Branson Buddinger

Branson Buddinger was a historian of Derry, Maine, whose deeply flawed yet passionately researched A History of Old Derry (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1950) became a foundational, if treacherous, text for anyone seeking to understand the town's pattern of cyclical violence. His work is first mentioned by Albert Carson, the former head librarian of the Derry Public Library, who dismisses it as the product of a "damned sloppy researcher" whose heart was in the right place. Carson advises Mike Hanlon to read Buddinger, but only after throwing the more reputable histories into the wastebasket, because Buddinger "got most of the facts wrong, but he got them wrong with feeling." This paradoxical recommendation highlights Buddinger's role as a necessary, if unreliable, guide into Derry's hidden history.

Life and Work

Buddinger's A History of Old Derry is characterized by its eccentric footnotes, which Mike Hanlon describes as "like footpaths twisting through a wild and anarchic country" that split and lead to dead ends or "swampy quickmud." Despite its scholarly shortcomings, the book agrees with the folklorist Sandy Ives on a crucial point: the original party of white settlers in Derry, numbering about three hundred, simply disappeared in 1741 without a trace. Buddinger and Ives also concur that "things really are not right here in Derry; things in Derry have never been right." This shared conclusion, drawn from different methodologies, gives Buddinger's work a strange credibility. His research also documents the 1906 explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks during an Easter-egg hunt, which killed over a hundred people, most of them children, and the 1930 fire at the Black Spot, a Negro nightclub.

Death and Legacy

Buddinger's fate is revealed by Albert Carson, who tells Mike Hanlon, "Buddinger committed suicide, you know." The official story in the Derry News called it a "falling accident," but Carson clarifies that Buddinger fell from a stool in his closet with a noose around his neck. Carson connects this suicide to Buddinger's knowledge of the town's 27-year cycle of violence, a truth that proved too terrible to bear. Mike Hanlon, following Carson's advice, uses Buddinger's footnotes as a starting point for his own research, chasing down the names and sources they contain. This process leads him to the oral histories of Sandy Ives and the testimonies of old-timers like Egbert Thoroughgood, who recounts the 1905 massacre at the Silver Dollar. Buddinger's work, for all its inaccuracies, thus serves as a crucial, if dangerous, key to unlocking the secrets of Derry, a key that ultimately cost the historian his life.