HANGING HILLS
Mountain — Meriden, Connecticut
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/hanging-hills-meriden-connecticut/

Mountain research record.

A mountain in Meriden, Connecticut, Hanging Hills is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Mountain research record. Its signature presence is Black Dog of West Peak — the figure the file’s accounts keep returning to. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.

The Hanging Hills are the cliffs that look down on Meriden — the traprock ridge of the Metacomet chain where Walter Hubbard built Castle Craig in 1900 and gave the city an eighteen-hundred-acre park. The hills are older than the tower: Triassic basalt, quarried for a century, and the highest ground on the East Coast within twenty-five miles of shore.
The legend is the Black Dog — the small spaniel-like animal that has been reported since the nineteenth century, appearing without sound, leaving no tracks. See him once for joy, twice for sorrow, three times for death. The story was fixed in print by W.H.C. Pynchon's 1898 Connecticut Quarterly account, in which the geologist F.S. sees the dog a third time just before his companion Herbert Marshall falls to his death on West Peak. Sightings continue in Hubbard Park.
The file keeps the Hanging Hills: the traprock, Castle Craig, the Metacomet Trail, and the Black Dog that has been walking the ridge since before the tower was built.
The Hanging Hills are the archive's Meriden file — the park, the tower, and the dog whose third look is fatal.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
The Hanging Hills are the archive's Meriden file — the traprock ridge, Castle Craig, and the Black Dog legend.
A ridge with a fatal dog keeps its tower — the file's suggestion being that the Hills' hold is the omen: the phantom that was literary before it was local, and the cliffs where people still look for it.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Local folklore] phantom animal: Local tradition treats three sightings of the phantom Black Dog of West Peak as a death omen. A natural place in Meriden, Connecticut doesn't need walls to hold a legend; it has geography. It survives as local folklore, which is to say it survives because people keep telling it. The report is preserved in sources like 'Haunted Hiking Trails'. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting.
  source: Haunted Hiking Trails (https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunted-hiking-trails)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Haunted Hiking Trails — Connecticut Office of Tourism
  https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunted-hiking-trails

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Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/