Delia O’Toole
There has been speculation of suspicious meetups in the woods surrounding the Wheaton College (MA) campus. At the beginning of the 2024 fall semester, reports of intense and loud howling began to file into the Norton Police Department’s office.
A Police Statement was released in December after immense pressure from Norton citizens looking for answers. The Statement claimed that there was no immediate danger to anyone in the area surrounding the woods. As for the howling, police said that Wheaton’s nature club informed them that they had been examining a coyote family from afar that was new to the woods.
Since the statement’s release in December, claims about the intensity of the howling have increased. The police have “no more information to share with news sources,” so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
Kids know more than they lead on; that has always been the case. So, in January, I sent out postings asking students enrolled at Wheaton College (MA) if they would be interested in an interview or if they would be comfortable sharing any information that they had.
Unfortunately for me, the college administration sent a mass email to each class suggesting that students do not speak on the college’s behalf regarding the suspicious activity in the woods. Due to this, many students were hesitant to meet with me to share any possible information they might have had regarding the manner.
However, as the activity continued, students’ anxiety began to spike. They wanted answers as much as anyone else, if not more, and the college nor law enforcement were supplying them with such information.
Grace Hannah, a freshman at the college, reached out to me via email. She had asked if she and a few other students could meet with me with some information they collected independently.
Obviously, the answer was yes, and what this group of students revealed to me was absolutely astronomical.
The students told me at first that they suspected it was just some animals in the woods, but as time went on, they became less and less convinced. Following what the Norton Police Department released and the many emails sent out from the school, they started to speculate that something bigger was happening.
“It all just seemed weird. The way everything was worded. And it seemed as though they had no answers themselves, but it is their job to make us feel safe, so they are lying,” Hannah said.
I asked the students what they thought was really going on, and the answer shocked me.
“We are convinced that it is kids at school. Like we think they are the ones howling,” Peyton Spahr, another freshman, said.
Her friend Molly Haller added, “It seems to be correlated to the cycle of the moon. I know that sounds so batshit crazy to say, but every full moon there is insane howling. Like the one scene is Zootopia, where those night howlers start howling. You know what I mean? One wolf howls, and then they all do.”
The group of students shared with me that they did, in fact, relay this information over to the authorities as well as the school, yet they were ignored, and the entire matter was swept under the rug.
Upset by the negligence of the research they found, the girls decided to contact me, hoping I could shed some light on their findings.
Before I began to write anything, I wanted to bring my findings back to the school’s attention. I hoped they would take matters into their own hands and develop some sort of investigation into what the girls had brought forward, but they had not.
Am I surprised? No.
Because of this, I took matters into my own hands.
Working side by side, Hannah, Spahr, and Haller began to focus on the behavior of students on the campus as the full moon began to roll around. The girls shared that over the past two moon cycles, they have witnessed very peculiar behavior from students they labeled as “furries.”
I questioned each student separately.
When I had spoke to Hannah, she told me: “Around nine o’clock there was a huge group of people who went into the woods, like a huge group. They’re the kids who wear the tails and ears and all of that stuff.”
When I questioned Spahr, she said, “I saw a group of people pass the dorm, and I had just thought, ‘Oh, it’s the people who are part of the pagan club at school doing some weird ritual thing,’ but then they were in some sort of costume. It was weird.”
I also asked Haller, but she informed me that she was in bed and did not see anything. So, do not try to diminish the accuracy of the information because one student got tired.
That was what the girls said in regard to the last moon cycle. This moon cycle, however, was much scarier than the last.
I decided to sit in one of the parking lots that border the woods to see if I could see anything unusual. I saw this “furry” group walking into the woods.
When they entered, they seemed oddly calm. A few minutes later, howling pierced my ears. They were the culprits. Moments later, they exited the woods on all fours, acting like rabid animals.
What is going on in the Wheaton woods, and why is the college trying to hide it?
Journalism 2.0 