Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf Read Online Free Page A

imbalance. When that missing symbol has meaning for more than one person, when it may even be the connection many people have to a common history, it can spark something worse.
    Most curses are active things, placed on people or places in times of vengeance or stress. They are invoked by the living, and they need to be nourished or they die. Many people think that believing in a curse might continue to give it energy even after the original person, who uttered the curse, has died.
    The Wampanoag wampum belts fall somewhere between the two. There is no doubting their importance to a nearly wiped-out culture and their connection to a famously haunted area of the country. What we don’t know is whether a spiritual explosion—which at times can be spooky and at other times downright dark—is part of an energy imbalance or is caused by a curse that remains active until the item in question finds its way back to the ones who revere it.
    The reason doesn’t really matter to those caught in the storm—they are just trying to understand what is happening to them and perhaps seek shelter from it.
    New England is the heart of haunted America. With its architecture, long history, and dark and stormy nights, it has been the archetypical location for the ghost story since Nathaniel Hawthorn handed his mantle to people like H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King.
    In a corner of Massachusetts, right on the border with Rhode Island, lays an area known as the Bridgewater Triangle. Depending on which authority you listen to, the Triangle might stretch anywhere from the edges of Plymouth Rock all the way across the Nutmeg State. The highest concentration of paranormal activity in the country lies in this relatively small area.
    Within the Triangle, anything is possible. It has been the home of UFO and Bigfoot sightings and the ground over which zombies are said to crawl. Ghosts
are around every corner. Some towns embrace their haunted histories, while others wish everyone would stop talking about them. And while it may be the playground of supernatural creatures like giant thunderbirds and pukwudgies (troll-like demons), the area’s high number of unusual murders, suicides, and cases of mental health disorders separate it from other places in the country that also experience ghostly phenomena. The Triangle has always been judged by the things that happen there, and the closer you look and the further back you go, the more you come to believe that the continuing activity is due to a lost belt.

    These Wampum belts at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in Key West, Florida, are similar to those that were taken from Anawan.
    The Wampanoag tribe met the Pilgrims when they first landed in this country, and at the time, they were the dominant people in the area. Although they had been hit by disease in the years leading up to the arrival of the Pilgrims, the Wampanoags’ connection to other tribes throughout New England and their entrenched political and social systems made them a major force. Like most Native American tribes, they had no formal written language and passed on much of their belief system and history through the oral tradition. The map to their past and to who they were as a people was a series of wampum belts worn by the sachem, or leader, of the tribe. Although there is no visual record of what these belts looked like, research has uncovered certain details.
    According to anthropologist and author Charles Robinson, the belts would have been about nine inches wide and could have wrapped around an average-sized man several times. Each belt would have consisted of shells and other natural elements, some worn through years of use. The most common colors may have been black and white, but similar belts from other tribes featured red, gray, and purple as well, with significance added to the color, shape, and size of each new shell that was added.
    During ceremonies, the sachem would tell the history and important moments of the tribe,