Checking Out the Local Sights
A while ago I was preparing to write about two odd places that I remembered from my childhood in New England. More like landmarks really. We had encountered them on those Sunday family drives. I hesitated at that time because I wanted to check the details about them online.
The first was called the Witch’s Den. I think it was situated in a wooded area or park somewhere in the Saugus area. To reach it we had to park the car and follow a path that wound through the woods. The “den” itself was little more than a huge boulder behind which the path passed. There was an entrance on the side away from the path. Perhaps the word “entrance” is too generous. It was more of a cleft on the bottom of the boulder. The whole place had a creepy feel to it. Not for any supernatural type reason. Litter was scattered around and a pervasive smell hung over the vicinity. More than likely it was the night time haunt of teenagers.
But when I looked for the Witch’s Den online, I could find no trace of it.
The second landmark was called the Devil’s Footprint. When I went looking for it, my search returned a list of a dozen similarly named sites. And none of them sounded like the one I remember. It was highly visible from the road. My father called our attention to it as we drove by. We must have stopped or at least pulled over for a minute, for I got a good look at it. It was another immense boulder, the flat face of which was viewable from the direction from which we were coming. Near the top there was a foot-like impression, one with three toes. (So much for cloven hooves.) I wondered if it were not a dinosaur footprint. The terrible lizard.
Crossing Paths with an Old Friend
I was surprised, and pleased to discover that one of the links from my search query for the Devil’s Footprint had a reference to one of my favorite personages of the 18th Century – George Whitefield. He was a contemporary of the Wesleys and like them preached on both sides of the Atlantic, and was instrumental in what is known as the Great Awakening. The website points to a church in Ipswich, where a flat rock on its grounds bears a single, might I say, shoe print. According to the story, Old Scratch popped in when George was preaching there, and was forcefully evicted.
I included George as a pivotal character in my first screenplay. I set the action in the London of the 1740s at the time when George was preaching in the open air to fairgoers at Moorfields. It’s a backdrop to the story of a young chimneysweep, questing throughout the city for a father figure.
(I published my screenplay, Peter and the Serpent, in book form in December of 2022 and it is currently available at Amazon and many other bookstores. Check the link below for your favorite).