Spooky Sugar Loaf

What you might see coming out of the fog one night, By Jay Westerveld Witches and spooky things are by no means in short supply hereabouts. From the time of the Lenape people who preceded the European settlers, our region has been considered a haunted hotspot, thanks in part to both legends and actual events. The Lenape people, like many other American Indian societies, were our nation’s first feminists. Women were at least as likely as men to accede to the worlds of chiefdom and shamanism. European settlers found these female shamans unsettling, to say the least, and the old European belief in witches found fertile ground among them. Elizabeth, the widow of Hugh Dobbin — they were among Sugar Loaf’s first white settlers, and on friendly terms with the Lenape — was accused of witchcraft by the locals in the hamlet. On the rare occasions when she’d hobble down to the village from her mountain farm, she arrived smoking a pipe and wearing a strange, pointed hat, and she’d purchase peculiar sundries. The people in the village found the fires she’d burned on the mountain terrifying spectacles to behold at night. It was rumored that, upon the passing of her husband, she had reverted to the old religion of her Emerald Isle homeland; thus the Samhain bonfires on Sugar Loaf Mountain, and the strange, howling sounds emanating from nearby Brimstone mountain, whose name did little to quell its reputation. Those who knew the Dobbin family recognized the fires as Elizabeth’s means of burning refuse, as her farm was plagued by wolves, attracted to farm rubbish. To most village residents, however, she was in league with these same wolves. Many were convinced she shape-shifted into one, much as local Lenape shamans were said to do — in fact, the local tribe was called the Minsis, or “Wolf,” tribe, and during their ceremonial harvest ritual (right around Halloween), howling participants would wear wolves’ fur and “transform” while in their trancelike state. Wolves were so serious a pest to the colonial hamlet that January’s full moon was called the “Wolf Moon,” due to the ravenous nature of the cold, hungry wolves pregnant with pups during this time. In the 19th century, a Colonel Weir decided to deforest the pine-covered peak of Sugar Loaf, ostensibly to improve the views from the summit. Locals agreed that he lit the peak aflame in an attempt to rid it of the ghastly sounds and strange, late-night lights that illuminated and haunted his farm. The pitch-rich yellow pines exploded into a great blaze at the summit. It’s said that cackling laughter was heard from the roiling, crackling flames, ridiculing the Colonel’s very efforts. The wolves evidently preferred the newly cleared summit, and the strange lights never ceased. Some villagers half-jokingly called the lights “Weir-Witches,” but their jokes ceased whenever they hunted the area and their dogs would cower and slink back to the village. To this day, the eerie autumn wailings and strange, fiery lights around Sugar Loaf mountain at night, do little to assuage these rumors. Being Elizabeth Dobbin was a few generations separated from Andrew Jackson, these rumors were successfully quashed over time, for the most part. Witches do little good for one’s political woodpile. Witches weren’t confined to the mountain hamlet, however. In the center of the long triangle between Sugar Loaf, Florida, and Warwick sits “Witch Hollow,” so-named for the strange fires that burned, inexplicably, in the dark, dank woods during Halloween. Teams of horses were lost to that black swampy expanse, never to be found. Hunters frequently reported seeing actual witches riding broomsticks there at the end of October. When they’d shoot deer in Witch Hollow, they’d find only a piece of brimstone or coal on the spot where the buck fell, with no explanation. It should be noted, however, that Witch Hollow was home to more than one excellent distillery, and wayward patrons, in their enthusiasm to sample the pure, clear product, often imbibed more than the typical “serving” in their quest to stay warm. Regardless of the truth of the lore, colonial homes thereabout were built with upward pointing “witch catcher” spikes in the chimneys, and most had inverted horseshoes hung over the thresholds to keep witches out. Some were even built with “witches’ steps” leading to the attic, narrow planks that the long, stiff feet of witches reportedly couldn’t tread. On the edge of Witch Hollow and Sugar Loaf sits “Calamity Corners,” said to be the site of the country’s first murder-for-hire (although first in the county may be more accurate). It was here, near the intersection of present-day Pine Hill and Hambletonian Roads (at the time “Sugar Loaf-Florida Road” and “Ridge Road,” respectively) that Richard Jennings was murdered in a grisly plot. Politics also played a part in keeping this story “On the DL,” as Mr. Jennings was an uncle of William Henry Seward. Two of his murderers were hanged for the crime and buried just outside the gates of the tiny cemetery overlooking the present-day Sugar Loaf post office. Residents gathered one evening shortly thereafter to drive two locust poles down through the graves at approximately the point where the murderers’ hearts. Their message: “highwaymen” were severely dealt with in the hamlet. On cool autumn evenings, strange figures are said to be seen in the fog around the cemetery, lying on their backs and pulling themselves up the misty poles that impale them. Horses would refuse to pass this spot on such nights, despite all prodding from their drivers. On Halloween in 1890, three young Sugar Loaf ruffians broke into Amzi Knapp’s distillery, just down the road from Calamity Corners, and stole a good quantity of whiskey. They enjoyed it a little too much on their walk toward Warwick on the the Sugar Loaf Florida road, and decided to sit down at the ill-fated corners near a burning cornstalk pile left, they presumed, by a local farmer. By morning, the three were found. One was dead, with the lower half of his body burned away — and no farmer could account for the conflagration Tales involving an floating, legless apparition at Calamity Corners on Halloween persisted into the 20th century. Witches were said to collect at that ridge on Halloween, burning cornstalk bonfires as beacons between Witch Hollow and Brimstone Mountain. Although I grew up on Calamity Corners, our chimney was devoid of witch catchers, despite the strange sounds and flickering lights in our orchard on Halloween night. I kept an inverted horseshoe over my window, though, just to be on the safe side. Not that I believed in any of that nonsense, of course. [Jay Westerveld is president of the Sugar Loaf Historical Society and the author of “In the Wild,” a column about local natural and cultural history published in The Chronicle.]