Monthly Archive for November, 2010

I associate a treasury of colorful Sutton tales with a theatrical legacy dating back to Vaudeville performers. Many performers did live in and around South Sutton in the early part of the 1900s. Although most of the stories of their early acts are now forgotten, at least one tale lives on.

There is a snake charmer buried in an unmarked grave with a hollow iron pipe connected to his casket so his snakes could come and see him after his death. This otherwise unmarked grave is said to be near some vague landmarks in a patch of woods along a back dirt road; it’s an area I’ve come to know very well over the past 25 years.

As teenagers, we would invariably invoke the story of the snake charmer’s grave when walking along that dark road on moonless nights. That story was more than enough to quicken my pace, although I was sure it was just a myth, re-told by local kids to scare wide-eyed citified visitors like me.

Turns out, the story is true.

The snake charmer was Winfield Scott Littlehale, third generation of the Littlehale family to inhabit a now-vanished farm located at the foot of the steep granite knob where I live.

Littlehale was an eccentric, a farmer and a seasonal exhibitor of native wild animals, some of whom he had trained to perform simple tricks. He kept and displayed exotics: a prairie dog, an alligator, a parrot, and a monkey as well as some oddities in his traveling show including albinos and a “fox-dog” named Judy.

A 1956 memoir written by the late Chet Wright of Sutton, Sketches Here And There, recounts details of “Littlehale’s Museum,” as it was known before the turn of the 20th century. As a boy of 10 or 12, Wright worked for Littlehale and eventually made a name for himself as a Vaudeville-era ventriloquist.

I remember Wright as an aged, nearly deaf proprietor of a general store overlooking Blaisdell Lake. His reminiscences are perhaps the only stories ever recorded about Littlehale’s menagerie.

According to Wright, Littlehale took his “Museum” on the country fair circuit in the fall and in the winter he rented a vacant store in a city and exhibited there for two or three weeks before moving on to another city.

“His show consisted of small animals such as mice, doves, guinea pigs, porcupines, rabbits, foxes, coons, woodchucks, crows, snakes, bobcats, turtles, monkeys, and a big alligator. He also had some very odd freaks such as a white crow, a white porcupine, white woodchuck, and a white squirrel. He had some small cages about three feet long with doors on each end, and by taking off these doors and putting the cages end to end, he made one long cage which he called ‘Littlehale’s Happy Family‚’…

Littlehale was quite a large man. He had a white horse and a buckboard, and when he got into the buckboard it nearly dragged on the ground… One of his attractions was a parrot whose talk was not exactly the Sunday-school type. He used to have a little perch on the side of his ticket box for the parrot to sit on, and when anyone came along and walked by instead of buying a ticket, the parrot would say ‘Cheap cus’.”

Littlehale died in March 1904. The circumstances of his burial are nearly as strange as his career. He was interred in the ox pasture behind his farm, somewhat diagonally due to difficulties in digging his grave. According to the obituary published in The Boston Globe:

“His burial in the pasture back of his home was in accordance with his expressed wish. He had selected the spot on the hillside, close beside two great boulders, and had buried some of his most cherished animal pets there, including the fox dog, which he had prized so highly. He asked that he might sleep with them in a casket of plain oak plank and his directions were faithfully carried out.”

The second description of Littlehale’s grave at the end of Chet Wright’s Chapter titled “My First Job in Show Business” contained an important missing clue to the location of the grave.

“Littlehale left full instructions for his burial. There was to be ‘no flowers, no singing‚’ and the coffin was to be made of two-inch oak plank… the town carpenters made the coffin according to instructions and the village blacksmith made the iron handles… Littlehale wished to be buried on the hill back of the house, between two rocks, under a big pine tree. A pipe was to be put into the ground so the snakes could come and see him. The details were carried out as he wished. Thus ends the story of one of Sutton’s best known showmen.”

The snake charmer story was re-told by successive generations but was nearly forgotten by the time that I first heard it. New residents of town don’t seem much interested in old local folklore. I hadn’t suspected there was any truth to the tale at all until I met Dr. Chan Blodgett, Littlehale’s great grandson.

Blodgett shared family photos of Littlehale’s cape house that burned in 1909. He also shared old postcards of a Victorian style inn subsequently built on the Littlehale house site by the Blodgetts. More importantly, Blodgett shared my desire to find the actual location of his great-grandfather Littlehale’s grave. We compared the two, slightly different descriptions of the gravesite. Fitting the pieces together, Blodgett and I soon found ourselves in the woods with a metal detector.

We spent a late autumn afternoon using the metal detector to search for the hollow iron pipe or any indication of buried metal – barbed wire, an old horseshoe, tin cans, shotgun shells, iron coffin handles – whatever. At the last possible site located between two great granite boulders and under a huge and ancient pasture pine, the metal detector beeped and flashed as we traced a rectangular pattern resembling the outline of a buried coffin. Late afternoon was rapidly fading to dusk.

“Maybe you ought to poke around here some more?” Blodgett suggested. “See if you can find something more convincing? Maybe you’ll find the iron pipe?”

“No thanks” I said. With the hair was bristling on the back of my neck as it grew ever darker, I was convinced we’d found the grave. Instead of digging around in the woods further, I contacted the absentee landowner to see what he knew, if anything, about the grave.

He purchased the tract of forestland 20 years earlier from Realtors who had no definitive knowledge of an unmarked grave – at least no knowledge they felt the need to disclose to potential buyers. Perhaps in the absence of a grave marker, the true story was in the process of becoming a local myth? An old iron pipe stuck in the ground is a feature that could easily disappear in a century. Obviously, stranger things had already happened.

Then the landowner produced an old survey map from his files with a handwritten notation: “Supposed location of the grave of W.S. Littlehale.” Case closed.

That night, I had a vivid dream of a white porcupine. Then about a week later, I actually saw one!

A pure white, albino porcupine with little pink eyes and pink palms perched in a roadside tree not far from Littlehale’s grave! The whole affair was getting creepy. Poke around that grave some more? I don’t think so! I don’t need the wrath of any ghost of a former inhabitant of the place where I now live.

Besides, I’d become fond of old Littlehale.

According to Chet Wright, “Littlehale had a great by-word ‘Yes I swear damn my soul!’” On occasion, I say that incantation aloud while working around our farm. The effect is immediate and electric.

It feels to me like Littlehale is ever just around the curve in the road, his buckboard wagon springs sagging under his weight. In pre-dawn gloom, Littlehale manifests in the creaking sound of the old-fashioned hand pump on our well, or the whinny of our horse, or the chatter of a squirrel.

A former neighbor named Don Lowe, once told me how the show people originally came to populate South Sutton. He said sometime before 1900, a rickety, horse-drawn wagon from an asylum for drunken performers broke an axle on a steep curve, spilling its passengers along the road. The liberated performance artists who literally just fell off the wagon performed a collective escape act, eluding authorities that made only a cursory search of the rugged countryside. In time, the harmless eccentrics founded a colony of Vaudevillians in the sleepy hollow of South Sutton.

And to that, Lowe raised his glass and winked.

Lowe knew that a good local story should end with a wink. The very act of telling a tale well gives it the quality of legend – even when it’s true. Perhaps the finest crop ever raised in the hill-farms and villages of once-rural New Hampshire is a handsome crop of local folklore; the stories that lie yet unharvested, their edges just touching like two great boulders deep in the woods of an old abandoned hillside ox pasture.

This tale was written by Dave Anderson for the Concord Monitor, date unknown.  Dave is director of education for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.  He can be reached via e-mail at danderson@spnhf.org or through the Forest Society web-site: http://www.spnhf.org