At Reid State Park, a partridge named Vinny once fell in love with a maintenance man. At Fort Knox, volunteers have fielded so many overnight requests from folks hoping to see a ghost that they’ve toyed with making an official weekend of it.

Then there’s George Washington’s lost gold … that perhaps isn’t quite so lost.

Strange, sometimes-lucrative tales from the state park system. Visit any of them June 19 — vehicles with a Maine plate get in free that day.

Bird love

The year was 1997. As part of his job as maintenance coordinator out of Reid State Park, Ron Shaw checked on wells at the end of a dirt road every day or two.

That’s where he met Vinny.

“I was grading the road one day and I look out my window and a partridge flies by,” said Shaw, a 26-year park veteran.

Shaw returned the next day. The bird buzzed him again. And again.

“He’d fly beside the truck and then land in front of me so I’d have to stop,” Shaw said. “Finally, I’d take 5 minutes and sit down and I’d run my hands in the leaves and start talking to him.”

The partridge pecked his hand. He sat on Shaw’s knee.

“He just got braver and braver,” Shaw said. “When I’d start the truck and start going again, he’d run beside the truck. He’d go the whole length of the (three-quarter mile) road.”

Shaw kindly slowed to 5 mph so the bird could keep up.

The partridge earned the nickname Vinny after Joe Pesci’s character in “My Cousin Vinny.” They shared the same sort of strut.

Vinny had one close call that summer: “I hadn’t seen him for a week or two and I thought, well, maybe he just wasn’t the smartest partridge and something finally got him, and then he showed up again and he had two tail feathers left, so something almost got him.”

At the end of the summer, Vinny was no more. The park superintendent has described the bird as in love with Shaw. Shaw thinks it was after his ride.

“Something fascinated him about the truck,” he said.

Treasure hunted

A pre-traitor Benedict Arnold, leading a convoy up the Kennebec River, tipped his canoe in Eustis in 1775 and lost a box of silver and gold given to him by Gen. George Washington to feed and pay the troops.

The water was too wicked and he had to paddle on, leaving the bounty behind.

Word got out. That box beckoned.

“For years and years and years, people with scuba gear, metal detectors and everything else you can think of looked for that crate of coins,” said Tom Desjardin, Bureau of Parks and Lands’ park historian.

Mention of the waterlogged booty near Shadagee Falls appeared in Lost Treasure Magazine in February.

But as far as Desjardin is concerned, people can look all they want.

They’re not going to find that silver and gold.

He knows where it is.

Probably.

Desjardin is the author of “Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold’s March to Quebec, 1775.” The Colburn House in Pittston, march headquarters, is a state historic site open on weekends in July and August.

John and Nehemiah Getchell were guides on that storied expedition, Desjardin said. Researching his book, the historian interviewed decedent Frank Getchell for background on the Vassalboro brothers. That’s when Frank casually mentioned how very strange it was that “these two fellows living in the wilderness, who had no cash in 1775, suddenly a couple years later bought a bunch of land on the river.”

“It wasn’t until Frank said to me, ‘I have no idea where they got the money’ this little light bulb went off. ‘I know where they might have gotten it …’” Desjardin said.

Of course, the brothers had known all about the tipped canoe.

He retrieved the deed for that land, still in the family, from the Kennebec County Courthouse. A clerk had noted the Getchells paid in gold and silver coins.

“Deeds never have that kind of specificity; there’s no reason to,” Desjardin said. “The clerk probably looked at the two of them and said, ‘Something’s fishy.’”

He suspects they retrieved the box in 1776 and sat on it to make sure any heat was off. They paid $4,000-plus for the property in 1779.

Inspired by the recent article, a Lost Treasure Magazine reader emailed asking Desjardin where to look for the loot.

He told them Vassalboro.

Ghosts and Fort Knox

They wore warm coats donated by L.L.Bean, ignored warnings not to visit in winter and edited out an unexpected cameo by bats.

SyFy Channel’s “Ghost Hunters” were the latest to poke around Fort Knox looking for anything poking back.

Leon Seymour, executive director of Friends of Fort Knox, said visitors share strange tales all the time.

“Of course, now with digital cameras, they’ll show you white orbs floating around in their photographs,” Seymour said. “They’ll come in (to the gift shop) and say, ‘Gee, my camera battery or my cell phone battery inexplicably went dead.’ Or occasionally, ‘Something pushed me; something pushed my hat off.’”

The iconic fort, another state historic site, is open to the public from May to October. The Friends host the annual Fright at the Fort there — 9,000 people turned out last year to be spooked by costumed volunteers — and the annual Paranormal/Psychic Faire.

“We get calls all the time (from ghost hunting groups), ‘Can we come in and spend the night at the fort?’” Seymour said. “We sort of have a reputation of embracing popular culture.”

He believes someone from the team behind “Ghost Hunters” read about the fort online.

“The Bureau and the Friends encouraged them, ‘Please, please do not come in winter. You bring them up in winter it could be 20, 30 degrees below zero here,’ but come they did,” Seymour said.

A crew of 18 from California stayed about a week in February with no heat and limited electricity. The episode aired two months later (Episode 707, “Residual Haunts”).

Park historian Desjardin said the bureau fields regular requests to film on state land. In April, the Discovery Channel’s “Dual Survivor,” starring a barefoot nature survivalist and a hardened, Army-trained survivalist, filmed for two weeks on the Cutler coast.

“We got a kick out of it because you could see a convenience store from where they started,” Desjardin said. “I imagine they did some clamming. We’ll know when it airs. We stay out of their way, especially that one, because you’re not supposed to see people in the background when they’re supposed to be stuck in the wilderness.”

Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, intriguing and unexplained in Maine. Send ideas, pictures and doe-eyed cormorants to [email protected].