Episode 42: The Portly Man

In this episode Megan investigates the strange phenomenon known as the Portly Man. Women are being abducted, driven around the state, and given bizarre history lessons about some of Maine’s darkest moments, before being returned hours later. Who or what is this portly man, and what is his purpose?

Content Warning: abduction, kidnapping, death, alcohol/drinking, time displacement, suicide,

Host: Chris Estes
Writers: Lucas Knight & Chris Estes
Special Investigator: Megan Meadows
Sound Design: Chris Estes
Producer: Megan Meadows

Transcript

 Malevolent Maine

Episode 42: The Portly Man 

Malevolent Maine is a horror podcast, and may contain material not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

INTRO: 

MEGAN: An encounter with the talking dead aboard a merchant sailing vessel. A mysterious creature that prowls the woods in Temple. And an update into our investigation of the King Beyond the Desert. Hey everyone, it’s Megan. These are the stories we’ve got coming your way in the next few weeks. We’re hard at work this season bringing you all new stories, both on our main show, and over on Patreon where we have new episodes of Cardinal Sins coming out and a new side story we’re about to announce. If you’d like to help support our investigations of things that go bump in the night, head over to patreon.com/malevolentmaine, where for a small monthly fee you can become a member of our Malevolent Mob and have access to early release episode, side stories, and other exclusive content. Don’t forget to follow us on social media, and as always, enjoy the show.

An icy wind tugs at your collar, but you keep your head down and continue walking into the wind. You hear an engine idling close by, but you don’t look up. It’s not for you. Your car is just a block away. The sound of a window being lowered gives you pause and then you hear a melodic voice ask if you’d like a ride. You don’t mean to, but you look up on instinct, and that’s when you see the man behind the wheel of the small blue truck. There’s a mischievous twinkle in your eye as he asks again. And though you’ve never seen this man before, you just know he’s your best friend, and you’d like nothing more than to go for a ride with this complete stranger. With a smile you climb into the truck and moments later you’ve disappeared from the sidewalk, your old life all but forgotten.

This is Malevolent Maine.

TITLE SEQUENCE

Stay focused, MMers. This week’s story is about a recent phenomenon happening around southern Maine. It was brought to our attention by our Producer, Megan, who has recently taken on a more investigative role at Malevolent Maine, in addition to helping to make the podcast. Here’s Megan to explain.

MEGAN: Okay, so I first heard about this story from a friend of mine who lives in Portland. She told me about a friend of hers who had recently been …well, not abducted, but… taken. I know it sounds weird, so let me explain. My friend’s friend, we’re going to call her Ava - that’s not her real name by the way - was at a winery in Portland. They were having a public tasting event and she was there with a co-worker. At one point the co-worker had to leave early. A sick kid or something. So Ava was there by herself. She decided to have one more glass of wine and then head out. When she got outside the venue, she said an older model small blue truck pulled up to the curb. At first she thought nothing of it, but being a woman, she was on guard. 

As she was walking past the truck to where she had parked her own car, the window rolled down and she heard a man inside say, “Pardon me, miss.” Again, Ava tried to walk past and avoid eye contact, but when the driver actually called out her name she looked up. It was an older man, maybe late sixties, early senties, balding, overweight with a soft, round face. She said when she made eye contact he smiled. “Wouldn’t you like to go for a ride?” he asked.

We contacted Ava, again not her real name but she wished to remain anonymous. Ava is in her late twenties, tall and fit. She runs half marathons and works for a research facility that designs medical equipment for pets. She’s smart and quick witted, maybe even a little sarcastic. Her eyes were bright, but a little guarded when we met with her. She said she had never heard of our show before, but that when Megan reached out with their mutual connection, she agreed to talk with us because her story is so unexplainable.

“I would never get into a car with a stranger,” she said. “I’m not stupid. You hear about it online all the time - women getting enticed into vehicles and then they are never heard from again. So, no. There was no way I was getting into that truck.”

Except, Ava said, as soon as the man asked her if she wanted a ride, Ava found herself suddenly wanting exactly that.

MEGAN: Ava said that it wasn’t against her will, at least not in the traditional sense. One minute she was trying not to be noticed and just get to the safety of her car, and the next, all she wanted in the whole world was to get into the truck with this man and go for a ride. Looking back on it, she says she knows how insane that sounds, how dangerous it was, but in the moment, it felt like the best idea in the world.

The man leaned over and pushed open the passenger side door of his truck, and Ava climbed in. She said the truck was clean, but not spotless. It looked like the kind of truck a little old grandfather would keep - well used, but well maintained. As she buckled her seatbelt, the old man pulled out into traffic and soon they were gone. 

That was the last anyone saw of Ava for six hours.

Ava says she and the man drove around for six hours. She doesn’t remember having to stop for gas or any other stops. She says they drove around Portland for a while before heading out of the city and heading west through Gorham to the town of Standish.

Standish is a town of about 10,000 in Cumberland County. It’s home to St. Joseph’s College and the Schoolhouse Arts Center at Sebago lake. It’s a relatively quiet community with a rich history that stretches back all the way to the French and Indian Wars. 

Ava says the man talked nearly the entire time they drove. She doesn’t remember all of what he said, but she claims she hardly got a word in. She does remember him talking a lot about the history of places or things that happened thirty or forty years ago. He would point out buildings, explaining the history of their architects or quaint Puritan-style churches and particularly moving sermons given there in 1967 or 1981. The man had an incredible knowledge of these people and events, Ava said, as if he had been there himself. As he spoke she began to see the things he talked about, imagining them so clearly in her mind it was like she, herself was there. 

At no point did Ava consider she had made a dangerous mistake by climbing into the old man’s truck. He never once said or did anything inappropriate, except of course, driving her around town. Her eyes grew heavy as they drove and her head began to feel light. Not an intoxicating feeling, she said, but more like taking cold medicine. She was swimming in the stories he was telling her.

MEGAN: Even though Ava says she got into the truck willingly, that she wasn’t forced or coerced aside from the initial offer, she still feels like her actions weren’t her own. She says that while she drove around with the man she believed she was in control of herself, she realized later that she wasn’t. Ava told me she would never get into a vehicle with a stranger. She also said she never once checked her phone, something she can’t remember ever doing for a six hour stretch. She says she understood that at any time she could ask the man to stop the truck or she could open the door and jump out, it just simply didn’t seem like something she wanted to do. She wanted to go with him and hear his stories.

It wasn’t until the truck was parked outside of an old red house somewhere in Standish Corner that Ava began to think she might be hypnotized.

The common belief, probably from too many TV shows in the 70s and 80s that relied on it as a plot device, is that hypnosis compels a person to do whatever the person in charge wants. Anyone can be hypnotized, and while under the so-called brainwashing, the person will say and do things completely opposite their character.

The truth is hypnosis is an altered state of mind, one of hyper focused attention, reduced peripheral awareness, and a greater chance to respond to suggestions. It doesn’t turn someone into a Manchurian candidate, but it can convince them to do things they most likely wouldn’t decide to do on their own, but secretly may want to. It’s been used for entertainment purposes - dance like a chicken in front of all your co-workers - and to help quit smoking or lose weight. Most of the Hollywood type hypnosis is a fictional extrapolation of that.

That’s not to say that kind of mental manipulation cannot happen. It usually involves the use of mind altering substances like drugs, months of conditioning, or oftentimes occult practices.

It seems highly unlikely that Ava was put into such a state by a simple random encounter with this man.

Then again, there is a little something of the Pied Piper in Ava’s story. In the well-known fable, a traveling musician offers to rid the town of Hamelin, Germany of its rat problem. The town elders agree and the piper plays a magic tune that causes the rats to follow him and ultimately leap into the river where they are drowned. When the elders refuse to pay the agreed upon fee, the piper plays another tune and leads all the children of the town away - some say to a secret cave, others to the very river where the rats drowned. 

Now, we’re not suggesting that the literal Pied Piper - most likely an allusion to Death - picked Ava up outside a winery and took her traveling around southern Maine. Her driver, for example, didn’t use music to lure her, and she is not a child. He also returned her safe and sound, something the Pied Piper never did with the missing children. But there is something of a hypnotic suggestion, a compelling, if you will, to follow and go along with the elderly man. Ava said she knew never to take rides from strange men, and yet, in the moment, she felt it was the completely right thing to do. The fear or concern she would normally feel, simply didn’t manifest itself, and the part of her brain that would normally keep her from getting into his truck seemingly shut down.

Which brings us back to her story and the truck parked outside Standish’s Red House.

Standish is home to several “villages” or smaller, mostly historic areas that were incorporated into the larger municipality. Standish Corner is one of them. It’s a collection of late 18th, early 19th century homes, in southeastern Standish, most of which have now been designated as historic landmarks. Just up the road from the intersection of Routes 113 and 35 lies the Red House. 

The House is tall, or seems to be taller than it actually is. It’s three stories, well technically two and  half. It’s a five bays wide wooden structure that was originally built by Albion Dearborn in the late 1700s, painted a unique shade of bright red. It has a unique roof structure, which has been referred to as a two stage gambrel, with the upper floor appearing recessed from the front of the house. It’s a unique design seen in only a few remaining houses in Maine, notably the Tate House in Portland, and the Burnham Tavern in Machias.

Dearborn was from Boston but was named the parson for Standish in 1779. He moved there with his family, a wife named Caroline, and three young children. Dearborn’s time in Standish was brief, serving as the parson for only seven years, but it is a memorable one in local histories.

MEGAN: According to Ava, the man in the truck pulled up alongside the Red House. It’s some sort of museum today, though it doesn’t appear to have regular hours of operation, and not many people stop there. They sat outside the house, the truck idling. Ava says she doesn’t remember any other cars driving by, but that doesn’t seem possible. The area is fairly well traveled along a major route. Cars should have passed by. 

While they sat outside the Red House, the man behind the wheel of the truck, a man Ava said at this point she considered a friend, began telling her the sad history of the house.

When Albion Dearborn and his family moved to Standish, he was determined to impress the people he would soon oversee. As the newly appointed parson, Dearborn would lead not just the church, but also the community. He wanted to win the respect of his parishioners by showing them that he was as hardworking and dependable as he knew them to be.

To that end Dearborn resolved to build his home entirely by hand with little to no help from anyone else outside of his family. As the parson he was a prominent citizen, and while his large home would reflect that, the fact that it was handbuilt, not hired out, would show his commitment to the area. Indeed when many heard of his plan, they thought it an admirable goal.

In the spring of 1780 construction began on what would come to be known as the Red House. Dearborn, though Harvard educated, had been raised on a farm, and began working on the home alongside his thirteen year old son, William. Tragedy struck less than two weeks into construction. A pile of bricks that was to be used for the chimney tipped over and crushed William Dearborn beneath it. The eldest Dearborn child lasted three days in a coma before succumbing to his injuries.

Albion and Caroline mourned their son, as did the great community. Dearborn had been in town just a short while, but the untimely death of a child is a pain everyone feels. Many men of the town volunteered to finish the home for the grieving family. Albion. Dearborn was a proud man, however, and he declined, dedicating the building of the family home as a way to honor his lost son. Construction was delayed for an appropriate time for mourning, and then once again Dearborn could be seen spending his free time working on the home.

Unfortunately the hard times weren’t over for the Dearborn family. By the end of the summer little Mary Dearborn, just six, was kicked by a horse and killed instantly. Again, came a time of mourning, again offers from the community to finish the home, and again the resolution to honor his family by finishing it himself.

When the first snow flew in the winter of 1780, the Dearborn house was nowhere near completed. And when a fire broke out in the temporary shack on their property the Dearborns were using as a home while the constructions halted, the middle child, Evan, was caught in the blaze.

Suddenly childless, many began to whisper that the Dearborns were cursed. And yet, when the ground thawed and the snow melted, there was Albion Dearborn with a hammer and a bag of nails continuing the work on the home.

By the following October the home was nearly finished, though many marked a change in the much pitied parson. Where Dearborn had been a friendly, welcoming man, he was now stern and kept mostly to himself, aside from his weekly church services. His hands and arms were scarred from the numerous injuries he sustained building the home, but many said it was his soul that was scarred much worse from the loss of his children.

Then Caroline Dearborn caught pneumonia. She clung to life for nearly a month before succumbing to the illness. In a little over a year the parson from Boston had become a childless widower. Still he toiled on the home, shrugging off all offers of help or aid of any kind.

Finally in the summer of 1881, the house was completed. As a finishing touch, Dearborn painted the house a garish shade of red, usually reserved for barns. Many thought Dearborn chose that shade to reflect the spilled blood of his family, but the scarred parson never explained his color scheme to anyone.

For three days after its construction, the Red House stood silent. During that time Albion Dearborn remained out of sight. The people of Standish were unsure if he was inside, though they never saw any smoke in the chimney nor any candlelight from the windows. Some thought the weary preacher might have taken a vacation after his monumental task.

When Sunday came and went and there was no sight of Dearborn, his parishioners decided to come calling. They found the back door to the home ajar and when they entered, cautiously calling out the owner's name, they found him hanging from a baluster on the staircase. Evidently, after finally finishing the cursed home, Albion Dearborn had walked through the empty rooms, alone with his silence and grief. Then he tied a noose and joined his departed family.

There’s a lot more to the Red House from stories of sightings of the ghostly Dearborn family to a curse on anyone who lives there. In fact, we could do a Malevolent Maine episode on the house itself, but that’s the important part of the story for how it relates to Ava and the strange man who took her there.

Ava said the man who had, not exactly kidnapped her, but taken her on this unexpected journey, watched her closely while he finished the story of the tragic Dearborn family. She said it felt as if he were studying her, searching for something in her face, some reaction. Soon after he put the truck in gear and began to drive again.

MEGAN: Ava told me they drove for a while after that. The man kept pointing out different places - homes and buildings, roads, even parks, and telling her things about their history. She doesn’t remember all of them, at least not in enough detail to retell. She says she only has vague memories of the return trip and getting out of the man’s truck, but at some point, they got back to Portland, and before Ava knew it, she was being let out of the truck somewhere on Commercial Street, nowhere close to where she had been picked up. She said the man thanked her and then drove off, leaving her to find a way back to her car. Six hours had passed. She said was shocked to see how much time had passed and that her phone was full of missed calls and text messages from concerned friends. 

On the surface, this story doesn’t necessarily seem to be typical Malevolent Maine fare. To be sure what happened to Ava in concerning, and thankfully it has a better ending than most stories of this type. Ava is adamant that the man never touched her, not even a handshake, and that aside from studying her face while recounting the story of the Red House, he hardly ever looked at her. Aside from taking her for six hours and leaving her in the middle of Portland, of course, nothing untoward happened.

We might chalk this up to an eccentric, lonely senior citizen with a penchant for Maine history. Obviously, what this man did was inappropriate, but as Ava told us, he did not hold her against her will exactly, and it would be hard to pin a crime on this elderly driver. It’s clearly an odd story, especially considering Ava’s instinct that while not against her will, there was something that made her believe going with the man was a good idea, but it lacks the…well, malevolent edge so many of our own stories have. In fact, if the Red House wasn’t involved - and that may be purely coincidence as you’ll see - we may not have ran with this story at all.

MEGAN: Listen, I certainly sympathized with Ava. As a woman, I know how dangerous this world can be. You always have to look over your shoulder, keep your keys between your knuckles - all of that insane stuff - just to feel safe.But as far as my first case went, this one didn’t seem to click. But then I happened to be out with some friends in the Old Port. That’s the downtown bar scene in Portland. After a few drinks, I went to the restroom. And it was one of those dive-y bar bathrooms with you know, tons of stickers and writing and all that stuff - cuz that’s the kind of bar I go to. And I saw it there, in the middle of band stickers and dispensary stickers and everything else they put up there. I don’t know why it jumped out to me, or how I knew, but something about this message sent a chill down my spine. In thick black letters someone had written: “Beware the Portly Man.” All of a sudden, I knew… I mean, I knew this had something to do with the story Ava had told me. She had never called him that, I don’t think I’d ever even heard that name before, but it felt right. I went back to the bar and started asking around, asking some of the women there if they had ever heard of someone called the Portly Man.

What Megan found shocked us. Not only had a few women there heard of the Portly Man, but when she went looking online, she found several warnings about the so-called Portly Man. “Don’t accept a ride from the Portly Man.” “Under no circumstances go with the Portly Man.” “A sketchy dude picked me up and told me the history of a tree.” These were just some of the comments we found when we started looking online.

Beware the Portly Man.

It seems the Portly Man was a much bigger story than we had suspected. The Portly Man appears to be the generally agreed upon name for this strange person, though it seems this is a term coined by the women who encountered him and not any title he gave himself.

About a dozen women going as far back as 2021 have encountered the elderly historian. We didn’t speak to all of them, but many were willing to share their stories.

All of them were nearly the same. Coming out of some public place, these women were approached by the Portly Man and offered a ride. For some unexplained reason, they found themselves agreeing. All of the women we talked with - all various ages from nineteen to forty-two - were taken for a lengthy period of time. The shortest was four hours, the longest twelve. They were driven all over the state, never too far from where they were picked up, but time seemed not to flow like normal, or at least not to matter. Along their drive the Portly Man explained the history of things - the Kineo Motel in Greenville and the train that used to run there, Mary Nason’s grave, the Millbrook Factory burning. And at some point, the Portly Man always stopped to tell a more detailed story of something or some one. One woman told us that the Portly Man actually took her to a small community play somewhere in Acton. He explained to her how the play they watched was the product of the playwright’s abusive childhood, a victim of both a father and mother’s violence. Another time, he took a woman to an art gallery and showed her a series of paintings an artist had done in the throes of a heroin addiction that ultimately led to the artist’s death. A third story was of a series of folk art pieces for sale at a farmer’s market, where the crafter had killed her husband soon after creating the pieces.

In the end, all of the women were returned unharmed, hours after they got into the truck, relatively close, but not exactly where they left from. In all cases the women were required to find their own means back to their vehicles or homes. None of the women were harmed in any physical way, and none of them could recall any inappropriate comments or actions.

MEGAN: This is os creepy. All of the women I spoke with mentioned that in the aftermath of their strange trip, they all felt a sense of violation. Not in a physical sense, or even an emotional one, but each woman talked about how they couldn’t believe they had been foolish enough to go with the Portly Man. At the time it felt like the most natural thing, like hopping in for a quick errand with a friend, but afterwards…these women - Ava included - were horrified by their decisions and confused as to why they would ever consent to such a thing.

With a bigger picture of this Portly Man, we began to establish some theories. First, there was a clear pattern here. For whatever reason, the Portly Man targeted women. More importantly for us, we began to see a pattern with the places he brought these women.

All of them were historical, at least in a sense that they were created sometime before the “modern” era. We’re talking about anything pre-1990s. Second, all of them were works of art, at least in some sense of the word. The play, which we surmise was most likely “His Lordship’s Last Wish” by Ian Vance, the heroin addict’s paintings, the so-called folk art, even the Red House, itself, could be seen as a work of art. More significantly, all of these pieces had some sort of tragedy attached to them, as if their very creation could not have happened without suffering.

Then there’s the odd appraisal the Portly Man seemed to do of each woman at some point during their trip. It sounds as if he was searching for something, perhaps some reaction he hoped to see on these women’s faces. As near as we can tell, the Portly Man didn’t find what he was looking for with Ava, nor any of the other women he took for rides. It’s hard to say what might have happened to these women if the Portly Man had judged them worthy by whatever measure he used, but we can assume it would not be good.

There’s also the odd, hypnotic, nearly narcotic experience all of the women claim to have. Nearly all of them seemed to have only a vague grasp of time passing during their encounters with the Portly Man. All of them were shocked to learn how much time had passed, and all of them were horrified that they ever agreed to go with him in the first place.

Is the Portly Man capable of some sort of supernatural ability to compel women to ride with him? Does he emit a sort of subconscious suggestion to find him friendly and go along with his suggestions for a ride? It seems like a bit of a stretch, and yet so many of the women we spoke with couldn’t fathom their actions the day they took a ride with him. It’s possible, of course, that the Portly Man is just an extremely skilled mentalist or hypnotist, able to catch these women with a single look or phrase, though this seems unlikely.

It’s also easy to overlook a small detail of Ava’s story that has a startling importance. The Portly Man knew her name. It wasn’t until he called her by her first name that Ava said she looked up and fell under whatever spell he had. When asked, only about half the women we talked with remembered him using their names. If the Portly Man is some sort of stalker, targeting specific women, he may be doing research on them, finding them online before eventually tracking them down. 

Then again, if he is something… more than human, it’s possible he has other ways of learning the identities of his victims. If this is a being capable of reading minds, it may explain how he is able to lull these women into going with him.

MEGAN: But what’s the purpose? Why does he want these women? What is he looking for? And what’s his connection to the horrible histories he’s sharing with his traveling companions?

At this point we don’t have a lot of information. Every woman we spoke with was adamant about her experience, and nearly all of the stories were identical. And here’s something else we’ve learned after years of investigation - there’s likely many more who haven’t come forward yet. 

If the Portly Man has preyed upon the twelve women we uncovered, it's highly likely there are others who haven’t spoken up about what has happened. 

His appearance seems random, ranging from the Portland area, all the way down to Kittery. It doesn’t seem as if he’s reached outside of southern Maine…at least not yet. That makes it hard to verify these encounters. We’ve asked local businesses for security camera footage that might show the women getting into his truck, but many of these encounters are from months, even years ago, and much of that footage simply no longer exists. 

Megan offered to serve as a potential target, to see if she could get the Portly Man to take her for a ride and verify these encounters, but with his erratic appearances, it’s nearly impossible to determine where or when the Portly Man will show up. That, combined with our hesitance to put any of our people in potential harm’s way after the events of last fall, ruled out any real chance of a timely personal experience.

So far, the Portly Man doesn’t seem to be overtly dangerous, per se. At least not violent. His abductions are temporary, and his victims are returned unharmed. However the mental anguish is very real and very lingering.

Ava says that while her encounter with the Portly Man doesn’t keep her up at night, she can’t shed the nagging question of why she went along with him in the first place. She’s troubled by how different she felt when she was with the man, versus back in the safety of her own home. 

“He did something,” she wrote to us in a follow up email. “I don’t know what he did, or how he did it, but he made me want to go with him, to want to hear him.”

To all of our listeners in southern Maine, we urge caution. It is never a good idea to accept rides from strangers, and many of the ramifications are far worse than lost hours and unique history lessons. Stay together - at this point, it doesn’t seem like the Portly Man targets groups, only individuals. Lastly, keep an eye out for an older model, small blue truck, something like a Chevy S-10 or a Ford Ranger. All of the women said it was a faded dark blue in color, with no noticeable damage to the exterior. None of the victims remembered a license plate or anything else that would make the vehicle stand out.

If you have had an encounter with the Portly Man, whether you went for a ride with him or not, or you know someone who has, please reach out to us. We want to hear your story. We believe you. 

At this point in our investigation, both his true identity and his motives remain a mystery. What does he want? Why is he taking women to these places with dark, disturbing pasts? And what happens when he finally finds what he’s looking for?

Stay safe out there, Maine. 

Malevolent Maine is Lucas Knight, Tom Wilson, and myself, Chris Estes.

If you’d like to read more about our investigations check out our website at malevolentmaine.com

While there, don’t forget to check our merch store. And, if you’re so inclined, support us on Patreon at patreon.com/malevolentmaine

Thank you for listening to Malevolent Maine.

And as always, stay safe out there, Maine.