Andy Chase

One of this year's Christmas presents from my parents was a copy of Weird New England, a great book about roadside attractions, local legends and hauntings, and other things like stone structures of unknown origin that dot the New England countryside. My friend Tom took the above photo when we visited one such structure in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, a small beehive-shaped cave built into the side of a hill in the absolute middle of nowhere.

Of course, most people are inclined to write "unknown origin" off as "colonial root cellar", but other popular theories attribute these things to vikings or celts who settled then abandoned New England hundreds of years before the puritans. I don't really subscribe to any particular theories myself, but it's a lot of fun to visit these places and wonder about them.

After poking through Weird New England, I did some Googling for information about some of the sites mentioned in the book, and was surprised to come across the website of an organization dedicated to researching, documenting, and preserving these old stone things. There are chapters in each New England state, and they seem to have regular gatherings and field trips to sites of interest.

How cool does that sound? After poking around their website, however, I get a bit of a kook vibe off of them... like they're a little too eager to pronounce any random pile of rocks in the woods as an Amazing Precolumbian Artifact with Deep Astrological And Historical Significance, even if it's pretty clear to the more casual observer that it's nothing more than the pile some farmer made when clearing out what used to be a pasture.

Kind of like when people take a photo in a cemetery with their thumb over the edge of the lens and say, "OooOOOOooOOOO! Look at the blurry white spot in the corner of the photo! I swear that wasn't there when I took it! Draw your own conclusions!"

Nevertheless, I when the weather warms up I think I'll see if I can tag along on one of their field trips. The one thing I'm definitely eye-to-eye on with this group is the notion of respecting these places, I.E. not tagging them with graffiti and leaving them full of empty beer cans. They keep their list of sites to themselves, and if I find they're not too flaky it will probably be worth the cost of membership to gain access to some of these places.

Tagged:

• newengland
• ruins
• weird
• stone