Title: The Murder Shelter

General Information about Item:

• Verbal Lore, Legend
• English
• Country of Origin: United States
• Informant: John T. Brady ’19
• Date of Collection: 10-31-17

Informant Data:

• John Brady is Dartmouth student in the class of 2019. John is from the suburbs of Chicago, IL. He grew up north of the city in a nice suburban town which he described as very “bubbly.” John was part of a boy scout group growing up in the Chicago area. Every summer for about one week, John and his fellow boy scouts went backpacking. They backpacked all over the United States. His scout troop went to New Mexico, California, Wyoming, Wisconsin, and other places. One of his earliest backpacking trips was actually a section of the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina and Tennessee. The trail started out of Hot Springs, NC. His early experience with the Appalachian Trail sparked an interest for John to conquer the entirety of it.

Contextual Data:

• Cultural Context: This legend has been told over many years throughout the Appalachian Trail hiking community. Any person can understand the Legend, but it is most prominent in the hiking community.
• Social Context: This Legend is told orally from hiker to hiker on the AT. The legend is also passed down through writing in trail and shelter logs. Most people hear about the legend through talking with other people on the trail and sharing stories.
• Overall Context: John Brady’s early experience hiking a portion of the Appalachian Trail encouraged him to later attempt to complete the whole thing. With his boy scout troop, he hiked a 40-mile section of the Appalachian Trail (AT), but he knew that the trail consisted of over 2,000 miles. He said that he saw some “weird looking Hippie dudes” as he described them, and thought that he may want to hike the entire trail between high school and college. John said that people are on the trail because they are in between things in life. “You are either in between school, love, or jobs,” John said. For him, he was in between graduating from high school and starting his new life at Dartmouth in Hanover, NH. John hiked the Appalachian Trail from March 5th until July 29th. Starting on March 5th was early in the season, but not too early where it would be uncomfortably cold. He also started early to avoid the large crowds that start the AT between mid-March and mid-April. It took John 149 days, or just under five months, to complete the AT. John’s preparation consisted of “googling” and asking knowledgeable backpackers about how they prepared for the trail. John did not spend a lot of time physically training for the journey but instead made sure he had a good plan of attack for the first month of the trail, which is most important according to him. Some people try to get ahead and complete many miles quickly but end up hurting themselves. John made sure that he set a pace that would allow him the most success. John starting hiking the AT with a lifelong friend of his that was also in his boy scout group. His friend was from the same hometown in Chicago, IL. His friend hiked for about three or four days before he got sick with a stomach illness and had to stop hiking. He hiked with many different groups of hikers going Northbound. The most prominent person that John hiked with was a man with the trail name “Werewolf.” Werewolf was from Tennessee. He was a grocery store manager and recently divorced from a long time wife. John and Werewolf got along very well given that Werewolf was around 40 years old. He also hiked with a mechanic named “Macgyver” from one of the southern states. He also hiked with two brothers named “Link” and oddly enough “Folklore.” the brothers were twins and were known on the trail as the “Arkansas twins.”

Item:

The “Murder Shelter” legend among hikers is that some local disturbed individual a number of years ago came up to the shelter in the middle of the night and murdered a couple of hikers on the AT. There are many journal entries in the shelter log that tell the entire legend of the Murder shelter. Many hikers decide to bypass the shelter and not utilize it due to the legend passed down from hiker to hiker orally and written.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

• Image of The Murder Shelter on the Appalachian Trail

Informant’s Comments:

• “I was hiking alone one dreary day in Virginia. My goal for that night was to make it to a hostile, a place to stay right along the trail, and I had heard good things about it. I was soaked with rain, I was tired, I was exhausted. I got up to a shelter and I figured ‘you know I might just spend the night here.’ I grabbed a Snickers bar out of my backpack, I bit into it, grabbed the shelter log book, which keeps track of other people who have passed through the shelter. All of the comments in the book were ‘Welcome to the Murder Shelter’ and maybe if it had been a bright sunny day and I was hiking with other people I would have spent the night there, but alone on a dreary day, I was definitely not going to stay there.  Being alone while hiking, I was not interested in being murdered by the ghost of this guy, or by a copycat killer.”

Collector’s Name: Colton French 

Tags/Keywords:

• Legend, Verbal, Folklore, Story, Scary