STRANGE BUT TRUE TALES

LEGEND TRIPPING IN THE BRIDGEWATER TRIANGLE, MASSACHUSETTS

LEGEND TRIPPING IN THE BRIDGEWATER TRIANGLE, MASSACHUSETTS

BY VICTORIA

A couple of my friends and I decided to go on a "legend trip" to the Bridgewater Triangle last March. We went to Lizzie Borden's house and on the way home, we decided to stop at Dighton Rock State Park.

Now, before I go any further, let me stop and explain some things. Firstly, I'm a sensitive/psychic (I guess). I can sense/feel/hear/sometimes see ghosts and other entities. This story revolves a lot around those abilities.

Secondly, I just want to go over some of the history of the Bridgewater Triangle for those of you who don't know about it. So the Bridgewater Triangle is an area in Massachusetts that is known for having some weird ass occurrences, such as UFO sightings, cryptid sightings (such as Bigfoot and thunderbirds), superfluous demon worship, and a very large amount of hauntings.

It is called as such because it is a triangle formed by the towns of Rehoboth, Abington, and Freetown with the town of Bridgewater right in the middle. One of the most notable areas in the Triangle is the Hockomock Swamp.

It is notable not only because that area has arguably the most paranormal sightings in the Triangle (some of which go back to the Pilgrims), but it also played a huge part in King Philip's War when it was used as a base for Metacomet (King Philip) to launch attacks on nearby settlements.

The swamp was called Hockomock by the Wampanoag tribe of the Algonquin Nation - the name means "place where spirits dwell." The settlers aptly named it "Devil's Swamp."  Our first stop that day was the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, in Fall River, MA. Fall River is slightly outside of the Triangle, but the energy certainly bleeds outside of the area of the main triangle.

I had been to the B&B before and slept over, so I knew what to expect from the spirits there. None of the people I was with had been there before. When we walked in for the tour, we were seated in the small parlor to wait for anyone else who may be running late. I sat in the chair closest to doorway to the living room where Mr. Borden's body was found.

Now, Mr. Borden generally doesn't like people in his house, so when we sat down, I felt him come over from where he was sitting on the couch and stand in the doorway watching us. When the tour guide started giving her speech, he walked away and sat back down on the couch, seemingly bored with us.

After we were done in the parlor, we went into the dining room where nothing happened, but the tour guide showed us some crime scene photos. We then went into the living room where Mr. Borden's body was found. When the group entered into the living room, I felt Mr. Borden get up from the couch, but I was talking with my friends at the time, so I wasn't paying attention to where he went.

While everyone was filing in, I went to go look at the small bookshelf next to the fireplace. There was a chair angled in front of the bookshelf so that it was facing the replica of the couch that Mr. Borden had died in.

I could feel Mr. Borden standing behind the chair and Mrs. Borden sitting in the chair as I was looking in the bookcase, but as everyone settled into the room and sat down, I found that people were looking at me because I was leaving the chair empty. When the tour guide started talking, I sat in the chair so that I wouldn't be standing in the middle of the room.

That was a massive mistake, since I sat on Mrs. Borden and could feel Mr. Borden staring at me disapprovingly from behind the chair. I was going to stand up right away because I was seriously uncomfortable, but one of my friends decided to take a picture of me in the chair, so I had to wait until she was done to stand up and bolt across the room.

Some other stuff happened in the house that day, although not to me directly. Two of the friends that I was with heard noises coming from one of the rooms in the attic when the tour stopped there and decided to go investigate.

They found nothing, so they left to come tell me and my boyfriend who was with us and when they went back in the room, there was a large shooter marble right where one of them had been standing not 30 seconds earlier.

One of them also heard footsteps following us up the stairs.  On the way home, we decided to stop at Dighton Rock State Park in Berkley, MA. Dighton Rock is a rock that they found when they were building a dam for the Taunton River in Dighton.

They dredged it up and discovered that it was covered in petroglyphs. No one has been able to identify or translate the petroglyphs, so we have no clue where they came from or who wrote them although the theories abound and include Native Americans, Ancient Phoenicians, Norse, Portuguese, and even Chinese.

Dighton Rock is fairly creepy in and of itself, but what happened in the park was even creepier. Since the park was technically closed for the season, the main road was closed to auto traffic. People were parking in a little flat dirt area off to the side and walking down the mile-ish long road to the park area. So that's what we decided to do.

As we walked down the road, it was really quiet. We couldn't hear any birds chirping and even though there are small streams that run through the area connecting Shepherd's Cove and the Taunton River, we couldn't hear any water running either. Even the conversations of the people we passed seemed muffled.

We passed the time by telling stories and making jokes, but we were all spooked whether we knew it consciously or not. You could tell by our body language - we were walking close together in a line and someone was always speaking so that we could stave off the feeling.

Afterwards, we all agreed that it was creepy, but didn't want to bring it up to each other at the time. While we were walking down the road, I kept getting this uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It didn't help that the woods were strangely thick and full of thorns and that I kept hearing rustling and movement.

I also started seeing things in the woods out of the corner of my eye. I felt like we were being stalked by a predator or that something dangerous was following us. I looked into the woods at one point and could've sworn that I saw a fully transparent Native American warrior/hunter stalking us through the woods. He was tall, but slightly hunched and thin.

He was bare chested and holding a bow with feathers in his hair and a quiver full of arrows on his back. I was shocked when I saw him, but he seemed to be the one who was following us. He never came any closer and when we got to the clearing in the woods where the park was, he didn't follow us into the park.

He did follow us all the way down the road until we got back to our car though. That seriously spooked me, especially because I was the only one to see him. Unfortunately, the Dighton Rock Museum wasn't open that day, so I have to go back there when it's open to see it and see if I can find that spirit again.