WEST PARIS – Days before Paul and Heidi Cornish opened their restaurant on Route 26 in West Paris, they drove 40 minutes to a cemetery in Andover and snapped a photograph of an old grave site.

Before opening night, they framed the picture and placed it on the mantel above the fireplace in the main dining room.

It was the couple’s way of paying respect to the woman who is believed by many to have cursed the property where their restaurant is located. It happened nearly two centuries ago.

It was a cold, autumn night in 1809.

Mollyockett was making her way on a dirt path from Andover to Paris when the temperatures dropped and the rain started.

Cold and tired, the elderly woman stopped at a large inn on a settlement overlooking a waterfall in the Little Androscoggin River. She knocked on the door and asked if she could have a room for the night.

Noticing her olive-covered skin, her dark eyes and the fringes on her dress, the owner told Mollyockett that Indians weren’t allowed at the Snow Falls Inn.

Then, in a bold move that would be talked about for decades, the innkeeper closed the door on her face.

An Indian medicine woman who is believed to have spent her life traveling the forests and dirt roads of western Maine, Mollyockett didn’t argue.

But she didn’t simply walk away.

With her hair tightly braided and her medicine pouch around her neck, she cursed the innkeeper, the inn and the future of the entire settlement by declaring that no white man would ever prosper on the land.

When the inn burned down in the early 1900s, most locals were convinced it was the work of Mollyockett.

Did the curse have anything to do with the fire that shut down the Cornishes’ restaurant for six months last year?

That depends on whom you ask.

“I don’t believe it had anything to do with the curse,” said Paul Cornish, who opened The River Restaurant with his wife six years ago after moving to Maine from Pennsylvania.

“I believe it was just misfortune,” Cornish said.

Second fire

A truck traveling on Route 26 had hit a utility pole and knocked down a power line. The line caused a surge of electricity. The surge started a fire. And part of the restaurant, including the apartment upstairs where the Cornishes lived, burned.

“If it was the curse, the building would have burnt down. Don’t you think?” Cornish said.

Eleanor Koskela, who is 82 and has spent much of her life in the West Paris area, doesn’t believe in curses. But she does wonder why that land, particularly the restaurants that have opened in the old schoolhouse on it, haven’t had the best luck.

Before the Cornishes opened The River Restaurant six years ago, the building was vacant for two years. Before that, it was Katie’s Kitchen, then the Snow Falls Restaurant, then Cysco & Honchos.

“It has changed hands a bunch of times. People wonder, you know?” said Koskela, sitting by her kitchen window, which looks out at Mollyockett Mountain.

Buried gold?

Koskela and her late husband, Taisto Koskela, inherited part of the mountain years ago. They used to take their children to Andover Cemetery where Mollyockett was buried in 1816, and they told their children and grandchildren the many stories involving the Indian traveler.

The daughter of Indian chiefs and supposedly the last living member of the Pequakett tribe, Mollyockett was originally called Mollocket. She has been credited with having great knowledge of herbs and medicinal cures.

As the legend goes, she continued walking to Paris Hill after cursing the Snow Falls Inn. There, she met a couple who needed someone to care for their sick infant.

Her prescription of warm cow’s milk direct from the udder is said to have cured Hannibal Hamlin, who would go on to become the vice president of the United States under Abraham Lincoln.

“It seems that with people who were nice to her, she was nice back,” said Tim Buck, who owns the Mollyockett Motel on Route 26. “With people who were mean, she could obviously be pretty aggressive.”

His motel has a large mural of Mollyockett walking through green fields. A wooden carving of the Indian princess sits by the pool.

Many customers have asked about the curse, Buck said.

Others are more interested in the gold that she supposedly buried in the woods somewhere near Paris Hill.

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