Vermont Scary Stories and Legends

Not only am I an avid consumer of horror films but I do also love CreepyPastas and folktales and other forms of scary storytelling. In New England, we have many folktales and scary stories like that and in Vermont too, we have a few chilling tales of the supernatural kind.

As a lifelong Vermonter and as someone insanely interested in the paranormal and cryptid world from my parents, I actively researched these stories for fun as a child and still do to this day. They creep me out for sure but they interest me far more. So I'm going to take some time today to tell you a few stories from all over Vermont and even a few personal stories too.

Old Home

I'll start with a personal story that my mom told me about when I was a kid. We lived in an older house when I was younger until I was around 9 or 10 years old and this house was built I want to say around the 1800's ish and it used to be a mail center/post office that people would drive their carriages to and from and all that. Anyways, it was an older house and it was creaky and the windows were thin and all that old New England house stuff and my mom told me that when I was maybe 5 or 6, I would wake up in the middle of the night and stand on my bed and face the corner my bed was in, start talking to someone and then scream. Now I remember absolutely none of this but my parents wouldn't make that stuff up to begin with. My mom also mentioned something about me talking to an old woman at night in my room too and then telling her and my dad about it the next day or if I screamed I'd say something. I don't remember that either but I also wasn't a kid who just made stuff up like that so my parents were a bit freaked out - which is so fair. Now I want to end this by saying a lot of the houses in our neighborhood were older but a lot of families lived in them and there was a gas station very very close by and a highway so it wasn't a typical rural Vermont moment.

Emily's Bridge

Probably the most famous supernatural story to come out of Vermont is about Emily's Bridge in Stowe Vermont. To preface this, in Vermont we have a few of the last remaining wooden covered bridges in the world and these are exactly what they sound like and I'd like their appearance to a bird house or a barn (look up Vermont covered bridges and you'll see what I'm talking about). Emily's bridge is one of these covered bridges in Stowe which is a really beautiful and historically important area in Vermont and it makes sense as to why this area would have some paranormal or odd activity. Also in Stowe is the Von Trapp Family lodge (Yes the Sound of Music Von Trapp Family) so the area is a really historically dense community. The story behind Emily's bridge is that in the 1800's, a young woman named Emily fell in love with a young boy in the area and the two planned to run away together. She lived near the bridge and traveled it often and the night before they planned to run away together, Emily's brother k*lled her lover and when Emily found out, she went to the bridge rafters and h*ng herself on the bridge and haunts it to this day. There's a few retellings of this story from person to person but this is the story that I know of. There's also a short film done on the bridge that I think its pretty good for a small YouTube film (You can find it here).

This bridge is pretty creepy on it's own but knowing the story behind it too makes it just that much worse to think about. People say that if you drive your car through or just up to the edge of the bridge and turn off your headlights at night, you'll see Emily standing in front of you and you may even find scratches on your car from her grasp.

Black Agnes

Cemeteries in Vermont are known for their amazing statues and intricate grave stones. One in my hometown is seemingly world famous, called Hope Cemetery, for it's crazy amazing granite and stonework and another in the town over includes stunning views of Vermont's capital city Montpelier. In this Cemetery in Montpelier, there are many statues and mosques but only one is said to be cursed. This is the Black Agnes statue. This gorgeously crafted statue adorns the grave of John E. Hubbard who was a very wealthy man but very much disliked in life. This statue depicts a woman draped in cloth and this woman is said to be Thanatos, the greek goddess of death and supposedly, if you sit on her lap, terrible things will happen. One story cited in Joseph Citro's book on the topic, said that a young couple found the statue and the boyfriend had sat on her lap and on the way home from the cemetery, their car crashed. Now my grandfather used to take me to this cemetery a lot just to look at all the stonework and the natural beauty of the place and he told me if you even touched the statue, bad things would happen to you. For me, even looking at it as I drive past when I'm back home makes me feel uneasy and the discoloration of the statue makes everything even scarier as it's now a black-ish tone since it's faded and darkened over time.

Thanatos AKA Black Agnes in Montpelier VT

The Equinox

Vermont gave way to at least one US President and that was Calvin Coolidge (driven by his childhood home and it's pretty scenic) but it was once home to another first family, even for a little while and that was the Lincoln family. In Manchester VT, the Hildene estate was once home to Abraham Lincoln's son and his family after his assassination. This estate is astonishingly gorgeous and has so many amazing gardens and has a lovely view of the mountains and town nearby but I'm not talking about the Hildene House. I'm going to bring your attention to a nearby hotel called the Equinox. The Equinox hotel has had many a famous guest in its time. Current sitting Vice President JD Vance and his family had stayed there previously (Before the very viral one with protests), the Roosevelts had also visited the hotel (I'm distantly related to them as well so that's kind of neat), and William Howard Taft had also stayed there. The few guests who checked in and never left however are Abraham Lincolns' sons and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln. They are said to roam the halls of the Equinox to this day and tap on the doors each night. While this building is still a very old building that has an eerie atmosphere and this famous guest list certainly attests to that, I'm unsure if it is truly haunted but I shall leave that up to the visitor to decide.

Dorm life

I want to share another experience I had that is a bit more intense than the others I've written about so far. I'm a born and raised Vermonter and I attend college in the state as well but in Burlington which is about an hour away from my hometown and where my childhood experience (according to my mother) took place. I don't have experiences like this often, actually I think the ones I speak about in this post are the only ones I've ever had besides one that happened on a vacation in Maine (not Vermont though!).

During my first week in my new dorm room in my first year of college, I was in a triple and our first year residence halls on campus are all Victorian era mansions so each room had a more homey vibe which helped a lot with homesickness for some folks. I was never homesick in the sense that the place I was in didn't feel like home but rather for other reasons I yearned for home. I was asleep maybe 4 days into dorm life and hadn't had any issues sleeping thus far in my time there and I remember being sound asleep in my bed and facing the wall. My bed was also lofted so my face was maybe 6 inches away from the ceiling if I slept on my back and it's not easy or quiet to even get your head on that level that you could talk to me face to face. Anyways, I was asleep and I woke up all of a sudden to hear a deep and disturbingly demonic sounding voice yell horrible things in my ear. I wont disclose what was screamed in my ear that night as it really is horrible and I don't wish to relive it in my mind again but trust me when I say, that stuff isn't something my brain could conjure up and in that voice too. I remember just staring at the wall terrified to turn around to the rest of the room but I needed to see if one of my roommates was playing a prank on me or not and as I slowly and with tears in my eyes turned to look at my roommate's beds, I saw they were both fast asleep and there wasn't any sign that someone had come in since our door automatically locked when shut and my desk chair was not moved for someone to stand on to get to the level of my ear. I didn't go to sleep that night and was actually excited for my 8:30am class.

I did a little bit of research before moving into that hall but never enough to really make sense of it. The residence hall I was living in was designed and built in 1889 by architect Alfred B Fisher for a Lawyer (there's the demonic source) named Henry Ballard who lived there until 1902. After my experience I re-did all of my research on the property and the history of the house and Henry Ballard too. Henry served in the Civil War and after he had returned from his service, he became a lawyer in the city of Burlington VT. Trying to dig further proved useless as the records are too old and too specific to find but I did find a release notice for one Henry Ballard of the Vermont infantry written to the state of Vermont after the Civil War. It's one document that details the ailments that Ballard faced towards the end of his life. He was senile, had lung disabilities (which I looked up to be lung cancer in our modern terms) caused by excessive smoking. These could both be tied to what I experienced that night when a deep and grumbly voice sounded almost demonic in my ear and screamed things at me that didn't make sense for me personally but still bothered me greatly. Not to say this as the ghost of this man or that it's at all connected to the house or the family because it may not be but it is an odd coincidence. To this day thinking about what was yelled at me that night gives me chills and I will not be naming my school or the hall I lived in but ever since then, I have never experienced anything like I did that night.

Vermont Police Academy

In Pittsford Vermont, there lies a police academy hidden in the green mountains. Formerly a state hospital for tuberculosis patients over a hundred years ago. One nurse named Mary never left the academy as she contracted tuberculosis and passed while working in the hospital. There are many remnants of the hospital in the current academy today and some of which are the old call buttons that used to call nurses to patients rooms and their bedsides in times of need and it's said that if someone presses the buttons during the nighttime, Mary will walk down the halls to check in on the patients in the beds. Often seen standing over beds and standing in doorways looking on at the folks in bed.

Let me know if folks liked this kind of post as I'm always excited to do more like this but let me know your thoughts in the comments and I'll see you in the next one!