When looking into the world of ghost towns, no one is expecting a happy story with a good ending. In fact, most of them are fairly bleak. But someone looking into the paranormal history of Dog Town would soon find it to be one of the most bleak and disturbing stories outside the realm of fiction. If towns were like people that could be born, live, and die – Dog Town, Massachussettes would have most certainly been murdered.
We first brought you the story of some of the residents of Dogtown last year, and while there are plenty of places that have yet to be written about in the world of hauntings, it would be impossible to tell the entire story of Dogtown in one sitting or even a full day of storytelling. It is one of America’s untold stories complete with a cast of characters, a plot, and a final curtain. If it were a play, it would most certainly have started out as a story of hope and promise but shortly ended with tragedy. All that remains other than legends of the paranormal end to Dogtown are the massive stones considered moral guidance to some, and a warning to others. At one point hikers might stumble across a rock that bears the solemn words, “Never Try, Never Win.” When one considers the end to this ghost town, the words take on an eerily prescient tone.
The town is densely wooded, and it’s terrain is far too rocky for the residents to have reliably built a farming community. But it is secluded. Secluded enough from the coast that any force attacking from the sea would find it difficult to reach the residents when they lived there. And it’s secluded in other ways as well. When its population was dwindling there was an epidemic of unexplained madness running through the town. And some of the historians at the time noted that it seemed to come about just as the land around the town was rejecting the prospect of any human stepping foot there. Built on an ancient cursed stretch of land, the final residents were accused of witchcraft.
The last man who ever lived in Dogtown was a freedman who went by the name Cornelius. Shortly after contact with the town was lost by the surrounding communities, and traders stopped coming out from there a search party was dispatched where they discovered Cornelius huddled in the basement. He had been driven mad, and was living out what appeared to be his final days in the middle of winter. Realizing they couldn’t in good conscience leave anyone in this forsaken place, Cornelius was taken to a poorhouse in Gloucester where he soon died.
Just what is it about some places that make them so cursed that not even the ground will yield food? And why would an entire community so suddenly vanish from the face of the Earth? Occasionally onlookers are drawn to the community, and it has ground for hikers and bicyclists who wish to immerse themselves in the morbid history of the town and get a glimpse of what a town might look like in the grave.
