In the early 17th century, when the first Europeans came to the place they’d soon dub Marshwood, they were warned off by the local Wampanoag, who told them that the land was bad—not merely swampy and inhospitable, but also somehow… afflicted. The old stories spoke of monsters among the reeds; of strange seductive voices whispering from among the moonlit trees; of weird apparitions glimpsed at high tide under the dark of night.
But the settlers—led by the Reverend Hezekiah Strathairn—would not be dissuaded by those tales, and they dared to put down their roots in unwholesome earth. While the struggles of many of the other colonizer communities of the so-called “New World” are a matter of both well-studied history and infamous legend, however, the grim early decades of Marshwood are little-known outside of its own borders. Indeed, for the first two centuries of its existence, only one (intermittently maintained) dirt road wound through the perilous wetlands to connect the modest central township and its outlying homesteads to the rest of the colony, and it was little-traveled by outsiders at the best of times.
Nowadays, Marshwood is still insular and isolated, even though it’s just ten minutes off the nearest major highway. Modernity creeps in, here and there, of course, but one could surely be forgiven for forgetting that the town has high-speed internet and a Dunkin’ Donuts in the square when the midnight fog rolls in off the Atlantic and casts a gauzy silver-gray veil over the ancient oceanfront saltboxes. Tourists sometimes come for the quintessentially “Old New England” atmosphere, but it’s not a place that any outsider ever really needs to be.
And, yet, here you are.
As a practitioner of some manner of eldritch art, you’re no stranger to the odd and the arcane, though that sort of thing is rarely any kind of proof against the slings and arrows of life’s more mundane unpleasantries, and you were in a bad way when the letter arrived. Composed on an old typewriter and lacking any signature, it informed you that you had, in the absence of any living heirs to the estate, been given joint ownership of Marshwood’s slightly decrepit Ayesleigh House, alongside five strangers of skills and lifestyle similar to your own. Suspect though the correspondence might have been, you were in no position to refuse what it offered.
So, you uprooted your life—such as it was—and made for Marshwood.
Once you arrive, it’s only a matter of time before you learn the truth behind a verse first penned by local poet, Emily Blackchurch, in 1875:
“Marshwood holds her secrets dear, deep within her dark, drowned heart.”
Hosted and narrated by:
Stephen Michael DiPesa (Nocturnalchemy)
Started 11/28/21.
Scenes played: 4
License: Community License
18+
