Bennington: Ghost Stories
Bennington alumni spanning four generations come together to share first person paranormal experiences and encounters they had on the small campus in Southern Vermont. As the stories unfold, striking parallels are drawn that prompt deep questions about space, who owns it, and who is not welcome to occupy it.Alex Pintair:When we first got to Bennington, it seemed like there was a bit of an indoctrination that would happen between the upperclassmen and the new kids where they would sort of say, all right, so this is where you are now. This is our space, you know, there's a ghost in Jennings and there's catacombs under VAPA.And there's all this stuff happening around here and, you know, welcome.Kate:Oh, well. It's crazy here because it's the place where the Four Winds meet.Melinda Castriatta Avellino:The end of the world was the Native American burial ground where the Four Winds met. They buried Native Americans that had mental issues that where the Four Winds met that was sort of like the story that went around.Kate:Oh, you know, when you're a first-year student there and you start hearing these stories, you're like, oh, well, that makes sense.Maddy Wood:But I have heard about the Four Winds. It was one of those things where I heard about it so much that I could swear that I was like experiencing it once when it was like standing in the middle of the lawn when it was really windy freshman year. I definitely believed that.Kate:And the place where the Four Winds meet, of course, we have this collective insanity, this collective mood that strikes us.Lisa Sciandra:But that may have just been a story people told to make it seem scarier.Raven:Yeah. I'd be interested to know actually the whole history of what happened. The Native Americans in that area, I mean, was Bennington really built on top of a burial ground? Is that real or is that just like white people, like, you know, making stories? Luz Fleming:Yeah, I always assumed those were campfire stories and I wasn't able to dig up much credible information one way or another on that one.I've recently been in touch with Vermont folklorist and Bennington alum, Andy Kolovos, and he wrote, “It is very much a white colonial kind of narrative. One that combines things like guilt with romanticism to generate a narrative that explains why things happen to white people. So I have not done any real inquiry into those stories about Bennington College. I treat them more like Bennington College, folklore tradition, rather than anything tied to the history of the land, or even the broader folklore of Vermont. This is not to invalidate the notion of an insular folklore among students at the college. That's real and cool.”Okay. So it may or may not be true, but there is absolutely no question that the Bennington campus possesses some extremely intense energy and I'm not here to prove or disprove any of the lore.I just want to hear people's firsthand experiences, and so let's hear from someone who swears he saw a being named Goat Boy, who has always been associated with the Four Winds and the Native American burial ground.Alex Pintair:My name's Alex Pintair. I started at Bennington in 1992. The first time I saw Goat Boy was probably mid September. And there was some sort of a party. It might have actually have been a birthday party for me. I think my mom sent down a cake or something and we're all hanging out. And at some point a friend of mine and I just decided to step outside, get some air. We had walked towards the center green and we were just sort of talking and kind of walking slowly along and then we were just standing there. And it was one of those fall nights where it was cloudy and a little bit chilly and there was, breeze, there was always breezes going through there. And as we're standing there, it almost seemed like if you can imagine fog that just sort of gets a little bit more solid.And over across the green up against one of the other dorms, it was almost like a patch of fog started to coalesce and get a little bit more solid. As it happened I nudge my friend and was like, “Are you seeing that?” And he thought he could, but he wasn't sure. And my dad had taught me when I was a kid that when it's nighttime and it's dark out, you can always see things better if you look just to the side of them.Something about the rods and cones in your eyes, get tired during the day, so at night, your peripheral vision can be a little stronger. And so I told my friend to do that and then he could see it. And as we're kind of watching this thing it sort of slowly sort of forms that were looking at this skinny pale white body of what you would think of as a ten-year-old boy, essentially.And then the head was the skull of a goat. These big black cavernous eyes, you know, this pale skinny boy body, it was kind of hopping from one foot to the other back and forth, but in a way where it was so slow, it like stayed up in the air longer than would be humanly possible.And he had something, holding something in each hand sort of stick shape, but I don't, I don't know what it was. And we stood there and just watched this happening for a minute or so, and in shock and silence. And then I remember I said something like, “Are you seeing this?” And he's like, “Yeah!” And then I broke eye contact essentially, when we looked back it was gone.So, of course, you know, we start walking across the green to like, see what's going on and we get closer and closer to it. There's nothing there. And we're just standing there sort of in the center of the green and looking around. And then I see something moving down at the edge of the green down where the edge of the world is there.And it's, it's the same thing. It's like this fog just becomes a little bit more dense and suddenly there he was, and he's just slowly dancing back and forth. And my friend sees it as well. And we start walking again, down the green now towards the edge of the world and the closer we get, it just goes away and it's not like I saw it disappear.It's just like, maybe I looked away, maybe I blinked. I don’t know, it was just gone. So then we get to the edge of the world. And if you remember that there was like a little Stonewall and it stopped being flat and it dipped down downhill and there was these fields and over on the left was this grove of pine trees.And again, same thing and there is, and these sort of slowly dancing back and forth. And that's when I kind of got shivers. It had seemed all almost exciting when we had seen them the first time. And then the thought crossed my mind, you know, it's, it's leading us somewhere and I don't think I want to go where it's leading us.Right where he was dancing down by those pine trees there's actually an old graveyard down there. So I was like, “Yeah, we should, we got to stop. We're not going down there.” And he's like, “Yeah, I agree.” And we went back, you know, back to the party. And we're a little bit freaked out. And I remember talking to, I think his name was Jason, who was the upperclassmen, and we told them what we saw and he's like, oh, you saw Goat Boy.And we're like, “What is up with that?” And he said, “Well, the story goes that back when this was when the land that Bennington College now sat on was Native American land, they said that the Four Winds met right in the commons area. And they said that because of that, the land was cursed. And so whenever there was someone in the tribe who, you know, had gone insane or had killed someone or had done something evil, they would bury them there on the cursed land.”And so apparently Goat Boy was the specter or the ghost of someone that had been buried there.
