The taboo against entering Vermont’s mountains

The taboo against entering Vermont’s mountains is a customary avoidance of remote hills, valleys, and settlements associated with a hidden race of beings. In the folklore gathered by Albert N. Wilmarth, fear shaped where people traveled and built; later, even after the stories weakened, custom and economic habit kept the hills largely deserted. The 1927 flood reports revived the legends and exposed the uncertainty beneath the apparent common sense of staying away.

Geography and customary avoidance

The forbidden places were not simply wilderness in general. Stories located the beings in deep woods on high peaks, dark valleys where streams began, steep gorges, and slopes beyond customary routes. Reports of queer prints appeared in mud beside brooks and on barren patches; circles of stones, worn grass, and caves partly blocked by boulders added signs of an unseen presence. The prints seemed to lead toward and away from caves, although their direction could not always be judged. These details made the taboo a practical map of particular places as well as a general warning against venturing too far uphill.

The stories connected such trespass with concrete losses. The beings were usually said to leave mankind alone, but venturesome people disappeared, especially those who built too near certain valleys or too high on mountains. Farmhouses on lower slopes were said to have burned, and some precipices remained objects of dread even after residents had forgotten how many people had been lost. The result was a geography of avoidance: localities gained reputations as poor or unlucky places to settle, and the warning could survive longer than any clear account of its origin.

The beings and the limits of trespass

The accounts described a large, light-red, crablike creature with many legs and two great batlike wings set along its back. Some stories had the beings walk on all their legs; others said they used only the hindmost pair while carrying large, indistinct objects with the rest. One report described a disciplined group wading three abreast through a woodland stream; another told of a creature launching from a bald hill at night and vanishing into the sky. Such details gave the taboo its rationale: the hills were not merely lonely or dangerous, but occupied by beings whose territory humans were not meant to enter.

The legends also shifted from simple territorial defense toward more unsettling forms of contact. Claw-prints were reportedly found near farmhouse windows, and people outside the most feared districts sometimes vanished. Travelers in deep woods heard buzzing voices imitating human speech and making offers; children were frightened by things close to their homes. Later tales accused recluses and remote farmers of changing mentally and becoming allies or representatives of the beings. Around 1800, eccentric people in one northeastern county could be accused of such affiliation. The taboo thus guarded against both physical trespass and suspected collaboration with the inhabitants of the hills.

Explanations varied across communities. Settlers with Puritan traditions could interpret the beings as familiars of the devil; Scotch-Irish communities associated them with malign fairies and the little people of bogs and raths. Pennacook myths offered a more elaborate account: the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear, maintained earthly outposts to mine a stone unavailable elsewhere, and carried it back to stars in the north. They harmed people who approached or spied on them, brought their own food, and were instinctively shunned by animals. The myths warned against listening to their night voices, which imitated human speech; the beings were said to know human languages but not to speak a language of their own, communicating instead through changes of color in their heads.

How a prohibition outlived its stories

During the nineteenth century, white and Indigenous traditions alike declined, apart from occasional local revivals. The settled paths and homes of Vermonters came to follow a fixed pattern. People increasingly remembered that certain hills were unhealthy, unprofitable, or unlucky, rather than remembering the fears that had helped make them avoid those places. Custom and economic interest then reinforced one another: established settlements offered little reason to move into the hills, and the haunted regions remained empty partly by accident and partly through inherited caution.

The taboo did not disappear altogether. Grandmothers and very old residents still whispered about beings in the hills, but even these tellers suggested that there was less to fear now that houses stood nearby and people left the beings’ chosen territory alone. That qualification preserves the old rule in softened form: safety is associated not with driving the beings away, but with keeping to human paths and respecting their distance. The abandoned landscape becomes the durable trace of a belief whose details have faded.

The flood reports and the problem of interpretation

The unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927, brought the old material back into circulation. Newspaper reports and an account relayed by letter described three clusters of sightings, near the Winooski River, the West River beyond Newfane, and the Passumpsic River. Witnesses reported pinkish, roughly five-foot-long bodies with crustacean forms, large dorsal fins or membranous wings, articulated limbs, and a convoluted head covered in short antennae. Their descriptions resembled the older stories closely. Wilmarth, who had learned the folklore from Eli Davenport’s rare monograph and from New Hampshire tales, initially attributed the reports to the imaginations of witnesses who had seen human or farm-animal bodies in the floodwaters.

That skeptical reading also reflects the way the taboo was transmitted. Wilmarth argued that old legends could color what witnesses thought they saw, and compared the Vermont stories with widespread traditions of hidden beings, including tales associated with the Mi-Go. His opponents replied that the persistence and uniformity of the accounts, together with the unexplored character of the hills, made it unwise to dismiss the possibility of an actual surviving race. The flood reports therefore turn a customary prohibition into a dispute over evidence: folklore may shape perception, but its endurance and its fit with reported experience also make it difficult to treat as mere invention.

A later account from the Great Sandy Desert offers a distinct but suggestive parallel, not proof of a connection. A correspondent described local fear of carved stones and stories of enormous underground structures; he reported that Indigenous people were so afraid of a particular site that an expedition would need miners for excavation. As in the Vermont traditions, inherited accounts informed the use of a landscape and discouraged approach. Across these episodes, the taboo is consequential even when its cause remains contested: it determines who enters a place, what they expect to find, and whether an old warning is dismissed as superstition or treated as knowledge.