Bridgewater Triangle

The Bridgewater Triangle is a magazine coinage, and it has a date. The name was printed for the first time in April 1980, in a Boston Magazine feature signed by Peter Rodman and Loren Coleman that drew a boundary of about 200 square miles across southeastern Massachusetts, with Abington, Freetown and Rehoboth at the angles and the Hockomock Swamp in the middle. That article did not open with monsters. It opened with three killings, among them the murder of fifteen-year-old Mary Lou Arruda, whose body was found tied to a tree in the Freetown State Forest in November 1978. Only afterwards did it list the reports that made the Triangle famous, and it gave each of them a name: a police sergeant's giant bird at Bird Hill in 1971, a black dog that killed two ponies in Abington in 1976, a snake seen by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in 1939. Coleman reprinted the whole account under his name alone in 1983, and Rodman disappeared from it. The ground underneath has an older and far better documented history: this was Wampanoag country, and King Philip's War ended at Anawan Rock, in Rehoboth, on 28 August 1676.

The Bridgewater Triangle has two histories, and they do not touch. There is the history of the ground, which is documented, and the history of the name, which can be dated to a single month. The ground is the Hockomock Swamp region of southeastern Massachusetts: the largest vegetated freshwater wetland system in the state, designated an Area of Critical Environmental Concern in February 1990 over roughly 16,950 acres across Bridgewater, Easton, Norton, Raynham, Taunton and West Bridgewater. The state's own designation document notes that the archaeological sites around the wetland span some 9,000 years. This was Wampanoag country, and the closing act of King Philip's War was played out at its edge. On 28 August 1676, sixteen days after Philip (Metacomet) was killed in Rhode Island, Captain Benjamin Church cornered Annawon, one of Philip's two remaining chieftains, at a rock outcrop in Rehoboth on the northern rim of Squannakonk Swamp. The Massachusetts Historical Commission inventory form for the site, filed by V. H. Adams of the Rehoboth Historical Commission in August 1981, sets down what happened in flat administrative prose: "Surprising him and his men here in Rehoboth, Church forced them to surrender. The Indians offered no resistance and Annawon gave Church Philip's regalia as a symbol of his defeat. Church promised to spare Annawon's life; however, he was called to Boston and upon his return to Plymouth within a few days found that Annawon had been executed." The outcrop, under an acre and "200 feet from road" in a "rural wooded context", was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 within the Rehoboth Multiple Resource Area. For the next two centuries the rock was an antiquarian attraction, not a haunted one. In July 1894 the Providence Journal reported — the item travelled as far as the San Francisco Morning Call — that "Anawan Rock, in Rehoboth, has been recently sold to the Antiquarian Society of that town by the owner, Mrs. Lydia Pratt of Taunton", that the society would enclose it but that it "will be open to visitors", and that a fissure in its face was known locally as Anawan's chair. The name is younger, and it belongs to a magazine. "The Bridgewater Triangle" is the title of a feature in the April 1980 issue of Boston Magazine (vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 48-56), printed in a section called "The Fringe", under the byline of Peter Rodman and Loren Coleman — two authors, not one. The article does not open with monsters. It opens with homicide: the disappearance of fifteen-year-old Mary Lou Arruda on 8 September 1978, whose body was found on 11 November bound to a tree in the Freetown State Forest; the killing of seventeen-year-old Lisa Arcudi in East Bridgewater just before Halloween that year; and the discovery on 13 January 1979 of the charred remains of Diane Dion, the mother-in-law of Norton's police chief, in the trunk of a car. Only after those three cases does the piece turn to lights, birds and animals. It also drew the map, in a sentence Coleman would reprint almost word for word three years later: the triangle "covers an area of approximately 200 square miles and includes the towns of Abington, Freetown, and Rehoboth at the angles of the triangle, and Brockton, Taunton, the Bridgewaters, Raynham, Mansfield, Norton, and Easton within." And it named its witnesses, which almost every summary since has not. In 1939 Civilian Conservation Corps workers finishing a job on King Philip's Street reported a snake "as large around and black as a stove-pipe". In 1970 armed state and local police with hunting dogs tracked a creature in Bridgewater reported as a huge "bear". At about two in the morning on a late summer night in 1971, Norton police sergeant Thomas Downy, driving along Winter Street in Mansfield towards his home in Easton, said that a winged creature over six feet tall with a wingspan of eight to twelve feet rose in front of him at a spot called Bird Hill; he reported it to the Easton police on reaching home, and for weeks afterwards his colleagues called him "The Birdman". In 1976 a large black dog killed two ponies in Abington; their owner, local firefighter Phillip Kane, said he found it standing over the carcasses, police took a thousand calls in three days, and officer Frank Curran fired a shot at it and missed. On 23 March 1979 the WHDH radio newsman Jerry Lopes reported an object shaped "like home plate on a baseball diamond" at the junction of Routes 24 and 106. Coleman republished the whole account — the same anecdotes, much of the same wording — as a chapter of Mysterious America (Faber and Faber, London and Boston, 1983, pp. 28-35), under his name alone. Peter Rodman does not appear in it. Every later retelling, including the earlier version of this file, inherited the single-author book and not the two-author article.

The Bridgewater Triangle is not a site. It is a 200-square-mile area with public land inside it, and three of those places can actually be visited. Anawan Rock stands on Anawan Street, which is Route 44, in Rehoboth. There is a small pull-off on the road and a short loop path to the outcrop, which the 1981 inventory form places some 200 feet from the road in wooded ground; a marker put up by the Rehoboth Historical Commission stands beside Route 44. It is free, unstaffed and has no facilities of any kind. Freetown-Fall River State Forest is at 110 Slab Bridge Road, Assonet, MA 02702, telephone (508) 644-5522. It covers about 5,000 acres with 25 miles of trails for walking, mountain biking, horse riding and cross-country skiing; it opens sunrise to sunset and parking is free. No alcohol, no camping, no fires. Off-highway motorcycles only, in a season that runs from the Monday after the first weekend in May to the last Sunday in November. There are restrooms, a picnic area and accessible restrooms. The forest also contains a Wampanoag reservation, which is not open ground for casual visitors. One warning about a landmark that most Triangle itineraries still list in the present tense: Profile Rock, the fifty-foot outcrop known as the Old Man of Joshua's Mountain, no longer has a profile. It came down on the morning of Wednesday 19 June 2019; Freetown police and fire crews were called at about 9:22 a.m., and the Department of Conservation and Recreation closed the trails, the Slab Bridge Road parking area and the entrance leading to the rock while it investigated the cause, saying it might have to hire a geologist. Access has since been restored, but what is there now is a broken outcrop covered in graffiti. The Hockomock Swamp itself is not a park. The Division of Fisheries and Wildlife owns about 5,000 acres of it, open for hunting, fishing, boating, canoeing and walking through the Hockomock Swamp Wildlife Management Area. There is no visitor centre, no staff and no marked circuit. A 1994 Boston Globe survey of the swamp opened by noting that signs to it "are hard to find" and that many residents of the six towns it spans did not know exactly where or what it was. Check the hunting calendar before walking in, go in daylight, and do not count on a phone signal.