In Episode 415 Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger explore Sand Hill Cemetery in South Canaan, Connecticut, searching for the grave of Miles Blodgett. His grave was ground zero for a horrific event that took place in 1878 when the man later dubbed the South Canaan Maniac approached the grave with a shovel and the intent of resurrecting the dead boy below.
BECOME A LEGENDARY PATRON:
https://www.patreon.com/NewEnglandLegends
CREDITS:
Produced and hosted by: Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger
Edited by: Ray Auger
Theme Music by: John Judd
SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST FOR FREE:
Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Pandora | Amazon Podcasts | TuneIn | iHeartRadio
JOIN OUR SUPER-SECRET:
New England Legends Facebook Group
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
*A note on the text: Please forgive punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. Like us, the transcripts ain’t perfect.
[WALKING THROUGH LEAVES]
RAY: Autumn is officially here! I guess that makes this the perfect time for a stroll through a cemetery.
JEFF: I think anytime of year is a good time for a walk through a cemetery for us, Ray.
RAY: That’s true. What brings us to this particular boneyard in South Canaan, Connecticut?
JEFF: Because Sand Hill Cemetery is ground zero for this week’s story. It’s both strange and troubling.
RAY: You had me at “strange and troubling.”
JEFF: We’ve come to the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut, to search for the South Canaan Maniac.
[INTRO]
JEFF: Hey I’m Jeff Belanger.
RAY: And I’m Ray Auger.
JEFF: Welcome legendarians. Thank you for joining us on our mission to chronicle all the Wicked Strangeness that is New England one story at a time. Whether ghosts, monsters, UFOs, roadside oddities, eccentrics, or the just plain weird, our community is on it! Most of our story leads come from you. Like this one! Thanks to our buddy Frank Grace for sending it in. If you’ve got something strange you think we should check out, please write to us anytime through our website with your ideas. We love hearing from you. Our website is also the place to see dates for my story tour. I have dozens of shows in the northeast coming up. And you can see dates to see Ray’s band the Pub Kings.
RAY: We’ll go searching for the South Canaan Maniac right after this word from our sponsor.
SPONSOR
[WALKING IN WOODS]
RAY: We’re walking through Sand Hill Cemetery in South Canaan.
JEFF: We are.
RAY: This cemetery is pretty well hidden by a stone wall and a line of trees right next to Route 63.
JEFF: Yeah, we almost drove right by the small entrance.
RAY: There’s just over 300 graves in here. So it’s not very large, but we’ve certainly seen smaller burial grounds. The oldest grave I saw in here so far dates back to 1761.
JEFF: The good news is it should be easy to find who we’re looking for.
RAY: And who’s that?
JEFF: We’re searching for the grave of Miles L. Blodgett.
RAY: Okay. The name isn’t familiar.
JEFF: No, it wouldn’t be. He died in 1873 at the young age of 15. The poor kid’s life never really got started. But this grave is the epicenter of our story.
RAY: While you look for his headstone, here’s a little more background on where we are. Canaan, is nestled in the Litchfield Hills of northwestern Connecticut. The town incorporated in 1739. In the early years, this was iron country. Back in the 18th century the woods would have been stripped bare of trees to make charcoal to fire the blast furnaces. As the iron grew more difficult to find and mine in this region, the industry moved on to other parts of the country. The town of Canaan became a small and quiet town, which is just how folks here like it. With a population of just over 1,000 people, Canaan is the second smallest town in Connecticut.
JEFF: What’s the smallest?
RAY: That would be Union, Connecticut. Population 785.
JEFF: Got it. So we’re looking for a small town maniac.
RAY: Those are the best kind. Everyone remembers them.
JEFF: Hey, I think I found the grave we’re looking for.
RAY: Yeah. It says Miles L. Blodgett. Was he the maniac?
JEFF: No. But he’s central to the story. To find the South Canaan Maniac, let’s head back to the year 1878.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: It’s late September of 1878 here in Canaan, Connecticut. Rutherford B. Hayes is in the White House, Richard D. Hubbard is the governor of Connecticut. Out in the western United States the Lincoln County War is making headlines, and inventor Thomas Edison recently patented his phonograph—but who knows if THAT will take off.
JEFF: Right?! Here in Canaan, the iron industry is still going strong, but there’s some talk of the mines eventually running out. But that day isn’t today. People who depend on the mine for their livelihood can’t think too much about tomorrow. Here in Canaan, life is chugging along.
RAY: Yup, people are living and working. Raising their families and doing their best.
JEFF: There’s one family, though, that’s struggling. The Blodgett family. They live in the Falls Village section of Canaan.
RAY: Right. Their boy Miles died five years ago. The death notice in the newspaper said quote, “He died on his 15th birthday in the same house and room he first drew breath.”
JEFF: And if you check out the epitaph on his headstone, the bottom line reads quote, “His last word was: pray.”
RAY: I just got a chill.
JEFF: Yeah. So the Blodgett family has seen some tragedy. Father William has also had his struggles. Over the past ten years he’s been confined repeatedly to the Middletown Asylum in the central part of the state. He’ll stay for several months, he seems to be improving, and then they send him home to Canaan. The death of his son didn’t help his mental state any. Here at the Blodgett Family home, William has been agitated lately. His family is concerned he’ll need to be committed to the Middletown Asylum again soon.
[NIGHT SOUNDS FADE IN]
[WALKING ON FLOOR PACING]
RAY: It’s the evening of Friday, September 27th. William has been pacing around his kitchen. He’s shaking his head.
[MUMBLING SOUNDS]
RAY: He’s mumbling something but I can’t make out what he’s saying. (PAUSE) Wait. William just stopped. He’s got a strange look on his face.
JEFF: Yeah. Now he’s heading for his back door.
[DOOR OPENS / CLOSES]
JEFF: He’s walking out to his shed behind his house.
[RUSTLING THROUGH TOOLS]
JEFF: He just pulled out a shovel from his shed.
[WALKING THROUGH THE WOODS]
JEFF: And now he’s heading toward the south side of town. Let’s follow him.
[WALKING THROUGH THE WOODS]
RAY: He’s walking into Sand Hill Cemetery. Ohhh I don’t like the looks of this.
[DIG DIG DIG]
RAY: William is now digging up his son’s grave in the dark. There’s just enough moonlight to see, but that’s about it.
[DIG DIG DIG]
JEFF: He’s dug down enough to expose the casket.
[THUD THUD]
JEFF: William is opening the casket.
[CREAKING DOOR]
JEFF/RAY: Ohhhh… that’s a horrible site.
RAY: There’s not much left of Miles except a grinning skeleton.
[MUMBLING]
[WALKING OFF]
RAY: Where is William heading now?
JEFF: I don’t know. Let’s follow him.
RAY: He seems to be walking toward Thomas Bailey’s farm just down the street.
[DOOR OPENS]
RAY: He’s entering Bailey’s dairy barn. What’s he doing?
JEFF: He’s taking a bucket of milk. And now he’s walking out of the barn back toward the cemetery.
[MUMBLING RESURRECTION]
RAY: Okay, William is approaching his son’s open grave.
[POURING MILK FROM THE BUCKET]
[RESURRECTION]
RAY: He’s pouring a little of the milk onto his son’s corpse. (PAUSE) Oh… now he’s rubbing the milk over the remains. William has this far-off look in his eyes.
JEFF: Hours pass as William pours little bits of milk from his bucket onto the skeletal remains of his son.
(PAUSE)
[ROOSTER CROWS]
JEFF: It’s morning when some people visiting the cemetery notice William mumbling incoherently about resurrecting his son.
RAY: Folks in town know William has been troubled. So they handle him as gently as possible. But still, this is just ghastly. No one has ever seen anything like it.
JEFF: After getting William back home, the cemetery staff return to rebury Miles. William will be brought back to the Middletown Asylum in the hope they can help him. Those who know the Blodgetts think maybe insanity is hereditary. And that brings us back to today.
[TRANSITION]
JEFF: William Blodgett is also buried in this cemetery. He died in 1898 at the age of 79. And his wife Mary A. Wright Blodgett is also buried here. She died in 1920 at the age of 100.
RAY: What a strange story. This isn’t even close to our first dig-up-a-body legend. But in most of those other stories it was either ghouls snatching a corpse, or a suspected vampire. In this case a distraught dad was trying to bring his deceased son back to life.
JEFF: Most of what we know about this story comes from the October 4, 1878 Hartford Courant newspaper coverage of the event. The headline reads: A Maniac’s Freak. The story made it to the wire service and was run in several newspapers around the country.
RAY: Fortunately, neither of us knows what it’s like to lose a child. But I can think of nothing worse that a person could ever go through.
JEFF: Definitely. That’s the worst event I can possibly imagine. And when you consider William Blodgett already had a history of mental illness, we can’t completely fault him for what he did… ghastly as it was. It was the newspapers who dubbed him a maniac freak because that grabs a reader’s attention.
RAY: On the surface, a person digging up a grave five years after burial in order to pour milk on it and try to resurrect the dead, definitely sounds like a maniac to me.
JEFF: Agreed. But when you dig…
RAY: Ahhhh I get it! Dig…
JEFF: When you dig a little deeper, you find there are human beings behind every legend.
[OUTTRO]
JEFF: And that takes us to After the Legend where we dig…
RAY: There it is again!
JEFF: We dig a little deeper into this week’s story and sometimes veer off course.
RAY: After the Legend is brought to you by our patreon patrons! They are the lifeblood of what we do. They’re a group of Legendary insiders who help us with all of the costs it takes to bring you our show. From production to marketing, hosting, travel, and everything else. We deeply appreciate the help of our patrons. It’s just $3 bucks per month for early ad-free access to new episodes, access to our entire archive of shows, plus bonus episodes and content that no one else gets to hear. Just head over to patreon.com/newenglandlegends to sign up.
JEFF: To see some pictures related to this week’s story, click on the link in our episode description, or go to our website and click on Episode 415.
Pick apart the story here.
Before we part ways for the day, please make sure you subscribe to our podcast. And please tell a friend or two about our show. That helps us grow. And the more legendarians we have, the more story leads we get, and the train just keeps on rolling.
We’d like to thank our sponsors and our patreon patrons. Thank you for keeping us going. And our theme music is by John Judd.
Until next time remember… Stay legendary.