In Episode 422 Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger drive to Sterling, Connecticut, to pop their car in neutral and search for the ghost of Gravity Hill on Main Street. The legend goes this was once land owned by a witch… and if you put your car in neutral her ghost will push your car uphill off her property. But is it true?
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CREDITS:
Produced and hosted by: Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger
Edited by: Ray Auger
Theme Music by: John Judd
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
*A note on the text: Please forgive punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. Like us, the transcripts ain’t perfect.
[DRIVING IN CAR]
JEFF: Okay, we’re going to make a right up there onto Snake Meadow Hill Road.
[BLINKAH]
RAY: Okay, got it. This is a pretty rural section of Sterling, Connecticut.
JEFF: It is. Not much out here but trees, and a few houses spread out from each other.
RAY: Yup.
JEFF: Okay, now you’re going to make a left onto Main Street.
[BLINKAH]
RAY: Okay. When a road is called “Main Street” I expect it to be full of houses and businesses, but this one has nothing but a hill ahead of us and trees on both sides.
JEFF: Yeah. It’s rural out here. Okay, stop right here by that first telephone pole.
[CAR STOPS / IDLING]
RAY: Okay. What are we looking for?
JEFF: Ray, we’ve come to Sterling, Connecticut to explore the mysteries of Gravity Hill.
[INTRO]
JEFF: Hey, I’m Jeff Belanger.
RAY: And I’m Ray Auger. Welcome to Episode 422 of the New England Legends podcast. Thank you, Legendarians for joining us on our mission to chronicle every legend in New England one story at a time. From ghosts and monsters, to UFOs and cryptids, to eccentrics and roadside oddities, we love all of the wicked strangeness that makes the northeast like no other place. We love it when you get involved with your episode ideas, when you share our podcast with your friends, and when you post a review for us. That’s how we grow.
JEFF: We’ll explore gravity hill in Sterling, Connecticut right after this word from our sponsor.
SPONSOR
[CAR IDLING]
RAY: Okay, Jeff. Here’s a little more background on the town of Sterling. It was incorporated in 1794 and named after an early settler named John Sterling. It’s a small town that sits on the eastern border of Connecticut, with just over 3,000 people living here.
JEFF: Small, rural town.
RAY: Right. So we’ve parked the car in the middle of the road here by the first telephone pole on Main Street. Our car is facing the southwest. There’s no other cars around, so I guess we’re fine here for a minute.
JEFF: This is Gravity Hill in Sterling, Ray. They say this road is haunted by the ghost of an old witch who doesn’t like anyone on what was her former land. They say if you put your car in neutral, her ghost will push it forward UP that hill ahead of us. Not only that, if we take a little of this talcum powder that I brought, and sprinkle it on the trunk of your car, after we’re pushed off her former land, we’ll see her fingerprints in the powder on your trunk.
RAY: Come onnnn….
JEFF: It’s easy enough to test.
RAY: I guess it is.
JEFF: Hold on, I’ll be right back.
[CAR DOOR OPENS]
JEFF Okay… I’m spreading some talcum powder all over your trunk.
(PAUSE)
[CAR DOOR SHUTS]
JEFF: Okay. The talcum powder is in place. You ready to test this thing?
RAY: Ready as I’ll ever be.
JEFF: Okay. So pop the car in neutral.
RAY: Okay. (PAUSE) Hmmm we’re starting to roll forward.
JEFF: We are!
RAY: We’re actually gaining speed and rolling up the hill ahead of us. That’s so weird!
JEFF: I know!
RAY: Okay, we’ve rolled a few hundred feet now, but the hill is climbing ahead of us and now we’re slowing down… (PAUSE) annnnnd… now we’re stopped.
JEFF: Okay. Let’s put the car in park and go check the trunk.
[DOORS OPEN AND CLOSE]
RAY: Oh man… look at that!
JEFF: I see it!
RAY: There’s a bunch of fingerprints in the talcum powder!
JEFF: There is!
RAY: So it seems like this legend is true!
JEFF: It looks that way, doesn’t it! To find out how we got here, let’s head back to the year 1792 and look for this witch.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: It’s November of 1792 here in Sterling, Connecticut. This new nation called the United States is still trying to figure things out, but here in Sterling, life goes on as it has for decades. Folks are just trying to get by, run their farms, and earn a living.
JEFF: That’s true. This is the kind of town where everyone knows each other. There are the people you see each week in church, or at their businesses, or on the street.
RAY: Sure. Just like any small town.
JEFF: But there’s also a reclusive hermit too. In this case, Margaret Henry. She’s an old woman who lives out in the woods. Folks in town know she’s out there. The fact that she’s so reclusive makes some people nervous. They want to know what she’s hiding. Others shrug, and figure they’ll leave her be.
RAY: Time passes, but all the while Margaret Henry’s witchy reputation grows… mostly because people don’t know much about her.
[WITCH CACKLE ECHOE IN THE DISTANCE]
JEFF: Did you hear that?
RAY: I did. Locals tell you old Margaret doesn’t like it when you get too close to her land.
JEFF: Still, on occasion, some folks will venture out to her on purpose to check on her well-being.
[KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK]
[DOOR CREAKS OPEN]
JEFF: Though she’ll greet her visitors with a gruff exterior, I think she appreciates someone is checking on her. It’s not those who are direct that Margaret has a problem with. It’s those who lurk and gawk.
RAY: That makes sense.
(PAUSE)
[SLIGHT CROWD NOISE]
RAY: So we’re standing in the heart of Sterling on a sunny afternoon. Plenty of people are walking around doing their weekly shopping and greeting their neighbors. Hey, check out that black cat walking toward those people.
[MEOW]
JEFF: Yeah. I see it.
RAY: At first, no one takes much notice of the cat. But soon, the cat starts getting in the way of folks trying to walk by. At first, they simply push the cat out of their way with their foot. But the cat seems insistent.
[MEOW]
JEFF: Pretty soon, the cat goes from being mildly annoying, to seemingly trying to trip people.
[CAT HISS]
JEFF: Those trying to walk around the town center have moved from nudging the cat out of the way to outright kicking it.
[THUD]
[CAT SCREECH]
JEFF: But the cat keeps coming back for more.
RAY: After a few minutes of this, the cat is battered and bruised and limps away from the sidewalk.
(PAUSE)
JEFF: It’s the next day, and two people from town are heading out to pay Margaret Henry a wellness visit.
[KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK]
[DOOR CREAKS OPEN]
JEFF: Once inside they’re shocked to see that Margaret is battered and bruised. She looks as if she’s been beat up. Now people are suspicious she’s indeed a witch who had transformed herself into a cat.
RAY: Because witches can obviously do that.
JEFF: Obviously. After the cat incident, Maragaret’s reputation was settled for many folks. Once she passed away, the reputation didn’t diminish. People sometimes head out to the woods near her old home to pick huckleberries and say her ghost would run them off her former land. And that brings us back to today.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: Over time, Sterling grew up into the modern era. Trails became paved roads, electricity and phone lines came in, and two centuries later, things look pretty different.
JEFF: Of course they do. But the legend persists about the ghost of the witch Margaret Henry who still runs people off her former land.
RAY: Which we’ve experienced first hand! When we got here, the car was literally pushed up the hill and we saw her fingerprints!
JEFF: Okay, we need to come clean on a couple of things.
RAY: Okay… like what?
JEFF: Margaret Henry wasn’t considered a witch in her day.
RAY: How did she get that label then?
JEFF: The earliest written record goes back to a short Norwich Bulletin article from 1914 that says everyone called Margaret Henry a witch even though she really wasn’t. The article is quick to say that in the opening paragraph. The article goes on to talk about the cat incident, and also how her woods were said to be haunted.
RAY: Okay, got it.
JEFF: The other problem with this back story is that Margaret Henry didn’t live in Sterling.
RAY: You’re kidding.
JEFF: Nope. She lived in Killingly right on the town line with Sterling. So not far. In the town’s historical records, Margaret Henry was remembered as a woman who lived in the late 1700s who was kind, she took care of the poor, and cared for foster children.
RAY: How did she go from that reputation to a witch?
JEFF: We don’t know. Also, this stretch of Main Street and Gravity Hill in Sterling, was never her land.
RAY: So that part of the story falls apart. But we witnessed the car rolling! We saw the fingerprints.
JEFF: I know. I know. I was there. The car rolling turns out to be an optical illusion.
RAY: How so?
JEFF: There’s a slight dip in the road. It’s gradual enough that you barely see it. But the road gently slopes down just before it slopes up. So your car starts to get a little bit of momentum, it rolls faster and faster until it starts to climb the hill up ahead.
RAY: Okay, okay… but what about the fingerprints in the talcum powder?
JEFF: Yeah… those are your fingerprints.
RAY: What do you mean?
JEFF: Every time you close the trunk of your car, you leave a little bit of oily fingerprints behind. The talcum powder makes all of YOUR fingerprints pop after it soaks in for a few seconds. If we walked up to most cars—assuming they weren’t just washed and waxed—and sprinkled talcum powder on the trunk, fingerprints would pop.
RAY: Well this is a big disappointment.
JEFF: Sometimes that happens. But when you hear the story, when you drive out here to test the legend, when your car actually rolls seemingly uphill, suddenly you find yourself buying in to every part of the story. The truth is there are many gravity hills all over the place. The story is the same, though, when it comes to there being a gentle dip in the road just before the hill.
RAY: It sounds like in this case, the story of the ghost of the witch of Margaret existed at least over a hundred years ago, and then people must have connected it to this weird gravity hill.
JEFF: That happens with legends. Still, maybe her woods are haunted, and maybe long ago they put the wrong name on the ghost. Today, we may never know why this happened, but we do know that where we’re parked right now is ground zero for a strange legend.
[OUTTRO]
RAY: Yes it is. And that takes us to After the Legend where we dig deeper into this week’s story and sometimes veer off course.
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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 422.
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Until next time… stay legendary!