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New book celebrates mysteries of New England
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By G. Michael Dobbs
Managing Editor
Two western Massachusetts attractions are featured in the new book Weird New England, written by Vermont's bard of the bizarre, Joseph Citro.
Citro has made a career of investigating and collecting the odd and unexplained stories of the six New England states in previous books such as Curious New England, the Vermont Ghost Guide, Passing Strange, and others.
"If I didn't do this book, someone else would have done it based on my research," he told Reminder Publications. Citro welcomed doing the project, though, as the book's emphasis on photos gave him the chance to illustrate many of the pieces with contemporary and archival material.
The way he learned of the assignment was just a little ... weird.
Citro said that he called Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman, the authors of Weird New Jersey, to do an interview for an article on that book for the Boston Globe. Moran and Sceurman had just made up their minds prior to Citro's call to them to offer him the chance to write the Weird New England book.
"It was highly coincidental and synchronistic," Citro said .
The book features chapters ranging from roadside museums to Big Foot sightings to prehistoric stone structures and little-remembered moments in New England history.
Citro toured western Massachusetts earlier this year with this reporter as his guide. We visited several different locations of singular attractions, including Nash's Dino-Land in Granby and the Titanic Museum in Indian Orchard. Both of those stories made it into the book's final cut.
Citro had visited Dino-Land when he was "a little kid," and said he was "glad to see it was still there." The late Carleton Nash, who received national publicity for it, founded the dinosaur footprint quarry. His son Cornell now operates the quarry and museum.
The book's editors did cut some of Citro's material from the final edit, including a chapter on an abandoned research facility in Vermont near the Canadian border. Citro said that in the 1960s the facility was used to develop a "super gun" a 500 foot-long cannon that would have shot satellites into space, rather than using rockets."
Visiting the lab is like "walking onto the set of [the James Bond film] Dr. No," he said.
Researching the book wasn't without risks, either. Although Citro has yet to a have a paranormal experience during his career writing about the unexplained, he did take two serious falls when photographing two of the locations in the book. He attributed the mishaps to uneven ground, not to the unknown.
One would think that after writing his latest book, Citro, is done mining the odd stories and history of New England. But he's not.
"New England is a gold mine," he said. " I'm learning new stuff all the time."
For instance, Citro said he's planning to investigate a story given to him by a man who is finding stone effigies on his remote rural property. What they are and where they are coming from are just a little of what Citro hopes to find out.
"New England still hasn't given up its mysteries," he said.
For more information on Weird New England, log onto www.bn.com.
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