Haunted place · Massachusetts, United States

Bridgewater Triangle

Updated November 20268 sources How to visit

2 archive documents

A label first dated to a 1980 article for about 200 square miles of southeastern Massachusetts, collecting UFO, creature and later ghost stories.

The story

The Bridgewater Triangle is an area, not a building: roughly 200 square miles in southeastern Massachusetts, across Plymouth and Bristol counties, with no official boundary. The Hockomock Swamp lies inside it. According to Wikipedia, the swamp was a base of operations for Metacomet during King Philip's War in 1675-1676. Wikipedia also gives the name as meaning place where spirits dwell, citing a 2013 book by Peter Tower, so that is recent secondary support. Wikipedia adds that a state representative pushed for its legal protection in 1971 and that it was named an Area of Critical Environmental Concern in 1990.

The legend

The label has a clear first text. The Bridgewater Public Library lists and scans the article The Bridgewater Triangle by Peter Rodman and Loren Coleman in Boston Magazine, April 1980, and it is the earliest dated text under that name that we found. The library and Wikipedia credit Coleman with the term, and Wikipedia and legendsofamerica.com say the 1970s, without a source we could check. The article itself says residents "have taken to dubbing it" that, and compares the area to the Bermuda Triangle. We found no earlier use, so its claim about residents is unverified. Coleman's Mysterious America repeats the passage almost word for word; the library's scan shows a Faber edition marked c. 1983, while the library's own list says 2001 and Wikipedia cites 2007.

The label gathers a mixed bag: lights and UFOs, large cats, giant snakes, Bigfoot-like beings, a thunderbird, cattle mutilations and cults, a curse from Metacomet's wampum, Pukwudgies, a ghost at Profile Rock (a seated man, linked to Anawan), and sites such as Bridgewater State University, Taunton State Hospital, Hornbine School and the Solitude Stone. The UFOs and creatures do go back to the 1980 article, which reports them mostly as events of the 1970s and names some witnesses, including police officers and a radio newsman, without giving its sources. The ghosts, the curse, the Pukwudgies and the named sites are not in the scanned pages we read, which are partly cropped, so they seem to have joined the label later. The UFO dates given by legendsofamerica.com, from 1760 and 1908 to 1968, 1976 and 1994, carry no primary source. Pukwudgies are genuinely Algonquian folklore according to Wikipedia, but their link to Freetown seems modern. Wikipedia marks the Native American curse with a note questioning its source.

Our search of old US newspapers (1770-1963) found no trace: Hockomock turned up only an unrelated 1922 ferry, and Anawan and Bridgewater swamp ghost returned nothing. A skeptical article by Rebecca Hyman in the Providence Journal (2011) is cited by Wikipedia, but we could not read it. Wikipedia also lists two cattle-mutilation cases in Freetown in 1998, via a paper we did not read, and a 2021 fiction podcast. In short: the label and its creature stories lead back to Coleman's 1980 article, and we found no document older than that article for the label.

What remains today

The area is lived-in and natural, with no common owner. Wikipedia says the state owns about 5,000 of the Hockomock Swamp's 16,950 acres as a wildlife management area. We did not verify the status of Taunton State Hospital or Hornbine School.

Visiting

No single place is the Triangle. Areas inside it described as public include the Hockomock Swamp Wildlife Management Area (per Wikipedia, open for hunting, fishing, canoeing and wildlife watching), Freetown-Fall River State Forest, and Profile Rock, which Wikipedia places inside that forest. The state pages were blocked, so confirm rules and access with the managing agency first. Some places are isolated, and much of the rest may be private or closed: do not trespass.