Dogtown

Hikers in Dogtown describe uneasy feelings and unexplained sounds, and the woods are wrapped in stories of witches: Thomazine "Tammy" Younger, who is said to have cursed teams of oxen carrying fish from the harbor unless their driver paid her a toll, Peg Wesson, who is said to have cursed two boys so that arrows fell from the sky and killed them, begging women who curse those who pass them carelessly at the entrance to the paths, and a man driven mad searching for gold. A writer in the 1900s warned that once inside you might walk in circles for a week without finding the way out. Dogtown is an abandoned colonial settlement in the woods of Cape Ann, first settled around 1693 and left to the forest by the 1830s; its last known resident was found in 1830 with his feet frozen in a cellar hole. Perhaps 60 to 80 homes once stood here, and cellar holes, stone walls and glacial boulders remain in a 3,600-acre protected watershed, with numbered boulders marking old house sites; in the 1930s Roger Babson had unemployed stonecutters carve motivational words on some of the boulders. Tradition says widows and poor families who stayed behind kept dogs for protection, giving the settlement its name, and the Haunted Harborwalk ghost tour features the witches of Dogtown.