A strong connection between paranormal activity and crimes is one of the most common motives in fiction, but also in lore and in so-called true stories. There are a number of stories where the paranormal activity is considered the cause of the crime. This applies especially to hotspots like the Bridgewater triangle.
Is this a cheap excuse for criminals? Of psychopaths who want to evade persecution? Or is there more to this? Fact is that haunted landscapes are often related to a higher number of extraordinary crimes, among them shocking crimes, satanic rituals, abductions, or mysterious disappearances.
There are many arguments against paranormal influence triggering malevolent human behaviour. We are fully responsible for our actions. Claims of “a voice told me to do this” are either cheap excuses or the result of conditions like Schizophrenia. But there are perhaps natural and less natural trigger effects that can play a role.
In the case of the Bridgewater triangle, where all sorts of crimes happened as animal mutilation or vandalism, but also serious crimes as murders, copycatting might play a role. Groups of people were attracted to the reputation of the place and started their own nonsense.
There should also be other sets of circumstances considered when it comes to hotspots for crimes in forests, mysterious mountain regions, swamps, and other areas. These include remote, abandoned regions that are less densely populated, which have served as a refuge for drug dealers and other criminals. Alternatively, there may be little law enforcement in a certain region.
There is also the question of what happened in the first place
A murder and an unsolved crime are the most common reasons for later paranormal activity.
A ghost of the victim of a murderer seeking revenge. Or the crime is unsolved, and the ghost haunts the place in order to bring the murderer to justice. The brutal crime left a residue, like a memory stored at the place it happened. Many hauntings in houses or special places are connected with crimes.
Sometimes it is said that the original crime leads to paranormal activity, which causes further crimes. A house or a place, or a forest is cursed.
This is the case with the Bridgewater triangle and the Freetown Fall River Forest: The brutal murder of Indian American king Philip and the slaughter of the American indian tribes there is one reason for the curse of the Bridgewater triangle, according to some believers.
However, this is a prominent example of how it works both ways.
People also say that the massacres and the betrayal that happened there are the result of ancient, old, darker forces. That’s hard to believe, as indigenous people were slaughtered nearly everywhere in the New World.
Another reason why we may attribute crimes and other events to paranormal activity is our own mindset. Everybody knows the “local legend” concept used in countless movies and stories. The lore of haunted places goes way back to the times of the Old Testament. This creates two effects: We attribute certain traces, events, and types of crimes as ritualistic, even if there might be no occult background here. Often, it is conspiracy theories that have a life of their own in our world, which create a certain interpretation. The second effect is that we see the paranormal at work even in cases where there is no evidence for this, but there is a long and strong tradition of storytelling shaping our thinking.
Nevertheless, the “power of place” is a concept well known around the world, and there are things that cannot easily be explained away.
What is the power of place?
We are talking about a less comprehensible force and a much more mysterious force, rather than a curse or a haunting. The power of place might also be something much more complex than a vortex or a portal. And not something which is the main cause of a specific event.
It is the “something” in the trees, in the fields, in the earth, that we can never comprehend. We can feel it, it is the subtle force shaping things at certain places, not a voice but an ancient influence.
It would be naive to attribute certain events or even crimes to that force, but perhaps there is a tendency in certain places to make things more likely to happen here as in other places. Mysterious disappearances are a prominent example – conditions of a landscape, like a wilderness, can only partly explain the statistics.
The key characteristics of paranormal zones remind us that we have to abandon the normal ways of thinking in our everyday world if we want to get a sense of the unknown. Things are more paradoxical than logical. The otherworldly realm even demands we accept contradictions.
Any of these zones, like the Bridgewater Triangle, the Alaska Triangle, or the Bennington Triangle, are hotspots of countless bizarre phenomena which are not simple UFOs or hauntings. They appear to shape human history in mysterious ways over longer, eternal periods, and not as a sort of intervention that causes an individual to do a certain thing.
Why is that?
If we look at the Bridgewater Triangle, we have reports of all kinds of phenomena: Thunderbirds, UFOS, Bigfoot, little people, giant cats, orbs, experiences of being watched, a sense of sylvan dread, a mysterious hitchhiker, a trucker pursuing drivers on a lonely road, mysterious disappearances, satanic rituals, briefly the whole set of strange phenomena. This is odd. The popularity of such places might trigger hoaxes or people invent things, but it is still remarkable. Things that can’t be explained away happen. And there is a blurred line between normal reality and the otherworldly here. The phenomena are real but not literally real. This is the biggest challenge for the human mind. But it explains why there is no simple connection between crime and paranormal activity.
One of the researchers of the Bridgewater triangle said that whatever resides there is an old soul. This is a good image. Something that works in large periods and something that doesn’t relate to humankind in a way we understand. It is more something that exerts a hidden influence upon us.
What does this force want?
Of course, there is no simple answer to this. Perhaps it is the transformative power of nature. William P. Simmons writes in Lost in the Wildwood: Sylvan Dread in Weird Fiction: In the confused paths of our minds, the forest is always there, ready for us to enter, ready to enter and transform us. For centuries, our imaginations have populated the forest with mythical beasts and beings, ancient powers that inspire delight and dread. Old Gods flourish in Oak trees and rivers, Elemental spirit walk borderlands of soul and soil. The Earth itself, imbued with a secret sacred sentience, hints of vast possibilities that we cannot define.” He speaks of a “cosmic intelligence beyond our logic and science, facts and spreadsheets. A secret soul both malevolent and nourishing”.
What exactly this force does, we don’t know. What we do know is that extreme circumstances bring out the best but also the worst in men. A famine, isolation, and starvation can awaken barbaric impulses. Civilisation is always a thin layer, barbarism is never far away. But the cause of horrific actions or crimes is never a power of place, or nature, it is what already exists in humankind.
