Murder in Hope Falls

When I was a boy in the 1960s and ’70s, I had free run of an emptied-out Adiron-dack village, a ghost town in Hamilton County named Hope Falls, whose roug-hand-tumble boom times had passed decades before. The sawmills and tanneries were long gone, leaving behind a one-room schoolhouse, a tiny cemetery and a few homes.

My grandparents, who had lived in Gloversville, bought the remnants of much of the little village during the Depression. They spent years building a modest stone house where I spent many weekends, hazy summer weeks, and snowy Christmases that forged ties to the Adirondacks that I still carry today. My grandfather died before I was born, but Gram stepped in as a surrogate mother after my own mom passed when I was five—teaching me how to snowshoe, cut hay and drive an old tractor.

Those ties have weakened over time, but I went searching for the ghosts of Hope Falls while unboxing some old books last year in my Maryland basement, particularly the tale of Edward Earl, hanged in 1881 for stabbing his spouse through the heart.

I had vague memories of the story of Edward and Mary