Slate and Shadow

In 1671, a servant girl in Groton said an old man walked out of a meadow with a book and guided her hand because she could not write. Twenty-one years later, in a Salem jail, Abigail Hobbs said she had met him in the woods at Casco Bay and put her name in the same kind of book. They did not stand up and proudly claim the word witch. Almost no one in New England ever did. The ones who refused the story were the ones they hanged.What they left behind was the furniture of a different tale: the woods, the covenant, the term of years, the master who already had other names in the ledger. Groton. Casco Bay. Salem Village. Andover. Same props. Different mouths.In 1921, Egyptologist Margaret Murray read those records and decided they were not panic. They were minutes — evidence of an old religion Christianity had never quite finished burying. A horned god. Covens of thirteen. A church in the trees. For a generation her version sat in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Then the historians took it apart. Then a new religion picked up the blueprints anyway.This episode of Slate & Shadow sits with all three versions: what the accused actually said, the woman who believed them, and the story that outlived the theory. Folklore first. The footnotes underneath.~30 minutes.Follow Slate & Shadow on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram for the walking versions of these stories. Subscribe here so the next one finds you.

In the far north of New Hampshire, in a county with more spruce than streetlights, people have talked for a hundred years about something that is not a bear and not a man.They call it the Woods Devil.Witnesses describe a tall, thin, gray-haired figure with a face too long for a person. It does not crash through the timber. It stands against a trunk, slides to the far side as you pass, and is gone. Sometimes it screams. Sometimes it only stares.This episode is a history of that legend — where the name comes from, what the lumber camps actually meant by “devil,” how older Abenaki talk of shy mountain people sits underneath the settler story, and the handful of hunters who said they saw the same wrong face: George Lavoie in 1948, Robert Goulet in Dixville Notch in 1952, and the later reports from Colebrook, Errol, and the roads that dead-end at Canada.It is not Champ. It is not Bigfoot with a local accent. It is thinner than that. And it already saw you.Slate & Shadow. Episode 2. About 30 minutes.

In the summer of 1720, somewhere on the Atlantic, Elizabeth Wilson gives birth on a ship bound for a new grant in New Hampshire. The child is named Mary. The town will call her Ocean-Born Mary for the rest of her life — and long after it.
The legend that follows her is the one New England likes best: pirates over the rail, a captain who spares the ship for a baby’s name, a bolt of green silk for a wedding dress, a retired pirate waiting in the hills, treasure under a hearthstone, and a ghost on the stairs of a Henniker house.
Mary Wilson Wallace did live. She married in Londonderry, raised five children, moved to Henniker in old age, and died there in 1814. She is buried behind the town hall. Pieces of that green dress still exist.
She did not live in the house that bears her name.
This episode of Slate & Shadow tells the story the way the region tells it — then walks the records to see what remains when the lantern comes on. A birth at sea. A life that was long and mostly ordinary. A Wisconsin photographer with a shovel for rent. And the question under almost every New England legend: when the story is better than the life, which one do we owe the truth to?