It also helps our marketing image significantly that we do have our very own true historically documented Civil War era 'evil witch' story, 'The Spooky Hollow Witch'!
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According to our town records, a certain woman named Hausisse (a generic Algonquin Indian word meaning 'old woman') was living in the upper northeastern reaches of Pauwau Valley on the upper part of Fsau (or Ghost) Creek, which already even by then had the local name of Spooky Hollow. She was infamous for wreaking her own special brand of havoc by leveling curses right and left before she met a suddenly violent and mysterious end... and on Halloween night too! What could possibly be better? It's a story just perfect for Hollywood!
Like the also infamous Bell Witch of Tennessee, old Hausisse was pretty much accorded to be a complete nutjob by all of her neighbors. Dangerously insane, completely batshit crazy and howling at the moon mad. If anyone ever had anything nice to say about her it isn't recorded by any of the dozens of surviving official complaints filed against her between the years of 1836 to 1863, the only years that the township records mention her. There is an oral tradition that she was half Mahican Indian and that her father had been a tribal medicine man who had sided with the English during the Revolutionary years, but there is zero written evidence to support that claim. It is fairly clear she did not get along at all with her neighbors and was plainly accounted by all to be a witch, and not a kindly 'misunderstood' good one either.
The townships records, which are oddly incomplete and sometimes annoyingly vague, clearly list a litany of complaints against her. It was all of the usual 19th century sort of complaints about women suspected to be in league with the devil; people cursed, cows poisoned or cursed, monstrous black cats seen at night near her home, more cows missing (presumed eaten by the cat), and other accounts and accusations of performing black magic. Oh, and yet more complaints about cursed cows. In other words, all of the usual stuff that crazy old women used to be accused of doing back in the dark days before satellite television.
Her curses were successful enough to make her apparently a rather rich woman, as she demanded good silver or even gold in payment to release her malevolent blights upon her neighbors. She was also reputed to be a miser, hardly ever parting with even a clipped penny.
What makes our crazy senile witch more interesting and relevant is found in the surviving documentation of the events of 1863. Many of the township records from this period are missing; someone suspiciously minded might think that these records were removed or destroyed intentionally long before even my father became sheriff here. Yeah, that would definitely include me... my cop nose can smell a cover-up even a hundred and fifty years later.
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The few undisputed facts of the Spooky Hollow Witch case are these. Late in the spring of 1863, a certain Thomas Gladdener was appointed by the Governor to be a special inspector for the state to coordinate with the federal government with its new draft of young men for the Union Army. In theory, this was supposed to mean that Gladdener was only supposed to insure that proper draft rules were observed, but in practice he soon found himself in the position of receiving large payments for commutations - for granting deferrals to wealthy young men for releasing them from army service. Soon he hit upon the scheme of coercing groups of uneducated rural men that could then be hired out by him as 'substitutes', earning him a fee of up to $500 dollars per man that he could enlist, voluntarily or not, into army service as a designated substitute. That was an awful lot of money in those days. In fact, his methods of coercion were plainly just kidnapping under the vague guise of law. Prepared with an armed force of accomplices, and unfortunately entirely legal paperwork that declared himself to be licensed state agent, he would travel across rural Vermont gathering every single young man he could muster, by any means, illegal or foul.
His usual method of gathering draftees was to gather a listing of the town's men folk and then prepare forged conscription documents, complete with a valid state seal, which they would use to then force the young man into drafted service. The draftee, if truculent, would be shackled and then placed on the nearest train for the state capitol, often in groups of a hundred men at a time, like convicts in a chain-gang. His agent and partner in crime there would arrange the sale of these new substitutes and then handle their final delivery to the Union Army recruiters. The Union Army was desperate enough for men and ignored the circumstances behind these sometimes extremely irregular and quite illegal deliveries of recruits.
In a very short time, Thomas Gladdener was a very rich man, but like most criminals he was greedy for yet more profit, and yet another big score long after he should have had the sense to quit. In the fall of 1863, he and his inland press-gang arrived at Pauwau Valley, but found the pickings to be extremely slim as warning had arrived a few days earlier of his approach. Only five young men could be located and captured, including the son of the Spooky Hollow Witch, a young man of uncertain age named Ethan. No last name for him is listed and no birth certificate has ever been found, but several surviving township notations for the lad invariably list him as being 'simple'.
Naturally this did not sit at all well with the old witch, who was then alleged to have cursed Gladdener and the entire township, for allowing this malfeasance to occur. She probably had a good point there. Already Gladdener's irregular recruiting activities were stirring up legal difficulties up at the capitol and eventually (after the war was over) his actions were proven to be illegal and some minor settlements were made to his victims. His abuses were already quite common knowledge and most towns never lifted a finger to assist him when he arrived. Why Pauwau Valley decided to cooperate is not explained in any of the township records. In any case, they did -- they got cursed -- and then bad things started to happen... in spades!
From this point, the few remaining township records for 1863 get much vaguer. There is an expense account for the parish church listed for twelve cords of cut firewood and the services of the gravedigger in October 1863, but no specific explanation of who was buried (or burned) or why the township itself paid for the expense. Yes, you can burn an awful lot of witches with over 1500 cubic feet of wood, but apparently they either had a lot of other bodies that needed burning (cremation was not at all customary at that time in these parts) or else someone wanted to make damn sure this one witch stayed burned!
There are no apparent gravestones or markers for those particular burial or burials either, but oral tradition has it that the simple uncarved white stone at the southeastern corner of the township cemetery marks the location for this peculiar internment of remains. You guessed it, the furthest and most remote corner of the graveyard where no grass or even weeds ever grow. The monthly alderman's meeting minutes for both October and November of that year are missing; the twenty-seven lost pages were apparently deliberately torn from the yearly record book. When this was done and by whom is unknown, but obviously the township decided that they wanted no written record of what had occurred and wanted the entire incident forgotten... and remain that way.
Right at about this time Thomas Gladdener also disappears from history, his place and time of death unknown. The only two rumors of any substance are that he had fled to Canada (with his wealth) and changed his name there in order to evade a forthcoming state investigation about this time. The other rumor is that he was murdered somewhere in the wild mountains of Vermont in revenge for his crimes. There isn't a drop of evidence for either claim. His last historical recorded sighting was in Pauwau Valley on Halloween day, if or when he ever left here is a matter of conjecture.
The final remaining shred of evidence concerning her fate is a short sentence in a courting-letter written by a local dairy farmer to his intended in early November 1864 that commented tersely that he had 'lost a cow in Spooky Hollow on the high slopes near Ghost Creek on All Hallows Eve night for the first time since the old witch was burned on that same day last year.'
