Welcome to My Nightmare

OR

What This Web Site Is All About

"History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." -- Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

By Evan J. Albright

Not long after World War II, two investigative reporters named Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer wrote a guidebook to New York City. This was no run-of-the-mill guidebook, which offered descriptions of the best restaurants and hotels and must-see attractions. No, their book instead told you where you could find a prostitute or a gay bar or even a decent flophouse when you were down to your last buck. They called their book, New York Confidential, and it was a publishing sensation.

Lait and Mortimer followed it up with Chicago Confidential and Washington Confidential. Hollywood made New York Confidential into a movie in 1955, turning it into an expose of big city corruption. Lait and Mortimer had no such allusions. "We are not reformers," they wrote in 1951. "We are reporters," adding, "We have nothing to sell except books."

In spite of the name of this Web site -- "Cape Cod Confidential" -- this will not be an expose into crime and corruption in Barnstable County. I spent enough time digging into Cape Cod crime during my ten years as a reporter and editor.

Instead I’ll be writing about the bizarre moments in Cape Cod’s history. Think of this Web site as a combination of "Ripley’s Believe It or Not" and American Heritage magazine, sort of what would happen if the staff of the National Enquirer was hired to write your high school history textbook. I promise everything will be true, almost always taken from what the historians call "primary sources."

The inspiration for this Web site comes from two sources. In the 1930s, the late Donald Trayser (for whom the Trayser Museum in Barnstable is named) published a series of articles in Cape Cod newspapers about some of the most notable crimes in Cape Cod’s history. He wrote about Jolly Jane Toppan, who murdered an entire family in Cataumet during the summer of 1901 (newspapers later claimed she murdered as many as 100). He also wrote about Charles Freeman, who in a moment of religious frenzy in 1879 stabbed his own daughter to death, believing that God would resurrect her in three days (needless to say, she never got up). Trayser’s series was so popular, that it was reprinted several times, the last time in 1968.

The other inspiration for this Web site is a writer who makes Trayser look like Pollyanna: Henry David Thoreau. His tour de force book, Cape Cod, is one of the most mean-spirited accounts of this region ever penned. While many praise the book for its naturalist descriptions of the Cape’s landscape, few point out how cruel Thoreau was in describing the inhabitants of our little peninsula. Here’s a passage from early in the book that is indicative of Thoreau's mean streak:

A strict regard for truth obliges us to say that the few women whom we saw that day looked exceedingly pinched up. They had prominent chins and noses, having lost all their teeth, and a sharp W would represent their profile. They were not so well preserved as their husbands; or perchance they were well preserved as dried specimens. (Their husbands, however, were pickled.)

Today, Cape Cod is hailed as a classic. That was not the case when portions of the book were first published as a series of magazine articles in 1855. Cape Codders were outraged at their portrayal, decrying Thoreau. When the articles were collected into a book in 1865 after Thoreau’s death, the furor started all over again. As one resident put it in a letter to a Cape newspaper, "Thoreau's book on Cape Cod has been voted a failure by all who are truly acquainted with his subject, while it has been praised by those who are totally ignorant thereof, and has, with this verdict upon it, already become stale, flat and unprofitable."

Cape Cod was the "Confidential" book of its day. Today, hundreds if not thousands of homes on Cape Cod proudly display Thoreau’s book on a shelf. What once was considered a scandal is now a classic of literature. Isn’t it amazing what a difference a century makes.

© 1998, 1999 Mystery Lane Press

rev. 4/17/01