper said were full of hobgoblins.

So many stories we cover from long ago will tell you a house is haunted, and it's been experienced by reliable witnesses. But this week's story may just find the reason why it's haunted.

The story ultimately launched the career of an old-time newspaper icon. The region was originally part of land purchase from the Abenaki people back in 1661. Not much was done with the land in those early years. It was eventually willed to Pellig, Sanford, thus the town name of Sanford. The French and Indian War made the region dangerous for a bunch of years, but once the dust settled, people arrived and built farms and mills, and the town grew. And yet there was one house in town that truly stuck out.

a rental property owned by the Garvin family. So let's head back to 1872 and look for the Hop Goblins of Springvale. It's February of 1872 here in Springvale, Maine. Springvale is best known for the manufacturing of boots and shoes, but lately locals have been talking about different kinds of soles. I get it.

It's been a cold winter, not enough to keep these hardy Mainers inside all the time. They still gather in shops in town, local taverns, or after Sunday church services. And the subject they're buzzing about the most lately is a haunted home owned by the Garvin family. This house is the talk of the town.

And now it's caught the attention of the Lewiston Journal. They sent a young reporter named Edward Mitchell to investigate the haunting. Fresh out of college, Mitchell is determined to get to the bottom of this haunting. If you hear a place is haunted, there are a couple of obvious questions you have to ask as part of your investigation. First...

Who has had strange experiences inside? You'll want to interview them. And do you believe them? Do they have something to gain from sharing the story? Have other people had experiences in the building too? Then you have to ask the follow-up question. Why is this place haunted? What happened here? All good questions, Jeff. So let's join the young reporter and head over to the Garvin farmhouse.

So Mitchell made the comment that if you live 100 miles away from a reported haunt, almost everyone believes the story. If you live 50 miles from the haunt, there's a few doubters. If you live 10 miles from the haunt, there's only a few believers. And if you're standing in front of the haunted house, you'll likely be told you've wasted your time. But

But every once in a while, a haunt delivers beyond your wildest expectations. The house itself is pretty simple. Once this was a bustling farm, and now it's mostly a rental property, and has been for decades. When the Garvins passed away, they left the farm to their children. The current owner lives in Minnesota. He's left the rental property in the hands of Asa Lowe, a local attorney. This isn't an expensive place to rent. I mean, it's not the nicest property, and being outside of town makes it less convenient.

The other thing is this place has had a bad reputation for almost 30 years, but it's gotten a lot worse in the past 12 years. Joining us in the house is Mr. Bodwell. Though he doesn't live in the house right now, he's lived here on and off for seven years. Folks in town know him as an honest family man. He's not one to make up stories. Hey, night is falling. Let's take a seat. All right, what are we waiting for? Something happened, I guess.

What was that? I'm not sure. Sounds almost like someone chucking dried corn off the cob and it's hitting the floor upstairs or maybe in the attic. What's that? I don't know. It was even louder than before. It sounds like someone throwing a pile of corn kernels down the stairs. Let's head upstairs and look.

All right, I don't see anything out of place up here. There's nothing on the floor, and the sound stopped. This is what Mr. Bodwell had to live with. Most nights, nothing would happen, but then some nights would be like this. And there's no rest or sleep when you're wondering what sounds like that are coming from. Oh, what's that? I don't know. It sounds like it was coming from the kitchen downstairs. Let's go check it out. Look at the stove. It's the covers on the cooking stove.

Wow, did you see that? I did. The cast iron cover on the burner just rattled on its own. Is the stove lit? I don't feel any heat coming off of it. Lift the cover plate and look inside. No, no, no. You do it. All right, fine. I'm getting closer. Okay, the stove is not lit, and I don't see anything inside. All right, this is a really strange way for a ghost to try to get our attention, isn't it? I don't make the rules, Ray. This stuff seems to happen on its own.

Okay, you heard that too, right? I did, yeah. A bedroom door just slammed upstairs. And we're all down here in the kitchen. Yep. Right. Right. All right, let's blow out all the candles and head outside. Yeah, I'm more than ready to get out of here. Okay, now that it's completely dark in here, I feel spooked. Yeah. As if this place wasn't weird enough already. Let's get outside. Let's just get back to town. I...

Are you? Yeah, I'm seeing it too. I see lights on in two of the windows upstairs. Me too. But it was dark when we came downstairs, right? Yeah, it was. And did a light just come on in the sitting room downstairs? It did. Okay, this is really strange. Should we go back in and blow out the candles again? You know, you can if you want. I'm going back to town. Nope, nope. I'm not going back in there.

Mr. Bodwell was just telling me how one night he and his wife were asleep in bed in that house during a windstorm. He awoke to find a woman standing next to his bed. At first he thought it was just his wife, but then he found her softly snoring beside him. After a quick nudge from his elbow, both of them were staring at this ghostly apparition. He said it was the ghost of an old woman. They were petrified, but then the ghost dissolved into nothing right in front of their eyes. Let's head into the tavern to see what others have to say.

Two beers, please. Cheers. So I just heard from another local who said when the Baptist minister used to live in that house, he complained of hearing groanings and moaning in the middle of the night. Used to keep him awake. And he also used to hear the splashing of water. That's so weird. I just heard from another guy who used to rent the house. He was so scared that he ran out of the house at midnight and ran all the way to town, mumbling about a witch in the house. And he never went back.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. I was just talking to an old-timer at the bar. He told me about Old Mother York. They called her a witch. She lived in that house going on 40 years ago now. He said she was an old hag with no teeth and a beard on her chin. They say she never paid any rent. She had some unholy power over the man who owned the house at the time. And folks in town feared her. They tried to stay in her good graces.

Someone else was just telling me how two strangers from Canada used to come and stay with Old Mother York. They'd stay for a week or two, then leave for a while, then come back. The strange thing was, there was always a rash of crimes when they were in town. Robberies, stealing chickens, and things like that. It got to the point where the local constable took notice. So the story goes that the constable and two selectmen came to visit Old Mother York one day and asked some questions about these French-Canadian visitors.

Mother York told them they were simply lodgers with her. But when the constable and selectman began to look around the house, they grew suspicious. And down in the basement, they heard moaning and then a shriek. And that's when they ran out of the house and never came back.

Mother York shrugged and closed the door behind them. They say about a year after the strange ghostly event in the basement, a peddler came into town with a fancy cart full of expensive items. At the end of the day, he made his way north. One local kid said he saw the peddler pull his wagon and horses into the farmhouse where old Mother York lived and get out to spend the night and rest his horses.

He was never seen again. The peddler was from Vermont, so a few weeks later, family came looking for him. They could trace his steps to Sanford, then to old Mother York's house, and then no further.

Some suggest old Mother York ran off with the peddler, because she too disappeared after he showed up. Others believe she was spirited away by the devil, and maybe the peddler's body was buried in the dirt floor basement. Given the history and the modern problems of keeping tenants who don't mind sharing their home with ghosts, it was decided to board up the house. And that brings us back to today.

So this article was written by Edward Page Mitchell. It made the rounds when it was first published and caught the attention of some New York newspapers who offered him a job. Mitchell would go on to become president of the New York Sun Publishing Company. And it all started from chasing a ghost in Maine. His article was our source for this week's story. I like how objective the article is. Didn't editorialize at all. It's sensational enough on its own. So the Springvale rumor mill caught the attention of the big local paper and the paper decided to look into it.

To be fair, we're not sure if the former Garvin house still exists. The article only mentions it was in Springvale on the north side of town near a farm. Now, to me, this is the perfect haunt. You have multiple modern witnesses, at least modern as of 1872. You have a reporter willing to go inside and look, and one who did the digging and found the backstory. Now, can we prove any of it? No. But so often, when there's this much ghostly smoke, there's also fire.

And that takes us to After the Legend, where we take a deeper dive into this week's story and sometimes veer off course. After the Legend is brought to you by our Patreon patrons. They're the lifeblood of our podcast. They help us financially with our hosting, marketing, production, everything else it takes to bring you two stories each week. It's only three bucks per month. It's like buying me and Ray a cheap coffee at a gas station.

that we have to split. But for that, our patrons get early ad-free access to new episodes and bonus episodes and content no one else gets to hear. Please head over to patreon.com slash newenglandlegends to sign up. See some pictures of Springvale, Maine? Click on the link in our episode description or go to our website and click on episode 382.

Haunted house. Made the news. Witches and haunted houses and ghosts and rattling pots and pans. A lot of ink on this story, too. This was not just a short article. This was like a whole page and a half of an old-time big newspaper. And I love the reporting because, I mean, sure, he had a little sizzle to it. There's no question he was trying to sell papers. But he talked to everybody. He talked to, you know,

various people who lived in the house. He found the reputation of the house and was able to sort of pick apart to this story of the witch that was there 40 years earlier. So that would have been like 1830s, right thereabouts. And so you can say, I don't believe in any of this stuff, but you've got good, reliable people who have nothing to gain, if anything. Right.

something to lose by sharing that story. And then you've got, you know, this plausible backstory of the murdered peddler, the witch who lived there, the spooky house, and you have a place that just gets a reputation. And eventually, if no one's renting it,

I wouldn't be surprised if the house is long gone. But the article never gave an address or anything like that. All we know is the Garvin house. A lot of strange coincidences, too, that are unexplainable or just interesting when you put it all together. Right. That people had disappeared or never went back home. Anything could have happened. Sure. Bear attack, obviously.

Yeah, of course. On the way out of town. Robbed and killed by somebody. Right. Of course. Yeah, any number of things. And all the crime that happened when two Canadians were in town. I mean, that could be a coincidence, but it lends itself well to the story in general. Right. Well, I mean, the article went a little more in depth on that, that like, you know, chickens are being stolen, someone was assaulted, houses were being robbed whenever these two guys were in town. Yeah.

You know, you don't have to be a NCIS pro to be like, huh, maybe we should check these guys out a little bit. Maybe they're coming here to steal and then move on before the heat gets on them. But yeah, so, so many facets to this story. And, but, but one of the things I totally dig about it is that there's certain things you expect when someone's describing a haunting. Slamming doors. Yes. Of course. Yeah. Something rattling. Rattling, wind blowing. Mm-hmm.

Corn? Dried corn being thrown down the stairs? That's new. All the hauntings I've heard over the years with you, I've never heard that one. I've never heard it either. And I adore that they described it as best they could, right? We hear this sound and what it sounds like, and I know because I used to live near a farm when I was a kid, and they grew dried corn. Not the kind of sweet corn that's soft that you eat, but the dried corn that gets used in feed for animals. Yeah.

And so it's hard. And when you shuck it, you would just kind of like, you know. Just kind of wring it out. Just wring it out. And they'd fall right off. Yeah. And it would like, and then it would, you know, fall to the ground. And then we used to corn cars, which is, don't do this. It's terrible. Like we'd throw corn at cars. Like whatever. We're stupid kids, you know. I did acorns if it makes you feel better. Same stupidity, right? Just a different thing. Just a different projectile. Did you ever touch an electric fence?

No. So the farm had an electric fence to keep the cows inside. Yeah. And we used to do this thing where you could make like a human chain. So, so like if we wanted to get you, uh, one buddy would grab the fence, then grab my hand. I'd grab your hand and the shock would go to the end, which is you. Fun. It's super fun. That's what happened to you. Yeah. That's, that's just, it all makes sense now. And you're like, yeah. And the electric fences are so, I mean, every kid is like,

should we pee on it? And no, bad idea. Don't, I can't stress enough. We never did. We never got to that level of stupidity. We were pretty stupid, but like we never quite got all the way down to that level, but we did touch it and, and feel the shock like through your arm. Was it a bad chunk? I always, Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It hurts. I mean, it's meant to take a thousand pound animals from going any further. What's that? What's a 80 pound kid. I didn't know. I didn't know if it was just supposed to surprise you a little bit. Um,

They can turn them up and turn them down, but it hurt. I mean, you didn't want to be in that anymore. And I remember a friend of mine who lived on a farm was telling me the story about how one of their farm hands that they were teasing had to go get a freshly born calf and carry it out. And he went into the field. He picked up the calf.

And he started running because mom's going to be mad. Mom's going to be chasing him down. So he's running and he goes to leap the electric fence. Oh, no. One leg went over, but then went under the underwire. Got tangled. And then he went flipped and tangled in it. And he's just... Oh, no. And the farmers are laughing. It's not lethal. He's going to be okay. But I mean, imagine co-workers, right? Just being like...

He's getting shocked. Great story. How did we get there? We were talking about corn. Corn. Right. And farms. The corn falling down the stairs. I don't know why you offered the fence thing. Yeah, I don't know. That's where my brain went. I think it's some shock therapy from the time I was like eight that just resurfaced. Did you also eat pain chips as a kid?

They tasted so good. Yeah, I get it. Especially the gray ones. I don't know why those tasted better than all the others. Maybe it's just me. But yeah, I loved that this one had a little bit of a different twist of...

hearing a very strange sound. And the water splashing is unique too, right? There's no indoor plumbing back then. So you're talking about, would have been water in a pan or whatever. And that would have been strange and unique as well. And dirt floor basements. Have you been in a house with a dirt floor basement? I'm sure I have. Yeah. I mean, so they're creepy.

My brother-in-law, before he moved in with my sister, had a house that was not all that old, but it had a dirt floor basement. And I'll tell you, man, it's just...

Because you know, like, I could dig into that and who knows what would find. Sure, absolutely. And you're like, they couldn't throw a little cement down? You know what I mean? Well, if they were trying to hide something, you think they would throw some cement down. Right, yeah. And also, too, I can't stress enough, most normal people wouldn't think to bury a body in their basement. Normal people. However...

Like there's a few and you've heard of them. John Wayne Gacy. Sure. If you want to be close to those bodies, you bury them in the basement. And no one would think of it because, because that's how you know you're not a psychopath. Cause like, well, if I killed someone, I'd put the body far, far away from me. Yes. That means you're a good, healthy person. If you're a psychopath, you're like, no, no, I want it in the basement. I left this one in the bed. Yeah. Where I know where it is. You're like, yeah, that's how you know you're, you're a special level of crazy. Yeah. Um, but yeah, that's, uh, but that's the thing. And when strange stuff happens in a house and when there's a,

that old lady that lives there and she's acting weird and the stories start to circulate and your imagination runs wild and then people can't stay there. And next thing you know, you've truly got a haunted house.

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