Satan in the Freetown State Forest: Three Centuries of Devil Five Thousand Acres Bristol County Woods

Locals have a rule about these woods. Go in the morning. Be out before the light goes. Five thousand acres of scrub pine, granite, and swamp sit wedged between Fall River and the Taunton line, cut by fifty miles of dirt road that all look the same once you are a mile down them. People get turned around in there at noon. The paper record is worse than the folklore: a girl from Raynham left in the trees in 1978, the Fall River killings of 1979 and 1980 and the courtroom testimony about what went on in a clearing, cattle cut up in 1998, two men shot on a forest road in 2001. Ichabod Poole has walked this forest for forty years and has never once stayed past dusk. He was here for the Satanic Panic, when a network special and a thousand rumors turned a real criminal case into a national ghost story, and he has spent the decades since sorting what happened from what the panic built on top of it. Inside: - The Assonet Ledge, the quarry that made it, and why the water at the bottom pulls at people standing above it- Profile Rock, sacred Wampanoag ground, and the night the face came off the stone- The Devil the Puritans brought with them, a person who signed contracts and worked out in the trees, three hundred years before anybody in Bristol County said the word cult- Pukwudgies, lights over the canopy, fires nobody lit, and the pet cemetery- Three original Poole theories, one drawn from a bog nobody would dig, one from what the quarrymen opened, and one about who the woods keep inviting back- A visitor's guide with the trails, the safety rules, and the places you leave alone The verdict in the last chapter is the one an old man arrives at after two nights on that ledge he will not repeat. Book Two of Ichabod's Haunted New England.