hexafu

CHAPTER 4

Things That Go Bump in the Bay State

The Bay State’s heritage of hauntings, both real and imagined, goes back early three centuries to the Salem witch hunt of 1692. That brief hysteri. of accusations, trials, and twenty executions has been documented an analyzed so often that the phrase “Salem witch trials” has passed into household usage. The same cannot be said of Massachusetts’ myriad other recorded incidents of hauntings, cursed apparitions, and unusual phenomena. Yet one need not look far to find a rich harvest of the mysterious.

The Hoosac railroad tunnel that runs through the Berkshire Mountains

has been associated with spooky incidents for more than a century. Its construction cost more than $15 million and 200 lives, and legend has it that the tunnel’s dead do not rest easy.

On March 20, 1865, two explosives experts, Ned Brinkman and Billy Nash, were buried under tons of rock when their foreman, Ringo Kelly, accidentally set off a blast of dynamite. Kelly disappeared immediately after the accident. Exactly one year later he was found strangled to death deep inside the tunnel at precisely the spot where Brinkman and Nash had died. Since then, many people have reported ghostly encounters with all three of the dead men.

In 1872, executives of the Boston and Maine Railroad were frightened by a moaning figure carrying a lantern through the darkened corridors of the Hoosac. In 1936, Joseph Impocco, a railroad worker, reported that he was saved from being run over by an express train when a spooky voice alled out, “Hey, Joe. Joe, jump quick!” He leaped from the track jus seconds before the train roared by.

Many people have mysteriously disappeared in the Hoosac Tunnel. In 1973, Barnard Hastaba set out to walk through the tunnel from North Adams to Williamstown. He was never heard from again.

Retribution is the motive attributed to Goody Hallet, the Witch of Wellfleet. Seduced at fifteen by pirate Sam Bellamy, she was later charged with murdering the child born of the union. While awaiting sentence, so the legend goes, she signed a pact with the devil and escaped from jail. From then on, she haunted the dunes, summoned hurricanes, stirred up thick fogs, and set out false lights to lure ships onto the shoals.

In 1717, Bellamy’s ship the Widdah was wrecked and his body cast ashore near Goody Hallet’s ruined cottage. Still not satisfied, her ghost continued to plague the waters of Cape Cod for the next eighty years, and on occasion she was sighted late at night dressed in red, dancing demonically on the Wellfleet village green.

Mad Meg Wesson, the Witch of Cape Ann, did not fare as well as the Witch of Wellfleet. Mad Meg wore a necklace of eels and kept as her familiar a raven with a peculiar jagged white marking under one wing. She heaved a multitude of curses in her time prompting hens to stop laying, fishnets to break, and pigs to devour their piglets.

In 1745, Sir William Pepperell led a military expedition against the French fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton. On the night before setting out from Cape Ann, Pepperell’s troops gathered for a celebration at a local tavern. Mad Meg appeared at the door and cursed the campaign. Thereafter all military pursuits failed miserably.

One day the troops spotted a raven, its underwing zigzagged with white.

One of the soldiers fired twice at the bird. His first shot broke the raven’s leg, his second shot killed it. Two days later, the army triumphed at Louisburg, and when the soldiers returned to Cape Ann, they later learned that Meg had fallen down and broken her leg. Two days later, the day of the Louisburg victory, she had died.

More than two hundred years later such ghostly goings-on can be dismissed as local legend or embellished half-truths. But dozens of other phenomena simply cannot be explained away so easily.

Many inexplicable incidents have occurred in two “window areas,” the Quabbin Reservoir near Amherst and the Hockomock Swamp in southeastern Massachusetts, near Brockton.

On August 13, 1819, there was a huge blast and a flash of light in the sky above Quabbin. Afterward a bowl-shaped object, dubbed a whatsis, was found in the front yard of an Amherst professor. The object was about eight inches across, covered by a velvety nap of buff color, and full of a stinking pulp that turned blood red and liquefied on exposure to the air.

College authorities judged the whatsis to be an unknown form of freshwater nostoc algae. Several more of the saucers were found soon afterward and similarly dismissed as nostoc, which forms blue-green colonies embedded in jelly. Nostoc, however, has never been known to arrive with a blast and a flash of light. Nor has it been known to stink and to dissolve red on exposure to air.

Other Quabbin oddities include mysterious beehive-shaped caves in Pelham, Leverett, and Shutesbury, and the sightings of crocodilian creatures in the Dismal Swamp near Ware. Crocodiles between six and eight feet long were spotted in 1922. Since then, three crocs ranging in size from one to three feet have been captured in the swamp. Crocodilians are generally found only in tropical or semitropical climates, of course. Unless you take into account the notion that Mysterious America’s colder climes have frequently been visited by out-of-place crocs. But more on that later.

On June 14, 1972, several fat, four-foot-long eels were pulled from the water pipes in a house in Medford after residents complained of low water pressure. The eels are believed to have swum more than 100 miles through the pipes from the Quabbin Reservoir.

The Hockomock Swamp area claims its own share of strange occurrences. Because of its long history of evil, bedeviled, and ominous occurrences, residents have recognized this area of the state for its strange and often sinister character and have, over the years, dubbed it “The Bridgewater Triangle.” This Hockomock Swamp region covers an area of approximately 200 square miles and includes the towns of Abington, Freetown, and Rehoboth at the angles of the triangle, and Brockton, Taunton, the Bridgewaters, Raynham, Mansfield, Norton, and Easton within the triangle. Historically, residents of areas such as this one have acknowledged the haunted or bedeviled nature of these places by giving them names such as Devil’s Kitchen in Illinois, Devil’s Den in New Hampshire, and Diablo Valley in California, as I pointed out in the last chapter.

In recent times, areas of strange unexplained activity – UFO sightings, mysterious disappearances, creature sightings, and a high incidence of accidents, violence, and crime have been labeled “Triangles.” The most famous of these is the “Bermuda Triangle.” The term “Triangle” is now a commonly accepted way of describing what researchers of strange phenomena call a “gateway” or “window” area, that is, a location of focused unexplained activity. The Bridgewater Triangle seems to be one of these focal areas.

For thousands of years, the local Indians have recognized the extraordinary character of the Hockomock area. Indian history figures prominently in the lore of Hockomock. The Indians viewed the area as especially sacred and sometimes evil. Several years ago, an expedition of Massachusetts archaeologists discovered an 8,000-year-old Indian burial site on Grassy Island in the Hockomock Swamp. When the graves were opened, the red ochre within the tombs allegedly bubbled and dissolved mysteriously, and every photograph taken of the site failed to develop.

During the 1970s, while clearing a path for Interstate 495, workers in Norton discovered arrowheads, stone tools, pottery and other remains of prehistoric Paleo-Indians who may have moved into this area after the glaciers receded more than ten thousand years ago. Archaeologists were not surprised by this significant discovery because this area of Massachusetts has one of the highest densities of prehistoric sites in New England.

The question of exactly who were the first new inhabitants of this area is a matter of local controversy. On a site thirty miles up the Taunton River at the edge of the Hockomock Swamp, there is a mysterious forty-ton sandstone boulder, which has been used by various nationalities as proof that they were the first “pilgrims.”

Dighton Rock, as it is called, sits on the riverbank directly across from the Grassy Island Indian burial grounds. This rock is covered by a tangled pattern of carvings and hieroglyphics. Various national groups have interpreted these carvings in a manner that supports each group’s contention that pilgrims or explorers of their nationality were the first to settle the area.

Today, Dighton Rock is the main attraction of Delabarre State Park. It sits in a temperature controlled house, the walls of which are covered with exhibits that support first pilgrim theories of various nationalities including Egyptians, Phoenicians, Vikings, and Portuguese.

Many Portuguese-Americans live in the area, and lately the inscriptions on Dighton Rock have been most cited by adherents of the theory that the first settlers were Portuguese.

In Lisbon, there are royal charters indicating that in 1501 Gasper Corte Real embarked for the New World and was followed in 1512 by his brother, Miguel. Neither ever returned. However, among the spidery scrawls on Dighton Rock, there appears to be the date 1511, with the abbreviated name “M-COR” near it. To adherents of the Portuguese pilgrim theory, these signs indicate that Miguel Corte Real arrived in mid-1502 and stayed for nine years. During that time, it is further theorized, the Portuguese and Indians interbred and this intermingling is supposedly the reason why the Indians of this region were remarkably light-skinned. European explorers such as Verrazano and Roger Williams later remarked upon the light skin of these Indians, known as the Wampanoags or “People of the Dawn Light.” The present day Portuguese-American residents of the area believe this characteristic was passed on by the crews of Miguel Corte Real, and that he and his crew were the first pilgrims.

There is, however, no certainty to this theory. The solid carved and crosshatched forty tons of Dighton Rock is but one of the many mysteries on the landscape of the Hockomock and the Bridgewater Triangle.

The swampy landscape, full of quicksand, rivers, and murky reed-infested pools, is not the only thing mysterious about the Bridgewater Triangle. The skies of this area also abound with strange appearances and disappearances.

From colonial times comes the report of “Yellow Day” when the skies above the area shone all day long with an eerie sulfurous yellow light. In more recent times, many reports of strange lights and noises in the sky above the massive power lines that run through the swamp have been recorded.

Every January, “spook lights”— unexplained elusive balls of light-have been seen over the railroad tracks that run beside the Raynham Dog Track and through the swamp.

In 1973, in Rehoboth, patrons of Joseph’s Restaurant on Park Street believed they were visited by a UFO.

The restaurant experienced a short power failure; when the lights came on, two large perfect circles were found imprinted in the dirt behind the restaurant. During the summer of 1978, many UFO sightings occurred throughout the months of July and August. Another major flap occurred during the spring of 1979. One of the most spectacular unidentified flying objects was seen then by Jerry Lopes, a radio newsman at WHDH in Boston. Lopes encountered his UFO on the 23rd of March. He described it as shaped like home plate on a baseball diamond, with a bright red light on its top, a powerful white “headlight” at the point on the bottom, and rows of white and red lights around the edges. Jerry Lopes saw this strange aerial apparition at the junction of Routes 24 and 106 near the center of the Bridgewater Triangle.

Finally, in the skies of the triangle, there have been sightings of large unknown birds. The most dramatic sighting of one of these huge birds took place at 2 a.m. on a late summer’s night in 1971. Norton police sergeant Thomas Downy was driving along Winter Street in Mansfield toward his home in Easton. As he approached a place known as “Bird Hill” in Easton at the edge of the swamp, he was suddenly confronted by a tremendous winged creature over six feet tall with a wingspan of eight to twelve feet. As Sergeant Downy drew to a stop at the intersection, the bird flew straight up and, flapping its massive wings, disappeared over the dark trees into the swamp. Downy reported the sighting to the Easton police as soon as he reached home. A patrol car searched the area, but the huge bird was not sighted again.

For weeks after, this policeman with the feathery name was teased by his fellow officers who called him “The Birdman.” Downy stuck to his story. Of course, he is not alone in sighting these tremendous birds or bird-like creatures.

Again and again, these enormous birds appear in human history and folklore. They figure in the Indian legends of Hockomock and of many other areas throughout the Americas.

Known as Thunderbirds in Indian mythology, these creatures were large enough and powerful enough to carry off a man. In recent times, these huge birds have been sighted by people in Texas and throughout the Southwest. They have been reliably reported from the Midwest since 1948.

In Lawndale, Illinois, I investigated the 1977 report that one of these huge birds carried a ten-year-old boy for a distance of thirty feet through the air (See Chapter Two).

Thunderbirds have also been seen in Northern Pennsylvania, in an area known as the “Coudersport Triangle.” These Thunderbirds are not the only creatures of the Netherland to have appeared in the Hockomock Swamp region. Several other creatures that occur repeatedly in human folklore and legend have manifested themselves in the Bridgewater Triangle.

The most famous creature to appear in the Bridgewater Triangle is the notorious Bigfoot. During the 1970s and 1980s, all kinds of sightings of Bigfoot, ranging from almost certain hoaxes to incidents involving eminently responsible witnesses and organized police hunts, have been reported.

In Bridgewater, in 1970, heavily armed state and local police, along with a pack of hunting dogs, tracked what was reported to be a huge “bear.” Since the creature was not found, police were never certain what it really was. Although bears have not been seen in the Bridgewater area for many years, they are certain that whatever the creature was it was not a hoax. Several very reputable citizens had had a good look at the huge creature before it lumbered off into the woods, and large definite tracks were found there. In other parts of the country, people trying to make sense of the unexplained have often labeled these large hairy creatures “bears.”

Around the same time, in April 1970, there were several other reports of a large hairy creature walking upright in other places in the Bridgewater vicinity.

Farmers reported killed and mutilated pigs and sheep. Another Bridgewater resident complained to the police that a large hairy creature walking upright was thrashing about in the backyards and woods of the neighborhood. Police investigated several times. One officer, lying in wait in his patrol car, reported that, entirely without warning, something picked up the rear of his car. The policeman spun the car around and when he flashed his searchlight, he saw something that looked like a huge bipedal “bear” running away between the houses. Then on April 8, police officers reportedly found tracks after a seven-foot-tall creature was seen. Nothing was found in further searches.

However, there were several other sightings in the area during 1973-1974. In Raynham, a night security guard at the Raynham Dog Track reported a series of horrible screams and screeches that frightened him and upset the dogs. Huge footprints, fifteen to eighteen inches long, were discovered in the snow south of Raynham. I discovered in my interviews with local authorities that on separate occasions several residents had reported seeing a tall, furry, man-like creature in the Elm Street/Bridge Street area of Raynham, and near the Hockomock Swamp.

In the Hockomock Swamp is Lake Nippenicket (locally called “The Nip”), a few miles northeast of Raynham. During the summer of 1980, several local men in a canoe on the Nip sighted a small, red-haired, chimpanzee-like ape, which reportedly walked upright on the lake’s island.

They told me in a subsequent interview that they had landed their canoe and searched the island but had found nothing.

In 1977, outside of the triangle area in Agawam, Massachusetts, near Springfield, footprints were discovered in the snow, and again tales of Bigfoot circulated. This time police determined that the incident was almost certainly a hoax. Previous sightings within the Triangle, however, could not be explained as hoaxes.

Many area observers and even the police have by now become firm believers in the weird creatures of the Bridgewater Triangle. As one police officer said in 1970, “Nothing surprises us much anymore. Last week, a motorist ran over an eight-foot boa constrictor. We still haven’t learned where that came from.”

Huge mystery snakes have been sighted before in the Hockomock region. In 1939, Roosevelt-era CCC workers, completing a project on King Phillip’s Street at the edge of the swamp, reported seeing a huge snake “as large around and black as a stove-pipe.” The snake coiled for a moment, raised its spade-like head and disappeared into the swamp. Local legends claim that a huge snake like this one appears every seven years.

In addition to legendary serpents, great cats-“lions” or “phantom panthers” – have been sighted regularly in places throughout the Bridgewater Triangle.

In 1972, in Rehoboth, Mass., a “lion hunt” was organized by local police. Residents of the area had been terrorized by what they said was a large cat or mountain lion. Cattle and sheep in the area had been mysteriously killed, and carcasses were discovered raked with claw-marks. Police took casts of the animal’s tracks and used dogs and a helicopter in an attempt to track it down. Nothing was caught. But similar incidents involving phantom cats have occurred in other places throughout the Bridgewater Triangle and across the nation. None of these mysterious felines has yet been captured. In 1993, a series of reports of a “large, light tan cat the size of a Great Dane,” labeled “The Mansfield Mystery Cat,” issued from the area. Local officials took the sightings very seriously, especially after Fire Chief Edward Sliney had a mystery felid encounter of his own.

Huge black dogs, as well as black panthers, have been reported within the Bridgewater Triangle. Both of these “creature-forms” have a long history in human mythology and folklore. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles has its roots in the many legends of the Hounds of Hell and the Irish Pooka, those huge black ghost-like dogs with eyes of fire. In 1976, a huge black “killer dog” was reported in Abington within the Bridgewater Triangle. The “dog” ripped out the throats of two ponies. Local firefighter Phillip Kane, the owner of the ponies, saw the “dog” standing over the bloody carcasses gnawing at their necks. He said that the “dog” eluded extensive police searches and, for a period of several weeks, terrorized the community.

During the three days following the killing of the ponies police received a thousand telephone calls. Schoolchildren were kept in at recess, and many home owners and storekeepers armed themselves with rifles. The last time this “dog” was seen was when police officer Frank Curran sighted it along some railroad tracks. The officer fired a shot but “missed.” The “black dog” merely turned away and walked off slowly in the other direction. And perhaps into another dimension.

The coastal areas of Massachusetts are also fecund territory for weird phenomena. The sands of Singing Beach in Manchester keen strangely when walked upon; all attempts to recreate these sounds under laboratory conditions have failed

Twice during the last century, in 1819 in Nahant and 1817 at Cape Ann, hundreds of North Shore residents reported sighting a forty-foot-long chocolate-brown sea serpent.

More recently, in 1964, a sleek unidentifiable creature about the size of a seal was reported to be haunting St. Mary’s Cemetery in Quincy. The creature, described as being black with short legs and dragging tail, uttered shrill cries and always appeared near running water.

There have been a host of other random oddities in other towns around the state. On September 7, 1954, in Leicester, frogs and toads fell from the sky and landed on rooftops and gutters throughout Leicester center and on Paxton Avenue. In Pittsfield, during February of 1958, patrons of the Bridge Lunch Restaurant were surprised to see an old-time steam engine with half a dozen coaches go clattering by on the railroad tracks outside. Railroad officials said that steam engines have not operated on that line for many years. On October 22, 1973, a Sudbury woman noticed sparkling fibers gathering on wires and tree branches. When she looked upward, she saw a shiny globular object disappearing in the clear sky to the west. She collected many of the strange fibers which have been found in other places and are known to ufologists as “Angel Hair.” She then quickly sealed them in a jar before they evaporated. Scientists at the University of Massachusetts confirmed that the fibers were not spiderweb but could not determine further what this Halloween substance was.

One can devise all sorts of explanations for unusual events. They might be the result of hoax, coincidence, or natural forces that have yet to be understood.

Psychic energy, the power of suggestion, and the fertility of imagination may be contributing factors. One might concede that supernatural or extraterrestrial forces are at work.

The public still treats such phenomena with a healthy skepticism. But there are indications that people are beginning to accept that there may be more to our haunted heritage than meets the eye.

In 1974, for example, the director of the Barnstable (Massachusetts) Housing Authority allowed a family to move from one public housing unit to another. The reason: the tenants had complained that the rooms were haunted.

CHAPTER 3

Devil Names and Fortean Places

When Western Europeans landed in the New World and began spreading across what was later to become America, they discovered what the Amerindians already knew…there were some strange places in this new land. Certain locations were “strange” because the early explorers and settlers would see, hear, smell or feel strange things—weird globes of light, eerie screechings, sickening sweet odors, cold drafts of air as well as unknown aerial phenomena, mystery animals and other “inexplicables.” The interface between these newcomers and the decidedly unexplainable phenomena produced place names that attempted to reflect the notion that the locales were special, different and, indeed, strange. The names can take many forms, but I have long noticed an American historical acknowledgment of Forteana-ridden places by the use of the word “devil” in the naming of these locations. A few examples will illustrate this point.

Some of the more frequent sightings of California’s phantom black panthers occur in the Diablo (Spanish for “devil”) Valley east of San Francisco. The Las Trampas Regional Park booklet notes the black cat is referred to as “The Black Mountain Lion of Devil’s Hole” because it is frequently seen on the slopes of Mt. Diablo and in the Devil’s Hole area of the park. Mystery lights also turn up in the Mt. Diablo-Diablo Valley area frequently.

In 1873, a live frog was found in a slab of limestone in a mine on Mt. Diablo, and in 1806, Spanish General Vallejo encountered a man-like apparition (which had exotic plumage and made “diving movements”) while battling the Bolgones Indians. Monte del Diablo is a very strange place.

The territory known as Devil’s Kitchen in southern Illinois was avoided by the region’s Amerindians because of their awareness of its sinister nature.

Southern Illinois, in general, is a frequent host to mystery animals and UFOs as well as the site of pre-Columbian stone walls which form a rough alignment between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Near Grand Tower, also in southern Illinois, is a small rocky hill known as the Devil’s Bake Oven. South of that prominence is a longer hill known as the Devil’s Backbone.

Speaking of the Devil’s Bake Oven, folklorist John W. Allen observes: “On those nights when the hill was flooded with gentle moonlight, visitors would report that they had seen a weird and mistlike creature… floating silently across their pathway to disappear among the rocks or in the dense bushes on the hillside. This disappearance was often followed by moans, wails and shrieks such as only a ghost can make.”

Devil’s Lake of Wisconsin has its share of geological oddities such as glacier scratches on unusual rock formations and petrified sand waves of an ancient sea, but it is the Amerindian mounds that are especially interesting.

Three major effigy mounds are located in Devil’s Lake State Park. One in the shape of a bear and another, which resembles a lynx, are at the north end of the lake. A bird-shaped mound is at the southern end. Did the moundbuilders wish to acknowledge real animals or phantom creature forms that haunted the shores of Devil’s Lake?

From nearby Baraboo (a mere three miles north of Devil’s Lake on Wisconsin 123), stories were circulating in the seventies of giant ghost elephants. Or were they mastodons? August Derleth, author and follower of

H. P. Lovecraft, likes this area of south-central Wisconsin because he felt it contains “Cthulhu power zones.”

During the summer of 1970, campers at Devil’s Lake complained of shadowy “somethings” prowling around their tents. Department of Natural Resources personnel stated that no bears are found in the area. However, Bigfoot accounts are well known from Wisconsin. Devil’s Lake is also the location of an 1889 lake monster report. Additionally, the surface of the lake is broken with the ghostly wake of a phantom canoe seen in the mists of cold, still nights. The place does have an aura about it. Folklore tells of an Indian maiden and her lover leaping to their deaths. In general, the site is said to be a “place of many dead.”

Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin, is a spooky spot.

One of my favorite examples of the reflection of Fortean phenomena via a “devil name” comes from one corner of the inland town of Chester, New Hampshire, on Rattlesnake Hill. A cavern there of “great notoriety in all the country round” bears the name Devil’s Den. According to local legends, the path leading to the cave “was always kept open, in summer and winter, by the passing to and fro of the evil spirits who frequented the place, though themselves invisible to the eyes of mortal men.”

The poet J. G. Whittier put the Devil’s Den traditions into verse, and the following two stanzas from his poem “Devil’s Den” give deep insight into bedeviled places in general:

“Tis said that this cave is an evil place

The chosen haunt of a fallen race

That the midnight traveller oft hath seen

A red flame tremble its jaws between,

And lighten and quiver the boughs among,

Like the fiery play of a serpent’s tongue;

That sounds of fear from its chambers swell

The ghostly gibber, the fiendish yell;

That bodiless hands at its entrance wave,

And hence they have named it

The Demon’s Cave.

Yet is there something to fancy dear

In this silent cave and its lingering fear,

Something which tells of another age,

Of the wizard’s wand, and the Sybil’s page,

Of the fairy ring and the haunted glen,

And the restless phantoms of murdered men:

The grandame’s tale, and the nurse’s song

The dreams of childhood remembered long;

And I love even now to list the tale

Of the Demon’s Cave, and its haunted vale.

Simply stated, the strange events of the past are often remembered in the geographical names of the area. Place names can be a Fortean’s clue to the “haunted vale.”

By 1983, I had found one hundred and twenty-five places with “devil names” in the United States, and I am finding more correlations with this list and Forteana every day. (See Appendix V.) I suspect many more etymological connections exist. My list of “devil names” is just the tip of the pitchfork.

Indeed, Henry Franzoni, a researcher living in the Pacific Northwest with a remarkable names database, told me that as of 1998, he had found 2,635 places named (or which were named) Devil, Diablo, or Diabla in the United States.

In a related vein is the native Algonquian word for the Devil — “Hockomock” — which I have written more about in Curious Encounters.

Franzoni has found a total of ten places in the U.S. named “Hockomock”: six in Maine, where I now live, two in Massachusetts, one in New Jersey (Hockamik), and one in Minnesota (Hockamin Creek). One of these, the Hockomock Swamp in the Bridgewater (Massachusetts) Triangle, is discussed in the next chapter. It is a place where people vanish and creatures like giant snakes, Bigfoot, Thunderbirds, and phantom panthers are seen. I first talked to Hockomock-area residents and Native Americans about the meaning of the name “Hockomock” to discover its link to the word “Devil.” Then I looked in a Depression-era Writers Project Administration (WPA) guide, the one on Massachusetts, and found it defined the variant name for the swamp, “Hoccomocco,” as “evil spirit.”

By the way, the WPA guides are wonderful books for tracking down the origins of place names. One of my favorites is the story behind Lake Manitou, Indiana. “Manitou” is an Indian word demonstrating some power and connection to the unknown— “The Great Spirit,” similar in a fashion to what we are talking about here regarding “devil.” According to the WPA guide for Indiana, Lake Manitou was inhabited by three “monster devilfish” that began destroying all the fish there after arriving from Lake Michigan.

“They even drove the wild game away, for when the buffalo, elk, deer, and other animals came to the lake to drink, fearsome serpentine tentacles shot out and dragged them beneath the surface of the murky water.” The prayers of the Natives exterminated the monsters and out of gratitude, they named the lake after the Great Spirit. While the exact details of the encounters may be shrouded in folkloric overtones, the underlying nature of such stories are an intriguing bit of evidence for some historical links to real events, as we have seen over and over again. The land reveals its secrets for those who wish to look.

The United Kingdom, likewise, abounds with fertile devil sites for the curious researcher. Evan Hadingham in Circles and Standing Stones writes:

“There are countless names and stories connecting ancient sites with giants and devils, such as the Devil’s Arrows alignments at Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, or the name Devil’s Quoits associated with Stanton Drew.”

Geographical “devil names” worldwide may indicate, as they seem to in America, locales high in Fortean energy and strangeness. These places deserve some extra attention, for from the stray sod to the fairy ring, from the haunted glen to the Devil’s Den, there lies many a riddle to unfold.

Mysterious America – Things That Go Bump in the Bay State

Mysterious America – Devil Names & Fortean Places