The Curious Tale of Asa Snow

Asa Snow had a reputation for being a bit of an odd fellow. In town, he went by the nickname, “Popcorn.” We don’t know if he chose this name for himself, but nonetheless, that’s what the townspeople called him. The inspiration behind the name was entirely his own doing, though. He limited his diet to almost solely milk and — you guessed it — popcorn. Not much else. Asa either distrusted or disliked much of the food available to him, as a diligent vegetarian cautious to the point of paranoia of anything on his plate. He also just loved popcorn. Rumor has it that when he died, he had his coffin filled with the salty treat. Yet his peculiar diet choices pale in comparison to the legends surrounding his death.

Beginning in 1844, just a few years after he moved from Cape Cod to Dana, neighbors noted that Snow had developed a preoccupation with death. That year, his first wife, Isabelle, took her own life with a piece of cloth that she ripped from her dress. Some speculated that she had been driven insane. One of the couple’s young daughters died shortly after.

The Snow women were originally buried in the local cemetery, but Asa decided he wanted to keep them closer. He built a family tomb in his backyard and moved their long-dead bodies to it, but not before displaying the decaying corpse of his wife to anyone curious enough to look. (Storytellers often say that this is when his second wife, Eunice, arranged to be buried elsewhere.) Asa then began focusing his energy on entrepreneurial advancements, lending money to neighbors at high interest rates and, despite his own unyielding support of vegetarianism, selling meat in the town. Some think that he buried a large portion of his earnings on his property, but others contend that it went into the building of his incredibly expensive casket. Before his death, he had a coffin built out of metal (extremely unusual at the time) with a glass window at the head. He arranged for a local undertaker to visit him each day for for seven days after his death to ensure that he was truly dead before they buried him.

When he actually died (having collapsed in a snowstorm under the weight of a dressed pig carcass) the undertaker only visited his body on three of those seven days. Dana was in the middle of an intense snowstorm at the time, and Asa’s widowed wife Eunice felt sorry for the poor man who had to trek out into the blizzard just to tap on the glass of her husband’s casket. She said that if her husband wasn’t dead when they put him in there, he was surely frozen by now. That was in 1872. Stories of the man who only ate popcorn gradually became legend, and over the years, the legend spread beyond the borders of Dana. Locals avoided the area on the anniversaries of his death, when his ghost allegedly exited his tomb to visit his second wife’s burial plot. The ghostly figure would spend the night visiting and return before dawn.

In 1912, 40 years after his death, a news reporter became curious about the strange tales surrounding this Mr. Asa Snow. After some investigation, it was reported that Snow’s coffin — and body — remained unchanged. There was no decay in his features, nothing different about his hair or clothes. Must have been the popcorn he took with him to the grave. Two men from Boston heard the news and decided to have some “fun” with it. They made a bet. The next November, around the time that Asa was expected to emerge from his tomb, one of the men rode his horse out to the property and sat down. His friend said he wouldn’t last the night. He thought he was going to make an easy lump of cash. Some time after he settled down, his horse began making awful, fearful noises. Faced with a choice between staying and winning the bet or running for his and his horse’s life, he chose the latter. Hours later, he found his horse a few miles away, still shaking in fear.

Now, Asa’s remains are buried in the Quabbin Park Cemetery, where many of the area’s residents were moved before the flooding of the Quabbin Reservoir. The remains of his house can be found just off of Gate 40 on the path to the old Dana town common. Though no more specific hauntings have been reported, locals say he still frequents the area, especially in November.

Asa Snow’s homestead was located right off of Quabbin’s present-day Gate 40 on Rt. 32A in Petersham, MA. The Snows are now buried in Quabbin Park Cemetery, located on Rt. 9 in Ware, MA. The Quabbin Reservoir Visitor Center is located at 485 Ware Rd, Belchertown, MA.