In Brief
More than a mile into the woods at Pomfret, Connecticut, all that's left of Bara-Hack is stone foundations and a small cemetery. The story goes that the place still sounds inhabited — children, cows, wagon wheels, the ordinary noise of a village nobody has lived in since the 1890s.
The Full Story
There's a ruined settlement in the Ragged Hills section of Pomfret, Connecticut that people call the Village of Voices. Nobody has lived at Bara-Hack since the 1890s, but by the lore you can still hear it — not screams or chains, but the everyday racket of a working town. Children laughing. Cows lowing. Wagon wheels on a road that no longer exists.
Two families built the place. Jonathan Randall bought 220 acres here in 1776, and around 1778 Obadiah Higginbotham moved his family up from Rhode Island, fleeing the fighting after the Battle of Rhode Island. They ran a flax-spinning-wheel business — Higginbotham Linen Wheels — off a waterwheel on Nightingale Brook, selling wheels to the towns nearby.
The unsettling part started while the village was still alive. As it's told, the Randall family's enslaved workers refused to go near one particular elm by the cemetery wall, saying an infant lay reclining in its branches. Those phantom-baby reports date to the early 1800s.
The families drifted off to factory towns, and by about 1890 the village was empty. Betty Randall, the last of them, died in 1893 and was the last person buried in the cemetery.
Then in 1971, a teenage seminary student named Paul Eno hiked in with a small group of fellow students and made four visits over two years. They heard dogs, cows, and children laughing in the woods, and tried to tape it — the recorder caught nothing. And over the cemetery walls, Eno said, they saw worse. "For more than seven minutes we watched a bearded face suspended in the air over the cemetery's western wall," he wrote, "while in an elm tree over the northern wall we clearly saw a baby-like figure reclining."
The elm over the northern wall. The lore links it to the same tree the enslaved workers wouldn't approach, two centuries earlier.
Whatever Bara-Hack is, it doesn't escalate and it doesn't fade. A Trinity College professor named Odell Shepard wrote it up in 1927: "there is always a hum and stir of human life." The land's been empty for over a century. The morning keeps playing anyway.
