Slightly Odd Fitchburg

This post was originally shared as a Facebook and Instagram "DID YOU KNOW" post. I share them and you can get in on the fun by liking my page at  Facebook.com/TheNewSlightlyOddFitchburg  and following me at  Instagram.com/SlightlyOddFitchburg ! Now onto the haunting story! Now, to be fair, these are all "know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy" stories. I can't verify a single one. Still, DID YOU KNOW Leominster has a haunted park? Leominster, Massachusetts, holds tales of the supernatural, particularly in Barrett Park , where fellers and fellettes whisper of two spirits said to haunt the area. The most well-known is the “Lady in White,” believed to be the ghost of a woman who drowned in the park's pond in the early 1900s. Witnesses describe seeing her spectral figure wandering the water’s edge at dusk, her flowing white dress glowing faintly in the twilight. Some claim she appears to be searching for something, or someone, lost to the depths. An...

This post was originally shared as a Facebook and Instagram "DID YOU KNOW" post. I share them and you can get in on the fun by liking my page at  Facebook.com/TheNewSlightlyOddFitchburg  and following me at  Instagram.com/SlightlyOddFitchburg ! Now onto the haunting story! DID YOU KNOW there’s a Christmas ghost of Route 2A ? Yeah, so, the stretch of Route 2A between Acton and Concord already feels like the kind of place where a ghost might wander out of sheer boredom, but every December it becomes home to a haunting that locals mention. They call him the Christmas Ghost of 2A, though older residents still prefer the name Lantern Man , as if giving him a title makes him easier to live with. The story traces back to the 1920s, when a traveling tinsmith named Elias Cutter vanished during a Christmas Eve snowstorm. He’d been walking the long road between towns, carrying a lantern he’d crafted himself, the sort of sturdy handiwork that could survive anything except, apparen...

This post was originally shared as a Facebook and Instagram "DID YOU KNOW" post. I share them and you can get in on the fun by liking my page at  Facebook.com/TheNewSlightlyOddFitchburg  and following me at  Instagram.com/SlightlyOddFitchbur ! Now onto the odd story! DID YOU KNOW the human soul was discovered right in Haverhill, Massachusetts ? Well, as long as you cross your eyes and squint hard enough, anyway. Dr. Duncan MacDougall was his name, and soul searching was his game! He set out to document the weight of the human soul back in 1901 , and his results have been a part of the public consciousness ever since. Duncan’s method was simple. He found six nursing home patients on the verge of death and put them on scales to measure their body weights at the moment of their expiration. His theory was that they would lose weight as their souls left their bodies and his results were, well, mixed. Four were suffering from tuberculosis , one from diabetes , and one from un...

This post was originally shared as a Facebook and Instagram "DID YOU KNOW" post. I share them and you can get in on the fun by liking my page at  Facebook.com/TheNewSlightlyOddFitchburg  and following me at  Instagram.com/SlightlyOddFitchburg ! Now onto the haunting story!   DID YOU KNOW that Pittsfield, Massachusetts has a ghost train? Back in 1958, a guy by the name of John Quirk was in the Bridge Diner which sat right next to train tracks. He was just minding his own business when a phantom train drove right by the place. He got a good look at it and told people it had five or six coaches, a baggage car, and a tender with coal in it. The same thing happened one month later at 6:30am and he contacted railway officials about it. They looked into what happened, since they had no idea why a steam engine was using their tracks and confirmed that a train running on coal hadn’t operated on them for many years. The whole thing played out again a few months later, and the ...

This post was originally shared as a Facebook and Instagram "DID YOU KNOW" post. I share them and you can get in on the fun by liking my page at  Facebook.com/TheNewSlightlyOddFitchburg  and following me at  Instagram.com/SlightlyOddFitchburg ! Now onto the haunting story! DID YOU KNOW the USS Salem is hella haunted? Commissioned in 1949 as a heavy cruiser for the U.S. Navy, the USS Salem wasn’t just any ship. It was the flagship of the Sixth Fleet which is, you know, fancy. This 717-foot-long hunk of ship patrolled the Mediterranean during the Cold War. Although the Salem never saw combat, it had its fair share of dark moments. It served as a floating hospital for victims of a devastating 1953 earthquake in Greece. Hundreds of wounded and deceased were brought aboard, beginning a spectral legacy that ghost hunters just can’t ignore. The ship was decommissioned in 1959, but its story was far from over. In 1994, it became a museum, and that’s when the weirdness began. Visi...

  Watch the video above or read it in article form below! Fitch Bits: The Gloucester Sea Serpent DID YOU KNOW that Gloucester, Massachusetts has its own sea serpent cryptid? The waters around Gloucester and Cape Ann are said to be home to a 60 foot long, serpent-like creature with the head of a turtle! These sightings have been going on for many years, with the first occurring in the 17 th century. In 1638, just 18 years after the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock , a feller name o’ John Josselyn made the earliest sighting. If you don’t know who that is, well, you’re not alone, but he was well-known in his time. He was a traveler to New England, and he wrote about what he saw and heard “with credulity.” Then there were a few hundred years’ worth of additional sightings, with the creature’s highest activity being recorded in the years between 1817 and 1819. These sightings were reported by fishermen and sailors with the descriptions always being pretty much the same. Sometim...

  Watch the video above or read it in article form below! Fitch Bits: The Last Salem Witch Trial DID YOU KNOW that the last Salem witch trial took place in 1878? "Witchonthefloorsayswhat?"   Yeah, so most people think the Salem Witch trials ended in 1693 after 19 women and one man were executed but think again! Just because one kind of crazy gets shut down doesn’t mean another one doesn’t take its place. So, it all started in May when a woman named Lucretia L. S. Brown decided to accuse a feller name o’ Daniel H. Spofford of “attempting to harm her through his ‘mesmeric’ mental powers.” That kind of sounds like he was trying to seduce her, but that’s not the case. You see, both people were Christian Scientists and that’s where most of these shenanigans started. "Yes, my name is Lucretia. You got a problem with that?" Christian Science was founded by a hot little minx named Mary Baker Eddy. She also wrote The Christian Science Monitor, Christian Science Sentinel, The...

This post was originally shared as a Facebook and Instagram "DID YOU KNOW" post. We share them weekly and you can get in on the fun by liking us at  Facebook.com/TheNewSlightlyOddFitchburg  and following us at  Instagram.com/SlightlyOddFitchburg ! Now on to the odd story! DID YOU KNOW that six pirates were all hanged, on the same day in Boston, back in 1717? The whole thing revolves around the Whydah. That was the pirate ship captained by a feller named Black Bellamy. He and his crew of around 110 were transporting a stolen cargo of 20,000 LBS of gold which is, you know, a lot. Anyway, legend has it that Black B. had it bad for a woman named Maria Hallett of Cape Cod. He was supposedly stopping by to get his doubloons polished when a fierce storm rose up and sank the ship, along with its gold and crew. Black Bellamy, along with over 100 of his pirates were swept into the ocean and drowned. How do we know that? Well because the bodies washed up on the shores of...

This post was originally shared as a Facebook and Instagram "DID YOU KNOW" post. We share them weekly and you can get in on the fun by liking us at  Facebook.com/TheNewSlightlyOddFitchburg  and following us at  Instagram.com/SlightlyOddFitchburg ! Now on to the odd story! DID YOU KNOW that the witching parts of the Salem Witch Trials actually took place in Danvers? Yeah, this is kind of like Salem's dirty little secret. Back in the 16 hundos, you had Salem Town and Salem Village. The town part was, well, filled with townspeople and seaports. The village part was where all the farms and such were. It was Salem Village where the girls claimed to be bewitched and where the accused mostly lived and were arrested. Salem Town is where the trials actually took place. About 60 or 70 years after those trials, Salem Village decided that it didn't want to pay taxes that were meant to support the filthy cosmopolitans and fishermen of Salem Town and became its own thin...

Watch the video above or read it in article form, below! Okay, so this post has been a long time coming. I was originally supposed to post it back in October as part of the Atlas of the Odd series. The whole concept was to give you haunted places that you could actually visit during the Halloween season, but, needless to say, that didn’t happen. I ended up coming down with COVID and that knocked me out for a month and a half. Then I came out on the other side of that just in time for the holiday season. Then I was just lazy. Anyway, here we are again in a new year and it’s finally time to visit Route 44 in Rehoboth! This is a story that you legally have to talk about if you write about ghosts and stuff. It’s pretty much been done to death, but hopefully I can give you some new information about it, or at least make it entertaining. Let’s just say that I want this post to get a big thumb up, and not just from a hitchhiking ghost! Get it? Wow, we’re off to a terrible start. Okay, let’...