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Contact: Denise Cassino, Publicist
LOCAL AUTHOR HITS THE MARK ON LEGENDS OF NORTH VILLAGE WITCH WITH NEW BOOK
PEPPERELL, MA, October 11, 2008 – Author, Rosemary Chaulk’s new book, Nissitissit Witch, has taken Pepperell by storm. “I can’t keep up with the demand,” says Chaulk as she unboxes another shipment. “The book has touched a chord with people of Massachusetts.” Centering on North Village because of the curse of the witch, research showed that North Village was doomed long before the witches ever came.
The book, Nissitissit Witch, suggests that the original curse on the valley was from the Indians who were slaughtered when the invading white settlers took the Nissitissit. The white man, as victor, wrote the history, but what about the history of those who came before us, what about the troubled Indian spirits? While telling tales of Indian Spirits and witches, Chaulk used this platform for her true message, which is the ravages of early pollution. “We took America from the natives and the first thing we did was to decimate the woods, pollute the rivers and torture the land for anything we could take for profit. We dammed the rivers and killed the salmon,” says Chaulk. Desperate for answers, the locals blamed the unusual and untimely deaths on a curse by the “witch”, a local woman whose extraordinary insight enabled her to predict and warn against the toxic practices.
During the 1800s, the Nissitissit was no different than any other river. During that time, rivers were the recipient of every waste product and poison produced. North village is located in a narrow valley that concentrates the flow from about forty thousand aces of land upstream. There were many little villages along the Nissitissit and any toxins they wanted to dispose of were dumped into the river. Right in North Village, Chaulk found that they made felt and had a velvet shop. The process of making felt uses mercurous oxide. Velvet clothes use felt in the collars, and the dyes in the velvets were also very toxic. Long-term exposure to mercury causes death by fits of insanity and people died in ‘an unusual way’.
Nissitissit Witch takes all of these factors and spins a fictional entertaining yarn that has lots of history of the area spun into a tall tale.
In its second printing, Nissitissit Witch is available on the author’s website, www.rosemarychaulk.com or through Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.
