In My Footsteps: A Cape Cod and New England Podcast

Episode 91: BONUS - The Darkside of a Vacation Destination(10-27-2022)

October 27, 2022 Christopher Setterlund Season 1 Episode 91
In My Footsteps: A Cape Cod and New England Podcast
Episode 91: BONUS - The Darkside of a Vacation Destination(10-27-2022)
In My Footsteps: A Cape Cod & New England Podcast
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Show Notes Transcript

The monthly bonus episode turns a vacation destination on its head.  Episode 91 takes a deep dive into some of the creepy, scary, and downright disturbing stories from Cape Cod's history.
The Cape is a beautiful place to live and visit, well worth its status as a popular vacation spot.  However, even the most spectacular places have a few skeletons in the closet. 
As a child growing up in the 1980s Cape Cod was seen as simple and mundane, bordering on boring.  Only later when becoming interested in its history did some of the darker stories come to light.
This bonus episode will explore true crime, paranormal, and much more that has occurred on Cape Cod.

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Hello World and welcome to the In My Footsteps podcast. I am your host, Christopher Setterlund. Coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, this is episode 91. It's a monthly bonus episode, the special Halloween bonus episode of the podcast. With these bonus episodes, we take one topic and dive deeper into it. And because Halloween is coming up in just a few days from when this podcast drops, this week's episode is going to be the darker side of a vacation destination. For generations on the surface, Cape Cod has been this paradise, like I say, a vacation destination, people from all over the country come here to enjoy the beaches, the quaint shops, and drives. And it is every bit the destination that I always say it is. But just below the surface, there have been some crazy things that have happened on this peninsula over the generations. And that's what I'm going to talk about this week because it's another part of the uniqueness of Cape Cod. I love where I live, and the natural beauty that I have the privilege of being able to drive a couple of minutes and be amongst with so many ties to historical events. So this episode of the podcast is not meant to replace Cape Cod in any sort of bad light. It's meant to show you that there's way more going on behind the scenes in a lot of places. So these are going to be some of the scariest, weird unexplained events that have happened on Cape Cod.

For me growing up on Cape Cod, a child of the 1980s. And I'm sure it's the same way for a lot of people that are my age around my age. You see this area in one way. In the summertime, it's fun, you go to the beach, there are people around, and it's kind of crowded, Labor Day comes the people all leave you wave at them from the overpasses. And as a kid, you almost think that it's like closing the doors on a bar or restaurant at night. It's last call Labor Day It's done. You hunker down, kids go back to school, and you get ready for the long and brutal winters where there's literally like nothing to do until it gets to be late March and early April. I freely admit I am in that camp where I thought Cape Cod was boring. It was dull. In the summer. It was fun. But the rest of the year there wasn't much going on. Now granted, I had friends and we would have a lot of fun growing up in the 80s and doing things riding bikes walking to the store going sledding. But I mean in the grand scheme of things from Labor Day till almost Memorial Day, Cape Cod was deserted, or so I thought, sure there were times growing up when Cape Cod became kind of the center of attention. Whether it was the freighter Elia coming ashore at Nasik beach in 1984. Hurricane Bob in 1991. But other than that, it was a paint-by-numbers vacation area busy in the summer, and slow in the winter, which is why when I first had the layers peel back for me as far as Cape Cod's history goes, I was shocked and disbelief. The first such event that shattered the illusion of my quiet home was the actual Lady of the Dunes murder mystery. You all that have listened to the podcast. You know, I've written the book based on the documentary produced by Frank Duran that dives into his trying to find her identity and solve the case. I was a teenager when I first heard the story about a body being found in the dunes in Provincetown in 1974. And growing up, I was always of the mindset that she was out there with a boyfriend a lover way out in the dunes. Something happened and she ended up dead. Only many years later, when I started working on the book with Frank did I realize there were a lot deeper, darker ties to this story than just a lover's quarrel. And we're getting close to 50 years with that mystery being unsolved. Hopefully with my book and Frank's documentary, maybe there'll be some answers. I've said before, that I'm not as interested in who killed her. I'm more interested in giving her her name back. So she has an actual name on her tombstone. So the lady of the dunes was kind of the first bursting of my bubble as far as what Cape Cod was. And I'm not saying Cape Cod is some sort of dangerous place. It's no different than most other places. It's safer than most places but

When you grow up thinking that it's a rather mundane beach resort-type community, especially in summer, and then you hear these weird stories, they make a bigger impact. In the years before the Lady of the Dunes, there was another true crime case that shocked the country because it happened on Cape Cod. And that was the killing spree of Tony Costa. This is one I had not even heard of Tony Costa until probably the late 2000s. And it was another It was a shock. Like, wait a minute, there was a serial killer on Cape Cod. Oh, yes, there was between 1968-69 Tony Costa killed at least four people out deep in the woods of Truro in the area behind the Pine Grove cemetery. If you go out there, even today, the Pine Grove cemetery is the middle of nowhere, you could go out there and scream your lungs out, and nobody would hear you. So just imagine more than 50 years ago, Kosta murdered at least four women with the number being possibly as high as eight. But the thing is when he was arrested, and they found the four bodies, local authority, so we've got enough to get him into court and on trial, and he was found guilty and put away. But when the judge asked Tony Costa, if he had anything else to say for himself at his trial, he said, Yeah, keep digging, which leads me and Frank and others to believe that there are other bodies still out there in the Turo woods now, and for the lady of the dunes documentary, Frank talked to a former state police officer who admitted that after Costa was arrested for the four murders, there was never a full reconnaissance done of the Turo woods, which means they never did a thorough search to see if there were any other bodies. So if you're ever hiking those woods in Truro, a lot of people go mountain biking out there. There's a lot of desolate fire roads. Just think about the fact that there could be remains of another murder victim of Tony Costa within feet of you, that will creep you out. But there could be more bodies for another reason. There have been rumors bubbling below the surface for years surrounding the Lady of the Dunes that her murder had something to do with the mafia. And the fact is that legendary mobster Whitey Bolger spent a lot of time in Provincetown in the 60s and 70s. This was confirmed when the Crown and Anchor in Provincetown when their owner at the time, Stan Sorrentino said under oath that Whitey Bulger had been there. If you've ever taken arts dune tours and Provincetown that goes from Race Point Beach, east through the Pete Hill bars where the rustic dune shacks are, if you've ever been out there and seen how expansive those dunes are, and how remote some of those areas are, they seem like perfect areas to drop a body. So there are rumors, legends, and urban legends, that there could be victims of the mafia out in the dunes of Provincetown. And if it's anything from around the lady of the dunes, I'm you're talking 50 years with Shifting Sands, the blowing the sands around, there could be skeletal remains just under the dunes. I have no information, no names. This is just one of those plausible things that could be true. So think about that. The next time any of you hike out to the dune shacks, how remote some of those areas are and what could be just under your feet. More recently, Cape Cod was in the news in 2002 for the brutal murder of fashion writer, Christa Worthington in Truro. And that case was a shock to the system. That was one of those things where if you didn't know the Tony Costa or the Lady of the Dunes stories, you would think this was highly unusual for Cape Cod. But like I said, we've got some of these true crime stories just like everywhere else. And it's all interconnected. When you start to dig it's like a spider web. Just In researching the Lady of the Dunes for the book and helping Frank with some of his reconnaissance work. We were searching for the diary of convicted serial killer Hadden Clark. He's from Wellfleet, or at least his family is he's in jail for a pair of murders in Maryland. He's in jail in Maryland, but he claimed to have killed the lady of the dunes. He told Frank if you find my diary buried behind my grandparents' property there, I've got more information. So you pull back from the spiderweb a little you've got the Lady of the Dunes, Hadden Clark, Tony Costa, Whitey Bulger. And when we were out there searching, we bumped into someone who knew Christa Worthington. So it tied it all together. It was just a creepy coincidence. But those cases that I just went over and the mafia ties and all that are the brightest lights when it comes to the creepy and the true crime as far as Cape Cod goes, I just mentioned last week the obsession murders of Lizzie Coleman and Sadie Hassard from 1895 and 96. I hadn't even heard those stories until I started doing research for the podcast for true crime segments. As I said, Those sound like they could have been ripped out of the headlines from the present-day where jealous or obsessed men stalk and kill young women that sounds like today are going back a few weeks earlier, the murder for hire plot of Bathsheba Spooner, she was born and raised in Sandwich on Cape Cod and went on to pay British soldiers during the Revolutionary War money to murder her husband and dump him down a well. Obviously, with some of these, you've got to dig and find old newspaper clippings, because this is not exactly stuff you put on postcards, but it's there, wherever you're from. You've got some kind of story like that. There's a story of young Edwin Ray Snow, who around the turn of the 20th century, robbed and murdered his young friend James Whitmore in South Yarmouth in an area that's a few minutes from me that I see daily. And finding and researching that story immediately changed how I view that area. There's the unsolved murder of Clarence Parker from Falmouth in the 1930s. I wrote a blog about that one gunned down on his walk home from A&P carrying a leg of lamb that the robber thought was the money from the cash register shot dead on his front lawn. No one ever was caught or charged. These are stories from long, long ago that I had to research and find otherwise they get lost in time. Only when I began researching my family tree for my Nana before she passed away, did I become interested in Cape Cod history. So we're talking 2006. And with the creation of online newspaper archives, it makes it easier to just research anything. And after the Lady of the Dunes after Tony Costa, I kind of became interested in whether there was anything more. Are there any other of these cases? And like I just named off there are and I'm still finding more that I haven't mentioned on the podcast or in blogs because I find it interesting that Cape Cod has this dark underbelly. After all, like I've said repeatedly, I love where I live. I love the beaches. I love the quaint main streets, the numerous beautiful scenic drives, and the historic homes. And I find it fascinating that there are all these true crime stories, paranormal stories, strange fires, it makes that quote-unquote boring Cape Cod that I thought I grew up in more interesting. I remember when I was probably a young teenager, my parents probably my father in passing mentioned a murder behind a nightclub called the Swamp Fox in Hyannis. And then it'll always stuck with me and only recently did I research it with the online archives. In 1976, a teenager named Chuckie Webster was murdered and left behind there. I think he was kind of in a shallow grave for weeks. And when I told my mother that she knew him, she knew who he was. And she knew who Richard Guerini the man who was charged with the murder was so that's something that affected my actual family. One of my sisters had a friend of hers get murdered in a robbery attempt in 2002. And I'm not going to name names you can look the story up, but that's another one where it kind of shatters your illusion of where you live. But it's not all murders on Cape Cod in the past. You've heard me mention about smallpox graves. You want to talk about creepy. I've mentioned on past podcast episodes about the Providence town secret smallpox cemetery. I've mentioned Thomas Ridley and his grave deep in the woods of Truro behind Montana's restaurant, and there are others smallpox was a terrible disease. These people were buried far from the village because they feared contaminating the people who were still alive. Several graves are just hidden in the woods. They have become almost these adventures to try to find these graves. And when I have found them Thomas Ridley, the Provincetown, smallpox cemetery, and more recently, the solo grave of Mehitable Wixon, which is in the woods of Harwich, off of Lothrop, road, their adventures until you find them and realize it's real people that are buried deep in the woods far from anyone. Mehitable Wixon is a weird story. She died during childbirth in 1832, at the age of 17. And she's buried in this little plot along with the baby. And I cannot find the reason why she is buried there with the child. And her husband, John Wixon, is buried in a normal cemetery a mile and a half away. That's one of those stories where it's not murder. It's not smallpox. It's just a weird strange thing that Cape Cod has. Of course, being that Cape Cod is where the Pilgrims first landed in 1620. It was first settled in the decade or so after that. There's a long history of Cape Cod so there's a long time where Europeans were here and have died, so there's a lot of paranormal stuff. The woods around Thomas Ridley's grave are pretty creepy. The fire roads behind Pine Grove cemetery and Truro are terrifying knowing there could be more bodies out there. There's the infamous Barnstable house on Route 6A in Barnstable Village that is rumored to be one of the most haunted places on the cape. It is said to be home to possibly as many as 11 spirits. They always do Haunted House tours this time of year down in that area. The other big one on the cape is the Orleans Waterfront Inn and Restaurant, right near the Orleans Rotary. It's been on the show Ghost Hunters on the SyFy channel. The legend is that in the 1920s, the Orleans in was also a brothel. And there was one of the working girls there. Hannah was murdered and haunts the end of this day. There have been stories I've heard of people seeing a nude woman in the top floor window when there's no one staying there. But you don't have to go on organized haunted tours, you can just walk through any of the cemeteries. They may not be haunted. But if you want to go back and look at the oldest graves on Cape Cod, there are three on the cape that date back to 1683. Two of them are at the Lothrop Hill Cemetery on Route 6A in Barnstable and the other one is at the old burial ground and sandwich which which was at the intersection of Main and Grove Street. It can be fun and spooky just to walk around the grounds of the cemetery at dusk and just after dark, where when you hear anything, it could be just the wind or it could be up Spirit coming out to wander the grounds. Hell we had a time back in March, I believe of this year. I was with Frank we were doing some filming for The Lady of the Dunes, not the documentary, but my own footage to make my own videos. And he and I met Steven the medium and his husband Elix at St. Peter's cemetery in Provincetown. While Steven was communicating with Susan Perry, who was one of Tony Costa's murder victims, he stopped and asked us if we heard that I was videoing him, so I didn't hear anything. But he said it was like a buzzing wind of spirits all coming to support Susan Perry, who was saying she didn't want to talk. It was fascinating like a support group coming to prop her up while she spoke. So we've talked about murders and true crime, haunted houses secret graves. Cape Cod has also seen its share of suspicious fires. The worst forest fire Cape Cod ever saw in 1946 is believed to have been deliberately set. It burned anywhere from an estimated 15 upwards to 35,000 acres. And it's a rumor that someone deliberately set that fire that torched all this land in sandwich and born. Then there's the story of the hotel Belmont on the Dennis Harwich line where in November 1974, the fire department responded to a small grass fire and they came in and put it out, but less than an hour later, they were called back and there was a much larger fire. Although they were able to put it out the Belmont never reopened as a hotel it was torn down and now it's condos. And then there's the story of theSitzmark II also known as the cinema lounge. Also on the Dennis Port Harwich line. It was a risk a controversial nightclub. In August 1974 It seriously burned to the ground with arson investigators saying it was done by a real professional. The urban legend is that it could have been mob ties. It could have been a bomb that blew it up. Because the story was about two explosions within milliseconds of each other started the fire. And you can go and find the newspaper stories where they talk about this. This is not me blowing smoke. I haven't written any blog or done a podcast segment about the Sitzmark cinema lounge fire but that's coming up incidents at bars and nightclubs with drunken unruly patrons that are not common on the Cape but that you hear a lot about pufferbellies and Hyannis ended up being a real trouble spot, especially in its last 10 or so years in existence with a lot of shootings and stabbings. Like I mentioned the Swamp Fox earlier. But to circle back to the beginning. The reason why I'm naming all these things is because there are really not that many on Cape Cod. As far as true crime hauntings and such. Yeah, there's a lot, but I've had to do a lot of research to find especially the old true crime stories. And there may be others that I've yet to find that will be shared in future podcasts and blogs. But the real reality is Cape Cod is an excellent place to live maybe a little lot expensive, but we've got beautiful beaches, quaint shops, and tons of history. There's a reason why it's a vacation destination where all these people want to come here in the summer, some end up building homes. But if it wasn't an amazing place to live, there wouldn't be this crush of people in the summer. But there are a lot of creepy and spooky old cemeteries haunted houses, and potential murder locations, especially out in those Truro woods. If you want to be creeped out, go take a hike out there on those old fire roads, or hike way out in those Provincetown dunes and know that there was never a full reconnaissance after Tony Costa's murder spree. Know that the mafia spent a lot of time in Provincetown and could have dumped people out in those dunes that were never found. Maybe you'll be out on a walk in those Truro woods, and you'll stumble upon a bone. Maybe you'll be out metal detecting in the dunes in Provincetown, and you'll come across a ring that's on a hand. Or maybe you'll be wandering the grounds of an old cemetery after dark and often in the distance you'll see a shadowy white figure coming towards you because even though Cape Cod is a vacation destination, it's got its own shadowy past and seedy underbelly, and if you go looking for it, you'll find it. Happy Halloween. Thank you for tuning in to Episode 91 of the In My Footsteps podcast. I'll be back next week for episode 92 My birthday the podcast's birthday, it's going to be a great show. But enjoy these last few days of spooky season. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I have been Christopher Setterlund and I will talk to you all again soon.