LIVERMORE – Norlands Living History Center kicked off its 14th annual three-day seminar of “Mysteries of Northern New England” with insight into a spiritual Indian legend, the revealing of information about a controversial Round Table Foundation in Rockland, and eccentric events occurring in the Bangor area a century ago.

Marie L. Girouard, director of Cultural and Historic Preservation Department, Penobscot Indian Nation, presented information about Pamola – a spirit in Penobscot and Wabanaki legends who resides at the top of Mount Katahdin.

The Penobscot people view this spirit as “helpful and extremely powerful,” Girouard said, though through the years, non-Indian natives have transformed him into an evil spirit through magazine articles and stories.

Mount Katahdin was, and still is, a mystical destination for Penobscot people. Every year there is a spiritual trek that involves adults and children running and walking around the mountain. Girouard said there are still spiritual occurrences at the mountain and told a story about an 11-year-old boy who went on the trek and kept running for 6 miles, never tiring. Some contributed the strength he felt to Pamola.

Lloyd Ferriss, writer for the Maine Sunday Telegram and author of “Secrets of a Mountain,” described author Aldous Huxley’s very unusual trip to Rockland in the summer of 1955.

Huxley, who is said to be a mystic, received an invitation to come to the Round Table Foundation, an 18-room mansion that at any time during the summer, housed five or six scientists doing experiments on trance and telepathy. It is said that the men did drugs such as LSD as a way to step backward and view the world differently.

Founder Andrija Puharich kept a very low profile and for many years after the mansion closed in 1960, the people of Rockland would not discuss the events that occurred there at all.

The French and American military were very interested in the mansion and considered using telepathy for warfare.

Experiments were done there on the relationship between humans and animals, and humans and insects. One of the best known experiments that went on was the ferret experiment in which a ferret was put in a cage with a sensor and a person would go in the cage having no contact with anyone except for the director outside of the cage.

Puharich would hire people who he thought to be telepathic to perform his experiments. The deceased Harry Stump, sculptor and wife of local Rita Stump, were hired for $50 a week.

Through reading Stump’s memoirs, Ferriss was able to gather information about Huxley as Stump was his closet friend there.

In a Stump memoir, Ferriss read Stump’s thoughts about Huxley. “Never had I met a man with a mind like his. It was like a steel trap, really.”

Stump wrote about a conversation he had with Huxley about “How everything is related and we are all part of a bigger cycle and should respect it.”

Ferriss acquired a Huxley memoir of which he read “It was all lively and amusing and I think promising,” referring to the summer he spent at the Round Table Foundation.

Wayne E. Reilly, freelance writer for the Bangor Daily News, discussed paranormal events around Bangor that occurred many years ago. Reilly said that Maine people were very active in the Spiritualist Movement during the early 1900s and in 1906 a state convention was held in Bangor. One event he discussed was a boy who came to Bangor Opera House and could heal people of all their ailments including blindness, deafness and other physical handicaps.

“A whole science grew out of testing these events to see if they were true or false,” Reilly said.

The event will run until June 16. For questions or a schedule of events, call Billie Gammon at 897-2236.