A Place of Vanishing: Barbara Newhall Follett and the Woman in the Woods

Appears in: The Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019

Barbara Newhall Follett (1914-1939?) was a New England child prodigy whose first novel The House Without Windows appeared in 1927 when she was only 12 years old. A second novel followed in 1928, but Barbara’s dreams of a literary career never materialized: her third and final novel Lost Island wasn’t published in her lifetime while Barbara herself disappeared from Brookline, Massachusetts on the evening of December 7, 1939. She was 25 years old.

My 2019 article “A Place of Vanishing” presents the hypothesis that Barbara Newhall Follett’s remains were discovered on Pulsifer Hill in Holderness, New Hampshire in November 1948 but were subsequently misidentified as those of a different young woman, Elsie Whittemore, who had disappeared from neighboring Plymouth, New Hampshire in 1936. The essay describes the lives of these two young women and explores the circumstances of their respective disappearances.

In April 2021 a brief postscript was added to the original article confirming Barbara’s connection to Pulsifer Hill during the period of her disappearance and placing the location of her second home approximately 1/2 mile from the site at which human remains were discovered in 1948.

Article and postscript are available to read free online via the link below.