{ "item_title" : "Hockomock Swamp", "item_author" : [" Ichabod Poole "], "item_description" : "There is a pull-off on a back road in West Bridgewater where you can park with your nose to the swamp. On a still night in late October, turn the engine off and wait, and the frogs quit one section at a time, starting far out and coming toward you. Like somebody walking in from the middle, telling them to be quiet. Ichabod Poole first sat there in 1966, in the back of his cousin's Plymouth, because somebody's uncle said that if you parked by the Hockomock after midnight you would hear drums. They did not hear drums. They heard the frogs stop all the way in to the edge of the road, then a long nothing, then a single splash out in the black water that sounded like somebody had dropped a stove into it. Nobody spoke for three miles. Then the girl from Raynham said it was a deer, and everybody agreed it was a deer, and none of them went back for years. He went back. He has been going back ever since. Seventeen thousand acres at the center of the Bridgewater Triangle. The Wampanoag name is usually given in English as the place where spirits dwell, and people have been buried on its high ground for nine thousand years. Inside: The name, what it actually means, and who was here before the English1676, when families went into this swamp to escape a war and did not come out, and nobody buried themThe bird: a police sergeant in Norton who filed a report on a wingspan between eight and twelve feet, put his name on it in a town where everybody knew him, and never took it backThe hairy men, and the thing a Raynham farmer watched move upstream against the current in 1910, as long as his hay wagon, told to the author by the man's grandson at a Route 138 counterLights on the water, what the swamp sounds like at night, and the particular way people get lost in itEvery town that touches it, one by one, including the lake at the top that does not look like it belongs and doesThe people who actually know it: hunters, state men, river people, kids on dares, the ones who will not talk about it, and the camera crowd who showed up after the documentaryA day walk in, a winter crossing when the ice will hold you, and a night at the edgeA visitor's guide, a full timeline, and sourcesThe state protected this place because it holds water. The last chapter is about what else it holds. Book Seven of Ichabod's Haunted New England.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/816/551/9798165514050_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "19.99", "online_price" : "19.99", "our_price" : "19.99", "club_price" : "19.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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