July 15, 1943

July 15, 1943, marks the death of Timmy Baterman, a young soldier from Ludlow who was shot down on the road to Rome while charging a machine-gun nest, an act that earned him the Silver Star posthumously. This date is the fixed point from which the town's darkest modern legend unfolds: the return of a dead man as a malevolent, knowing entity, and the destruction of his family. The day is not merely a historical marker but the ignition of a supernatural crisis that Jud Crandall would later recount to Louis Creed as a dire warning against tampering with the Micmac burying ground.

Timmy Baterman's Death and the Return Home

According to the letter Bill Baterman received from the lieutenant in charge of his son's platoon, Timmy was killed on July 15, 1943. His body was shipped home two days later, arriving at Limestone on July 19, and was placed aboard a "mystery train" of flag-covered coffins the very next day. The train, driven by Huey Garber, carried eighteen or twenty bodies destined for towns across Maine, including Ludlow. At each stop except Ludlow, there were weeping relatives; at Ludlow, Huey was treated to the sight of Bill Baterman, who looked "like he was dead inside and just waiting for his soul to stink." Timmy's body was taken to the Greenspan Funeral Home and, two days later, buried in Pleasantview Cemetery with full military honors on or around July 22.

The Resurrection and Its Consequences

Four or five days after the burial, the mailwoman Marjorie Washburn saw Timmy walking up the road toward York's Livery Stable, pale and lurching, dressed in old chino pants and a faded flannel shirt despite the ninety-degree heat. Other sightings followed: Timmy was seen walking back and forth along the Pedersen Road, his eyes "like raisins stuck in bread dough," his hair sticking up in spikes, his fly unzipped. He spoke to a woman named Mrs. Stratton, asking if she still had her jazz records because he wouldn't mind "cutting a rug" with her. The thing that had returned was not the ordinary, goodhearted boy who had left for war; it was sly, knowing, and malicious. When four local men—Jud Crandall, George Anderson, Hannibal Benson, and Alan Purinton—confronted Bill Baterman at his home, the resurrected Timmy revealed their darkest secrets: Alan's wife was unfaithful, George's grandson was only waiting for him to die for his money, and Jud's own visits to a whorehouse in Bangor. The creature spoke only of the bad, and its voice was filled with a screaming, raving malevolence.

The End of the Baterman Horror

Two nights after the confrontation, the Baterman house burned flat. Range oil had been splashed from one end to the other. Inside, Bill Baterman had shot Timmy twice in the chest with an old Colt's pistol, laid him on the bed, and then sat down in his easy chair, spilled the oil, and ate the barrel of the .45. The county medical examiner determined that Timmy Baterman had been dead for two or three weeks before the fire. Jud Crandall, who had been led to the Micmac burying ground by the drunken Stanny Bouchard when he was ten years old, carried the story of the Baterman tragedy for the rest of his life, and he told it to Louis Creed on the night before Gage's burial, hoping to prevent Louis from making the same terrible mistake.