Bara-Hack

An abandoned 18th-century settlement in Pomfret's Ragged Hills where visitors have reported hearing the sounds of daily village life (children laughing, dogs barking, wagon wheels) for over a century, even though no one has lived there since the 1890s. Seminary student Paul F. Eno documented the phenomena across four visits in the early 1970s, including a phantom infant in an elm tree that had been reported since the settlement was still inhabited.

In 1971, six seminary students from St. Thomas in Bloomfield hiked more than a mile into the Connecticut woods to reach a place no one had lived in almost a century. They heard children laughing. Dogs barking. The creak of wagon wheels on a road that no longer existed. Their tape recorder captured nothing.

Paul F. Eno led that group. He was 18. Over four visits across two years, he and his team documented things in these ruins that launched his fifty-year career in paranormal research. "For more than seven minutes we watched a bearded face suspended in the air over the cemetery's western wall," Eno wrote in Fate magazine in 1985. In an elm tree above the northern wall, they saw a baby-like figure reclining on a branch. That same phantom infant had been reported two centuries earlier, when the settlement was still alive.

Bara-Hack sits in the Ragged Hills outside Pomfret, Connecticut. The name is Welsh for "breaking of bread," though the current landowners suspect Odell Shepard made it up. Shepard, a Trinity College professor who later won the Pulitzer Prize for biography, visited the ruins in the 1920s and wrote about them in his 1927 book The Harvest of a Quiet Eye. "Although there is no human habitation for a long distance round about," he wrote, "there is always a hum and stir of human life." Before Shepard's book, no written record uses the name Bara-Hack at all.

The settlement started around 1778. Jonathan Randall and Obadiah Higginbotham fled Cranston, Rhode Island, during the Revolutionary War after British advances following the Battle of Rhode Island. Randall had bought 220 acres in Pomfret two years earlier. The two families built homes along Nightingale Brook, set up a waterwheel-powered gristmill, and ran a spinning wheel business called Higginbotham Linen Wheels.

The ghost stories predate the abandonment. While the village still had living residents, the Randall family's enslaved workers refused to go near a particular elm tree after dark. They reported seeing figures reclining in its branches at dusk, gathering like birds on a wire. A phantom infant appeared in that same tree, always at twilight. This was the 1700s or early 1800s. Two hundred years later, Paul Eno's team saw the same infant in the same spot.

Bara-Hack never grew much. Industrialization killed the spinning wheel trade. Families drifted to factory towns. The last burial in the Randall-Botham Cemetery was Betty Randall in 1893. By then the forest was already swallowing the foundations.

But the sounds kept going.

Every generation since abandonment has reported the same thing: the daily noise of a village that isn't there. Children playing. Mothers calling names. Cows lowing. Heavy wagons on dirt roads. Always auditory. Always ordinary. Not screams, not moans, not chains rattling. Just a community going about its morning, echoing through empty woods.

Some locals blame a Nipmuc curse. The Nipmuc people lived on this land before colonists pushed them out, and tribal elders reportedly cursed the ground when they left. Whether or not that story holds up, the land had a reputation for strangeness before anyone alive today was born.

What makes Bara-Hack unusual is the consistency. The sounds Eno documented in the 1970s match what Shepard described in the 1920s. Visitor accounts from the 2000s describe the same phenomena. A century of reports, all saying the same thing. Not escalating, not fading. Just a village that keeps playing on repeat in a forest where nobody lives.

You can't visit anymore, at least not easily. The Townshend family owns the land now and closed it to the public after years of ghost hunters trespassing through the woods. Stone foundations, a millpond bridge, and the cemetery are still out there, slowly losing to the Connecticut forest. If you want permission, try Pomfret Town Hall. Approval is rare.

Eno died in 2024 at 71. He spent his whole adult life investigating the paranormal, got expelled from a third seminary for it, and wrote multiple books. But it all started in those woods outside Pomfret, listening to a village that refused to go quiet.