Groundhog Tails

"Peabody, here," with another episode of Peabody's Improbable History. It is time to use the WABAC (pronounced "wayback") machine and learn more about yet another one of history's fateful moments.

Our story takes place in the once lonely "hills" of upstate Pennsylvania, where once men were men and women liked them that way.

Under the shadow of a lump called Kellogg's Mountain there once lived an unassuming, slightly-built woman that had only a few passions in life to distract her from the day-to-day passing of the clouds overhead, an occasional rainbow and the wildlife meandering through the nearby woods and fields. Those passions included listening to music, taking photographs of icicles by the thousands and sharing both the music and photos on the Internet with her friends.

She was a demure, thoughtful and caring person. Standing up for her friends against any slight and letting them know she had them on her mind when they were ill or not feeling well. Her biggest trips away from that pastoral little corner in the shadows of Kellogg's Mountain included trips to the beach to the southeast, the lakes further north, and a singular frightful trip to a ladies room in Wichita Falls, Texas. But we will speak no more about that - this is the story about that woman's passions and how the Internet brought the great world beyond the hills into her trailer...

Now, this seemingly harmless, caring, loving woman, who doted on her daughter and grandson, lived her life somewhat vicariously, connected to her friends by the slenderest bit of twisted wire. A wire that allowed her to share and find the music that she loved as well as the photos and videos she took - with the world. And when that wire failed... Oh heavens! Pity the poor soul that failed to fix it quickly and efficiently! Time after time, "The" cable guy came to her door with feeble words of how that little twisted wire wasn't going to be fixed quickly...and time after time, the sounds of the shovel grating through the red shale rock could be heard, most often on darkest nights of the new moon.

There grew up a local legend of around the missing cable guys...guys that would ride out to the isolated glens and vales in plain colored panel vans and never return. If one were to believe the legends, it tells of a cable guy graveyard - tucked into the mists found in the deep shadows of Kellogg's Mountain, out yonder, past the unassuming, slightly-built woman's trailer...

But surely that is all but silly piffle. Or so this historian thought, until he found, deep in the archives, a yellowed poster...


"Hmmm..." he thought to himself, "The legendary winter of twenty-eleven... I wonder?," as he dug through the papers in moldy boxes until he found a few photographs, stuck together in an old-style, USB memory stick...


After carefully activating the memory stick, he found photos of a dead groundhog, without any sign of what had killed it...and looking more closely, the historian noticed ligature marks around the poor creature's neck...his eyebrows crinkled as they did when he knew he was looking at something seriously mysterious.


"These seem to be old crime scene photos... and I do believe that's Punxsutawney Phil...and that mountain in the background! That could be none other than Kellogg's Mountain..." Looking through the photo's more rapidly, with steadily growing horror...


"What's this? ... Oh my dear heavens! Irrefutable evidence of the cable guy graveyard!" "And what's this?"



"Oh, Mister Peabody!!"

:)