Abenaki

The white settlers called it the Great Pond, but long before they came to Maine, the Indians had named, obviously we wouldn't say Indians now, but I'll just read it as it is, had named it Penny C was C, pronounced Penny C was C, the lake where the women died.

From the Abnaki words, Penembe, Peguas Ababam, in memory perhaps of some unhistoric tragedy.

From their villages on the upper Seiko waters, the Pequots were accustomed to cross over to the Androscoggin and often stopped at this lake midway to fish in the spring and and again in winter to hunt for moose, then snowbound in their yards, that was the yards as in quote, on snowshoes or paddling their birch canoes along the pine-shadowed streams, these tawny pre-Columbian warriors came and camped on the Pen-a-Sea, We still pick up their flint arrowheads along the shore, and it may even be that the short brown scraligs were here before them in Neolithic days.

There are two ponds or lakes of this name, the Great and the Little Penisee will see, the latter lying a mile and a half to the west of the larger expanse and connected with it by a brook, to the north-east, north and west, The land rises in long, picturesque ridges and mountains of medium altitude, and still beyond and above these, in the west and northwest, loom Mount Washington, Madison, Kearsarga and other white mountain peaks.

Lore about large serpent-like creatures living in Lake Champlain dates back hundreds of years.

Eight-foot-long creatures are referenced in Haudenosaunee and Abenaki legends.

Explorer Samuel Champlain said that he saw them in the 1600s.

Now, side note, researchers today believe that they were all talking about a large species of fish that we now call the alligator gar.

The region stretching from downtown Bennington out into the dense wilderness of the Green Mountain National Forest was later dubbed the Bennington Triangle by local author Joseph Citro.

Long before it became a true crime phenomenon, indigenous Abenaki folklore warned that the mountain was a cursed place where malevolent spirits and a man-eating stone caused travelers to vanish from existence.

That folklore took a terrifyingly real turn on November 12, 1945, when 74-year-old Mitty Rivers, an exceptionally skilled local hunting guide, walked slightly ahead of his party in Bigford Hollow and completely vanished.

Despite an extensive military-led search, the only trace of Rivers ever found was a single, ink-stained handkerchief discovered near a trail the following spring.

His path led him through the territory of the Shawnees, where he followed the broad valley of the Wabash River, which we call the Ohio, nearly to its source in the cold, rocky country of the Iroquois.

As the winter snows began to fall, he found refuge in an Abenaki village, waiting out a long, bitterly cold season.

There, he befriended an older traveller who promised to guide him to the great water.

When the spring snows finally melted, the two men walked together, their feet growing painfully sore on the sharp stones of the eastern hills.