Willey House at Crawford Notch
This wandering includes a spooky story!
While Aisha and I were visiting the White Mountains of New Hampshire over Labor Day weekend, we found that we had some time to kill before our timed trip up Mount Washington via the Cog Railway. I suggested we drive down to Jackson from our hotel in Gorham and then make our way around the state forest. We could stop at anything interesting we saw along the way.
But besides Attitash Mountain Resort and an alarmingly busy Story Land, there wasn’t too much interesting to see, at least nothing that felt worth stopping at. Winding around mountains, we passed the time in the car by playing a game of “They’re a 10 but…”
By the time we got to Crawford Notch, I pulled into a small free parking lot so we could stretch our legs. There were a few other cars in the lot, which was tucked in a valley between mountains next to the Saco River. Across the street stood a couple brown and green houses advertising fudge, ice cream, and public restrooms.
A nearby sign read: WILLEY HOUSE HISTORIC SITE. Even though I’m from New Hampshire, I’d never heard of this place—an apparent tourist destination, though a small one. The mountain views were majestic. My phone had zero service.
We walked along the river path and put a couple quarters into one of the old-timey “Fish & Duck Food” dispensers. We fed a few ducks and tossed the rest of the pellets into the river, causing excited fish to splash to the surface.
We sat in the shade at one of the picnic tables beside the river for a bit, watching a family with a loose labrador upset some of the water fowl. When it got too buggy, we decided to cross the street and check out the fudge and ice cream situation. Neither of us were hungry, but curious nonetheless.
It was a typical New Hampshire tourist stop, complete with moose and black bear paraphernalia and maple leaf candies. I always think it’s funny to see the tourist idea of my home state. I’ve never seen a moose, and the only black bears I’ve seen rode scooters at Clark’s Trading Post.
We left without buying anything and stopped to look at an important-looking boulder beside the house. The plaque on it was hard to read, but at least it said: THE LANDSLIDE 1826. Curious. I made a mental note to look up more about this place later, once I had service again.
But honestly, after a somewhat stressful Cog Railway adventure (let’s just say it involved a wrong turn, a flashing car maintenance light, and a call from our landlord), I’d mostly forgotten about our little stop in Crawford Notch.
The following week, I had an assignment to read the 1835 short story “The Ambitious Guest” by Nathaniel Hawthorne for a horror writing class. The tale tells of young man who stops by a family’s house one September night while traveling through “the Notch of the White Hills” in “the valley of the Saco.” They discuss the young man’s ambitions, as well as visiting “the basin of the Flume.”
As I read, I begin putting the pieces together that this must be northern New Hampshire. In fact, the more I read, the more uneasy I begin to feel. At the story’s conclusion, the family and the guest are all killed by a sudden landslide. The guest’s ambitions are forever unfulfilled.
I immediately took to the internet to look up “The Ambitious Guest,” and discovered it was based on an 1826 tragedy in Crawford Notch where a landslide killed seven members of the Willey family and two others.
That’s right. The story is based on none other than Willey House, the historic site we’d visited just the week before on a total whim. I had never heard of this place, the tragedy, or the Hawthorne story before.
A creepy coincidence, or a sign from the universe to watch out for landslides?
