A body in New Hampshire
on the disappearances of Elsie Whittemore and Barbara Newhall Follett & the act of erasure
Barbara Newhall Follett was, by all measures, a lot. Taught by her father how to type at the age of four, she quickly took up correspondences with antiques dealers, relatives, artists, scientists, writers, and thinkers. She spent much of her childhood engaging in regular exchanges with them. And they all seemed to indulge her, seemingly happy to laud her for her quick wit and writing ability.
By the age of nine, she’d tapped away on her typewriter long enough to finish the first draft of a novel. Soon after, this novel draft, as well as most of her family’s belongings were lost in a fire. Devastated at the loss of her work, she began to work at it again, completing a new draft by the age of twelve. Soon after, Knopf offered her a publishing deal, and, not long after that, in 1927, The House Without Windows made its way into the world, selling out its initial print run before it even made it to bookstore shelves.
Barbara Newhall Follett was officially a literary star before she even became a teenager. But in contrast to the glowing reviews and accolades Barbara received, New York Public librarian and literary critic Anne Carroll Moore wrote, “I can conceive of no greater handicap for the writer between the ages of nineteen and thirty-nine than to have published a successful book between the ages of nine and twelve. What price will Barbara Follett have to pay for her “big days” at the typewriter.”
This turned out to be a prescient warning. Not long after Barbara’s book publication, her parents’ marriage would fall apart, an event that would ripple through the rest of Barbara’s life. Plagued by self-doubt, periods of writer’s block, and financial pressures, Barbara never acheived the same level of literary fame as she had as a child. In many ways, the world had seemed to forget their star child novelist as soon as she became an adult.
On my podcast she goes by Jane, we covered Barbara’s story. Because her short life was so expansive, we covered the first fifteen years of her life in episode 1, ending the first time Barbara ran away from home. Because, you see, one consistent behavior in Barbara’s life was her desire to leave her life and troubles behind. And she did so in many ways in her twenty-five years: whether heading to Tahiti, or ditching her work life to travel around Spain, or hiding out in a farmhouse in New Hampshire, it is clear that when things became tedious or difficult in her life she would simply abandon her circumstances for something new.
In episode two of our coverage that we released this week, we focused on the next ten years of Barbara’s life, tracing her story through her emergence into adulthood and marriage, culminating in her disappearance at the age of twenty-five. Struggling with her own failing marriage, on December 7, 1939, Barbara stepped out of the Brookline, Massachusettes apartment that she shared with her husband and disappeared into the night.
It can seem startling to learn that a young woman who had packed so much into her life in just twenty-five years could just simply vanish into the night. But Barbara’s story might have some resolution in the last few years. In his article “A Place of Vanishing: Barbara Newhall Follett and the Woman in the Woods” for Los Angeles Review of Books, author Daniel Mills wrote about his theory that the unidentified remains of a woman found on Thanksgiving Day in 1948 in New Hampshire might very well be Barbara’s.
In his article, he references Barbara’s ongoing and deep love for New Hampshire, a love that led to her and her husband renting a farmhouse in that state and using it regularly. Later, in a followup, Mills provides compelling and clear evidence that this farmhouse was located just a half mile from where these remains were found.
Given this research, it seems this woman could be Barbara, but definitive proof may never come. These remains have, in the years since, been misplaced, an occurrence that, if you listen to our podcast, happens with more frequency than any of us would be comfortable with.
But long before we arrived at this point, theorizing these remains were those of Barbara Newhall Follett, investigators had pressed the idea that this was another missing woman, Elsie Whittemore. In the summer of 1936, Elsie was 25-years-old when she stepped out for some air after dinner at her in-laws, intending to take a walk to ease her indigestion, and disappeared.
As a pregnant mother with a 14-month-old daughter, Elsie’s life was likely quite different than Barbara’s. Though they were both 25 when they went missing, Elsie’s disappearnace three years before Barbara’s means she was slightly older than the other woman. Still, they were contemporaries. Though women of different circumstances, they were born into the same time, facing many of the same challenges. Both women, for instance, found work as stenographers, one of the few career options open to women at the time. Barbara found the work loathsome, hating that labor took her away from her true passion of writing. There is no record of how Elsie felt about her career.
Barbara’s future husband, Nickerson, was a Dartmouth alumn who spent his first year after graduating walking the newly formed Appalachian Trail with Barbara before the two took off to Spain. Though they posed as husband and wife, the two wouldn’t officially marry until 1934 when they returned to the United States. Elsie, meanwhile, would marry a year and a half before Barbara in February 1933 in New Hampshire, the state she would spend her married life in.
While Nickerson would go on to be employed by Kodak, Elsie’s husband Edward would find employment as a construction foreman. Barbara’s life is heavily documented, a collection of her letters and papers now residing in the archives at Columbia University, so we have documents that show that in some ways Barbara appreciated the financial stability Nickerson’s job offered while also feeling stiffled by the routines their life had fallen into. Of her own employment, Barbara wrote to her close friend, “Besides working for the minister, whom I like very much but whose work is rather meager for anyone as intelligent and speedy as I (Hurrumph!??) I’m not doing ‘manuscript work,’ as she calls it, for the dyanmic and metoric lady who dictates everything she writes.” This documentation allows us to see into Barbara’s world in a way we can’t with Elsie. Though it’s likely Elsie also sent letters to friends, letters that may still exist today, they aren’t carefully handled by a university system intent on preserving them for their significance. This is how erasure happens. Everyday women whose stories we don’t get to hear.
Elsie Lufkin was born in 1911 in Fairlee, Vermont to Charles and Myrtie Lufkin. By the time she disappeared, she was pregant and living with her young daughter at her husband’s parents home in Plymouth, New Hampshire, while her husband was away at work. This is, again, strikingly similar to Barbara’s experience. Though Barbara and Nickerson did not have children, Barbara wrote about being home without her husband while he traveled for work.
On June 29, 1936, Elsie finished her dinner and went for a walk. She never returned home. Though a massive search along the routes she would have walked launched within hours, few clues surfaced beyond a few reports of people seeing her looking dejected or depressed.
In the summer of 1948, twelve years after her disappearance, Elsie’s husband Edward filed for divorce citing her long absence as cause. Nickerson, Barbara’s husband, waited just four years after Barbara’s disappearance to request the same, filing for divorce in 1943. Soon after, Nickerson married again, likely to a woman he may have been having an affair with during his marriage to Barbara.
But for these two women, who shared many similarities despite leading vastly different lives, their stories truly intersect at the discovery of human remains near Pulsifer Hill in Holderness, New Hampshire in December of 1948, just months after Edward filed for divorce from Elsie. These discovery of these remains, found by a deer hunter beside Durgin Brook, is one that hit the newspapers quickly. They were initially thought to be the remains of another missing woman, Paula Welden, who disappeared from Bennington College in Vermont in 1928. Paula’s case had captivated the northeast, her disappearance such an enigma that, in the years since, her case has inspired at least two literary works, Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. But interest in the discovery of these remains faded quickly for many when it was determined these remains were not Paula.
Still, investigators were set on trying to learn who these remains belonged to. They quickly settled on Elsie Whittemore, despite the fact the descedent’s height and clothing were not a match. In fact, a pair of glasses was found with the remains. Elsie didn’t wear glasses, but, as Daniel Mills points out in his article, Barbara very much did.
Elsie’s in-laws rejected this identification by law enforcement. They felt confident the remains were not their daughter-in-law’s. As such, they never claimed these remains for burial, leaving them instead with law enforcement where they were eventually misplaced.
Helen, Elsie’s daughter, would go on to be raised by her grandparents, her father residing first in Maine and later in California. Elsie’s disappearance forever fracturing this small family.
When I think about disappearances, I think first of the literal kind, Barbara arguing with Nickerson before stepping out the door of their apartment building never to be seen again. Or Elsie throwing on a coat to ward off the chilly evening air of a New Hampshire summer before going for a walk, easing her pregnant body down the road one step at a time until she faded from view. But when I think about disappearances, I also think of the other ways someone can be lost: records barely tracing someone like Elsie’s life, the pieces of her life thrown away or in the back of a drawer somewhere, law enforcement misplacing what was left of someone…each for me reminds me the importance of writing pieces like this, so that what can disappear so easily is recorded somewhere.
This month of she goes by Jane, we’ll be sharing the story of Paula Welden, the missing Bennington student. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts to hear it first. And, join my co-host and I on StoryGraph, a reading tracker and social app, where we’re hosting a readalong for Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, a book said to be inspired by Paula’s disappearance.