Issues → May/June 2007 → Feature Stories →
Here in New England
(page 2 of 3)
The calls came. Hank was traveling far and fast. A postal worker saw him north of Four Corners in Richmond, a local landmark about 12 miles away. A woman called from Richmond. Hank had been in her yard. But she had always feared dogs, so she didn't approach him. She said, "He just lay down on the side of the road, wet and lost."
"Our hearts soared," Marianne says. "We knew he was alive." Strangers searched hiking trails. People taped Hank's photo to refrigerators. One phone call came from a man who simply said, "I see you found my dog." He had seen the poster with Hank's face and the words: "Help! I'm lost and want to go home!" and thought the Woods were trying to find his owner. Marianne believed that he was Hank's owner when he asked, "Does his left leg still quiver?'" She asked why Hank was so thin, why his leg had never been fixed, why the man had never notified authorities that his dog was lost. Yet from Hank's temperament, she also knew he had apparently been loved. If they ever found Hank, she thought, the family would have a hard decision.
After four weeks, Richard Wood concluded that they would never see Hank again. "I lost confidence that our description of Hank was helping. We were getting calls from people about dogs that in no way could have been Hank. People wanted it to be Hank. But how brown is brown? How big is big? But there wasn't a lot of future in telling Marianne to give up hope. I could see she was willing to go on for a long time." The Chesterfield, New Hampshire, police called. They had picked up a dog that matched Hank's description. But when Marianne looked into the police car, she began to sob. It was not Hank. In late August, the Woods left Northfield to go to a family reunion in New York State. Marianne did not want to go; she had to be there for Hank. But Richard assured her that there were many friends who would keep looking.
This brings us to a sun-splashed day, August 28, 2006, and three intrepid teenage girls. Two of them, Emily Jacke and Rebecca Young, were about to begin their junior year at Northfield Mount Hermon; the third was their friend, Sara Voorhis. They had spent the night before at a sleepover, spinning tales of ghosts, spirits, "all things creepy," as they'd say later. Emily and Rebecca told Sara they'd show her a secret place at their school where spirits lived, a ravine so gloomy and filled with tangled branches and ruins of long-ago structures that few ventured in.
Emily's father waited in his pickup beside a now-empty dormitory while the girls quickly scrambled out of sight. They picked their way across a stream, descending ever deeper into the woods. They dropped stones in abandoned foundations, listening to the ping when they reached a watery bottom. Suddenly, a noise startled them. "Loud enough to make us jump," Sara says. "It was a metallic sound, like a thunder board. Like metal crumpling up." They were alone, they had no cell phone reception -- all they had for protection was Sara's pocketknife, which she opened. They should have run out of the ravine. They know that. Sara implored them to see what it was. Nervous and cautious, they moved toward the noise. "We were all jumpy," Emily says. "There was a feeling there was something there. A surrounding presence. Spooky."
They came upon the deep, wide foundation of what they later learned was once a water-collection cistern for the school. They looked down to where the noise kept reverberating. "It's a dog," Rebecca gasped. But not a dog like any of them had ever seen. This dog's ribs poked out. Its paws were ripped and bloody. Its fur was so matted and tangled, it looked more like a phantom than a dog. It frantically climbed a metal beam that reached from the ground to a few feet short of the top, and scrambled up, only to fall down. All around the wall, the dog had left bloody, desperate footprints as it clawed for a foothold. It made no sound except for a thin whine. Amazingly, it wagged its tail. Sara says, "He seemed like he was smiling at us."
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