"OLD COOT"

When I was bringing up my youngins...many years ago...I liked to tell them of the GHOST that lives in our back yard woods...being that I live near The Bellows Pipe Trail. I delighted in the fact that the Transcript would run a story about "OLD COOT" and had pictures taken by Randy Trabold,1939, to back up the story. Well time passes and old news just goes by the way side. I happened to mention "OLD COOT" to someone the other day and their response was..."OLD WHO?"... {they may have thought I was referring to chbpod... :~) }... So I got out my SURFboard (an intentional pun) and went a surfing the net. All I could find was an article in...http://www. iberkshire.com/...written by Joe Durwin last year on Oct. 27. I couldn't find the Photo taken by Randy Trabold. Anyway, Pass this on to your youngins... TIS THE SEASON TO BE SPOOKY...HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Mt. Greylock's Bellows Pipe Trail - The Old Coot As the Civil War began, a North Adams farmer named William Saunders left home in 1861 to fight for the Union. About a year later, his wife, Belle, received a report that her husband had been gravely wounded and was in a military hospital. That was the last she heard of him. Alone and in need of help, she hired a local man to work the farm with her; later she married the man and he adopted her children. In 1865, a bearded, ragged man, wearing a Union blue uniform, stepped off the train in North Adams. You can guess who had finally returned home. Saunders walked to his farm, and while standing outside he saw his wife and happy family, his children calling another man "daddy." Crushed, he turned on his heels and walked away, heading toward Mt. Greylock, where he built a shack in the remote Bellows Pipe. He lived the rest of his days there, almost a hermit, hiring himself out occasionally to farms, known to locals only as the "Old Coot." War and time had ravaged his appearance and no one recognized him. It's said that he even worked his old spread on occasion, perhaps sitting down to meals with his family, only he knowing the truth. Folks say the Old Coot was insane, but whether it was caused by the horrors of war or grief at losing his family, no one knows. One winter's day, hunters came upon the shack to find the Old Coot cold dead. But they were startled to see his spirit fly from his body and head up the mountain. That was the first sighting of the Ghost of the Old Coot, but certainly not the last. To this day, his bedraggled spirit is sometimes seen on Mt. Greylock, always heading up the mountain, but never coming down. You might say you don't believe it, but are you brave enough to walk the Bellows Pipe Trail after dark? ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Mount Greylock, it seems, may be home to an even more esoteric entity. He is known as the “Old Coot,” and is sometimes seen wandering up the mountain near the trail that runs through the Bellows Pipe area. As the story goes, the ‘Coot’ is the astral remnant (or should I say revenant?) of a man named Bill Saunders, who lived in Adams nearly a century and a half ago. Saunders left his wife and child to fight in the Union Army. A year later, his wife received word that he had been badly wounded and was in a field hospital. When, after many months passed, she heard nothing more of him, she assumed him to be lost. She hired a local man to help work the farm. Eventually they married. Then, after the war had ended, Saunders returned, only to find another man had taken his place. Devastated, he spent the rest of his life living as a hermit in a small shack in Bellows Pipe. Many years later, hunters discovered him dead in his cabin but were mystified to see a strange man-shaped shadow dart out of the shack and into the woods, heading up the mountain. Ever since, hunters and hikers have reported seeing a shadowy, bedraggled form walking through the woods up Mount Greylock. Twice, the North Adams Transcript has published photographs alleged to be of the “Coot,” one by Randy Trabold, in 1939, the second by Richard Lodge in 1979. The Lodge photograph seems to depict a tall, dark, man-like form walking through the woods with his head hung low. Was this the ghost of Bill Saunders?