In the summer of 1985 in Bear Brook State Park, New Hampshire, 11-year-old Jesse Morgan and his friends were playing a game of hide and seek in their close-knit trailer park community of Allenstown. While Jesse was searching for his friends one of the friends, Keith, had given himself away by exclaiming and calling out that he had found a barrel. What they presumed had to have been rotting milk, they left the area, unencumbered by the discovery of what in later months, would surface again as the remains of two people, a woman and a little girl. Who was the murderer, and where were they now? What were their motives? Were there more possible victims? All intriguing and important questions demanding answers, though perhaps among such lines of inquiries non more important than who were these victims? What were their lives like, what could have their future looked like before this malevolent gesture toward human life had transpired, and what could we do to honor their lives?
The podcast Bear Brook begins with nostalgia, a scene set by the 80’s decade and the song “Don’t you” by Simple Minds. Jason, our narrator gives the audience a feeling for this era for those whom, like myself, do not necessarily relate. The Nintendo had just premiered in the states, Coca-Cola had just introduced “new Coke” and life was rather amicable in Allenstown. We are immediately presented with a “how could anything ever go wrong here?” situation, and thus begins the ominous backdrop in the popular hit song to one of mystery and dreadfulness. We hear interview excerpts from several people who lived in Allenstown when this story became public and national news. The first being Jesse Morgan, who gives his testimony of the day when he and his friends had been playing hide and seek, when they happened to have stumbled upon the barrel. Next, we hear from Jesse’s parents describe life in Allenstown preceding the time of the discovery, it is here where we are introduced to the idea of a neighborly community in which “people helped each other out” and got along well. Jesse’s father recounts a time, where the East coast had especially cold winters, where none of their cars would start though if someone’s car did start, that person would come around and start one car and the whole thing would cycle through so people could get to work. We transition to the policeman, Ron Mont Pleasure, who was the attending officer who had received the call from a local hunter months later about the same barrel in which Jesse and his friends had not reported earlier in the story. Ron also attests to the notion that this non-traditional community looked out for one another, though we are then presented with a crucial piece of information. In Allenstown, with a population of about 4,300 there was only one cop for every 20 square miles or so, and none place less patrolled than Bear Brook State Park. From a narrative perspective, we begin to discover the nature of the place in which we are brought to by the malicious event that had transpired there. We begin to get the feeling that while everyone maybe looking out for each other, the geography in which they live says otherwise. Jason proves this point by saying “if you were to walk out from the Morgan’s (then) home, it wouldn’t be another five miles until you came across another house”.
Nearing the middle and last minutes of the story, the audience is also given the framework of how an investigation is conducted. Jason gives us questions to think about including, “in an area this large, how far do you stretch the red tape”, and Mont Pleasure’s account of how he felt his police training had kicked in during that moment. Coupled with more interesting lines like “in order to know who the victim knew, we have to know who the victim is”, which gives us the premise for, what I perceive this first episode to be about, knowing who these people were and just how many more people actually go missing in the world without much remembrance unfortunately. Ultimately the podcast employs an overload of sensory stimulation, both in the piano-xylophone-like music and an abundance of questions and information we are given in the forms of descriptions and personal accounts in order to surmise our own inferences and conclusions. The episode ends with a second barrel being discovered by a major crimes investigator, only a few hundred feet from where the first barrel had been found a year or so ago, and so we are served with an all of a sudden “big gasp” moment at this discovery that will be pursued in the next episode. Short excerpts are given from the next episode that builds anticipation for its release as a final narrative choice to maintain attention.
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