Dogtown

Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town

Elyssa East

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781416587187
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The area known as Dogtown -- an isolated colonial ruin and surrounding 3, 000-acre woodland in storied seaside Gloucester, Massachusetts -- has long exerted a powerful influence over artists, writers, eccentrics, and nature lovers. But its history is also woven through with tales of witches, supernatural sightings, pirates, former slaves, drifters, and the many dogs Revolutionary War widows kept for protection and for which the area was named. In 1984, a brutal murder took place there: a mentally disturbed local outcast crushed the skull of a beloved schoolteacher as she walked in the woods. Dogtown's peculiar atmosphere -- it is strewn with giant boulders and has been compared to Stonehenge -- and eerie past deepened the pall of this horrific event that continues to haunt Gloucester even today. In alternating chapters, Elyssa East interlaces the story of this grisly murder with the strange, dark history of this wilderness ghost town and explores the possibility that certain landscapes wield their own unique power. East knew nothing of Dogtown's bizarre past when she first became interested in the area. As an art student in the early 1990s, she fell in love with the celebrated Modernist painter Marsden Hartley's stark and arresting Dogtown landscapes. She also learned that in the 1930s, Dogtown saved Hartley from a paralyzing depression. Years later, struggling in her own life, East set out to find the mysterious setting that had changed Hartley's life, hoping that she too would find solace and renewal in Dogtown's odd beauty. Instead, she discovered a landscape steeped in intrigue and a community deeply ambivalent about the place: while many residents declare their passion for this profoundly affecting landscape, others avoid it out of a sense of foreboding. Throughout this richly braided first-person narrative, East brings Dogtown's enigmatic past to life. Losses sustained during the American Revolution dealt this once thriving community its final blow. Destitute war widows and former slaves took up shelter in its decaying homes until 1839, when the last inhabitant was taken to the poorhouse. He died seven days later. Dogtown has remained abandoned ever since, but continues to occupy many people's imaginations. In addition to Marsden Hartley, it inspired a Bible-thumping millionaire who carved the region's rocks with words to live by; the innovative and influential postmodernist poet Charles Olson, who based much of his epic Maximus Poems on Dogtown; an idiosyncratic octogenarian who vigilantly patrols the land to this day; and a murderer who claimed that the spirit of the woods called out to him. In luminous, insightful prose, Dogtown takes the reader into an unforgettable place brimming with tragedy, eccentricity, and fascinating lore, and examines the idea that some places can inspire both good and evil, poetry and murder.

PART ONE

Chapter One

The Birth of Tragedy

DURING THE EARLY MORNING hours of Monday, June 25, 1984, a chorus of howls rippled across island Cape Ann. After the first alarm rang at three-fifty in the morning, sirens wailed and flashed into the rain-drenched night as fire trucks raced up Massachusetts’s North Shore to put out the largest blaze in recent Gloucester memory: a six-alarm fire on Main and Porter Streets in the heart of downtown. Tenants in apartments over the Mark Adrian Shoe Store rushed to safety just seconds before an explosion blocked the exit. The fire burned through the dawn as smoke mixed with fog and heavy rain brought visibility to a minimum across much of Cape Ann. But the winds were blowing to the southeast and, five miles away, on the northwestern side of the island, just beyond the ancient woodlots of the abandoned colonial settlement known as Dogtown, there was no sign or smell of fire, just the lingering echo of sirens and howling dogs in the gray light of dawn.

Rainy summer mornings on Cape Ann inspire sleeping late and staying indoors, but Erik Natti got up early, met his carpool, and traveled twenty miles for an end-of-the-year teachers’ meeting at Marblehead High School. Matthew and Diana, Erik’s two children from his first marriage, were at their mother’s house in Salem. Erik would later recall driving away that morning and hoping that his second wife, Anne, “would enjoy a good day of being by herself” at their summer camp, an Airstream trailer at the northern edge of Dogtown.

The bulk of Cape Ann’s population and development are clustered along the shoreline, but the Nattis had recently settled into these highland woods at the end of Quarry Street to be as far away from civilization as possible and still remain on the island. They preferred the relative isolation of Dogtown’s quiet expanse to inconveniences such as being awakened by sirens in the middle of the night.

The Nattis, who had a house in the village of Annisquam where they lived during the school year, may have told you that their summer camp, which filled a woodland meadow on land where Erik grew up, was in a part of Gloucester known as Bay View. This would not be untrue, but the top of Quarry Street, where houses disappear behind denser and denser woods the higher one climbs, also marks an unofficial entry into Dogtown—an invisible threshold to the island’s wilderness interior.

Dogtown’s colonial ruins, which cover half of the region’s official three thousand acres, lie south of the Nattis’ summer place, but people generally use the name Dogtown when referring to the entirety of the island’s unpopulated center, a region that covers approximately five thousand acres. These malleable boundaries suggest that Dogtown is larger than any strict interpretation of history or land survey that tries to pin it down. It also implies that the name “Dogtown” stands for something too complex and elusive to be contained by the four roads around which the colonial village was created.

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, tragedy stems from the conflict between mankind’s civilizing, Apollonian desire for order and our yearning for wild, Dionysian abandon. At the time of its inception, this colonial village represented an Apollonian ideal, but by the turn of the nineteenth century, when the Commons Settlement became known as Dogtown, the Dionysian impulse had overtaken the place. The region may indeed have been overrun with dogs back then, but it also began to inspire a certain type of human wildlife. Many of Dogtown’s “witches” made fiery home brews, told fortunes, hosted buccaneers and gambling parties, and profited from prostitution. The folkloric record maintains that a couple of these women cursed anyone who attempted to enter their desolate village. Even in 1984, Dogtown remained a place where people escaped civilization either by going there to party with abandon or to lose themselves peaceably in nature.

By the twentieth century, Dogtown had become a unique landscape, an isolated, municipally bound wilderness—not a manicured park—and a ruin-filled ghost town where the Dionysian principle with its knife’s-edge balance between creative inspiration and destructive madness seemed to prevail. Dogtown enabled both Marsden Hartley and the influential postmodernist poet Charles Olson to cross the internal wilderness of their respective creative crises. Others, less fortunate, did not safely traverse either the actual, physical wilderness of Dogtown or the mental one it could impose. This wayward quality may have been the reason why a Bible-thumping millionaire named Roger W. Babson decided to have twenty-four large boulders hand-carved with Protestant prescriptives during the Great Depression. The lessons imparted by Babson’s boulders—”USE YOUR HEAD,” “TRUTH,” “BE ON TIME”—stand out boldly against this confusing landscape as patent guideposts for those who may wander too far astray.

Over the years, most Cape Anners, being oceangoing people, ignored Dogtown. Of those who actually paid attention, some looked at the ruined settlement and saw a wasteland where civilization had died; others saw a life-affirming place where nature triumphantly resurged from the dead; many saw both things at once, as though the area represented all parts of the cycle of life.

The Nattis subscribed to the “cycle of life” point of view. Rumors and folktales about witches had long been the stuff of legend and did not bother them in the least—in fact, one could almost say such stories conveniently helped keep outsiders away. Not that the Nattis were misanthropes; though Erik was an especially private individual, both he and Anne were well-liked teachers. Anne taught in nearby Prides Crossing at the Landmark School, which specialized in instructing students with dyslexia, and took her own private tutoring pupils as well. One of these pupils, a challenging little boy named Daniel Bulba, wanted nothing more for his tenth birthday than to have Anne attend his party. Anne was just the sort of person to honor such an invitation, her deep brown eyes lighting up with pleasure. Erik was equally devoted to teaching biology and chemistry at Marblehead High School.

At about the time of her engagement, Anne, who was in her late thirties and had never been married, wrote to a friend and confided, “Everything I’ve been running away from for the last many years I now find I’m running after.” In a subsequent letter she stated, “I feel kin to a whole history of waiters on the eve of The Day—a bridegroom on his last fling, a graduate carousing, a king before coronation, a soldier before battle, expectant father, sacrificed virgin, all of them attending their souls to time, while time moves deliberately on to meet one marked spot where the world will suddenly change.”

Time moved ahead to Anne Phinney and Erik Natti’s wedding on Saturday, August 20, 1983, a memorable event for all who attended. The couple hired a band that transported a thousand-pound piano up Quarry Street, a particularly steep and treacherous dirt road, to their ceremony and party at a clearing in the woods. At their reception, Anne and Erik, who is of Finnish descent, marked their commitment with a group sauna, a Finnish ritual observed on occasions both venerable and mundane, which meant before long, Anne, Erik, and their guests were “taking the heat,” cleansing and purifying themselves in this time- honored way, and following it with a cooling swim in Blood Ledge Quarry, one of the many abandoned granite quarries that dot the Cape Ann highland.

Life had finally, pleasantly caught up to Anne Theresa Phinney, now Natti, as she walked through these ancient woods with her husband at her side, like Adam and Eve, neither unwise nor wholly innocent.

It was a fitting image: if anyone belonged in these woods, people believed, it was Erik, who had grown up in them, and Anne, who had grown up in a family of outdoorsy, educator parents in western Massachusetts. Then there was Erik’s mother, who liked to tell people that she was a witch.

Once, when Erik was a little boy and had been the object of wrongdoing by another kid, his mother marched over to the offending boy’s house, pounded on the door, and cursed the child’s mother in Finnish. She didn’t just swear, either. She moved her hands to conjure a whole variety of spirits, and from what young Erik could make out, she threatened to turn the woman’s ovaries into walnuts. Mrs. Natti raised even more eyebrows when she took Erik and his sister Isabel out of Sunday school because she did not want them to be corrupted by the Bible. The Natti family’s holy book was the Kalevala, a Finnish creation epic full of nature, magic, and shamanism. The Kalevala, like the Natti paterfamilias, originally came from Karelia, a heavily forested region divided between eastern Finland and Russia that is culturally distinct from western Finland. The Natti family tradition holds that Erik’s paternal great-grandfather was sold into slavery in St. Petersburg, but managed to escape and eventually found his way to Cape Ann in the late 1800s to work in the granite quarries. If there was anything from the Old World this Natti forebear was going to pass along to his descendants, it was a love for the Kalevala, and the shared Finnish and Karelian belief that the forest is enchanted and sacred, especially the birch and the blueberry that thrive in northern Dogtown. While there were other Finns on Cape Ann, most hailed from the western part of the country and considered Karelians to be unsophisticated backwoods people. One Cape Anner of Finnish descent says that his mother used to refer to the Nattis by a Finnish word that translates loosely as “forest people” or “leprechauns” and sounds like “met-tah buuloo,” from the Finnish word for forest, metsä.

Although Erik’s family wore their eastern Finnish culture proudly, they were no hicks. Erik’s maternal grandfather was the sculptor Paul Manship, whose most famous work is the bronze Prometheus carrying fire in hand as he soars above the ice-skating rink in New York City’s Rockefeller Center. Manship and the extended Natti family were central figures in a vibrant community of artists, writers, and designers on Cape Ann.

The Nattis had another claim on this forgotten corner of the world. After the quarrying industry went bust during the Great Depression, Erik’s father, Ilmari “Jimo” Natti, and uncle Robert “Bob” Natti had bought some acres on the cheap and transformed this decimated land into a forest. Jimo could have charted his son’s growth next to the white pines he planted four years before Erik was born. Though a day came when the forest outgrew the boy, the man never outgrew the forest. It was Erik’s and, by extension, his wife’s.

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the island, the Main Street fire continued to gorge itself on wind, metal, plastic, and wood. Eighty-four firemen, including additional crews from six surrounding towns, attacked the blaze. The sounds of shattering windows and splintering doors punctuated the fire’s roar. News crews arrived, trailed by insurance adjusters who worked the crowd of spectators that was pinned behind police barricades, searching for business owners such as shoe-store owner Mark Adrian Farber, who watched as the apartments above his store disintegrated before his eyes.

Later that week, Gloucester would celebrate its annual St. Peter’s Fiesta, a traditional Sicilian festival honoring the patron saint of fishermen and keeper of keys to the heavenly kingdom. The novena, a timeworn Sicilian ritual in which fishermen’s wives and mothers pray to the saint for nine days, was already under way. In two days the novena would end and Gloucester’s summer tourist season—so vital to the town’s economy—would begin. But for now, downtown was burning in the rain, and all people could do was watch and worry.

On this day, more so than on any other, Dogtown could not have been more remote.

WHEN ANNE AWOKE she called her friend Linda Ryan, who worked as a flight attendant and had the day off. Anne and Linda, former roommates, were as close as sisters. Cross-Dogtown walks were part of their bond, as was their unique communication system. If either Anne or Linda were passing near the other’s home, she would leave a woodland calling card such as some pinecones or flowers to say hello. On Sunday Linda had ridden by the Natti camp on horseback and left a branch for Anne, who placed a bough and a small present on the porch of Linda’s Rockport home later that evening.

That Monday Anne planned to walk through the woods to Linda’s house—the same house they had shared for three and a half years before Anne moved in with Erik. Anne’s normal route usually took just over an hour, but right before hanging up the phone, Anne said she might try an alternate way, potentially delaying her arrival. It was the start of her summer vacation. She had time to wander.

Anne Natti was not the sort of woman to forgo a walk in the woods, even on this dreary Monday morning: it would make for an especially solitary, peaceful experience of the kind that only Dogtown could provide.

Anne dressed in multiple layers to protect herself from the elements, which bore down heavily. She sealed her slender, petite frame inside a pair of yellow rain pants and matching hooded slicker, snaked her feet into a pair of rag wool socks, and stuffed them into tall rubber boots. She placed her and Erik’s puppy’s red leash for use in Rockport inside a Ziploc plastic bag, stepped outside, and closed the door behind her. The puppy, a German shepherd mix named Woofer, bounded into the fog. It was between 9:15 and 9:30 A.M.

Though parts of Dogtown lie just beyond backyard swing sets and raised garden beds where bees cling to bright flowers, the rest of Cape Ann seems far away. The region may fill the geographical center of the island, but it is cut off from Gloucester and Rockport. Its elevation (between 150 and 180 feet above sea level) and awkward and sometimes impassable terrain add to its aura of remove, but the region’s colonial ruins easily give one the impression that Dogtown is separated from society by time as well as geography. The area is an island within an island, riddled with a labyrinth of sixty miles of trails that appear and disappear, depending on the season, and that seem to multiply into endless wilderness. It is easy to get lost in Dogtown for extended periods—when one woman went missing there in 1951, the police had to borrow a map so they could find their way around. But Anne Natti regularly walked these myriad paths; she was an unlikely candidate for going astray.

This morning she chose a route that wound through what she and Erik called the “deep woods,” a copse of hemlock, white pine, and cedar that a retired NASA physicist and MIT professor named Frederick Norton had started planting in the 1930s. This 121-acre stretch of Dogtown woods feels prelapsarian, though every bit of it was designed, sprouted, and planted by “the professor,” as he was called. Such is the illusion of an expertly engineered and carefully managed woodland; though it is one of the most cared for parts of Dogtown, the Norton Forest looks like primeval wilderness.

Like a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, the professor, who was eighty-eight years of age in 1984, nearly always went barefoot, and shod his feet only when they hit the pavement. He did not even put on his L.L.Bean mukluks the previous September when he walked through the forest to Anne and Erik’s wedding. Erik was like a son to the professor. They shared an intense love for the land; to them, it was sacred.

As Anne walked through the Norton Forest this blustery Monday, the wind gusted heavily, as it is prone to do on this exposed promontory during a storm. It howled and rattled through the trees, shaking their branches to create a sudden deluge. The hood of Anne’s yellow rain slicker muffled her hearing and cut off her peripheral vision. The steady patter of rainfall intensified, drowning out the distant rumble and whine of a dirt bike.

The dirt bike rider had altered his course after seeing a home-made sawhorse made out of birch logs blocking a trail and marked with a sign saying NO BIKES. Making his way down a path that had turned slippery with mud, he stopped under a tree to wait out the pelting rain.

Woofer appeared through the trees, pranced up to the man’s bike, sniffed the front tire, and darted away. The man watched the dog sally to a bush, a tree, a rock, and trot back to its master, a small figure dressed in yellow walking a nearby path. Moments passed. A tiny fragment of a single day gave life to an idea that would change two lives and a place forever.

Anne had no idea what was behind her. The man was careful not to make a lot of noise as he crept in close and planted his large palms against her back, shoving her forward. Trees whirred by. The ground came up to meet her.

Anne struggled to get up. The man grabbed a rock sitting alongside the trail. The rock was large enough to make a cornerstone, broad and heavy enough for crushing things. He heaved it with all of his might onto the back of Anne Natti’s head.

The human skull, designed to cradle and protect the brain, is durable and difficult to break, but Anne Natti’s skull immediately fractured upon impact.

This blow was survivable in and of itself, but no trauma of such magnitude exists in isolation. A shuddering, domino-like effect traveled down Anne Natti’s spine. The degree of force her brain experienced would have immediately sent a cascade of opiates through her nervous system. Her brain most likely shut down in a self-protective mode, making her lose consciousness almost immediately. Pressure and fluid would have begun to build inside her cranium, causing her to moan and writhe involuntarily. She began to hemorrhage.

The man wrapped his long arms around her and dragged her to her feet and off the trail. She continued to moan and writhe. He dropped her among the trees just beyond the edge of the path and swung at her face with another rock. The blow broke her jaw and her nose. It pushed her left eye deep into its socket. Her movements slowed.

The man checked her pockets for money. Peeled the rain slicker off without unzipping it. Stripped away her vest. A sweater. He lifted another sweater, chamois shirt, and turtleneck off her body in one efficient stroke, pulled off her boots, and rolled down her socks, one by one. Then came her yellow rain pants, belt, and dungarees. He stripped off her tights. Unhooked her bra. Slid off her underwear and placed it in the Ziploc with Woofer’s red leash. It would stay dry and relatively clean, though her exposed body was now wet, dirty, bloody, and going cold.

He had been thinking about raping her. Rain continued to fall heavily. Blood seeped into the earth. The rainwater diluted it until there was no longer a trace.

Suddenly, something snapped inside him. All of a sudden he came to and realized what he had just done.

He moved quickly. He tied the yellow rain pants around her neck and used them to drag her naked body deeper into the woods. Her b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyritht Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• Epilogue
• Author’s Note
• Notes on the Term “Dogtown”
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author