The Eerie Series Continues: The Bard of the Bizarre

Oct. 17, 2018 | G. Michael Dobbs
news@thereminder.com

Joseph Citro

Joseph Citro has investigated, cataloged and reported haunted places all over New England and yet the man called “the Bard of the Bizarre” has never experienced something that has gone bump in the night.

He has stayed in haunted inns and bed and breakfasts hoping to see what others have seen, but so far spirits have eluded him.

He doesn’t seem to mind as for Citro, the story is the thing.

Citro is careful to distance what he does with the activities of “ghost hunters.” He investigates like a journalist, pouring over old newspapers and records and conducting interviews armed with a notebook and a camera.

A native Vermonter, Citro has written about New England’s unexplainable and odd since the early 1990s in books such as “Passing Strange,” Cursed in New England: Stories of Damned Yankees,” “Weird New England,” “The Vermont Ghost Guide,” and many more.

His most recent is mediation on ghostly incidences “The Vermont Ghost Experience.”

Speaking to Reminder Publishing, Citro said his interests in such unworldly matters came from his father.

“I have to blame my father,” he said. “My father was full of stories.”

He recalled how his father would regale him with the stories of the buildings they passed by.

He found as a child he was “more interested in the stories than whether or not ghosts really existed.”

When he began his career as a horror novelist he used many of the stories he had heard as the basis for his fiction. “I kept uncovering more local lore and by the mid-1990s I put the fiction aside and started collecting stories.”

When asked if he prefers fiction to non-fiction, he admits that is a difficult question. “The process is the telling of the story [whether fiction or not] … the model is the camp fire tale. You tell it in a way to engage the reader.”

For Citro, the Bakersfield area of Vermont is among the most haunted of places he knows, as there are multiple sightings of a ball of light, an orb, over a 200-year period.

“It seems to show some kind of intelligence,” he said.

He spoke to a college professor who has a cabin in the area. One night he saw the orb in front of his home. He opened the door and made gestures of invitation. The orb hesitated for a moment and then flew off.

“No one knows what to call it. It doesn’t behave like a ghost,” Citro added.

Another area known for hauntings is a covered bridge in Stowe, VT, called “Emily’s Bridge.” As he wrote in “Vermont’s Haunts,” the legend is that a teenage girl named Emily lived in Stowe in the 1850s.

“She fell in love, “ Citro wrote, “with a young man and for whatever reason, failed to pass muster with her parents. So the headstrong couple decided to elope, agreeing to meet on the covered bridge at midnight.

“Alas, poor Emily soon learned her parents had been right all along. The young man never showed. Too humiliated to go home and too timid to run away alone, the dejected teenager hanged herself from a rafter.”

Since then people have reported seeing a ghostly female figure, but Citro is doubtful.

“I’ve done a lot of investigating there and I don’t think there’s any truth, don’t think there’s a ghost,” he said.

Instead he believes the bridge is in a spooky area where unexplained things have happened.

With cable TV channels full of various supernatural investigation shows, Citro compared the many TV shows featuring supernatural investigations to the interest in mediums and séances in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

“It’s a fad, a cultural bubble, not much substance to it,” he asserted.

Some people take the current form of ghost hunting very seriously, he noted, as there are real estate agents who have hired them to dispel the spirits in supposedly haunted locations in order to sell the property.

There are now various “haunted” inns and hotels that cater to such folks, he added, giving the ghost hunters a chance to exercise their protocols.

He joked, “It’s very hard to find a hotel or a bed and breakfast without a ghost!”

This time of year, Citro is busy with speaking engagements around New England. He most recently appeared at the Greater New England UFO Convention and has a slate of lectures at libraries.

Although Citro has never seen a ghost, he has had an inexplicable event. In 1994 he was alone in his then home in Burlington, VT. He heard a high-pitched whine and thought it was coming from outside. He realized, though it was coming from his kitchen.

There on the counter top was a thick drinking glass spinning around so fast it was producing the noise. “It was the weirdest damn thing,” he recalled.

The glass exploded sending pieces all over his kitchen. Much to his amazement, the shards were not sharp, but were like little cubes.

He has no explanation to this day, but instead has a great story.

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