On a Wednesday evening in late October, when the light goes early and the hills above St. Johnsbury turn the color of old brass, the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum will host a talk about the stories that refuse to die. "Unveiling the Shadows: Myths and Legends of the NEK and North Country" is a free public program by Robert Jones, the owner of Ysbrydoliaeth Curiosity Shop, scheduled for 7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 21, at 1171 Main Street. The event is billed as a journey through the Northeast Kingdom and the New Hampshire North Country for skeptics, believers, and lovers of a good yarn alike, peeling back layers of local history to reveal the magic and mystery hidden in plain sight.
The venue alone sets a mood. The Athenaeum is a legacy of the Fairbanks family, a private, nonprofit public library and art gallery, and a monument of the nineteenth-century belief in learning. Horace Fairbanks founded it as a culture center for the town, providing a free public library, art gallery, and host for numerous educational events. A talk about legends in a room built to hold a monumental American landscape is a fitting pairing: both are exercises in looking at a place and seeing more than what is plainly there.
The speaker comes to the subject by an unlikely route. Jones, the owner of Ysbrydoliaeth, comes originally from Monroe County in northeastern Pennsylvania, born of a Pennsylvania-German and Welsh family. The shop's name is Welsh for "inspiration," pronounced roughly uh-sprid-OH-ly-eye-th, and its root, ysbryd, descends from the Latin spiritus, meaning spirit or ghost. That double meaning is deliberate. The shop, which opened in the Calderwood Building in St. Johnsbury after Jones was inspired by a fall trip to Vermont in 2021, describes itself as a magasin de curiosités, a cabinet of curiosities, with merchandise from the United States, Wales, Brittany, France, Japan, and Argentina. Alongside soaps and candles and Welsh woolens, it stocks what it calls a touch of the otherworldly, and it presents its owner in the language of the eccentric uncle.
That background matters for the talk. The Northeast Kingdom, usually taken to comprise Essex, Orleans, and Caledonia counties, is a region of deep woods, hard winters, and small towns where stories travel by word of mouth and outlive the people who first told them. The North Country across the Connecticut River shares the same weather, the same terrain, and much of the same storytelling inheritance. Jones's program promises to treat those traditions as history rather than mere entertainment, examining how local lore accumulates around real places and real events until the line between record and legend blurs.
The event is free and open to the public, and it is the kind of evening that asks only that you show up and listen. The Athenaeum is committed to educating and inspiring the St. Johnsbury community and beyond, a monument to the nineteenth-century belief in learning. A century and a half after Horace Fairbanks founded the library, the building is still doing that work, one story at a time. For anyone curious about what lurks in the Kingdom's shadows, or simply in the mood for a good yarn on a dark October night, the doors open at 1171 Main Street.