Forbidden Files - The Disappearance of Sorensen Transportation

Why are nearly 40 tractor trailers abandoned somewhere in the woods of New England, in a spot that before Google Earth they were apt never to be found? That question was asked by a whole lot of people last year after a video of these trailers was posted on YouTube, and the debate ranged anywhere from this being a grand robbery, an insurance scam, or a few ideas that were even more sinister.

Although it's hard to tell what you're looking at by the picture above, here is a zoom in of the northern group of trailers.

First let me give you the background. This adventure began last summer when I received a message from my friend Barry with a link to a YouTube video titled Mystery of the 39 Abandoned Trailers, about a guy who found these trailers while looking on Google Earth for new places to ride his dirt bike. The link my friend sent me included one simple sentence - We need to find this!

The video was careful to not disclose the trailers location - and in fact three weeks after it was posted it disappeared from the user's channel altogether - but there were just enough clues to start our investigation. All the trailers had the name Sorensen Transportation on them, a shipping company from Bethany CT that either went belly up or merged with a larger firm in the 1990's. Whichever happened, it took place prior to the Internet being the informational catch-all that it is today, and after three days of chasing every lead to a dead end I was beginning to lose faith in ever finding them. That's when Barry, who turned out to be a much better detective than I was in this case, sent me an excited message - I found them!

No sooner did his coordinates hit my inbox than I was clicking them and seeing the satellite image for myself, and we immediately made plans for that weekend to hike to the spot, winter weather be damned. These weren't the kind of woods that came with parking lots and hiking trails and benches dedicated to loved ones though, they're the kind where hundreds of acres are densely pack with trees and bushes in a remote area of a remote town. So I located a cemetery that bordered the woods, and thinking it would make a convenient enough place to park the car while we made the 1-1/2 mile hike in, our plan was set.

That Sunday morning we arrived and our first obstacle was that the cemetery wasn't nearly as handy as Google Earth made it seem, with houses and a cliff-like hill bordering the access point, so off we went looking for another spot. We finally parked down an old logging road, waited while a pickup crept by, then confident they weren't stopping to check out what a Toyota Yaris was doing running around the woods, we set out.

The next hour consisted of avoiding private residences, trudging through snow and slush, and climbing the same long and steep hill we'd tried to avoid at the cemetery, and which surrounded this location like a fortress. Days later I plugged the GPS coordinates into an elevation map and learned our destination was 1,014 ft above sea level, a brutal and unexpected climb that at the time had me wondering why we weren't at home watching football with a beer like other grown men. And to make things extra fun this remote area had no cell phone service, so for navigation we were relying on my new Garmin GPS which I hadn't quite gotten the hang of yet. My biggest accomplishment with it thus far was pinpointing the neighbors shed that borders our backyard.

So I was more than a little surprised when vehicles started appearing through the trees.

And soon after we began seeing trailers.

One of the things mentioned in the YouTube video was that the trailers were full of various merchandise like appliances, mattresses, and other valuables. Part of that was true, as most of these trailers were packed full, but everything we came across was used, not the newly packaged merchandise we'd assumed the trailers were hiding. We found ourselves looking at trailer after trailer of some pretty nasty junk. I'd take my chances on a jailhouse cot before snuggling up on one of these mattresses for the night.

And in trailers that were full on the inside, more goodies were piled underneath.

After spending some time wandering among this group, we followed the overgrown remains of a dirt road - a road once wide enough to drive these trailers down - in search of the second cluster.

This group had once been neatly parked but have sat so long they've begun toppling onto each other.

We didn't open any of the trailers ourselves, but enough had been left open to see that once again we were dealing with stuff that would look more at home in a dumpster.

Including the trailer full of appliances that had been talked about in the video. I'm guessing this fridge last saw action around the same time milk was being delivered to your front steps.


Another thing debated on were the rigs used to drive these trailers out here. More than one person claimed these cabovers (a name I had to google) would certainly have had value to them, especially if they'd been running well enough to haul all this trailers out here to begin with.

There were many other vehicles, including these dumptrucks which on the outside at least seemed in pretty descent shape. Of course, I sit behind a desk all day and have no dirt under my fingernails, so probably I'm not the best judge of heavy equipment.

Here was one of my favorites, this old beast that I posed next to like some bad Sears catalog model.

Which had a hood ornament that, as chick repellent, would've rivaled the hand grenade shell I once mounted to my old Chevy Chevette.

So what conclusion did we come to on why these trailers are abandoned in the middle of nowhere? By dirt road, these woods are accessed only by a house a quarter-mile to the north. Whether they own the property or not we do not know, but we didn't encounter a single Private or No Trespassing sign the entire day. I couldn't find any connection to the owners of the property and Sorensen Transportation though, so here are my theories:

a) The company hid them as an insurance scam - Although this was a popular theory online, it just doesn't make sense to me. What would the claim be, that someone stole 40 of your trailers plus all your trash? Unless it happened so long ago that the stuff was all in good shape at the time.

b) The flip side of this, that the trailers are actually stolen and hidden out here - Another one that seems plausible at first but has some holes. Why steal all these trailers just to let them rot?

c) This is an illegal junkyard - The amount of other vehicles out here makes me consider this, but not all the vehicles seem like they were junk. Plus this wouldn't explain where the contents came from, unless the final job of Sorensen before going out of business was to dispose of it all, and this was how they saved money doing it.

d) This is the world's biggest hoarder - In the end, this is the theory I'm leaning toward, mixed in with a dash of the illegal junkyard. Most of what we saw in those trailers smacks of that TV show Hoarders, where an item doesn't have any practical value but has just enough Yeah, but what if I cleaned it up potential that the person refuses to part with it. Additionally, at least one of the trailers had a sticker on it advertising storage trailer sales. Could it be that these are retired shipping trailers that were sold for storage, and owned by the house to the north?

Although a giant hoarder is what I've decided on, one thing keeps me from going all in with this theory. Every hoarder I've seen on TV is surrounded with their clutter. Usually they live in a house that has barely enough pathway to walk room to room, which allows them to look at and touch their belongings whenever they want. But in this case you'd have to hike a quarter-mile into the woods if you wanted to roll around in your junk. Then again, most of this is stuff you can't exactly bring into the living room with you, so what else are you supposed to do with it?

So the king of all hoarders? Yeah, maybe.

But ... 39 overflowing trailers is an ungodly amount of anything, and it still makes me wonder if somebody isn't hiding something out there in all this mess.

Curious Graves - Persecuted For Wearing The Beard

My friend Barry would not have had a good time living in the Massachusetts in the early 1800's. He's one of those guys who likes to go for stretches at a time without shaving, such as an entire season or two, and it's not uncommon for him to show up at our house sporting the kind of shag you half-expect something to jump out of. In the prim and proper 1830's this lack of grooming was just the kind of thing that could get you ostracized from a community.

That was the dilemma for Joseph Palmer, a man perhaps born in the wrong generation. Like my friend Barry, Palmer enjoyed a thick but not quite so lustrous beard. But when Palmer moved to the town of Fitchburg Massachusetts at the age of 42 he was singled out by everyone from young kids who would ridicule him in the streets, to clergy who would shame and criticize him for what they claimed was Palmer's resemblance to the devil.

Never mind Palmer's argument that when you put pictures of the devil and Jesus side by side Jesus tended to be the scruffier of the two, the townsfolk didn't want to hear that, they just wanted him to clean up and conform to society. When he continually refused, things came to a breaking point, and one day four of the more reasonable men in town set out to beat Palmer up and forcibly shave him themselves. Palmer was a stubborn man in more ways than one however, and with a small knife was able to fight the men off and injure two of them in the scuffle.

With zero sympathy in the community, Palmer was quickly deemed the instigator in the fight and sentenced to jail. There he took his stubbornness up a notch, writing letters and smuggling them out through his son which were published in the local Worcester Spy newspaper, where he told of his story and persecution. And a funny thing started to happen. As word of Palmer's plight became widespread, sympathy throughout neighboring communities began to grow until a call went out for him to be released. Realizing the court of public opinion had swayed, the sheriff told Palmer that he was dropping all charges, and no hard feelings you're free to go. But not satisfied with the sheriff's simple admission of my bad, Palmer refused to leave his cell until many days later when police had to physically remove him and dump him in the street.

Palmer's story has a happy enough ending, at least. Due to the popularity his letters from jail brought, he was able to live the rest of his days free from harassment until his death in the 1870's. But he never forgot how he was treated, and as a message to the world - and perhaps as a big middle-finger to many of his tormentors - he adorned his gravestone with this bearded likeness of himself, and on it had carved this reminder; "Persecuted For Wearing The Beard"

Joseph Palmer's grave is located in the front row of the Evergreen Cemetery in Leominster,
(Lemin-stir, not Leo-minstir ... Tina) Massachusetts.

Bear Hill Tower

It's fitting to me that a town by the name of Stoneham would be home to a stone tower that looks straight out of medieval Europe. Welcome to the Bear Hill Tower of Stoneham, Massachusetts.

Located within Middlesex Fells, a 2,500 acre reservation criss-crossed with hiking and mountain bike trails, Bear Hill Tower was constructed in 1910 on a 319 foot elevation as an observational tower. It's actually the second tower built on this site as a replacement for an original one built by the Appalachian Mountain Club, and is perhaps one of the lesser known locations on the Massachusetts list of historical places.

Driving to the reservation was a bit confusing as we had to enter a small industrial park to find the trailhead. We were almost convinced our directions had led us to the wrong area, but after a couple testy exchanges with Siri we found our spot, a small parking area to the left of the first building in the park. From there we started our half-mile hike to the tower.

I've read that the the Bear Hill Tower is sometimes locked, but I don't know this for a fact since this gate was wide open the day we visited. Or, maybe Tina picked the lock with one of her bobby pins while I wasn't looking.

My suspicion is that the tower used to be locked but is no longer maintained, a suspicion I base on the large tree that's been allowed to grow and obscure the front of the tower. That feels to me like a place nobody is looking after. But provided you're lucky enough to enter it like we were, you'll find yourself climbing a tight, circular stairway that starts with cement steps before changing to these more narrow wooden planks. Also, Dramamine makes a person brave, notice the 2 missing rails where Tina stood to take this picture.

Make your way up its 4 winding levels and you'll be rewarded with a view that stretches all the way from New Hampshire to Boston. Squint past the glare of my forehead and you'll see the Boston skyline in the background of our picture.

This was our last stop for the day on a whirlwind visit to several sites in Boston, so luckily it was a very easy hike. Next time you're looking for something not too challenging that has a very cool payoff at the end, take an afternoon and make the one-mile loop up Bear Hill in Stoneham.


Links:
Coordinates of Bear Hill Tower

On The Hunt For Abandoned Vehicles

What's better than spending a day hiking in the woods? Spending a day hiking in the woods where there's a payoff at the end, which for us lately has been some pretty cool abandoned vehicles.

I'll start with our adventure last fall to the Mill Pond Conservation in Burlington Massachusetts, where the biggest challenge of the day was figuring out where to park. We didn't know much about the place other than two things - it was a conservation area, and there was an abandoned truck somewhere in those woods. We weren't even sure if the area had walking trails though, and after circling the surrounding neighborhoods a few times - to the point we were getting longer than casual looks from some residents - we weren't even sure there was an entrance. Houses seemed to border the conservation's entire 140 acres.

But fortunately I make a habit out of "yupping" my wife, because long after she'd told me to give up searching I found a small parking area at the end of Makechnie Road, where we entered the woods. And after an enjoyable and not too long hike we found the prize, this rusted heap that barely had the words "Burlington" something or other written on the door.

Next we'll bring you to College Woods here in Durham New Hampshire, another easy and enjoyable hike we made this winter. That is, enjoyable until I took us a half mile off-trail and into snow and slush and across a small stream that our hiking shoes were totally unprepared for. After several white lies where I told Tina to keep moving because our destination was "just over the next hill", we finally did come over the next hill and find what I was looking for, this beast that some company dumped long enough ago for trees to have grown around it.

While driving through Berwick Maine one afternoon we pulled over to check directions and noticed a dead-end dirt road disappearing into the woods. Abiding by our family rule of never letting a dead-end dirt road go unexplored (a family rule I created at that very moment), down it we went. Although in itself the road was unremarkable I spotted something through the trees, and to the synchronized eye-rolling of my two youngest children had Tina pull over. There I crept through the woods and snapped pictures of this stripped down old relic.

This next spot brings us back to Massachusetts, and on a hunt through a former farm turned conservation area. The cars we found in these woods were a real windfall - three old Saabs the likes of which I've never seen on the roads of New England.

One being this mini station wagon. I've never seen Tina look large next to any vehicle other than her Big Wheel.

Our final abandoned vehicle I'm adding for two reasons. First, it's a model I'd never heard of before and thought it had a cool name, a Plymouth Scamp. Second, this car is a piece of a much bigger puzzle, the disappearance of Sorensen Transportation and 39 of their tractor trailers that were abandoned in the woods of New England many years ago. This caused quite an Internet buzz when pieces of the story came out last year. Their location was kept secret, but Barry and I found clues to their whereabouts and took this picture while on the hunt to find these trucks for ourselves.

Stay tuned!