The Hoge Mystery:
Where the Dream-Road Ends...

N. A. Reiter

27 November, 2005

"If you follow every dream, you might get lost..."
~ Neil Young

Across the Autumnal Hills:

This is a story about what happens when you follow a strange and vivid dream into the waking world. You stalk it for a time, and then it stalks you. In the end, it leads you to places far away; places in distant forests where roads turn to trails, which turn to clearings, and then evaporate under ominous trees. From there, you have nowhere else to go, except back home.

In late 1999, I had been dream journaling for perhaps six months or so, and was in the halcyon era of finding quests beckoning from every old Jungian REM stress dump. I came to grips eventually with dream interpretation and my own self-analysis, but there are a couple of dreams from that year that still catch my attention when I leaf back through pages of notes.

In the end, though, most of them eventually were revealed in symbology to be reflective of what was transpiring in my life in those days, without any true touch of the magic, prophecy, and premonition I thought I craved. More than most of them, really...pretty much all of them - except maybe for one.

This is the story of that one. We’ll start here.

Follow me back there to that evening, and drift along:

"...I walked alone under early autumn trees - oaks and maples, with pines here and there. I found myself hiking across forested hills and valleys, looking for a place I had been told about. The scenery was beautiful around me, but unknown. It could have been anywhere in the North, I suppose - from upstate New York to Maine to Ontario. While I didn’t know where I was, I knew why I was there. Somewhere in these wooded hills, an evil lurked in the form of a strange and notorious cult. I was seeking the nest or home base of this cult.

I stepped from a woodland path into a clearing or meadow. At the edge of the clearing, under the eaves of the trees and brush, lay a cluster or pile of weather beaten brown road signs, broken from any pole or post, and lying in weeds. I knelt down, and examined them. There was other lettering in a white or yellow color, but the single name or word that stayed in my waking memory later was... "H-O-G-E." Turning from the signs, I walked a short distance across the meadow to a ramshackle barn or shed, filled with rubbish. Other piles of board and stone, as well as tiny chicken coop or outhouse type buildings gave testimony to this place having once been a farm or compound, long demolished and torn asunder by time and weather. Yet I knew that somehow, the cult I sought still used this place, and if I was not careful, I would be caught in the open by some of the members who would be returning soon.

After sifting through trash and rubble for a minute, I turned and hastened back through the woods to a small road that I knew would lead to the safety of a nearby town.

At this point, the scene around me changed, and I was in an industrial town on a wide river or narrow lake. Near the waterfront. The feeling here was one of Lake Champlain, or maybe somewhere along the Saint Lawrence. New England perhaps. I walked into a diner or coffee shop that was marked outside with a sign in the shape of a star, and a name to match, such as "Star Diner." The patrons looked up with the paranoia a visitor expects in small towns. I asked among them if anyone knew of a mysterious cult in the woods nearby. None said that they had.

The waitress on duty was a tired looking middle aged graying woman. She came close to me and whispered that she knew what I was talking about, but couldn’t speak freely until after her shift. She was not a born local, but had come to this place - like me - from the Midwest. She asked if I could come back and talk to her later after her work hours. I agreed that I would..."

And that was the end of the dream.

It was the single remembered name from the broken sign that snagged me, aided by the extraordinarily moving beauty of the mysterious place where I had wandered. The archetypes and symbols of dreams I was slowly becoming a scholar of, but the appearance of place names and numbers threw me. And still does, to a degree. The power of this name was inversely proportional to its short odd spelling. Was it pronounced "hogue" or "hoje"? Even by the middle of the next morning, over my breaks at work, I realized the chase was on. What would I find, by following this one? X-Files type mystery? A harrowing mission to break up a Satanic Cult? It was back in the heyday of the Avalon adventures with my old partner Lori. She agreed, this was a weird one, but she stepped back respectfully, and let me run wild with it. As my good friend Dan Boudillion said recently, "Nothing is more interesting to our own selves or more boring to others than our dreams." How true. The dream is for the dreamer. But a story is for sharing, and if the listener finds the story to be boring, he or she can turn the page or leave the campfire.

The First Circle:

My web searching skills were rough in those days, but I started by methodically searching the United States for place names containing the oddly spelled HOGE. I remember at the time coming up with scant little - a lumber yard in Tennessee (definitely not New England) and a possible match with an obscure crossroads in rural western Vermont. That seemed to be a bit more like it. But beyond those - nothing much was coming at me. In my youth, I had been on perhaps three summer vacation trips with mom and dad through New England to the coast. The name certainly did not match any consciously remembered place from my childhood. I asked my parents if they recalled ever stopping at some place by that name - such as a state park or town. No - nothing recalled. I stopped focusing on Hoge, and thought it worthwhile to place the town on the river or lake. Some unspoken or unconscious feeling whispered "Lake Champlain". The more I tried to force a conscious resonance with my dream, the less coherent it became though. After a point, it doesn’t pay to think too much into them, really. Dreams that is.

By the following spring of 2000, my family had declared the destination of choice for our summer vacation road trip. We would be heading to Maine for several days, and then would try to catch upstate Vermont and Montreal on the way back. It seemed like it might be the perfect opportunity to do some Hoge-hunting along the way. In July, we set off and headed up north through New York State, Vermont, New Hampshire, and then Maine. As we passed through western Vermont, I hadn’t neglected the one obscure crossroads that had had been named Hogue that I had found on a map months earlier. We detoured a bit and found the location, but it was nothing more than a crossroads in a broad open stretch of field and pasture country. There was no shred of resonance. I could have stayed to obsess and dig more, but inwardly a voice said, "naw - t’ain’t it..." For three days, I wandered by cold stone and sea in Acadia. That was a tonic for the heart, and always will be.

During our trek back west, we stayed for a day in St. Albans, Vermont. St. Albans is a charming but somewhat bland northern outpost of Vermont life, way up at the tip of where Lake Champlain really can’t be called a lake anymore. Probably more a ditch or creek, I suppose. As we toured about, I looked for some form of resonant image, like a "Star Diner" or a "Hoge Road", or even a "Hoge" in the phone book. Nothing. The general "New England" feeling was there, but nothing to hang a hope on. We arrived back home, and I finished out the summer with thoughts of Hoge and occult steeped wooded hills fading rapidly. I lost hope, and lost desire for any hope. That’s when things get moving again, though.

The Second Act:

Months passed and lapped like shallow sullen waves carrying flotsam into and out of my life. My obsession about the Hoge dream waned into nothingness. It was then that on a bored summer afternoon at work, when I should have been gainfully engaged in my day job, but was web-surfing instead, that the Hoge enigma came around once more, this time like a runaway train.

Maybe it was one of my first playful forays into Google. I searched H-O-G-E. Several hits came up on the search, two of which referenced something very curious - something that brought the madness back all over again. I found references to a primitive Boy Scouts of America camp in New Hampshire... Camp Hoge, located in the rolling hills outside of the town of Walpole. And Walpole was on the Connecticut River... The resurgence of information induced in me the clammy vibration of the rush to meaning and manifestation. I could scarcely believe what I was reading. I was closing in on the autumnal hills of my dream...

Over the weeks that followed, I made a number of phone calls to the library in Walpole, as well as a couple of names given to me as being possible sources of information about the Boy Scout Camp. I finally stumbled across one of those great wellsprings of local town lore and knowledge. Every town, from the Deep South to the furthest hamlet in the north woods has one. In Walpole, his name was Buck. It was Buck who told me one evening over the phone about how Camp Hoge got its name. In return, I shared with Buck my own quest. He was surprisingly open minded and thoughtful about the notion of dream imagery coming to life, and we kept in touch for a while. This is what Buck told me about the history of Camp Hoge:

In the years before, during, and after World War II, a highly renowned and brilliant engineer by the name of Dr. Pierre W. Hoge (pronounced "hogue") had come to make his summer retreat on some family land to the east of Walpole, in the hills off of Maple Grove Road. Pierre had been a Princeton graduate, and had been a materials scientist and project engineer on the Manhattan Project. One of his specialties was said to be anti-corrosion coatings or paints. However, Pierre was also interested in geology, botany, and conservation, and at the farm on Maple Grove Road, he was supposed to have set up a veritable terra-forming project, with micro-hydro power, fish ponds and experimental tree and garden plots. Apparently, Dr. Hoge maintained an apartment in Connecticut until his death, but with passing years, more and more of his time was spent in Walpole. After his retirement, presumably in the 1950s or 60s, Pierre became something of a legendary hermit of the Walpole area. He was said to have grown more eccentric, and only rarely made journeys by foot into town for provisions, the balance of his time being spent in his eco-lab property. Pierre had a married brother who kept a home on property adjacent to Pierre’s farm however both homes apparently burned at different times and were never rebuilt. Pierre never married, and as far as anyone knew, died without any descendents. As of a couple of years back, a younger sister of Pierre’s was thought to still be alive somewhere in the Hartford area. Upon his death in 1978, local residents were surprised to learn that Pierre had bequeathed his old property to the Boy Scouts of America, Daniel Webster Council. Nobody had the faintest idea of how Dr. Hoge had come to be connected to the BSA, as he had no sons or wards, and apparently had never been a Boy Scout himself. However, the property passed into the hands of the Scouts and became known as Camp Hoge. It remains a primitive camping ground for Scouts to this day.

Buck remembered Pierre as a kindly but strange older man who came into Walpole on occasion. He also recalled that when upon Pierre’s passing, some volunteers had gone back to the old farm property for the purpose of cleaning it up. They found a vast pile of liquor bottles, mainly vodka and gin, built up in the old barn and sheds. As I described my dream images of the ramshackle compound or old farm in the woods to Buck, he concurred that it was passing strange that my visions so neatly matched his own recollection of the disarray that the farm had been in. Still, to Buck’s own admission, many strange things lie waiting in dreams, and one shouldn’t be too surprised.

I inquired as to whether any tales around the town had grown up about some unknown nefarious cult using the grounds (The BSA probably not qualifying as either nefarious or a cult). Buck couldn’t think of any. The land in the hills above Walpole had once been quarried and mined for feldspar. Pierre Hoge had been a local man of color and mystery, but the same generous benefactor to Boy Scouts didn’t appear to personally be on the level of a Reverend Jim Jones or David Koresh. There was a tale that one of the sheds had been painted with some leftover top secret experimental paint from the WWII or Korean era, and was still bright and wear free today! Between that, though, and the piles of old booze bottles, Pierre certainly commanded no dark forces or images. As for the bottles, well, being an eco-sustainability guru thirty years before the times is thirsty work. A Martini man is a good man.

For a couple of weeks, I spun amidst the revelations about Pierre Hoge, and tried to follow up on all the minor threads I could grab. I discovered that he had been born into a well to do family in eastern Ohio, and had sat on the board of a local telephone company for years. For an Ohio native like myself, that was a nifty bit of micro-trivia. However, as had happened so often before, the fuel of mystery burns out long before we would like. The trail went cold again, and I eventually resigned myself to the belief that I had learned as much as I could about the Hoge enigma. Jung’s ghost rolled its eyes as I once again nearly forgot that synchronicity is not to be followed, only acknowledged. It’s a litmus, an indicator. When the litmus test is done, it becomes meaningless.

For a brief time in the weeks after my conversation with Buck, I obsessed over one last "lead" that dropped into my lap. It seemed that Walpole, New Hampshire was the home of a New Age institute dedicated to energy healing, founded in the 1980s by well known genre personalities Carolyn Myss and Meredith Young-Sowers. However, from what I could divine from on-line information, and from a quick check back with my Walpole contacts, the Stillpoint Foundation, as it is known, certainly didn’t seem to invoke any negative cult-like status. Not for me at least, although I’m sure a number of folks of anti-New Age or traditional religious sentiment might feel otherwise. A swift consulting of Terraserver shows that The Stillpoint Foundation is on a small road a mile or so south of Walpole, while the Hoge compound is up in the hills to the east.

It’s what I love and resonate with the most about Yankees, I think - they are as cautious and conservative as they come, but have never lost the old core Libertarian "live and let live" spirit. I think that's why so many alt-culture, metaphysical, pagan, and New Age oriented people end up in Vermont, New Hampshire, western Massachusetts, and Maine. It’s the land of Henry Thoreau and Betty Hill. What would you expect?

That fall, my mom and dad took a leaf color road trip into Vermont and New Hampshire, and at my request, made a swing through Walpole. Never afraid to question locals anywhere about anything, my dad managed to eke some directions out of the attendant at the local Marathon station, and took a drive up Maple Grove Road to where the pavement ended. Beyond that point, another half mile or so into the woods, down a nigh impassable gravel and rock road, was Camp Hoge. Minivans can only go so far, though, and after snapping a few photos of a rustic gate and paved road's end, mom and dad continued on their way. Still, their early autumn photos tantalized me, and the pneuma of those golden hills floated back into my mind and heart for a few last meditative moments.

Thrice Cast - the Visit to Camp Hoge:

For over two years, my life’s highway passed into time with little further thought of Pierre Hoge or Walpole, New Hampshire. I fell out of touch with the local folks I had found so helpful. The old dream was not forgotten, and once in a while, when I would be discussing the topic of dream questing or dream interpretation with a new friend, I would bring it up.

In February of 2005, thoughts turned again toward the annual choice of destination for the family road trip, come June. As many who know me personally will attest to, I have an insatiable lust for roadside weirdness, and for including as many strange, Fortean, crypto-historical, or paranormal oddities into the highway miles as possible. After some debate between my two younger sons and spouse, we decided to make our yearly trek a Canadian adventure, and find a northeastern route into Quebec and northeast Ontario. Esoteric mysteries in Montreal, the severe majestic scenery of the Laurentian Mountains and the Kingdom of Saguenay beyond, with mounds and petroglyphs in abundance along the way; these were placed on the agenda.

While picking out the best route east and north to reach Quebec, I discovered that an auspicious route through Vermont would take us irresistibly close to Walpole, New Hampshire. Yeah, let’s add a quick swing through Walpole into the basket of the Quest. I might not be able to explore Camp Hoge, but a picture of the town sign might be a worthwhile souvenir. In all honesty to myself and the reader, I didn’t really find much interest in pursuing it beyond that point. In looking back on it now, I confess that I harbored a certain amount of fear that if I were to explore the Camp Hoge area too intently, the last wisps of dream-gossamer would be dissolved. I had taken Buck’s word as gospel that my description of the mysterious dream shed was a close match, and I felt uneasy about risking that piece of lore that was so handy to bring up in conversation and storytelling. I’m not as ruthless as I once was to pin things under a microscope. I’m getting old. I can see more frequently where a gentle mystique and taste of witchy mythos is often times a nice sugar coating that makes the bitter pill of impending mortality go down easier.

So we set out and headed into the east for our 2005 vacation, on June 20th. Some stops in New York State and a dip through the Catskills set the mood for the trip. I was looking forward to making a beeline north through the Granite State to the Que border. On the morning of the 22nd, we crossed the Connecticut River, and by mid morning pulled into Walpole.

I found the same gas station that my dad had inquired at previously, and asked the 30ish female attendant how one might find Maple Grove Road. Her eyes fell upon me with some detectable suspicion, and she recited a sequence of turns and corners we needed to follow. Maybe I could at least drive as far as mom and dad did, to where the paved road ended. I hopped back in our van, and drove off in the direction indicated. A few miles later, we had re-joined the main highway, and very obviously had missed the turn off I was supposed to have taken. One more gas station came into view, this one a larger service center. I supposed that I could ask once more.

The place was hopping with farmers and road workers tanking up on morning coffee and donuts. I asked the clerk how to get to Maple Grove Road. Immediately, a sandy haired 40ish fellow getting a coffee turned around and said, "I live on Maple Grove Road!"

The fellow, a local farmer named Dave, lived at the end of Maple Grove Road... right where my parents had stopped! I briefly explained myself to Dave, and without going into the more esoteric parts about the dream, told him I had been in touch with some local people in the past, and was interested in the story of Pierre Hoge. Dave knew my old contact Buck. If we could spare a little time, Dave indicated, he would be happy to lead us to his farm, and then could take me in his four wheel drive truck further up the gravel road to Camp Hoge itself. I felt elated inwardly at my good fortune, and the amazing coincidence playing itself out. However, I also felt a twisting of my stomach at the notion that I had been set up by The Gamester. Was I man enough this morning to see my dream images die forever if the surroundings of Camp Hoge looked nothing like my autumn hilled but sinister fantasy? Was I strong enough to risk it all for truth and "dis-illusion"? I was. What better morning than this, to do this thing.

I drove back through Walpole, following Dave’s truck. We passed the service station where I had first inquired about Maple Grove Road. Had the woman there tried to send me on a goose chase out of the town? The green leaves and boughs of June displayed none of the golden aura of the season in my dream certainly, but heading east, up that little lane of a road brought on a faint chorus of familiarity. We stopped and parked in Dave’s barnyard. I grabbed some cameras and my GPS, and Deb and the kids sequestered themselves with some magazines and comics to wait me out. We were only going to be a half mile away or so... Later, after the day was done, Deb confessed that she had been terrified at the notion of me hopping into the truck of a complete stranger, and heading off into the hills alone with him. I apologized. Sometimes that last thrust of dream questing involves an abandonment of caution that our everyday rational selves would not allow.

The truck trundled upward into a wooded region of mixed pine and hardwood. The road became a coarse gravel path. Dave and I talked about Pierre, and Buck, local geology, dogs, hunting, and sending grown kids off to school. Before long, the gravel road broke up into something barely resembling a trail of fist and head sized rock, washed out here and there. I held my breath at one point as we tipped upward sharply and Dave put the truck in creeper gear to pull up over a broken off bank of rock. I asked if this road had always been like this. Dave indicated that in decades past, it had been far more drivable and had been maintained as a respectable byway. But then finally there came a time when nobody lived up there anymore, on the hills and valleys adjoining the road. The Hoges pretty well closed out the era. Even the Boy Scouts entered the wooded area from the other side, and another road, before hiking or four wheeling to the camp. I felt blessed to be under the guidance of someone like Dave, an outdoorsman who knew these hills from countless hours of hunting and fishing. The woods was deep, the woods was magic. Maybe this wasn’t the high wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, but it was filled with venerable trees, and the shadow of the Old Horned One moved here. Dave hunted bear in these hills, with his dogs.

The rocky path spread out slightly and crossed with another vague trail. Our first stop was the heart of Camp Hoge. Among the trees and in a couple of clearings, I could see the busywork of Scouts, some old fire-pits and lean-tos. We got out of the truck, and I took a GPS reading. By the trail, on the ground by some downed branches, was a cluster of brown wooden trail signs...

It was the signs from my dream, as sure as the woods were deep.

I don’t really know what Dave was thinking of me by that time, but I’m positive he noticed my wide eyed stare and faltering of words about then.

We climbed back in the truck, and re-traced our path maybe an eighth of a mile to a nearly invisible trail that ran north alongside a stone fence that bordered on a meadow. Dave pulled in there, and indicated that the remains of one of Pierre Hoge’s old barns was a short distance away. This was the barn that Buck had told me about. I jumped out and charged up through the trees and over stones.

There it was. I felt oddly ...noble... in that moment. It was as I had seen it in my dream. Absolutely. Maybe someday I’ll find a good word to describe the feeling. No idea why the term "noble" fits, but it does. Here was the meadow I had walked; here was the junk filled shed I had picked through, in that land of dream. All that was missing was the imminent return of the cultists. And the red gold of a New Hampshire autumn.

I asked Dave if I could take a double fist sized white quartz rock from the grounds as a token. He laughed and said he doubted if the hills would miss it. Nobody else up here would. I was quieter on the drive back out. Dave pointed out the old feldspar quarry, and some other long forgotten homestead ruins. I can’t say I wanted to stay and explore all day, or for the rest of my life. I didn’t. I came, I saw, and I left a subtly different soul than when I arrived. I saw a dream come true, and something true become dream-like. Maybe I still need to go back there in a far off September, and walk up that road alone. But for now, I was satisfied.

We arrived back at the van, and discovered that we had been away for about an hour. The parting salutations and goodbyes were Yankee simple, and Yankee courteous. We left, and Dave went back to his farm, his dogs, and (probably) a briefly lingering sense of curiosity about the oddball Midwesterner he had just taken on an adventure.

The only thing more astonishing than the veracity and one-to-one accurateness of the imagery in my dream of the old Hoge property was the rapidity with which I integrated it into my world and heart. I’d like to say I was so giddy I could barely drive, but I wasn’t. I was happy. Quietly amazed, yet nonchalant. Vindicated? No, that would be too dramatic. Maybe it was just a feeling that some of the little stories in life could still have magical or happy endings. So few do. We drove onward to Quebec that day.

In Arcadia:

The road leads back home. Early winter snows have fallen and are melting as December looms. This story is a bit overdue, but it was a hectic summer and fall. The road or trail is not accomplished until the stories are told.

At one point in late summer, I thought this might be a good topic to write up into a research report on a first hand account and analysis of dream precognition and Jungian synchronicity. To take Pierre Hoge and my dream adventure and pick it apart under a microscope, and speculate on precognition theories. I felt more in the mood for a story and some grey Sunday morning musings on meaning, though. I get into trouble when I put myself under a microscope too often.

What did it all mean? In 1999, I had a dream one night that had some very specific images, settings, and a name. I followed the trail of this dream on a quest, as relentlessly as I could. To my surprise, I was led in and out of strange coincidences and discoveries, but never to fulfillment or any sort of deep meaning. With time, years, I found myself in the position of being able to visit the place in the physical world where it seemed as though my dream had been beckoning me. And I found there, that indeed, a place that I had never been to - or had any possible connection with in my physical life - was precisely as I had dreamed it.

Could I chalk this up as first hand evidence that precognition or unconscious psychic remote viewing is real? At one time I would have said yes, but not anymore. I think the most I can say is that it was a first hand adventure into understanding that consciousness can link to the physical world in ways that are inscrutable. Now it’s not to say conversely that I don’t intend to keep researching consciousness and its connection to the physical world as years go by! I certainly do. Maybe there was an element of precognition in the Hoge enigma, or of my consciousness folding space and time and making two points - an Ohio night in 1999 and a New Hampshire summer’s morning in 2005 - meet.

Despite the congruence of the physical reality with the dream world setting, there was a lot else that really never manifested. The nature and presence of the dark-arts or evil cult. The "Star Diner" on a waterfront. The middle aged waitress prepared to pass crucial information on to me. The setting, name, and physical placement all came true. The core issue of seeking out an evil presence and exposing it never materialized. Maybe it all means that there never was an evil cult in the woods, and what I was seeing really was a purely precognitive view of a trip over five years in the future. A trip that had been prompted by the dream five years before!

Isn’t that a tidy little Zen koan, worthy of a bamboo whack? Maybe I experienced what the relativistic cosmologists would call a "closed time like loop." Whatever. It was a hoot. It didn’t give me any firm answers about time, precognition, and the universe, but it made me see some possibilities, and that’s a good thing

The part about the cult in the woods, well, maybe that was completely internal in the end. We all - each of us - have our own dark arts cults in the autumnal hills of our own souls that need to be ratted out. We all have the tired crone waitress archetype inside as well, willing to whisper clues to us. We all have a need to walk the road that plunges into the trees of September.

Dreams apparently do come true sometimes, but only for their own reasons and in their own time. The key in the end is to remember to walk back out of the woods.

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