By Richard Day

A weird, gruesome legend is told about Robeson's Hills, just across the Wabash River from Vincennes.

In the midst of these hills is a deep, dark ravine, where the rays of the sun never penetrate. Trees interlace their branches overhead, and underfoot, ferns and wild-flowers grow in abundance amid decaying leaves and rotting logs.

The mouth of the ravine--now blocked by the Red Skelton Bridge-formerly opened on to the river road. From it, even on the sultriest summer day, there came a delightfully cooling breeze, laden with the sweet fragrance of decomposing vegetation. This place is known as "Dark Hollow."

Many years ago, a devout Frenchman who lived upriver was coming to Vincennes to attend church services on Holy Thursday. He was traveling alone, on horseback, even though it was a time of Indian trouble--enough to keep most people safely at home.

Near the hills, he was set upon by a band of Twightwee Indians. They dragged him into the hollow and cut off his head. But strangely, the Indians were too frightened to take his scalp--because he was so devout. His horse dashed into the depths of the hollow and the head rolled after it to the horror of the Indians.

A couple of weeks later some hunters found the horse grazing by the headless body of his master. They took the horse, but left the mutilated and badly decomposed corpse for the buzzards. But the head "rolls again" when it storms on Holy Thursday nights--as it always seems to do--and the thunder mingles with the howls of the terrified Indians--or so the story goes.

The mouth of Dark Hollow was filled in during the construction of the new U.S. Route 50, so now, the best way to visit the hollow is to take the Red Skelton Bridge over the Wabash.

Off to the right, immediately after one crosses the bridge, is a parking spot. A drainage ditch leads down to the bottom of the ravine where a small stream trickles along the floor. There is a kind of path formed by the pebbles of the stream-bed which leads deeper into the hollow.

Dark Hollow is well-named; it is cool and dark, as the story says, with steep sides of shale or leaf-meal covered clay. Tall trees--oak, ash, beech, maple, poplar--tower overhead like the "forest primeval," and beneath them, ferns and little white wildflowers cover the slopes.

However, despite the horrific story connected with the place, the hollow is a good place to take a quiet walk.

Mrs. John Newton (Katie Robeson) of Vincennes remembers Dark Hollow as a kind of lover's lane. (As a child, she was warned to stay away from the "parkers" who stopped there.) Later as a girl she used to tramp all over Robeson Hills, gathering flowers, persimmons, nuts, and mushrooms, but she says, "My father told me to stay way from Dark Hollow. I remember it opened on the old River Road. It was narrow, with a kind of wagon road leading back, then it got even narrower, just a path. There was no telling who might be lurking back there, to jump out and grab you."

There appears to be little historical basis for the legend. The motif of the "headless horseman" is well known from the story by Washington Irving.

The Canadians, too, have a story of Indians beheading a pious Frenchman to preserve his beautiful scalp intact. The head startled the Indians by talking--perhaps the early version of the Dark Hollow story had that head speaking, too.

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EMAIL: rking@indian.vinu.edu