New Hampshire isn’t referred to as the Granite State for nothing at all. 1 issue my birthplace has in abundance is rocks. In its very long historical past, New Hampshire has been the settling spot of several peculiar and inert stony masses: the much-skipped Old Male of the Mountain, climate-ravaged Mount Washington, and my big brother Doug, to name a handful of.
I appreciate them all, but one conglomeration of rocks has captured my imagination — and a certain stage of archaeological notoriety — for a long time. I refer, of course, to the inscrutable landscape of stone and earth that locals continue to get in touch with Secret Hill. You may know it as America’s Stonehenge.
Journey Into Secret
I grew to become conscious of the spot at the age of 9, watching In Lookup of… the common seventies Television set show hosted by Leonard Nimoy and devoted to unsolved mysteries and unusual phenomena. 1 episode targeted on Secret Hill — a web site of uncanny stone rings and buildings whose pretty existence proposed to some minds the pre-Columbian presence of civilizations with innovative information of architecture and astronomy, perhaps even a style for blood sacrifice.
The episode highlighted commentary by Hans Holzer, parapsychologist and qualified on phantoms and poltergeists. Evidently, Holzer also studied archaeology and ancient languages. Who knew? He confidently declared that markings on a stone at Secret Hill — which seemed an awful good deal like scrapes from a farmer’s plow, but by no means thoughts — ended up proof of ancient Phoenicians in New Hampshire, hundreds of years right before the to start with European colonists.
It was just forty miles from my household. I experienced to go. If this spot elicited the curiosity of Mr. Spock and the finest ghost hunter this aspect of Scooby-Doo, you knew it was really worth a glimpse.
And so it proved to be, when in 1977 I at last confident my dad and mom to check out Secret Hill, positioned in Salem (but not that Salem). The stone chambers ended up spooky right here and there various rocks jutted from the floor at odd and unnatural angles. I was especially riveted by the so-referred to as sacrificial table, a multi-ton slab with unusual channels carved close to the stone sides.
“That’s so blood can drain off,” my brother helpfully observed. “I bet they killed a lot of men and women right here. Even young children.” He eyed me thoughtfully, as if struck by an interesting notion.
(Credit: Stan Shebs/CC BY-SA three./Wikimedia Commons)
Breathless travel writers and the destination’s website by itself explain the spot as a maze, suggesting a broad, forbidding labyrinth concealed in just a primeval forest, the sort of spot one could possibly enterprise into and by no means return. Although the web site does sit on thirty acres of woodland, most of the stone buildings occupy a comparatively compact spot. And while there are in fact winding paths and subterranean chambers dotting the landscape, it really is no maze. You would have to be supremely inattentive or obtuse to get misplaced there.
My brother obtained misplaced there. We identified him at some point, but our mother created an embarrassing fuss about it. So it took some convincing — and the passage of far more than thirty yrs — to get him to return, which we did one pre-COVID summer months not very long ago.
Theories (Not Pretty) Set in Stone
In fairness to my brother, a lot of other men and women have gone astray at Secret Hill above the yrs. William Goodwin, an insurance policy executive who purchased the property in the nineteen thirties, believed that the stone buildings there ended up designed by Irish monks who someway created it to America in the 11th century. He was so confident of this “simple fact” that he created alterations to the web site to fit his theory.
“[Goodwin] is documented as possessing ‘rearranged’ several of the stones on the property, so that it is not doable now to know what is unique — if something — and what is the final result of Goodwin’s perform,” says Curtis Runnels, a professor of archaeology, anthropology and classical studies at Boston College.
Later on, a Harvard scientist named Barry Fell studied obvious inscriptions on stones at Secret Hill and claimed these markings ended up Phoenician or Iberian in origin. Fell, it really is really worth noting, was a maritime biologist, your go-to man if you wished to know about, say, sea urchins. But his forays into epigraphy ended up perhaps less accomplished and received him primarily skepticism and ridicule from the scientific local community.
All we know for confident about the early historical past of the web site is that it served as a homestead and a rock quarry in the 19th century, and that Indigenous People in america ended up after active there, potentially for hundreds of years. Nonetheless, beginner researchers, New Age devotees and the current owners continue on to aid the belief that America’s Stonehenge’s functions are as outdated as four,000 yrs, ended up designed by prehistoric European guests, and may even have some link to the men and women who designed Stonehenge on England’s Salisbury Simple. In simple fact, the only hyperlink amongst America’s Stonehenge and the genuine issue is the name by itself, and that little bit of rebranding failed to come about till the nineteen eighties. Runnels notes that no verifiable proof has ever turned up to aid any of the wilder statements bordering the web site.
“There are no European artifacts these types of as metals or pottery at the web site,” Runnels says. “There are no European artifacts everywhere in North America relationship to two,000-four,000 yrs ago.” In quick, whatsoever transpired on the ridge at Secret Hill is not recognised for certain, but, Runnels provides, “Centered on the available proof — relatively than unsupported conjecture — the various stone preparations on the web site ended up created by owners of the property in the 19th and twentieth hundreds of years and have no link to prehistoric Europe.”
A Wander Among the the Rocks
On our return journey to Secret Hill not very long ago, my brother and I wandered in ideal solitude (at $13 a head, you could possibly have the spot to yourself, far too). In the intervening yrs given that our childhood check out, I experienced been to the genuine Stonehenge, and there was no comparison. No trilithons of towering majesty right here. The stone walls and buildings appeared smaller sized than I remembered, far more like deserted cellars than a temple designed by an innovative men and women. Even the sacrificial table experienced misplaced its luster.
“Yup, that’s in all probability a lye stone to make cleaning soap,” my brother helpfully observed. He now owns an 18th-century farmhouse and knows a little bit about Colonial-era resources, but authorities have shared this see as well.
Does that indicate Secret Hill isn’t really worth a check out? Very well, I would not go that much. It really is continue to a diverting walk in the woods — if you have young children, you could do even worse than acquiring them out in character in a spot that is complete of curiosities. Even Runnels acknowledges that the site retains some virtue. “It would absolutely qualify as an archaeological web site,” he says. “In simple fact, there are two archaeological web pages at Secret Hill: Indigenous American and Colonial American.”
But if I experienced any guidance for the current curators, it really is this: Stick with the unique name. Your hill is no Stonehenge, but it continue to retains a lot of secret.