Elbert Stevens owned a sawmill in Bridgewater Corners, Vermont at the turn of the last century. His people had been in the area for time out of mind and he was known as a man who, like the bedrock that makes up the state, was solid, strong, and in a word, reliable.  He was also a keeper of things, never one to discard anything that might be of use later, a habit practiced by many folks of his age and caliber. You never know when you might need something later - usually after you threw it out the year before. Such people kept things, just in case. One of those possessions was a scrapbook, a place to glue the memorable tidbits of news and marginalia found in the papers and almanacs read during those long Vermont winter evenings when the wind howled outside the door like wolves. He hadn’t started the scrapbook - it had merely been handed down to him from a family member long gone, but he held it as something precious for within those pages was something incredible and truly fantastic, a tale told by lamplight on the darkest nights of year, when the cold seeped in from the bottom of the door and made you wonder - how cold is too cold? The thought of it was enough to keep him reading and rereading it over the years, especially on those long, cold winter nights and it set his mind wondering. Can such things be?  That relative had left Elbert a story clipped from a newspaper now long out of print and forgotten, prior to the American Civil War, in the 1830s.  The paper’s name was not on the clipping. Fading to yellow, the old newsprint held the story recounted by an unnamed traveler who recalled a practice he had personally witnessed in the far hills of northern Vermont. Later, author Robert Wilson would write of this clipping in the pages of Yankee Magazine, first in April of 1940 and again in March of 1963. So we are several steps away from a primary source, but the idea is one so singularly strange that it bears retelling. Elbert Stevens recalls, “I am an old man now and have seen some strange sights in the course of a roving life in foreign lands as well as in this country, but none so strange as the one I found recorded in an old diary kept by my Uncle William that came into my possession a few years ago at his decease.”  Elbert claims to have been to the location of the events described in the article, about twenty miles from Vermont’s capital, Montpelier. A log cabin on a mountainside still stood where the traveler claims this all took place. Elbert even claimed to have spoken with an old man about the events in the story and the old fellow claimed that his own father was one of those folk who spent the winter in a kind of frozen death, what scientists today might call ‘suspended animation.’ Scientists have long known about the ability of certain animals who can hibernate - slow down their natural processes to such a degree that they persist in a kind of torpor, a state of sleep so deep, they conserve energy and most efficiently use fat and water in their body so that they can stand the long, low temperatures of northern climates.  Bears, turtles, snakes, groundhogs, bats, even bumblebees all possess the ability to enter this state, known to scientists as heterothermy. As the core body temperature drops below 95 degrees, the metabolic rate decreases, the heart beats slowly, respiration slows, as well. The body temperature of these creatures lowers, as well, and fat deposits are called upon to feed the furnace of the body instead of ingesting food.  Certainly old-timers who had to hunt to bring home fresh meat in the winter, would have been aware that some creatures effectively disappeared in the winter. Where did they go? But the idea that humans might be able to hibernate seems against all prior knowledge and reason. But what of hypothermia, the slow freezing deathlike state that comes before the final heartbeat of those humans who are exposed to winter’s fury? The cells in the b