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Spotlight On: The Freetown State Forest Freetown, Massachusetts

The Freetown State Forest is a place well steeped in legends about devil-worshipping cults, gangster slayings, zombies, supernatural beings, and ghosts. My good friend Christopher Balzano has extensively researched the dark tales of the Freetown area and the state forest itself. On an afternoon in the spring of 2008, I met with Christopher at the forest’s main entrance, and he gave me a guided tour of the most haunted places there. We were also there to meet up with Ron Kolek and members of his New England Ghost Project team for an investigation that night.

The first place Christopher brought to my attention was a spot called Profile Rock, located right off of Slab Bridge Road. The rock has a natural formation in the shape of the profile of a man’s face. It is said that the local Wampanoags believed it resembled their great sachem, Massasoit. His son, Metacomet, would go there often to meditate and commune with his late father’s spirit. Many hikers and mountain bikers use the paths around this part of the forest, and Christopher Balzano has interviewed some who have seen the ghost of a Native American on top of the rock.

From there, we drove to an area called the Reservation, located near the entrance of State Forest Road. On the way there, Christopher pointed out Copicut Road to me. He said that there are stories about a mad trucker who appears out of nowhere and hassles people driving along the road. This crazed phantom pulls up close to their car’s rear bumper, honking his horn and flashing his lights as if he is in a desperate hurry. The mad trucker then disappears without a trace.

We turned onto State Forest Road (off of Bell Rock Road) and parked at a small, dirt lot. The Reservation is an area set aside for the Wampanoags to hold their yearly meetings and spiritual powwows. Christopher has talked to people from all walks of life that have seen ghosts in and around the vicinity of the Reservation. One common thread in all their tales was that the witnesses did not feel threatened by any of these spirits.

A middle-aged couple very interested in Native American history and customs visited the Reservation in the summer of 2000. When they got out of their car, they heard the sound of drums coming from the forest where the Wampanoags hold their meetings. The couple assumed that there was a powwow in progress and decided to walk into the woods in the direction of the drums. They saw no one as they approached the meeting area. What they saw instead were five human sized columns of what looked like smoke or storm clouds, positioned motionless in the corner of the covered picnic pavilion. Even though they felt privileged to see such a sight, they thought it best to leave quietly.

Christopher spoke to a young woman who would sometimes go to the Reservation to pray, meditate, and practice Wicca. One afternoon while assembling an altar out of branches and other natural materials, she felt the sensation of being watched. When this feeling became too much for her, she went through the procedures needed to properly close down her altar. As soon as the young woman finished and started to leave, she caught sight of a teenaged boy skipping silently over the grass. He was wearing only a pair of pants; but stranger still, he was glowing a light green color. The strange boy stopped, looked right at her, and smiled. He then turned away and faded into thin air.

Before heading to our next haunted destination, The Assonet Ledge, Ron Kolek and members of his paranormal group arrived and assembled at the Reservation. They were hoping to capture evidence of the supernatural creatures that are said to inhabit the forest. The Wampanoags call them Puckwudgies. They are troll-like beasties that use balls of light called Tei-Pai-Wankas to lure unsuspecting victims to their doom. Ron and his team chose to walk through the forest under the light of the full moon while Christopher and I decided to take my four-by-four to the Assonet Ledge and meet them there.

The Assonet Ledge is an old, disused quarry located deep in the forest at the end of State Forest Road. The New England Ghost Project team was using a GPS unit to find the ledge as they walked along deer trails that paralleled the dirt road on which Christopher and I drove. Our two parties stayed in touch with hand-held radios. Shortly after Christopher and I arrived at the base of the quarry we tried to radio Ron’s party. What we got back over the radio was something about their psychic, Maureen Wood, being attacked by an elemental.

While we waited for them to arrive at the old quarry, Christopher told me about the ghost that is often seen standing at the top of the Assonet Ledge. Known as “The Lady of the Ledge,” this sad female ghost is thought to be a suicide victim who jumped to her death with a broken heart. Though this cannot be confirmed, there are many known suicides and accidental deaths at the Assonet Ledge. In the early 1990s, our friend Matt Moniz saw this ghost and thought she was a real, flesh-and-blood person. Matt had arrived at the top of the quarry right before sunset to do some stargazing with a few friends of his. As he walked out on the ledge, he noticed a woman in a white dress standing only a few yards off to his left. Matt turned around and told his friends that they weren’t alone, and when he turned back, the woman was gone. There was no sound of a splash from the deep pool below, and the water was as smooth as glass when Matt looked over the edge. His friends stared at him for a moment and then explained that he had just seen “The Lady of The Ledge.”

When the New England Ghost Project finally arrived at the base of the Assonet Ledge, they told Christopher and me about the encounter they had in the forest. Their psychic, Maureen, had sensed an evil presence stalking them through the woods. When they activated their thermal imager and pointed it in the direction Maureen instructed them to, the imager’s screen showed a strange distortion hovering a few feet away. Maureen suddenly fell down and began to cry out as she rolled around on the ground. The team got on the ground with her and encouraged Maureen to fight whatever was attacking her. This worked and all went quiet. When they looked for the creepy distortion again with the thermal imager, they could not find it. The member of their team who was operating the imager is a professional firefighter who has been fully trained in the use of the sophisticated device. He told me he has never seen anything like that distortion before.

As we were all about to call it a night, it happened again. Maureen Wood started to behave strangely. She threw off her handbag and began growling with a twisted look on her face. She almost backed into the quarry pool. Because we were standing at the bottom of the ledge, the fall wouldn’t have been much, but the water is very deep. She and anyone else who may have jumped in to pull her out could have drowned. Ron and Christopher had to tackle Maureen and take her to the ground to stop her from going into the water. As they held her down, calling her back from whatever force was attacking her, Ron dislocated one of his fingers. While all this was happening, I was shooting video in infrared. As I watched the whole event unfold through the camera’s view screen, I noticed a strange little light appear behind the group as they huddled around Maureen on the ground. The light lasted for thirteen seconds before it disappeared. I walked right up to the spot where the point of light was, and I found nothing on the ground, such as broken glass, that could account for what I’d seen.

The Lady of The Ledge haunts the old Assonet quarry.

We packed all of the team’s equipment into my vehicle, and I drove Ron Kolek, Maureen Wood, and another female member of their team back to the Reservation. Christopher Balzano and the other three male members of Ron’s expedition walked back along the road under the light of the full moon. When Christopher and his party reached the parking lot, they reported another sighting of the weird distortion. As they were walking along State Forest Road, the three members of Ron’s team estimated that they were not too far from the area where they had seen the distortion earlier that night. Even though they weren’t in exactly the same spot, they felt it was worth a shot. They turned on the thermal imager and began scanning the forest. As they scanned the forest, the distortion reappeared. As before, the anomaly started off as a head-sized blob, but grew rapidly. As it grew, it began to move towards them. Christopher told me later that he could not explain what he had seen on the thermal imager’s screen. He only had a few seconds to observe the distortion because the three brave members of the New England Ghost Project took off running down the road with the imager in hand. In the world of ghosthunting, we call a panicked reaction like this “pulling a Scooby-Doo.”