All seven of us heard it at the same
moment on that chilly fall day in 1971. For most of the past 5,000
years, and who knows how many silent epochs before that, it would
have been a simple, everyday sound. But amid the haunted woods of
northeast Connecticut on this Halloween weekend, it gripped with awe
and disbelief the fellow seminary students and corporate photo
expert who were with me.
It was the rumble of an oxcart – an invisible oxcart — bumping along
a rutted road that had long since vanished beneath an impossible
tangle of hardwoods and vines. As we stood, dumbfounded, the sound
grew louder and closer. From less than thirty feet away came the
jingle of harnesses, the heavy hoofbeats, the clatter of wooden
wheels. Two of us stepped toward the sound, but stopped when we
heard a man’s voice. “Hya! Hya!” hollered the unseen driver, and
there shot through the air whatsounded like the crack of a whip. A
few long moments later the sounds faded off to the right, down a
trail into what was, in 1971, a swamp.
We were young “ghost hunters,” it was our first investigation of an
alleged haunting, and we had seen and heard things in this place
that we thought only Hollywood could dream up. We stood in shock
amid the overgrown cellar holes, stone walls and woods of the
settlement that had been known to its Welsh-born founders as Bara
Hack, roughly translated from the Cymric language as “the place
where we break bread.” Established in the 1770s and depopulated,
supposedly, by disease late in the 19th century, Bara Hack had long
been known locally as “The Village of Voices.”
Written accounts from as far back as the 1920s reported frequent
paranormal activity there, and they weren’t kidding. Our 1971 team
consisted of six of us from St. Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield,
Connecticut, all sixteen to eighteen years old, and a photo expert
from an East Hartford technology firm. In our four expeditions to
Bara Hack that year and the year after, we experienced apparitions,
teleportation (the movement of objects from one place to another by
non-physical means), and numerous photographic and auditory
anomalies. For long periods we would hear all around us what we
could only conclude were the sounds of daily life in that
long-vanished village: farm tools, cows, dogs, snatches of
conversation….
The Village of Voices.....
In my ensuing decades as a paranormal investigator, I would
experience far more bizarre sights and sounds than I had at Bara
Hack. I was to be injured by poltergeists, insulted and taunted by
nonhuman voices, stalked by “spirit orbs,” and touched by presences
that I can only describe as angelic or even divine.
But Bara Hack was the beginning, the
place that has “rocked my world” from that day until this.
