Witch's Leg, Bucksport, ME

This past weekend I decided to take a field trip to a nearby coastal area to find some geocaches in what I hoped would be picturesque locations.  My expectations were met with beautiful blue skies mirroring the sparkling blue ocean.  The day started off with a extreme wind but turned into a mild and pleasant day. 

My first set of geocaches were in the ocean side town of Bucksport.  Here I set out to find my first virtual cache.  A virtual cache is where the hider expects you to visit a location and answer a question or accomplish a task; there is no actual container to find. 

Upon arriving at the coordinates for Witch's Leg, the seeker finds a small and weathered cemetery.  After taking the stairs up to the viewing platform, I found a large monument with the name Buck etched into it.  To the left is a plaque explaining the significance of the monument.  The story goes something like this:

Jonathan Buck, founder of Bucksport and war hero, accused a woman of practicing witchcraft.  She was condemned to death by burning.  While she her body was going up in flames, her body started to disassemble.  Her son, a social outcast, ran up to the body and grabbed her leg from the ashes.  He ran into the woods with the leg.  Buck eventually died and had an ordinary stone placed to mark his grave.  Many years after his death, a new monument was erected to honor him.  One morning, passersby noticed a blemish on the stone in the shape of a leg.  The monument has been polished although it has not helped remove the outline.  The plaque also notes that there were executions due to witch craft and that stone tends to have blemishes.  What do you think?

I shared this story with my fourth grade students and asked them same question.  Some believed it was a curse and other attributed the mark to imperfections in the stone.  They had fun sharing ghost stories of their own, many of them more unbelievable than Buck's.