After three months of searching for answers, in March of 1952 the Springfield Police pretty much threw their hands up on finding the identity of a skeleton some boys found the previous November in a wooded area off Methuen Street.
Police in nine states were given the description of the remains, but the quest was “fruitless.”
I wish I had more to give you in this mystery, which I detailed in Skull and Bones, Part 1, but they never found out whose skeleton it was. Maybe it was nothing scandalous—it could have been someone down in their luck and health and had lost contact with his family, so no one missed him. An alcoholic who killed himself or passed out and froze in the woods during the Depression? Could be. With two sets of complete dentures, however, it seems that this person had the means to get dental work done and wasn’t “off the grid,” but who knows?
The bones were found in the North Branch Tributary Park, also called the Grayson Kettle Conservation Area because it is a glacial kettle hole—a depression resulting from a mass of ice left behind by a retreating glacier. I had always thought that those woods had a sinister air to them, but not because of the skeleton story—I had never heard about the boys’ find until recently, and it happened so long ago it’s doubtful there’s even a neighborhood legend about it. (Although I could be wrong: I don’t know many people who live in this area.)
I think the Grayson Kettle’s notoriety (in my mind) came from a 1977 incident in which a teenager raped a five-year-old boy there. One day, two boys were walking a dog in the woods when a 17-year-old from Jennings Street—which intersects with Methuen—surprised them. One of them was able to get away, went to the rape victim’s home, and told his parents. I know the brother of the kid who ran away, and he said the woods never had an ominous aura to him, despite the rape. And he had never heard of the skeleton story until I told him. My friend grew up on Slater Avenue and the Grayson Kettle was simply a path of woods (much of it wetland) to play once in a while and build a log cabin.
The neighborhood behind Jennings Street, however, he thought was “very creepy.” There was a man on one of those streets whose face was disfigured in a fire, a guy who “scared the hell out of us.” The layout of that neighborhood was a bit funky—planned streets that were never built or finished and some of them dead-ending bizarrely like Newfield Road and Andover Road, and some that were paved but end in dirt paths, like Almira Road. Take, for instance, Leopold Street and Patterson Avenue: they both end at Houston Street, but Houston Street, Like Methuen, was never fully completed:
Hell, even Grayson Drive is split into two sections by woods:
In the days before GPS technology and Google Maps it was easy to get lost in the lower Methuen/Jennings/Woodrow/Newfield section—a secluded area in the middle of the city that wasn’t stripped of its woods like our Pine Point Party Paradise to the southwest. There are houses dating back to the 1920s in a neighborhood of mostly post-WWII housing. Some of the older houses are “quaint,” but just look at this one from 1920. This is listed as a two-family house? Wow:
And how about that mysterious “desert” in the woods between Grayson and Jennings? Was there a pond there once or something? Weird:
One of my other friends remembers partying in a car on lower Methuen Street near Jennings because it seemed fairly hidden and he thought the cops wouldn’t see them drinking. “We were next to the woods,” he remembers, “and I said, ‘Let’s not stay here. I didn’t even feel comfortable pissing outside the car there. Felt like we were being watched by someone. I warned my wife about that neighborhood. No bike rides or walks down there.”
Of course, the Methuen and Jennings intersection is a stone’s throw from Fox Road, where another skeleton was found in 1994! But that’s another story.
Okay, let’s move on from that weird neighborhood!
This photo was back from when people were petitioning the Forest Park Zoo to give Snowball a bigger and better cage after she was shot by the cop while chomping on a girl’s arm. Well, she never got a better place to live.
Yes, 16-year-old Jody thought Snowball was cuddly and wanted to pet her. A Hell’s Acres reader commented in my original post, “The girl was drunk and had been egged on by my cousin Beth (no last name) who was also drunk, to pet the bear. Beth didn't suffer and although she was the instigator, my aunt always maintained that Jody had been the one to start the incident.”
This is what the Mountain View sign in on Allen Street in Hampden looked like back in the day. The new one was put up in 2015. This was definitely a stop for us kids riding our bikes from The Acres over to Pine Knoll and then pedaling way out to Somers and beyond for the hell of it. Here is the sign before 2015:
Here it is now:
The place, nicknamed “Snappy’s” by Hampden people, has been in existence for 60 years—amazing since it’s open only April through October. Well, I guess it sometimes opened in March and closed in September, depending on the year.
There’s the mountain in the background (Goat Rock) in the above photo! The place, which now has less of a mountain view, sure has gotten bigger over the years. Actually, the original Mountain View was just around the corner from Somers Road and Main. This is what it looks like today:
Snappy’s was so-nicknamed because guys used to park their cars at the side of the original building and blast their music until “Sully” ran out and snapped on them. Not snapped AT them, but ON them. He completely snapped. He was once rumored to have taken a tire iron out as the “peacemaker” in a fight between two customers. OK, it’s not just a rumor. Also raising his ire: calling him Sully, or even worse—the other S word—Snappy.
When Snappy—um Sullivan—moved the shebang to Allen Street around 1963, the original shack ended up being a first aid station at the Ski Rattlesnake in Somers. That’s right, there was a ski area with three rope tows off Old Stafford Road from 1965 to 1968.
What a great slice of Massachusetts Americana the Mountain View was and still is. I never really had anything but soft-serve there, but I always heard about the famous pepper burgers back in the seventies.
See you next month, Hell’s Acres readers.