Mount Chocorua

A dramatic 3,490-foot peak in the White Mountains, named after Chief Chocorua whose dying curse is one of New Hampshire's most enduring legends.

In the language of the Abenaki people, there is no oral tradition of a chief named Chocorua, yet this 3,490-foot peak in the White Mountains carries a curse that shaped an entire town's identity for nearly two centuries. The most enduring version of the legend, first published by author Lydia Maria Child in 1830, tells of events around 1720 when a Native man named Chocorua left his young son in the care of the Campbell family, white settlers with whom he was on friendly terms. While in their care, the boy discovered and drank poison that Mr. Campbell had prepared to kill foxes. The child died. Consumed by grief, Chocorua exacted a devastating revenge, and when Campbell returned home, he found his wife and children slain. Campbell pursued Chocorua up the mountain, where he wounded the fleeing man with a rifle shot near the summit. According to Child's account, Chocorua raised his arms to the sky and delivered one of the most famous curses in New England folklore: 'A curse upon ye, white men! May the Great Spirit curse ye when he speaks in the clouds, and his words are fire! Lightning blast your crops! Wind and fire destroy your dwellings! The Evil Spirit breathe death upon your cattle!' He then leaped from the precipice to his death on the rocks below. What makes the Chocorua legend remarkable is that something genuinely strange did follow. Cattle in the town of Burton, nestled at the mountain's base, began sickening and dying of a mysterious ailment that settlers called 'Burton's Ail.' The disease was so persistent and so devastating to livestock that in 1833, the terrified townspeople voted to change the town's name from Burton to Albany, hoping to sever the association with Chocorua's malediction. It was not until years later that geologists discovered the true cause: unusually high concentrations of muriate of lime, or calcium chloride, in the local water supply were poisoning the animals. The curse had a scientific explanation, but by then the legend had taken permanent root. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the first major literary figure to immortalize the story, publishing the poem 'Jeckoyva' in 1826, four years before Child's prose version. Historian Mary Ellen Lepionka has noted that if a Chief Chocorua had actually existed, he would have been a notable enough figure that indigenous oral histories would preserve his memory, and they do not. The character appears to be a creation of the Romantic era, shaped by white authors projecting their own guilt and fascination onto the landscape. Yet the mountain itself remains one of the most photographed peaks in New Hampshire, its bare rocky summit unmistakable against the sky. Hikers who reach the top on autumn evenings report an unsettling stillness near the cliff face where Chocorua supposedly made his final leap, and some claim to hear a low moaning carried on the wind that sounds nothing like the gusts that rake the exposed granite.