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The Redcoat Skeleton · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:14
Kristin: Grim.
0:14
Kristin: Morning and welcome to the Grimm.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode we'll be opening the gate and entering Bennington Center Cemetery, located in Bennington, vermont.
0:25
Kristin: So grab your favorite mug, cozy up and let's take a dig into history.
0:30
Kristin: The weather is shifting, spring has arrived, softening the last brittle edges of winter, and the grim is nearing the end of its first season.
0:39
Kristin: Only a few episodes remain, but we intend to make them linger.
0:43
Kristin: This week we turn our attention to Bennington, vermont, a town wrapped in postcard charm, particularly during autumn's firebreak crescendo.
0:51
Kristin: But beyond the leaf papers and whitewashed storefronts lies one of the most quietly powerful landmarks Bennington Center Cemetery.
1:00
Kristin: If you're drawn to old graveyards, not just for the dead but for what the dead leave behind, bennington Center belongs at the top of your list.
1:07
Kristin: Founded in 1762, the cemetery lies beside the Old First Church, a stark white colonial structure now spiritually divorced from the graveyard it once served.
1:18
Kristin: The cemetery is lovingly tended by the Bennington Center Cemetery Association and the care shows not just in the trimmed grass to the old-growth trees, but in the atmosphere.
1:28
Kristin: This is a place that breathes.
1:30
Kristin: The hillslopes gently, shadows stretch long and if you look past the trees, the green mountains rise like ghosts in the distance, but it's the gravestones that truly seize you.
1:41
Kristin: Many are carved from white marble, an unusually defiant choice in the 18th century when slate, granite or sandstone were the norm.
1:49
Kristin: Marble weathers poorly, soft and vulnerable to time, but here it lends the landscape an otherworldly brightness, like bones catching light long after sundown.
2:00
Kristin: One of the grounds when you'll find small signs, quiet place cards that do more than name the dead.
2:05
Kristin: They draw your eye to the stone carvers, the artists, artisans and the unnamed hands who gave death a face.
2:11
Kristin: Carvings are fierce, precise, mournful.
2:14
Kristin: There's sermons in stone.
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Kristin: Among them, zerubbabel Collins is the most prolific.
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Kristin: Over 40 stones in Bennington Center bear his hand.
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Kristin: Unmistakably, once you know the signs their wings, skulls, blazing suns, soul effigies etched into pale marble, the grim iconography from a forgotten gospel.
2:34
Kristin: His apprentice, benjamin Dyer, carried the tradition forward and though the hands changed, the message remained you are dust and you will return.
2:43
Kristin: The message remained you are dust and you will return.
2:47
Kristin: But Collins was not alone.
2:48
Kristin: His work is joined by stones from Ebenezer Soule, a master in his own right and heir to a remarkable four-generation dynasty of carvers.
2:54
Kristin: Soule's legacy extended through four sons, two grandsons, an adopted grandson and a great-grandson, a lineage of hands shaped by chisel and granite.
3:05
Kristin: He was an itinerant carver, moving between Massachusetts, vermont and New Hampshire, leaving behind quiet masterpieces in graveyards like breadcrumbs through the wilderness.
3:16
Kristin: Southey likely passed through Bennington in the 1770s and his stones, some of the earliest in the cemetery, reflect a humble, haunting beauty.
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Kristin: His winged heads stare straight ahead, expressionless and eternal.
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Kristin: Intricate feathers stretch beneath them.
3:32
Kristin: Wigs of curling stone rest atop their round faces and the crisp curves of their carvings stand in contrast to the cold finality of their inscriptions below.
3:41
Kristin: Nearby, the stones of Josiah Manning offer a different kind of presence heavier, more primal.
3:48
Kristin: Manning's winged effigies don't gaze blankly, they glare.
3:52
Kristin: Some look startled, others angry.
3:54
Kristin: Their broad, simple faces echo African masks or Mesoamerican figures less refined but no less powerful.
4:02
Kristin: On one of his works, the Latin phrase memento memoriae remember you will die is carved like a whispered warning.
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Kristin: Manning knew the words well.
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Kristin: He died in Connecticut and carved his own tombstone before passing.
4:16
Kristin: So much artistry scattered across centuries and stage converses here in one small Vermont cemetery.
4:22
Kristin: For those who understand what they're seeing, bennington Center isn't just a burial ground.
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Kristin: It's a cathedral of carved morality, a Louvre of funerary art.
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Kristin: But for those who stop, who see and who listen, it offers something rare.
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Kristin: Not just beauty, but memory.
4:39
Kristin: Not just memory, but meaning, and meaning here runs deep.
4:42
Kristin: Bennington is more than a quiet town.
4:45
Kristin: It's a name etched into the long shadow of the American Revolution.
4:50
Kristin: In August 1777, just 15 years after the cemetery was founded, the town found itself drawn into war.
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Kristin: The Battle of Bennington, though, fought across the border, and while loomsack New York was aimed squarely at this place.
5:05
Kristin: The British came for a supply depot, but they left in ruin.
5:09
Kristin: A detachment of British and Hessian troops, led by Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Baum, marched on Bennington, unaware that it would be met with fire and fury.
5:19
Kristin: Local militia led by General John Stark and bolstered by Seth Warner's Green Mountain Boys rose from the fields and forests to repel them.
5:27
Kristin: Stark's words still echo in the dirt there are the Redcoats and they are ours.
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Kristin: Or this night, molly Stark sleeps, a widow.
5:35
Kristin: They fought not just for provisions, but for their homes, their dead and their right to decide what would be written on their stones.
5:42
Kristin: The British were broken, hundreds were killed or captured, and the ripple of that defeat weakened Burgund's campaign, clearing the way for American victory at Saratoga and, eventually, independence.
5:55
Kristin: But what is a battle, after all, if not a prelude to burial?
5:59
Kristin: Today, a monument near the center of the cemetery marks the graves of 75 soldiers from that conflict, british, hessian and American.
6:08
Kristin: All buried in the same earth, all claimed by the same silence.
6:13
Kristin: But not every grave here speaks the language of war.
6:16
Kristin: Some speak in poetry.
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Kristin: The far edge of the cemetery's sloping ground lies a modest slab headstone, plain, unadored and perhaps the most visited grave in all of Vermont.
6:26
Kristin: Beneath it rests Robert Lee Frost, one of America's most celebrated and most quietly haunted poets.
6:34
Kristin: Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco, a world away from the frost-britten woods and stone fences that would later define his work.
6:42
Kristin: His early life was shaped by instability.
6:45
Kristin: His father, a volatile journalist with Confederate sympathies, died of tuberculosis when Robert was just 11.
6:52
Kristin: The family, penniless, relocated east to Massachusetts and from that moment on, hardship followed Frost like a shadow.
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Kristin: He attended Harvard but never graduated.
7:03
Kristin: He labored as a teacher, a farmer, a factory worker, always writing, always observing.
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Kristin: For a time he and his family moved to England, where his first two collections were published to quiet acclaim.
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Kristin: But it wasn't New England, especially New Hampshire and Vermont, that etched itself into his bones and became the bleak, beautiful stage for his poetry.
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Kristin: Frost's verse is famously deceptive, written in rural vernacular with pastoral imagery and conversational rhythms.
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Kristin: But beneath the surface lies something colder.
7:35
Kristin: He wrote of walls that divided neighbors, woods that tempt with sleep, roads diverging in Frostlite's woods and truths too harsh to speak aloud.
7:44
Kristin: His world was one where nature was not a bomb but a mirror, vast, uncaring and deeply indifferent.
7:50
Kristin: Though the public saw him as the voice of rustic American wisdom, frost was not a man unburdened.
7:57
Kristin: He won the Pulitzer Prize four times, read at John F Kennedy's inauguration and became a national symbol.
8:04
Kristin: But beneath the accolades was a life frayed by loss.
8:07
Kristin: He buried his wife, eleanor, and four of their six children and then struggled with mental illness in the family, including a son's suicide and a daughter's institutionalization.
8:18
Kristin: As the decades passed, his poetry grew starker, the sentimentality eroded, leaving behind something sharper, more resigned.
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Kristin: Death was no longer a metaphor.
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Kristin: It was real, present, inevitable, among the colonial dead, carved masterpieces and the casualties of war.
8:35
Kristin: A place heavy with history and haunted by memory, not in a theatrical way but in the still inescapable way of frost creeping in under a doorframe.
8:52
Kristin: His headstone is humble a plain slab of marble bearing his name, alongside Eleanor and several of their children.
9:00
Kristin: Beneath it, an epithet carved like a final, reluctant truth, I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
9:06
Kristin: It's a line from his 1941 poem the Lesson for Today, and it reads both like a confession and a closing argument.
9:14
Kristin: Not quite bitterness, not quite peace, just a weary acknowledgement that the world, for all its beauty and cruelty, was never quite home here, in this quiet cemetery, surrounded by the carved faces of the 18th century sole effigies and the long shadows of war.
9:30
Kristin: Frost is exactly where he belongs, not exalted but embedded, and another voice in the silence.
9:37
Kristin: Another name on the stone, still quarreling quietly with the world.
9:42
Kristin: Another name on the stone, still quarreling quietly with the world and the cemetery.
9:46
Kristin: On one side of the monument honoring the soldiers of the American Revolution reads a simple inscription, easy to overlook David Redding, loyalist, hung 1778.
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Kristin: At first glance it reads like a simple conclusion, final, uncomplicated.
10:01
Kristin: But Redding's story, like the times he lived in, was anything but simple.
10:05
Kristin: It's a tale of war, betrayal of justice and doubt.
10:09
Kristin: Obonzo would not rest for nearly two centuries, a name nearly lost to history and a man whose death echoes still in the soil where he fell.
10:19
Kristin: Reading was a loyalist, a man who sided with King George III in the blood-slick chaos of the American Revolution While others in Bennington were pledging themselves to independence.
10:30
Kristin: Reading threw in his lot with the British, enlisting in the Queen's loyal rangers and fighting under General Boyan during the failed 1777 campaign.
10:40
Kristin: He escaped the disaster at Saratoga, but he didn't disappear.
10:44
Kristin: He stayed in the shadows carrying messages, gathering intelligence and slipping between enemy lines in plain clothes.
10:51
Kristin: It was his second life, not as a soldier but as a spy, that sealed his fate.
10:56
Kristin: In 1778, redding made a fatal mistake he attempted to steal muskets from a barn-turned-arson owned by Colonel David Robinson.
11:05
Kristin: It was a bold act of sabotage, and a clumsy one.
11:08
Kristin: He was caught red-handed.
11:09
Kristin: Worse, he was in civilian attire, stripping him of any protection as a combatant.
11:14
Kristin: He was a traitor, plain and simple, and the Republic of Vermont, barely two years in its own radical experiment, was eager to make an example of him.
11:23
Kristin: Years in his own radical experiment, was eager to make an example of him.
11:26
Kristin: Redding was jailed in the barn behind the Canamunt Tavern, then broke out and fled toward Hoosick Falls, new York.
11:30
Kristin: But he didn't make it.
11:31
Kristin: He was dragged back in chains.
11:33
Kristin: The gallows were raised.
11:35
Kristin: His first trial was flawed six jurors instead of 12, a technicality under English law which Vermont still observed despite its independence.
11:44
Kristin: His lawyer, john Burham petitioned for a new trial and the Council of Safety agreed.
11:49
Kristin: The execution was postponed by a week, but the crowd was already gathered.
11:54
Kristin: Hundreds came to see a man die.
11:56
Kristin: When the news broke of the delay, the mood turned violent until Ethan Allen himself arrived, just released from British captivity, allen quieted the mob by promising blood.
12:07
Kristin: You shall see someone hung at all events, for if Redding is not then hung, I will be hung myself.
12:14
Kristin: The crowd dispersed and on June 11, 1778, justice, or something like it, was carried out At his second trial, this time with a full jury.
12:24
Kristin: Allen served as prosecutor.
12:26
Kristin: Redding was again found guilty of amical conduct.
12:29
Kristin: His guards, sacked at the same man who had once let him escape, drove him to the execution site.
12:34
Kristin: The noose was waiting.
12:35
Kristin: David Redding became the first person ever executed by the Republic of Vermont.
12:40
Kristin: But that should have been the end.
12:42
Kristin: Instead, his body was claimed by Dr Jonas Fay, one of the men who had helped draft Vermont's Declaration of Independence.
12:50
Kristin: Fay preserved Redding's skeleton for study, but something was off.
12:54
Kristin: According to local legend, he could never get the bones to quite fit properly together.
12:58
Kristin: The joints wouldn't align.
13:00
Kristin: The frame refused symmetry.
13:02
Kristin: Whispers grew that there was something wrong and maybe justice had not been fully served.
13:07
Kristin: The skeleton passed in the hands of Dr William Towner of Massachusetts, who had no trouble assembling it.
13:14
Kristin: Redding's bones were used in medical instruction, passed through the generations of the Towner family, eventually stored in a chest in a dusty attic part relic, part curse.
13:24
Kristin: In the 1970s the skeleton resurfaced.
13:28
Kristin: John Spargo, president of the Bennington Historical Museum, recovered the remains and placed them in the collection, but they were not put on display.
13:37
Kristin: They were not honored.
13:38
Kristin: A single photo in 1975 by Centennial Publications showed the bones folded, anonymous and waiting.
13:46
Kristin: And then finally came the burial.
13:48
Kristin: In 1976, nearly two centuries after his hanging, david Redding was laid to rest just miles from where he once swung from the gallows.
13:57
Kristin: His grave is marked now, not grand, not forgotten.
14:00
Kristin: A name, a date, a footnote in stone.
14:03
Kristin: Bennington Center Cemetery is more than a resting place.
14:07
Kristin: It's a ledger of lives and losses, chiseled in stone and softened by time.
14:12
Kristin: Here the revolutionary dead lie beside poets, spies and forgotten souls, all watched over by the work of hands long vanished.
14:20
Kristin: The trees whisper and the marble gleams like old bone.
14:24
Kristin: Every path is lined with reminders that the past is never truly silent and though time moves on outside its gates, within them it stands, still waiting for the living to remember and to reckon.
14:36
Kristin: The grave grind for Bennington Center Cemetery was a maple nut brevet from the coffee bar.
14:41
Kristin: For more honorary grinds in the area, please visit the-grimcom.
14:47
Kristin: For now we're closing the gate on Bennington Center Cemetery.
14:50
Kristin: We hope you enjoyed our dig into history.
14:53
Kristin: If you did subscribe today to join us next time when we open the gate on the Grimm you