Wytchery: A Gothic Cabinet of Curiosities and Mysteries

A collection of gothic horror stories, urban legends, ghosts, haunted houses & other curiosities

The History Trekker

 

History travel is time travel

WHEN THE TIME AND PLACE IS RIGHT, the present fades away and you find yourself transported back to another time, another place. The more you know history, the more you understand how we got here, the more you understand who we are. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

Have you ever wondered what it was like to live in another time? Sometimes it’s the little details that tell the story of the past, things that at the time were taken for granted. Everything from spoons to medicine …

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As a kid, nothing made a long drive complete like a stop at a historic site. From the battlefields of the Civil War, to time traveling back to early Plymouth at Plimoth Plantation, there’s more to American history than we realize, and it’s all around us. Just ahead at the next exit even.

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Some towns and cities reek of history. New York City has history literally stacked on top of history. Other towns are like stepping back into time … from the curated Colonial Williamsburg, to the towns where the twentieth century was just slow to show up. Nearly all towns and cities have their history, if you know where to look.

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All around the world, people celebrate their history. Hell, here in America we celebrate medieval history and we weren’t even around in the middle ages. Maybe it’s the costumes, maybe it’s just a chance for guys to play with weapons. While you might not get an authentic experience, you do get a healthy dose of fun and a lesson or two.

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We’re still fighting the American Revolution in some places. The Civil War is still being played out on the streets and in courtrooms across the country. It’s hard to argue that the founding fathers would have been against gun control when one of the first things Washington did was require everyone to register their weapons. Would the original participants in the Boston Tea Party join today’s tea party? The oft times hidden side of history …

Return to Sleepy Hollow, from an essay by Washington Irving

Haunted Towns and Cities, Historic Towns and Villages, Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson River Valley, The History Trekker

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Sleepy Hollow, a remembrance by Washington Irving is a short article which first appeared in the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1839. Unlike Irving’s more well-known short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Sleepy Hollow is autobiographical in tone. He explored the area as a teenager – a valley of the Pocantico River near Tarrytown, New York, […]

Folk horror from Wiltshire: The Blood Stone at Luccombe Spring, starving out the Vikings at Bratton Camp, the White Horse of Westbury and the nature of folklore

Britain, Europe, Great Britain, Haunted Hikes, historic and haunted travel-destinations, historic sites, Papers, The History Trekker

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The Luccombe Valley below Salisbury Plain and Bratton Camp, just visible in the upper right. In the foreground are two of the four barrows in the valley, with one of the others being the site of the Bloodstone.   While wandering on Salisbury plain one day I came across a hidden valley and as I […]

On the mystery of a white horse carved into the slopes of Bratton Downs … the White Horse of Westbury

Britain, Great Britain, historic sites, Papers, The History Trekker

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Nobody really knows when or why a chalk horse was carved onto the side of Bratton Downs, below the iron age Bratton Camp. The current version has evolved over the past two centuries into its rather literal shape today. An 18th century engraving shows an earlier horse, smaller and facing the opposite direction. It’s believed […]

Is it really the House of the Seven Gables? Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way the Turner-Ingersoll mansion in Salem breathes New England history

Haunted Tours and Attractions, historic sites, New England, Salem and Essex County, The History Trekker

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“Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted […]