 Hello! My name is Terri Silva and I am one of the board members for the Eton Island Homestead Museum. I'm not here too much because I work full-time but I like to come on a weekend. I know a little bit about Thea and I can ask to introduce her. So here we go. Thank you for coming out on this rigid Vermont winter day. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge our sponsors who help make our homestead programs possible. Vermont AARP, North Country Community Credit Union, and M&T Bank. Also town media television which records our lectures and makes them available online to those unable to attend. A few words about our speaker no doubt known to many of you. Thea Lewis is a Burlington native who grew up in the city's old North End. Her six books from the History Press are often interspersed with people who are familiar to her. And they are available at Phoenix Books in case anybody would like to get one. She's also the founder of the Queen City Ghost Walk, the tour company she's operated since 2002. And some of you may know her by her spookier alter ego, Vermont's Queen of Halloween. I personally went on a couple of the Ghost Walks when she first started. And they're very cool if you ever want to do it. You can run around behind buildings in Burlington. This happened here and this happened in your life. Wow, things I didn't know. Her latest book, True Crime Stories of Burlington, Vermont was published last September. You can follow her on Facebook as Thea Lewis or Queen City Ghost Walk. Instagram as Vermont Ghost Guide or Twitter as Just Thea Lewis. And without further eloquence, and I've been waiting to say that line from a quiet man. Hello. It is so much fun to be here with you today. I have to ask, I was here, oh my gosh, it must have been eight, ten years ago. Was there anybody here now who was here then? Oh my goodness, well thank you for coming back. And is there any, another show of hands? Anybody been already on a Queen City Ghost Walk? Yes. Yes, okay, quite a few of you. Well, our tour season is going to be starting up again in August. I'm making plans for it right now. And as some of you may know, if you follow me on any of those social media platforms, we had a couple of guides last year, new guides for the first time in 20 years. And I felt pretty lucky because one of them happened to be the sexton for the Burlington Cemetery. She's the administrative person and her name is Holly. And then the other one is a young woman who writes sort of spooky music for streaming TV shows and movies. So I thought, not too bad for the first time, hiring people for the ghost tour. So here we are. I'm going to see if I can get back to where I'm supposed to be here. Apparently not. Escape? No. Ah, there we are. So today's program, it's a teeny, tiny little thing here. Today's program, The Stories That Shaped Us, was inspired simply and exclusively for this event because I started thinking when I first spoke with John, who got in touch with me, oh my goodness, with six books. And this is the first time I've been here in so many years. What in the world am I going to concentrate on? And I thought, what is the common thread here? And the common thread is all of the stories that I write, all of the ghost stories and all of the crime stories and all of the stories like of the notable folks like Admiral Henry Mayo who are buried in Lakeview Cemetery. I don't know how many of you knew that. The Admiral of the U.S. Navy. All of those stories are stories about people who helped shape either our city or our world. So I thought, okay, the stories that shaped us and away we go. I wanted to start off by giving a nod to the first people who walked on the lands here in the city of Burlington, Inchiton County. And these are the Abnaki and other visiting tribes to the Champlain Valley, to Lake Champlain. And if you've lived in Burlington for any period of time, you know where Rock Dunder is. Rock Dunder, I'm always telling the tours of little kids that I bring along the waterfront. I say, see that outcropping of rocks sticking up out there that looks kind of like a shark's fin? And they say, yes. And I say, well, that's Rock Dunder. Years ago, when the native tribes were meeting there at that rock to talk over their treaties and exchange gifts, it went by another name. It was called Ozehozu, a he who created everything. And this was kind of a god or a totem to the Abnaki people. And Ozehozu was supposed to have been this large, larger than life character. And he actually had no legs, but powerful forearms. And the legend went that he would drag himself around all of the land we see today. And he created the furrows that were the valleys. And that created the mountains next to the valleys. And finally, when everything was done, he dragged himself around enough, I guess, it began to rain. And it rained and rained and rained. And this huge ravine that he had created became Lake Champlain. And apparently with the sun sparkling on the water after the rains, it was such a beautiful sight. He decided to plant himself right there in the middle of everything so he could see it for all eternity. Ozehozu, I just love it. Let's see if I do the right thing here. Perhaps not. Perhaps I'll go this way. Nope. It's kind of bumping me out here, so I'm not sure what's going on. Well, let me try it this way. I guess I need some help because it's not... I've got another screen up here for some reason. Wait a minute. Can I do that? No. Just click out. Just click out. Okay. Ta-da. All right. There we go. And now Ethan Allen. The reason we're sitting where we're sitting today, Ethan Allen. And are there any Ethan Allen fans here? People who read a lot about Ethan Allen. There you go. So Ethan Allen, pretty much inescapable when you're talking about Vermont history. I was so excited to go to Washington, D.C. and go into the beautiful statuary rooms at the Capitol and see all of these statues that have been chosen by each state, too, for each state of all these notables. And of course, Ethan Allen was there. Ethan Allen is an amazing character to me and also a kind of a comic relief because when I think of Ethan Allen, I think of all of the little stories that I've been told about him and have read about him that make him the colorful character that he was from the things that he drank. Stone walls. Anyone ever tried a stone wall which apparently was hard cider and rum and beer back in the old days? This was something that people sat around the fire and knocked back and probably knocked him out. I love hearing about the things he drank, about him tarring and feathering people. And I love the fact that he is in one of my books. I tell the ghost story of Ethan Allen. He apparently when he was a man sitting by the fire talking with his cohorts, he would claim that he was going to be reincarnated. And when he came back, he was going to be brought back as a magnificent white steed and knowing all of his exploits and that he probably had a head that would have a hard time fitting into this room because of his ego, I thought, isn't that typical? And just kind of filed it away and wouldn't you know it? Maybe two or three years later, I started hearing stories from people about the intervail lands and how people crossing through them early in the morning and the mists of the morning would sometimes see the shadowy figure of this magnificent white horse galloping across the fields. And I said, Tang, Ethan Allen. Oh, the joke is on me. The joke is on me. And then we've got to go to his brother Ira, little brother Ira, who I have a soft spot for. Ira Allen as that younger brother had to be running as fast as he could to keep up with this larger-than-life personality that was his brother Ethan Allen. And there's a story about Ira Allen. Talk about the stories that shaped us and the stories that shaped my tour, Queen City Ghost Walk. There's a great story about Ira Allen visiting his neighbors and people who lived next to his property, the Scottish folks. And often Ira Allen and these folks would gather in front of the fire and the people would tell him about Scotland and about how the ghosts in Scotland were absolutely the most fearsome creatures anywhere. And they said, you know, you actually have a ghost down at the end of your pasture land. You ought to be careful about that. And he laughed, filed it away. And then one night he stayed a little too long drinking by their fire, and he realized that he had to get home and tend to the things that needed to be tended to. And he got home, he saw, that some of his young goats had gotten out in the cold spring weather and were gambling around, and he was going to have to walk in the dark and what was now a spinning snow to gather them up. So there he went, and one little goat, Darnit, kept eluding him. So he kept having to walk farther and farther to the edge of the pasture, far away from his house, farther into the dark with this little goat galloping along ahead of him. Well, finally, he got nearly to the end of his land, and there he saw her, this fearsome hag standing there on his property, waving her arm at him. She's a terrible sight. And he thought, oh my goodness, those folks were absolutely right. They were telling the truth. I can't believe this. And he was about to turn and run, but there was a little goat. He still needed to get it. And he thought, what kind of man would I be if I did not go and meet that fearsome, horrible hag face-to-face? So he crept up, and as he got closer and closer, he realized that it was not a ghost or a fearsome hag at all. It was just a tree with a broken branch waving in the wind, waving and waving. And so I love that because it's a lesson to me and should be to all of you that every ghost story you can debunk makes the ones that you can't debunk even spookier. And who do we have next? Oh, well, going sort of chronologically through time, we leave the 1700s and the early 1800s and we head to, or go into the late 1700s, early 1800s, and we look at the Pomeroy home, which if you live in the Burlington area, it used to be a different color. It was a light sort of creamy yellowish-white for years and years. I used to walk by that place and think, oh, if only that were my home, having absolutely no idea that this was a place where Dr. John Pomeroy used to have young medical students come and visit with him and used to dissect corpses right there in the house. So the thought of it might have put me off as an 18 or 19-year-old young person. Dr. John Pomeroy was not, in fact, a certified medical doctor. But back in those days, late 1700s, early 1800s, if you had some idea of what made the human body tick and people had faith in you, respect in your abilities, you're a doctor. Dr. John Pomeroy ended up being honored by having the very first medical school at the University of Vermont named after him. What a wonderful thing this man who was so well respected in town and Dr. John Pomeroy, his family, has buried right as you walk in the front gate at Elmwood Cemetery. If you have not been there, I encourage you to go. But there's a great holy cow. Pardon me, butterfingers. Gotta go back. You're getting, close your eyes. Oh my God. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. It doesn't. It just means you get to see them again. So here we go. There's a wonderful connection between a loose but wonderful connection between Dr. John Pomeroy and Pomeroy Hall and this gentleman here, H.H. Holmes, because H.H. Holmes attended the medical school at Pomeroy Hall back in the day. Now, if you don't know who H.H. Holmes is, what a terrible, devious character. He was a man who started off his life in Gilmantown, New Hampshire. He was a young man, married a young woman there. Her parents were well-to-do. Her father financed his education and he wanted to become a doctor. So he came to Burlington, began to attend the medical school at UVM, but he left after just a year, saying that the medical school was much too small to suit his needs. Well, I don't think that was it at all. I think that H.H. Holmes was already up to some of the shenanigans he became famous for. Burlington was such a tightly knit community back then. H.H. Holmes left and he ended up in the city of Chicago, where he became the fellow we know from Eric Larson's book as the Devil in the White City. This was a man who was an expert at murder and he ended up building a place in Chicago that was called later on by people after he was found out, the Murder Castle. He was just such a devious man that in the building of this castle he would hire different construction crews. He would hire one crew and he would have them say, create these dumbwaiters that bodies could be thrown in to be brought down to the basement to be gotten rid of because he was having these rooms that other folks had built that were airtight where these people would asphyxiate and then there they'd go down to the basement. Now, say you were somebody who was of average stature, your skeleton was not much to write home about. H.H. Holmes in his Murder Castle would probably throw you in the cremation device he had, what if you were, say, a woman maybe six feet tall or more, very rare in those days. H.H. Holmes would dismember you and throw you in this vat of acid he had, take all the meat from your bones, string you back together and sell you to a medical school or a prominent doctor in the area. Horrible, horrible, creepy man. Now you're saying to yourself maybe, what in the world? I mean, what do you think he could have been doing, Thea, here in the city of Burlington? H.H. Holmes lived here in the city when our lumber business was booming. If you were to walk around the waterfront back in H.H. Holmes time, you would see lumber stacked 40 feet high as far as the eye could see. And imagine people coming in by ship or by train, heading to the city of Burlington, trying to get their bearings, and they might come upon this dapper young gentleman who was all too willing to help them. Why? Because he could bump them off and then he could provide a cadaver for a doctor or medical student here in the area and collect a fee of $30, which was about what you would pay for a decent cow back in those days. So horrible, terrible criminal was actually, I'll leave the rest for, you can find H.H. Holmes in True Crime Stories of Burlington, Vermont and also in Haunted Burlington, probably also in Wicked, Vermont, those books. But he was eventually captured, thanks in part to something that happened later on when he returned to the city of Burlington. Devious, horrible, horrible man. And then we go on to not exactly chronologically, here we go, but Timothy Follett, who certainly you could say he made his mark on the city of Burlington. When we go into Elmwood Cemetery and see Timothy Follett's stone, unfortunately it cracked, it's on its face and I've talked to a gentleman who was a local firefighter here, now retired, who restores these things and we're supposed to get together this year when it gets warmer and see if we can fix Timothy Follett's headstone, so it's in a little better position, but his real monument is this house, the Follett House, which you might know as the Parlor Real Estate Agency. It's a beautiful place inside and out and it's got so much ghostly activity. Nobody in there is shy talking about it. It's one of the main stops on a Queen City ghost walk tour. I'll tell you that one day, I was doing some grocery shopping in South Burlington and a young woman, pretty, a young woman came running up to my car and she said, you. And I said, yes. And she said, you're the lady who does the ghost tours. And I said, guilty as charged. And I was standing next to a car that I had at the time that had a huge logo on it, so it was no way she was going to mistake me for somebody else. And she said, do you ever go to the Follett House? And I said, no, only several times a week. We hit September. I'm there a lot. And she said, well, has anyone ever told you that if you work there, strange things might happen to you? And I said, yes, darling, but what's happened to you? Well, she told me that she'd only been working there for a little while. And she'd heard the stories. You know, weird things are going to happen to you. Don't worry about it. Everything will be OK. So she'd been there for a while, month or so. And she came in one morning and found that there was nothing on her desk. All of her pictures of her children and her husband and her dog, all of her little desk toys, all of her pens and pencils, her favorites, gone. So she stood up and said to her coworker, excuse me. You know, those people who clean and leave at night and the woman said, yes. She said, do you think that they cleaned my desk and then just forgot to put my stuff back? She said the coworker looked at her and said, oh, sweetheart, they don't clean our desks. And we're going to find your stuff. But when we do, it's going to be in the damnedest place. And it was in the damnedest place, apparently. Upstairs, underneath a low bench in the cupola, all stacked together like Jenga. So somebody being crazy in that place. Timothy Follett, another person I have a real soft spot for. He was a young boy of just about seven when his father passed away and his mother moved him and his sisters to the city of Burlington. She wanted better opportunities for her children. And for Timothy Follett, a bright young man, it seemed like the sky was the limit. I mean, here's this young man who graduates from the University of Vermont, very young, in his teens, becomes a lawyer, passes the bar. I think he's 21, 22. And then he begins to build businesses and design canal boats. And actually, with a group of investors, had a textile mill in the city of Winooski. And that's why in Winooski we have a street called Follett Street. Now, at one point in time, and I don't know how many people are long-time Burlingtonians, might remember urban renewal. Back in those days, I mean, look at that house. The city wanted to tear it down. The VFW owned it at the time. It was a mess, not inspectable. And so the Pomerolos came in and said, we'll get the historic preservation money and we'll take some of our money, and we will turn this place into the show place it should be. I mean, a jewel in Burlington's crown. And I just can't imagine the city of Burlington without this building overlooking the waterfront. Now, some of you may have heard this story. If you've been on a walk, one more thing about Timothy Follett and how much I admire him. There was a period of time when I was still learning so much from my tours that I would go home at night after being at Special Collections at UVM and my husband would come home from work. And I'd say, oh, you're not going to believe this thing I found out today about Timothy Follett. And one night we were sitting there after dinner. He had a glass of wine in his hand and I said, oh wait, I forgot to tell you about this thing, about Timothy Follett. And he said, see ya. And he put down his wine and he said, you know, if I didn't know better, I'd say you have a little crush on Timothy Follett. And I just said, Roger, if the only man other than you I've got a crush on died in the mid-1800s, I think we're doing OK. Doing just fine. We got here. I wanted to show you Timothy Follett. One of the things he was was the first president of the Rutland and Burlington Railroad Company. And this is an 1850s era locomotive. My goodness. Look at that thing. I don't know whether I'd want to travel on it. But back in the day, people probably felt like, sure, it's fast. What the heck? And then, another of my favorites. Take a look at this. Handsome gentleman. If any of you follow me on Facebook, can I see a show of hands? Facebook folks? Well, a few, not too many. The first time I posted a picture of the young Brigadier General William Wells, many of you probably know his statue in Battery Park as an older gentleman. I put this picture up on Facebook, and one woman commented, oh my goodness, what a Civil War hottie. I would tend to agree. And the great thing about William Wells was, it seems like from everything I've read, he was as good as he was handsome. He mustered into the Civil War when it started, and he wasn't finished until it was finished. He came back to Vermont, and he married a Burlington girl, and he went into business with her father, and they had the Wells Richardson Company. They had this pharmaceutical firm. They made all of these dyes and tinctures. They made something that you might, if you've done enough research, want to call snake oil. It was called Payne's Celery Tonic. You know, all of these crazy tonics that people would sell door to door and sell from wagons in those days. Payne's Celery Tonic, the advertising, would make you think that it would cure anything. Headaches. Oh, gosh, gout. Gastrointestinal problems. Insomnia. The thing about Payne's Celery Tonic was, though, it wasn't that it made you better, but you felt so much better, because it was about 20% alcohol. So, it's just so... Brigadier General William Wells is buried at Lakeview Cemetery. He is in the book, Lakeview Cemetery of Burlington, Vermont. And what an incredible character. He was a surveyor as a young man in Waterbury. I would call him a Renaissance man. He was interested in so many different things, and is definitely worth your looking into. And I kind of did all that talking about it. I kind of free-formed that one, but... And there we go. If you didn't know, William Wells has a statue at our Battery Park, and there's an identical statue on the battlefield at Gettysburg. And as a Vermonter, it was such a moment of pride for me to go to Gettysburg and to find his statue and to say, my gosh, this is a Vermonter that people see, you know, all the time and they know, yes, Vermont is not just about maple syrup. There we go. I was talking to you about Burlington's Waterfront and all the lumber. You can see lumber in the foreground, and this was actually... There's a big blank space there, because this is probably after the time that some of the machine shops on the waterfront had burned down and needed to be recreated. If you look in the background, you'll see all of this lumber, all of this industry. Imagine standing on, you know, Bank Street or College Street back in the day, and that's what you would see. It was a place where not just adults worked, our lumber yards, but little children, eight, nine years old, worked between these stacks of lumber, too. And there were very often terrible accidents that occurred there for the folks working on that waterfront. There was a gentleman who lived in this great big house that is now part of the UVM campus who had a lot to do with that lumber on the waterfront. I just love this building. It's been restored lately and is so pretty. I'm going to show you this gentleman, Lawrence Barnes. He had a school named after him. He was a hero in the city of Burlington. He was the man who, when the city kind of threw up its hands, after the fire on the waterfront, and they said, gosh, we've got to have these machine shops. People are not going to know what to do. The city is in trouble. And he said he would rebuild them, and he would rebuild them even faster than the city needed them to be rebuilt. Lawrence Barnes was a guy who figured out how to economically strip and ship lumber so that our lumber industry was just booming back in the 1800s, so much so that in that third part of the 1800s, there were people who claimed to one another on the street that they were afraid that if they were going to build a house, they'd have to get their lumber from another state because right now, we're about 70% forested. Back then, we'd cut down so many of our trees, we were only about 30% forested. So it was quite a, quite a boom. I want to make sure and there we go, we're doing well, okay. So I talked to you about William Wells, and this is a gentleman who has a connection to William Wells. He is Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, and he's the man who took the very first cross-country drive in a Winton automobile all the way across the United States, from San Francisco to New York City, and he did it on a bet. It was just there at a dinner party, enjoying himself, having a great time, probably after a couple of drinks, and they're talking about the automobile and how wonderful it is, and you know, he couldn't take it very far, and he's like, oh no, I believe I could. I think I actually might be able to do that. And so, whoop, no, there we go. So it was in 1903, and he was traveling with this man named Sewell K. Crocker, a young man in his early 20s, and these two guys had absolutely no idea what was in for them. I mean, they tried to, you know, best-laid plans. They made sure that they had the appropriate clothing. They made sure that they had the extras that they needed. But it was a long way from point A to point B to point C, and it wasn't like you were going to find an automobile repair shop or a Winton dealership as you made your trek across the country. So they had some pretty interesting adventures. The connection to William Wells is Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson was married to his daughter Bertha, and later on in his life, I want to tell you, Dr. Jackson actually was a publisher here in the city of Burlington, the Burlington Daily News. Now, this is the cutest thing. Somewhere near Idaho, they took on a traveling companion, a dog named Bud, and so that Bud would not, you know, here are these guys traveling across all of these different terrains. They had goggles so that they wouldn't get blinded by the debris that was flying at them in their cars, and they made sure Bud had a pair of goggles, too. So I just love this little dog. So William Wells and Dr. Jackson and their families all buried at Lakeview Cemetery. We're not sure exactly where Bud is. We believe he's buried somewhere on the grounds of the family home, of Wells' family home or Jackson's family home, but we don't know for sure. Okay. You ever look at a picture of somebody, and just by looking at their face, you just have this flash of exactly what they might have looked like when they were seven? Without the mustache, though. But really? I mean, can't you, you look at John Jay Flynn and it's like, I think that he was that same kind of earnest little boy back in the day. John Jay Flynn, what an incredible businessman. What an inspiration to the city of Burlington, although he had no children of his own. He was a man who made sure that every New Year's Day, all of the little children in the city of Burlington, boys and girls who happened to be, oh gosh, messengers or newspaper deliverers or the kids who stood out on the corner saying extra, extra, read all about it. He made sure that they were all invited to these big posh parties at one or two of the fanciest hotels in the city of Burlington, and there they would be treated royally. They would be given a turkey dinner. We think of turkey dinner for Thanksgiving. These kids, probably a lot of them didn't see a turkey dinner all year long until that time, and he would always make sure they had ice cream for dessert, which back then was a much more exotic treat than it is today. I mean, I know kids who get ice cream several times a week, and back in those days it just didn't happen. John J. Flynn opened the Flynn Theater in 1930, and gosh, what a wonderful show place it is. When I go in to see a Flynn show, I'm reminded of just what a gracious place it is and what a wonderful, what a wonderful place that sets the scene for any kind of entertainment I'm waiting for. John J. Flynn was not just a businessman, not just a man who created theaters. He had a hand in bringing the electric trolley car to town, and his humble beginnings probably let him have a greater understanding of what it was like to be those children who sold newspapers on the street or people who just struggled day to day. He didn't start off with money. He was a farm boy who came to the outskirts of Burlington and worked for a farmer and then managed that farm and then bought that farm. So, quite a story. He also was interested, not just in philanthropy that way, but he was one of these people who managed to make deals to keep the city of Burlington viable. Back in the 1930s there was a broom company here in the city of Burlington, and they decided they were going to move to St. Albans because they knew they could save money because in St. Albans the taxes were lower. Today Flynn got some other businessmen together and he said, no, we really can't let this happen. And so they got everybody in a room and talked to them, and they managed to keep this broom factory in the city of Burlington. I think it's an amazing thing. And there, before the Flynn opened, all of these wonderful banners strung across the streets. I don't know whether you've heard, but the Flynn Theater is one of the most haunted places in the city of Burlington. We believe that the gentleman who is called the Flynn Ghost may be a worker who was kind of taken on on the down low. Surely there were people who, there were crews who were assigned to build that place, but there's a rumor from some folks I know who are in Lyric Theater Company that John J. Flynn started to get a little nervous because he's got all these signs, you know, it's like, it's going to open, here's when it's opening. And that he said to his fellows, are we ready? And they said, well, we might not be. And so they hired a few people off the books and we think that maybe one of those fellows was working none too carefully and fell to his death inside the Flynn Theater. So many people have seen him. There are about five ghosts that I've heard mentioned in the Flynn, but this character, the worker in Grey Worker's Overalls and Dusty Boots has been seen so many times that we simply call him the Flynn Ghost. All right, this is a personal story before I get on to the last two sort of better known stories that shaped us in more modern times here in the city. Dorothy Robar O'Leary Shay Martin. Why so many names? Well, this is my grandmother with the green circle. Back in the day next to her is my Aunt Doris, great Aunt Doris, and then the little kid is their youngest sister, Leona. There's a picture of my grandmother there all dressed up, maybe for a date, I don't know. But so many names because as her younger brother said, she liked to get married. She married and married and married and married and married. But there was a period of time, this is a story that is in a couple of my books, Wicked Vermont and in True Crime Stories of Burlington, Vermont. And the reason I ended up putting them in the book was, you know, when you're a writer and you're assigned a book by your publisher, there's an awful lot of going into old newspapers and falling down the rabbit hole of history. Just, I can't even tell you how many times I'd be looking for some mass murderer or some terrible crime that happened in Plattsburg and I see some little article and I say, oh my goodness, what's that? Click and then all of a sudden I'm down, down, down. I was reading about the blue laws in the city of Burlington. You'll know what the blue laws are? The blue laws, for any of you who don't know, there was a time back in the city of Burlington where on a Sunday, you could not buy anything that wasn't food. Nothing. Detergent, soap, toilet paper, nothing. Well, my grandmother lived on Battery Street with her children. She was a newly divorced mother of five, four at the time. I'm sorry, gosh, there was one kid added later. That was some shea. So anyway, so here she is, newly divorced. She was a person on Battery Street back in the day who was one of those wild women who did all these things that they weren't supposed to do. She was a banker for many people on Battery Street. She would take money that women didn't want their husbands to know they had or that husbands didn't want their wives to know they had and she would put it under a floorboard in her kitchen and keep it safe. It was better than the bank. She knew exactly where it was. Little notes on little paper wrapped up. Who had what? She wasn't in a position. Oh, holy cow. She wasn't in a position to... It did it again. Wait a minute. It's gone away. I'm not sure what I did. I'm just going to talk until we figure it out. She wasn't in a position to loan money, but she was a banker. She also was sort of the neighborhood doctor. I mean, if somebody's kid had an injury that was too major to be minor, but too minor to call a physician, then she was usually the person who knew how to patch them up. But as this young newly divorced woman, she needed to make a few extra bucks and so she was selling whiskey out of her back door on Battery Street on Sundays. People would come and they'd tell her that they wanted to buy a shot and she'd say, okay, come around at the back door and she'd usually try to do this when her kids were off at a neighbor's house or something or her aunt's house being minded over there. So on this one particular day, I learned from the newspaper, on this one particular day, Dorothy O'Leary at the time opened her door and there was a young gentleman standing there wearing a very nice suit and top coat and a wonderful fedora hat. And he asked to buy a shot. And she looked at him and then said, yes, you know what's coming. She looked at this gentleman and she said, sure, come around to the back door. So he's headed to the back door and the younger woman in the picture, the teenager that you saw, Myant Doris, who everyone called Dodo, she says, Dot, you're not going to sell to this guy, are you? And my grandmother said, of course I am. Did you get a look at him? He's gorgeous. So she opens the door, invites him in, takes the whiskey out from under the sink, puts it on the table, pours the shot. He gives her the money and then a bunch of liquor control agents come swarming into her apartment. Terrible, terrible thing. So I see this and a lot of this is, a lot of this wasn't in the articles online. It was told to me by my mother who I called and said, Mom, grandma was arrested for selling liquor out of her back door and she said, I thought you knew that. I said, how would I know that? It was the 40s. I wasn't born yet. And she said, well, you know, she told me the whole story. And, you know, apparently because she had a sweet smile and an angelic face, when she got in front of the judge, they dropped the charges except for this little fine that she had to pay. I think a $12, probably a lot of money to her back in the day. $12 fine. But I think, how many other relatives in my, how many other people have done these things I know nothing about. It's crazy. Oh, I will tell you. I said how many other people, and she said, well, there was one cousin who was arrested and he actually died in jail because he threw somebody down a well. But there was that. You just never know. And then there was Donald de Mag. Donald de Mag in the late 1940s and early 1950s was the topic of so many news stories in the Burlington Free Press and the Burlington Daily News. This was a young man who lived on North Street in the city of Burlington. He had a, he unfortunately was partially deaf, pretty profoundly deaf for day-to-day conversation with people and his parents during that time, deafness was a stigma. He was sent away to school, but the school was pretty hell-bent on just teaching, just teaching people how to read lips. They didn't teach American sign language at the time. So Donald de Mag was pretty much sunk. He began to be a behavioral problem. And then in his late teens and early 20s, he started taking things. Finally, as a man in his 20s with a wife and a young child, he strikes up an acquaintance with a man on Center Street in Burlington who owned a harness shop. That man's name was Francis Rassico. So Francis Rassico, a man in his 80s, and Donald de Mag goes in and says, listen, I lost my job and I need to borrow $200. Rassico says, no, I can't loan you the money. So de Mag waits until Rassico turns around and then picks up the big iron coal shaker from next to the wood stove and bloodins him, hitting him 18 times, killing the man, and he flees. He's eventually caught and he's eventually tried and he's put in prison down in Windsor and after a period of time deciding that prison is not for him, he escapes. Now, something I should tell you about Donald de Mag is, it might have been easier back in those days for him to escape than it would have been some other folks because he was considered a danger, kind of powerfully built. He didn't spend his time in prison just sitting around eating bonbons. He was working out. And so there were guards who were just plain scared of him. Maybe the whole idea of the communication barrier and all that might have had something to do with it too. So anyway, he escapes and when he's caught, it's up by the Canadian border. He is actually picked up while hitchhiking by a border patrol agent. So the guy says, hey, where are you going? And de Mag is kind of iffy about his answers and finally the guy says, if you don't tell me what's going on with you, I'm going to have to take you to jail. And he says, well, I actually escaped from prison in Windsor and I'm kind of happy that you picked me up because it's so stressful to be out here trying to hide from everybody. So they send him back and this time he goes to prison and he makes a friend, Francis Blair, who's another sort of malcontent habitual offender and the two of them break out of prison. They steal a laundry truck, break through the prison gates and they're finally found in the area of Springfield, Vermont after they assault a man named Donald Wethrop and kill his wife, Elizabeth. So it's a terrible story. Donald de Mag, kind of a guy who it seems never really had many advantages in life, certainly, but ended up just becoming an habitual offender and a serial escape artist. He was, he's here because he was the last man to be executed by Vermont's electric chair. You know, in the 70s there was a long period of time from the early 50s to the 1970s when the state of Vermont said we're not going to execute people anymore because it's cruel and unusual punishment but Donald de Mag was the last and that electric chair is at the Vermont Historical Society but it is not on display. It's in the basement with a sheet over it where people feel that it is just too touchy a topic for, it's just too touchy a display to put out there for people to take a look at. And this is, yeah, this is somebody that is going to be recognizable to a lot of people even though they're only mug shots. I decided to use the mug shots because this is Louis Hamlin and Jamie Savage who in the spring of 1981 abducted, they actually detained and abducted two S-exjunction girls 12 year old girls who were on their way home from Albert D. Lawton School they had cut through the Maple Street Park and they were in that wooded area there when these two boys who were up to no good decided that they were going to torment these girls and terrorize them they actually shot them with an air pistol, stabbed them and did kill one of them one of them actually died Melissa Walbridge died from her injuries and the state of Vermont was shocked and outraged by these crimes but they were also completely outraged by the fact that Jamie Savage as a 15 year old was not going to get any kind of comeuppance for what he had done Louis Hamlin at 16 would be tried as an adult and he was but Jamie Savage would serve three years in detention and then at the age of 18 he'd be free and so people just couldn't stomach the concept of that and so it changed our laws it just the legislature convened a special session that spring and they changed the laws so that Vermont went from from looking at someone like Jamie Savage a 15 year old as a child to having some of the toughest juvenile juvenile laws in the juvenile crime laws in the country so I'd mentioned that Louis Hamlin was 16 and he served 45 years to life for aggravated sexual assault and murder for the murder of Melissa Walbridge and it's just interesting and shocking to me you heard the introduction about me I grew up in the Old North End and was living in the Old North End with my mother and my siblings when this crime occurred and as I've written in the book True Crime Stories my brother attended school with Louis Hamlin and he came home one day after school and he's raiding the refrigerator and he said hey Louis Hamlin I said what's new and he said Louis Hamlin shaved his beard and right away I thought well that's strange and he must look so completely different and that was one of the things that made it difficult for the authorities to figure out who this kid was who'd committed the crime because after shaving his beard they had to rely on other people's testimony about oh yeah they looked at the mug shots and there were several different sets of mug shots and by the time they got to this one even Louis Hamlin's aunt reported to somebody yeah I think that's my nephew so they were eventually caught so I think that is probably what I've got yeah there we go and there are all the books there are my books with the history press True Crime Stories of Burlington Vermont Lakeview Cemetery Haunted Burlington Wicked Vermont Haunted Inns and Ghostly Getaways and Ghosts and Legends of Lake Champlain which was crazy to write because my publisher got in touch the first week in March and said we're kind of late in our Haunted series this year can you write a book and I said sure like when do you need it she said June 1 like oh my goodness so that was my husband who is a wonderful my husband Roger is so great he just said the dog, the kids, the house I've got it write the book, write the book and then the other book is there's a witch in my sock drawer that is a book for kids a friend of mine Bianca Shera who used to be Bianca Slota who was a reporter at WCAX TV that's where we met she has a child who is three and she sent me a note via Facebook the other day saying I just want to let you know that this is currently Julian's favorite book and that always makes me really happy there's a retired police officer detective from the city of Burlington Emmett Helrich some of you may know that name and he has a son Jack who's a teenager now and I'd given Jack the book and Emmett ran into me one day and he said oh Jack loves your book we have to read it every night and I said oh that's great and he said no it's long it's long well thank you so much I want to open it up to a little bit of time I want to open up for some questions if you have some thank you so much this has been so much fun so much fun big house with the observatory on St. Paul that is from the 1800s oh gosh yeah yeah is it Hitchcock wait a minute was it Hitchcock Hitchcock don't buy the handies right now yes I think it was Hitchcock I want to say but I in city of Burlington became like a historical society museum or something because I think it's getting not workable but do you know much about that I don't know a ton about it I know that the doctor was one of the cohorts of Timothy Follett and it's you just walk in there and just well I have only been in there when it was cut up after it was cut up into apartments but this was probably 15 years ago going inside and looking at some of the woodwork and looking at some of the ways that it was carved up was a little bit like a you know alternately delighted and sad there are a lot of places here in the city of Burlington that I wish the city of Burlington had gotten a hold of before before they ended up you know in the hands of people who would turn them into apartments Lord knows we need housing but there's I didn't go into King probably the most famous smuggler in the state of Vermont Gideon King's house is a house on King Street in Burlington King Street was named after him and it's this red brick house that has a massage place in it maybe a law office I'm not sure and you know going in there I went in I think a few years ago to buy a massage gift certificate for someone and you walk in and it's still apparent that the building's old but to see these places that were absolutely that were owned by people who were so incredibly interesting I mean Gideon King was a guy who I'm going to digress and I apologize in advance I'll try not to be too long Gideon King was did not care that we had a trade embargo going on in the early 1800s and one night he was on his ship out on Lake Champlain and there was a customs agent who stopped his boat and the the customs agent got on the boat with two of his men and he said Gideon King we know what you're up to with the smuggling business and if you don't stop it will go bad for you and apparently King drew himself up to his full height and looked the agent in the eye and said ask me do I care I allow no man to tell me how to run my business why should the president of the United States be any different so a guy like that who a street is named after him and there's this house you kind of wish it was a museum of some sort I certainly do so the black snake affair that happened down here on the river was part of that the black snake affair was yeah we were talking about the black yeah the black snake affair is another one of those situations where and this was much more overblown than the Gideon King thing this fracas in which a farmer is killed and these Irishmen are you know certainly they've got the blame pinned on them and one guy is finally hanged and and it's a spectacle for the entire city of Burlington and beyond people just came from out of town to see this man hanged that was entertainment back in those days anybody else yes are you writing another book at this time I'm I am writing a book right now but not for my publisher I'm writing a book called Saint of Circumstance which is a novel about a young man it's kind of a coming of age novel about a young woman first and then her young son whose lives start off in Louisiana and she comes to live with relatives in Vermont bounces to California and then back again and the about 50% of the books is set in Burlington but definitely a work of fiction about how people are not always what they seem and people's shortcomings don't always make them so right now that is in I'm hoping my last edit stage I've had some beta readers who've read it and I'm going to be looking for an agent because the history press doesn't do non it doesn't do fiction only non-fiction was somebody back there have you go delve into Queen City Park and they attempt to communicate with your dad I have and I'm I'm trying to think of whether or not that was in my might have been in haunted Burlington I don't know how many of you know but the Queen City Park area was a real hotbed of of a sort of psychic activity back in the late 1800s and early 1900s and there's been talk of people having these seances and things and these wonderful hotels that were visited by people from not just the United States but Europe back in the day and I've read stories of these ritualistic dances trying to call forth spirits on the beach there at Queen City Park ladies naked in the misty moonlight holding hands yes so it's definitely something that I would love to look into it's one of those for me it's like so many books so little time there's a book that I was sent by my publisher and I think it's it's called witches wenches and wild women is the series they're doing now and I got to thinking about my grandmother and also a woman named Philamine Lemoine who was probably the most notorious madam the city of Burlington had ever seen and then I thought about other women who would be considered wild who really we wouldn't think of them as wild these days but oh and there's a young woman I write about in my latest book in true crime stories who who was basically caught by the police helping her boyfriend who was a barber smuggle or hooch down the drain when the police broke in she would be a wild woman so I thought could I write a book about witches, wenches and wild women maybe I don't know I might I don't know anybody else would like to ask Thea some questions or talk to her stick around afterwards okay okay what announcement on our next talk is February 18 and the speaker is Jack Kelly who's a nationally known author he doesn't live but it will be recorded by comedy television and it will be available for viewing at other times also okay so Thea again thank you thank you all so much I appreciate it thank you