In the House of the Widows

Ellen and John were the perfect couple, and after they got married, they found the perfect house. Tucked away on a quiet street in a quiet corner of Vermont, the old Victorian was definitely a fixer-upper. Ellen and John weren’t afraid of a little work, but after the events they witnessed in the house, they found other things to fear.

Ellen and John were married on a bright summer day in 1986. They immediately began searching for their dream home, and by autumn, they had found it. It was an old house – drafty and in need of some repair – but Ellen and John saw nothing but potential. “We were young and we thought we could handle whatever came along,” Ellen tells me.

The young couple started right away ripping up carpets and painting walls. Soon the house was more of a mess than it had been when they first laid eyes on it, but it was all part of the plan. As Ellen worked upstairs on the two bathrooms, John was downstairs uncovering the beautiful, old hardwood floor that had languished for years under an orange shag carpet. “That carpet was the first thing that had to go,” Ellen recalls.

As the carpet came up, John began to notice some pesky stains on the floorboards. He tried cleaning them, spending time at the local hardware store in consultation with the owner, Bill, and when that didn’t work, he sanded them down. The stains went deep, however, and John and Ellen were resigned to hiding the problem with strategically-placed furniture.

The Midnighters

For over thirty years, Jerry worked as a police officer in Pittsburgh. In his time on the force, Jerry has seen some bad things, some worse things, and some downright evil things. Cleaning up when people got mad or got crazy was part of the job, but there were other things that Jerry saw, things that most people never see, things that prowl the night, things that refuse to die.

I interviewed Jerry several times in 2002. The following incident is just one of the many stories Jerry shared in hours of audio recordings. I have transcribed them just as they were told to me by Jerry.

“This was back in ‘62, I’m thinking. It was just after midnight, and me and Frank – that’s my partner at the time, Frank – we got a call about a burglary in progress. Now we don’t get many of those, or we didn’t get them back then when people didn’t have home alarm systems and that. So Frank and me, we hit the gas and got right over. Yeah, we was pretty stupid to want to get there fast, huh?

“It was a small apartment building and there was this girl, not more than 20 – nursing student, I think – that lived up on the third floor. She comes running out when we pull up. We think the guy must be inside already and we rush the stairs, but the place is empty, right, and the girl comes in behind us and says, “No, he’s out there,” and she points out the window.

The Legend of Mother Meade

Western Pennsylvania has its fair share of strange stories and weird legends, but none more so than the story of Mother Mead and her thirteen children. In the early eighteenth century, the state was sparsely settled with European immigrants. In an effort to attract more settlers and displace the native Indians, the English welcomed religious sects of all flavors.

One of these sects was centered around the personality of Mother Mead, an enigmatic and colorful early American figure. It was said that Mother Mead was a powerful witch or a lapsed Anglican nun or a runaway slave who took up with the Iroquois. Whatever her true identity, she became the focus of a number of tall tales over the years.

One of those tales concerns Mother Meade’s numerous children. Although they were all very different and spawned many legends of their own, one thing they all had in common was that they were born monsters.