Donny Marsden, owner of the Fayeville General Store, remembers the children too. “Polite kids, just a little strange,” he says. “They didn’t go to school, didn’t seem to have friends. I never saw them with any of the kids in town, anyway. They’d come in, load up on candy and soda, then head back up the hill on their bikes. The boy would buy comic books. And sometimes they’d play the video games I’ve got set up in the corner: Sea Wolf and Night Driver. But they’d never play if other kids were around. They had a funny way of talking too. Always using big words. My wife called them the Little Professors. The girl, one time I remember she said, ‘I hope your day is sublime,’ as she was leaving. What kind of kid talks like that?” He shakes his head. “I kinda worried about them up there on the hill all alone. Surrounded by lunatics is no place to raise kids.”
Irene Marsden, Donny’s wife, chimes in with her own story: “Our nephew Billy was about the age of the Hildreth boy. He saw them on their bikes one time and asked if they wanted to play. The girl shakes her head and says they can’t. ‘We’re not allowed,’ the boy says. ‘Why not?’ Billy asks. ‘Because,’ the girl says, ‘we’re vampires, and if we played with you, we’d have to bite your neck and drink all your blood.’ She bared her teeth and snarled. Poor Billy was spooked. He never asked them to play again.”
Lizzy
August 20, 2019
BILLBOARDS WERE ILLEGAL in Vermont, but quirky hand-painted signs were everywhere. The one greeting visitors to the island looked as if the local elementary school had helped with the design: The backdrop to Welcome to Chickering Island was a bright blue lake with boats and a cheerful smiling sunrise. Above it all soared a giant, disproportionate crane that looked more like a pterodactyl.
I’d pulled out my laptop and done some quick research on Chickering Island when I’d stopped somewhere in Pennsylvania to refuel and get a cup of crappy gas station coffee and a questionable burrito kept warm under a heat lamp. It turned out it wasn’t an island at all, but a peninsula on Crane Lake, the fourth-largest lake in Vermont. And despite the name, there were no cranes this far north in Vermont. The whole thing felt like a lie: not an island, and not a single crane anywhere near the lake. Chickering Island had just over five hundred year-round residents, and the population jumped up to a couple thousand during the summer. There were lots of rental properties. A few farms. A protected wildlife sanctuary. Two campgrounds （at one of which I’d made a reservation for four nights）。 An artsy downtown full of seasonal shops. Spotty cell reception. It was a place where people vacationed, renting rustic little summer homes along the shoreline of the lake in an attempt to truly get away from it all.
And the perfect place for a monster to hide.
* * *
I HAD TRAVELED all over the country, been to nearly every state and up to Canada and Alaska—even down to Mexico—hunting monsters. But I’d avoided Vermont. Hadn’t been back there since I was a kid. Whenever I got a tip about a strange creature in the Green Mountain State, I pushed it aside, made excuses.
Vermont meant Fayeville and the Hillside Inn.
Nothing, I’d told myself again and again, could make me go anywhere near it ever again.
The most terrifying, unfaceable monster of all dwelled in those hills and mountains: the dark, shadowy form of my own past.
But now here I was.
I rolled down the window and inhaled the air.
Breathe, I told myself. You’re all right. You can do this.
I’d driven right by the exit for Fayeville over an hour ago. I’d felt the pull of it, of Fayeville and the Inn, felt the place reaching for me with dark little tendrils.
Part of me longed to stop, to go see what was left of the place.
Others had, I knew. True-crime junkies who loved The Helping Hand of God and wanted to see for themselves where it had all taken place.