In Brief
Dogtown is an abandoned colonial village five miles inland from Gloucester, Massachusetts, gone to cellar holes and stone walls. Its last residents were called witches, and a 1921 newspaper blamed their evil power for the hikers who kept getting lost in its woods.
The Full Story
Dogtown is an abandoned village in the forest above Gloucester, Massachusetts, five miles inland from the harbor, and the strangest thing said about it is that the woods take people. In 1921 a New York Times article blamed the village's reputed witches for the hikers who kept getting lost there, and claimed that on occasion a distinct cackle could be heard coming from the trees.
It was a real town once. Families first settled the place in 1693 and called it the Commons; as many as a hundred lived there in the mid-1700s, built inland to stay clear of pirates and raiders off the coast. When those threats faded, the families drifted back to the harbor, and the empty houses filled with squatters and outcasts. By 1828 the village was all but gone.
The last people there were the ones the legends keep. Thomazine "Tammy" Younger, called the Queen of the Witches, lived in a little house on Fox Hill, made rum and read fortunes for the lawless men who came by. The story goes she could bewitch the oxen hauling supplies over the bridge near her house, freezing them in place until their owners paid her a toll. It was never proven any of these women were witches. As the author Elyssa East found, the ones accused were usually midwives or folk healers, or the destitute and outcast.
The last resident of all was Cornelius "Black Neil" Finson, a freedman found in the winter of 1830 living in a cellar hole with his feet frozen. He was carried to the Gloucester poorhouse and died soon after. Hikers today still tell of seeing his ragged figure by the trails, staring before it vanishes when anyone steps closer.
The strangest run of trouble came in a single year, 1984. That March, near the road into Dogtown, two teenagers reported a gray, monstrous, dog-like animal running into the trees, with big teeth and foaming at the mouth. Days earlier a deer had been found mutilated but uneaten. People in Gloucester started calling it the Dogtown werewolf. Then in June, a teacher named Anne Natti walked into the woods with her dog and was followed by a local man who pushed her down and killed her with a rock. He's serving life. The author Elyssa East, who spent years here, threads those events together and writes about the place as though it exerts some malevolent pull on the people who wander in.
What's left now is 3,600 acres of glacial boulders and the stone foundations of houses, still pocking the forest floor. East wrote that the place carries a feeling of intruding somewhere haunted. In woods where a town used to be, with nobody left to get lost but you, that feeling is the whole of it.
