Echoes in the Darkness

Prologue

There was always a taste for Gothic in the original colonies, particularly in that historic territory that lies west of Philadelphia, and east of Lancaster where Amish farmers still resist the 20th century.

Schoolchildren of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania are told that the springtime explosion of red, white and blue on the mournfully lovely countryside was caused by the sacrifice of Revolutionary dead. The tulip is blood-scarlet, the dogwood bone-white, the iris a visceral blue. Thus, the flora is a memorial to the patriots, or so the schoolmasters say.

The haunt of history is everywhere. “The Main Line” of the Philadelphia commuter train slashes east and west near the old battleground where soldiers wrote of corpse-eating wolves that could outhowl the wind. Local schoolchildren envision bloody footprints in the snow, and gaunt specters with ice-locked muskets, their feet wrapped in rags, led by General Washington who denied himself shelter so long as his starving soldiers had to sleep in the wilderness.

It’s a land of splendid trees. When William Penn arrived in 1682 he marveled at the trees: black walnut, cedar, ash, hickory, sassafras, beech. The oaks are formidable: red, white and black. Some trees, 250 years old, are local treasures. There are ancient buttonwoods, yellow pines, firs and red maples. And of course, there’s hemlock.

A great oak still stands that was used as a gibbet after the Battle of Brandywine where in 1777 Washington suffered a defeat. The wretched victims of the gibbet were spies, or so their executioners claimed. Their white dangling bodies turned iron-gray and then black against the colorless sky and parchment leaves of that hanging oak.

Not surprisingly, it’s a land of antiques and collectors. Tables in Main Line mansions and manor houses are often made of split slab, with round legs set in auger holes. Ancient nails of all kinds are treasured collectibles, some shaped like tiny piano mallets.

This was a land of forges and furnaces. Iron was always cherished. “There is an abidingness about iron,” a settler wrote, “and most things made from it.” It’s impossible not to feel this abidingness along The Main Line.

Youngsters from all over America come here to attend prestigious prep schools and academies. For higher learning there’s Swarthmore, Haverford, Villanova, Bryn Mawr and others, as well as several seminaries marked by split-rail or white-pine or iron gates, surrounded by native trees that turn bronze and fiery during Indian summer. The trees lie side by side with pretty autumn flowers whose names are sinister: red-hot poker, white snakeroot. It’s hard to miss the taste for Gothic.

One can be lulled by a sense of the “abidingness” on suburban roads, especially on cloudy days when vivid colors are muted, and cheerful light shines from a Georgian mansion, a French château, a colonial manor house. There’s something reassuring about the craft and labor that’s turned so many ancient carriage houses and barns and stables into enduring homes of brick, stone and cedar. But just past any turn in the road, there might be another kind of structure made of the local moss-green stone called serpentine. A slated spire or iron-gray vaulted arch might loom suddenly. It’ll only be a church or public meeting house or a distant manse, but the medieval stone undermines the pastoral in this heartland of Friends, as the English Quakers were called.

Perhaps the Gothic Revival was inspired by the mercenaries who brought the warrior arts. German professionals taught the citizen soldiers the value of cold steel at the end of a musket. Bloodied French veterans scoffed at tales of Lafayette’s gallantry. They massacred for money. In the early days native Indians were never certain whether they should murder for the invaders or risk being murdered by them. In the land of patriots and Friends there were always pitiless renegades. They were as medieval as serpentine stone.

But even with their taste for Gothic the locals were bewildered by the series of irrational and “evil” events that destroyed many lives and led to the most massive homicide investigation Pennsylvania had ever experienced.