Henry W, Shoemaker, Part IV: Long-tailed bobcats

Shoemaker's pamphlet "Felis Catus in Pennsylvania" describes an incident on January 16, 1922 in which a wildcat was killed in Nockamixon (Bucks County) by 16 year old Tunis Brady. Frightful screams had been heard in the vicinity for three years. A detailed description of the dead animal quoted in the pamphlet describes a cat about 2 1/2 feet in length and a foot in height, with a broad head. It was a smoky gray color, with yellowish patches on its undersides. It had an 11 inch long tail which was bushy and rather like a raccoon's. It had a white spot on its throat and was marked with black stripes. At the time, it was believed that the animal may have been similar to a European wildcat (Felis sylvestris) and the original article describing Brady's kill is quite clear on its not being a bobcat (Lynx rufus) or lynx (Lynx lynx).

Elsewhere in Shoemaker's article it is described how just such an animal was kept in the Philadelphia zoo, and labelled an "Indian Devil". Similar animals were to be found in the Blue Ridge Mountains and also in the Chestnut Ridge area in the western part of the state. In around 1920, Daniel Trouts killed two similar wildcats in the same area as Brady's kill. Robert Lyman's Forbidden Land describes these wildcats as being recorded from Potter County.

Karl Shuker has noted that long-tailed specimens of the normally short-tailed bobcat and lynx have been recorded. In fact, despite the early denials, the size of the animal and coloration meshes perfectly with commonly-accepted traits of the bobcat. The striped markings of the animal may not line up perfectly, but as some lynx subspecies such as the Iberian lynx have coats with a striped appearance, this is not out of the ordinary either.

Furthermore, bobcats can be melanistic (black). I have been wondering whether a melanistic long-tailed bobcat could account for some of the sightings of "black panthers" often recorded. Also, a wildcat with similar markings to the Nockamixon one could account for sightings of "tigers".

Henry W. Shoemaker, Part III: Peter Pentz's maned cat

Another of Shoemaker's tales of the Lock Haven area in Clinton County was the account of a bizarre cat killed by the 'mountain man' Peter Pentz in 1798.

Shoemaker says that Pentz was visiting with Isaac Dougherty near McElhattan Run when they heard a commotion among Dougherty's animals. They found a steer dead, a large maned cat crouched over its body. Pentz and Dougherty tracked the animal up the side of Bald Eagle Mountain, eventually tracking it to a cavernous den in a 'bare place' (large rock-strewn clearings common to the area). Here, the two killed the maned cat and its mate, and captured three cubs.

Chad Arment points out that elsewhere in his writings (Extinct Pennsylvania Animals vol. 1) Shoemaker theorizes that Pentz's cat may have been "a modification of the prehistoric lions which Prof. Leidy called felis (sic) atrox". It is intriguing that such a similar idea to that espoused by Loren Coleman and Mark A. Hall was made over a half century before.

In the same passage he mentions that the Indians of Manhattan Island, New York, said that male cougar were maned. He also mentions later that the skin of a cougar killed along the Greenbrier River in West Virginia had a tail similar to that of an African lion.

In his original recounting of the tale, Shoemaker theorizes that the cat was an aberration of the normal cougar; it is perhaps possible that the genetic traits of Panthera atrox still exist in the genepool of the cougar accounting for lion-like attributes.

Recent studies have indicated that prehistoric lions including P. atrox lived until 13,000 years ago.

Henry W. Shoemaker, Part II: The White Wolf of Sugar Valley

A white wolf haunted the earliest settlers of Sugar Valley, near Loganton (Clinton County) around 1840. The wolf was first encountered by Philip Shreckengast of Tylersville near his barn. It had apparently been eating some animal as its mouth was bloodstained. Shreckengast managed to sever the wolf's tail by slamming the barn door. The wolf was also seen in the graveyard at Brungard's Church by a preacher, who said it was yelping "like a yellow cur that had had boiling water poured on it" as it ran out of the gate.

Granny McGill, a supposed witch living near Lock Haven, told Jacob Rishel that before contacting George Wilson (the killer of two "werewolves" in Wayne Township) they should attempt to locate a black lamb born during a new moon in the Autumn of the year. One was eventually procured, and the wolf was indeed trapped and killed.

The pelt was described as being shaggy and long-haired, almost like an Angora goat, rather than short-haired like the average wolf.

The head of the wolf was displayed mounted on a pole near Jacob Rishel's home. Children were afraid to pass by the head. It was reported that the jaws of the severed head moved, and that the eyes flashed green, and that as long as it was present it warded away wolves from Rishel's farm.

Shoemaker also recounts in his account of the white wolf in "Wolf Days in Pennsylvania" that another wolf which he likened to the French Beast of Gévaudan terrorized the area around Carroll, although no date is given for this event. This wolf was killed by John Schrack, who also had the pelt of the white wolf, as it was attempting a 16-foot leap over a stockade fence at a sheep pen. One of its paws was impaled on the top of the stockade for a good luck charm (elsewhere Shoemaker mentions that this tradition was a widespread one in Sugar Valley and elsewhere).

Pennsylvania black dogs

On Mysterious Britain & Ireland, Part Two of my piece on American black dog mythology, focused on Pennsylvania.

Werewolf Lore in Pennsylvania: Henry W. Shoemaker, Part One

In Pennsylvania Mountain Stories (1909) is the tale of a ghostly black wolf in Oak Valley. Through cross-referencing with a few other tales of Granny Myers elsewhere in the volume, I've figured that this occurred in the valley about five miles north of Loganton (Clinton County) and the wolf-haunted Sugar Valley.

Silas Werninger shot two men and killed one after a row at a Youngmanstown hotel. He barricaded himself in his wife's cabin near Jacobsburg and while there shot two policemen sent to collect him. At some point, the house was set on fire, and while Mrs. Werninger and her children escaped, Silas slit his own throat. His body was buried in a grove of oak trees. That winter, a "big black shaggy dog" was seen near the oak grove where Silas was buried. Ira Sloppey, an old wolf-hunter from Clearfield County, said it was a large wolf. Sloppey was shot in the leg as a hunting party infiltrated the grove after the wolf. Dogs would not enter the grove, and soon the adjoining portion of the road was disused.

Sam Himes stopped to visit Granny Myers, a local witch. She said that it was not a wolf, but the ghost of Silas Werninger. To dispel the haunting, she said, his body would need to be exhumed and buried in the Lutheran cemetery in town. This was done, and within a few weeks Himes had killed the wolf.

Shoemaker also recounts other bits of werewolf lore from Clinton County. In "The Werwolf in Pennsylvania" (Shoemaker's spelling), he gives a tale which he heard from Peter Pentz, a famed "mountain man" who lived near McElhattan. Pentz' aunt, Divert Mary DePo, a midwife, was returning home one night in the 1850s when she saw an "enormous black dog". The werewolf rose up onto two legs and chased Mary home. There, Mary's husband used two pewter bullets (not silver) to shoot the werewolf dead. It fell and transformed into the body of a neighbor of theirs.

And in "Wolf Days in Pennsylvania" (1917), he gives an account of werewolves encountered in Wayne Township (the region where the above stories took place). He tells the tale of George Wilson, who was convinced that a neighbor of his was a witch, and took the shape of a wolf at night. He saw the huge brown wolf one night on his farm, and shot it in the foreleg with a silver bullet. It vanished, but a short while later the suspected witch was seen to have a broken arm. Another wolf was also killed by Wilson with a silver bullet, a three-legged creature, and one wonders if this one was the first come back for revenge.

The saga of the Hyote

In the summer of 2003, a family living in Joppa (Harford County), Maryland, saw a strange canine beast. Eventually they set up some game cameras to capture images of the creature, and they weren't disappointed. They got the above picture of the mysterious dog drinking from a horse trough. The sightings and photographs mostly went unreported for a year.

The following summer, another family in Glyndon (Baltimore County) reported something similar seen meandering through fields nearby and again got photographs of it. The animal was soon labelled the Hyote (hyena/coyote), after the Joppa and Glyndon photos made the national news. A stunningly original name, maybe, but at least it wasn't called a El Chupacabra or something.

It wasn't long, though, until the Glyndon witnesses captured an animal in a trap. What they had captured was a juvenile red fox with a severe case of sarcoptic mange (although some felt that it was an endocrine disorder). And although the residents who saw the animal were adamant that it wasn't what they had seen, in the minds of the media, the mystery was solved.

Dragons!

In November, 1883, an individual using only the initials R.B. wrote to the Frederick News in Maryland. He swore that at Catoctin Mountain he had seen, early one morning,

...a monstrous dragon with glaring eye-balls, and mouth wide open displaying a tongue, which hung like a flame of fire from its jaws, reared and plunged.

This may be the same as the dragon which supposedly guarded the mines at Silver Run, in Carroll County. In the 1760s, a silversmith by the name of John Ahrwud supposedly was shown a hidden vein of silver under Rattlesnake Hill by local Indians. Ahrwud was permitted to use the silver in his work: but he was never to become greedy and take more than he needed, nor to tell anyone of the mine. He broke this when he told his wife and daughter about the mine and thereafter was banned from the mine.

In the 1780s, according to "A Field Guide to the Monsters and Mystery Animals of Maryland," by Mark Chorvinsky and Mark Opsasnick, a German silversmith and his daughter saw a "fiery dragon with gaping jaws" in the Silver Run mine. Was this silversmith Ahrwud? A "large white fiery eyed monster" was seen near Rattlesnake Hill in 1885. It's usually thought of as a Bigfoot, but could it have been the dragon?

Another 1800s dragon tale, this time from Pennsylvania, supposedly occured at a country schoolhouse in Jenner Township (Somerset County). William Johnson and others swore that they had seen a monstrous serpent coiled around a schoolhouse built at the crossroads there, always at night and on the nights of a new moon. Only one coil of this serpent was seen - never a head nor tail. Apparently, anyone who trod on the serpent (not everyone could see it) was hurled to the ground.

Maryland and Delaware black dogs

Over on Mysterious Britain and Ireland is an article I've written on ghostly hounds in Maryland and Delaware.

A trip to Lock 49

On November 3, Mindi and I took a trip to Reading to do a bit of early Christmas shopping. While there, we decided to stop at the old Union Canal, so we could check out Lock 49. On August 17, 1875, Louise Bissinger, distraught over her husband's infidelities, took her three children on an outing along the Tulpehocken Creek. She had a basket tied around her waist, and when she reached the area of Lock 49, she grabbed her children tightly and plunged in. The children were still alive when witnesses arrived on the scene, but they drowned before the bodies could be pulled from the canal. The bodies were taken to Gring's Mill nearby. Later reports had it that while Mr. Bissinger mourned the deaths of his children, he callously was unmoved by the death of his wife. The stories have it that the ghostly forms of the Bissinger children are seen walking along the canal's towpath. Though the canal is now dry, the towpath is maintained by the Berks County Parks Department as a trail and it's commonplace to see joggers and cyclists along the old canal.

Lock 49 was a bit over a mile along the trail from the Wertz Bridge, a rather long wooden covered bridge bedecked with hex signs crossing the Tulpehocken. Shortly after entering the forested section of the path, after passing through what was the canal basin, I found a small conical structure about a foot tall made of three interlocked sticks. Similar stick structures have been previously found in areas of Bigfoot sightings and may be markers of some sort. This was probably in the area of what had been Lock 50. For the rest of the mile-long hike, I was hearing movement in the brush directly beside the path, movement which seemed to stop when I stopped and begin again once I started walking. This could easily have been squirrels but I didn't see anything there.

There were game trails leading all through the woods near Lock 49, though once again the skeptic in me wants to say these could have been due to the many local ghost hunting groups which have likely been all through these woods. I braved thornbushes and stray branches to follow these paths, which led from the maintained part of the trail clear through the canal bed and up the opposite bank, on which there was a second, less maintained trail.

The entire area is very near the Reading Airport, and the Berks County campus of Penn State, and not far from the Berkshire Mall.

Nick Redfern's book Man-Monkey is about the traditions of a shambling humanoid - what could be called a Bigfoot, though it is likely that it, like other British sightings, are something else - along the Union Canal in Shropshire, England. One aspect mentioned was the humanoid as the ghost of a suicide whose body was found in the canal. I had mentioned to him the coincidence of another Union Canal with a suicide in its history, as well. This possible presence of some sort of humanoid furthers the coincidence.

Tulpehocken is a Lenape (Delaware) word meaning "place of the turtle". The turtle, in Lenape lore, was the spirit entity which helped create the world. Like other cultures worldwide, the Lenape had the world resting on the back of a turtle. What does that mean? I don't know, quite possibly nothing.

Devotees of the ideas of Jim Brandon and Loren Coleman about so-called "twilight language" and the names that pop up again and again in Fortean contexts would be interested to know that there is a Warren Street in the area.

The Manor Road Pig-Dog

On the morning of February 6, 2009, two men driving along Manor Road in Baltimore County saw a strange creature amble across their path. The animal had hind legs longer than the fore, and its face was a hybrid of dog and pig features. The two were quite clear that it was neither a dog or bear - it apparently had thinner legs than a bear and didn't move in the same way as a bear. A bear had recently been seen on Manor Road, making it possible that it was a bear, despite the denials.

Manor Road runs east of Loch Raven Reservoir.

The Dauphin County Bigfoot

WHTM television has reported that a fellow in Dauphin County has released what may be a film of a Bigfoot (WHTM provides a still image of the supposed creature). The story's been making the rounds on various cryptozoological and Bigfoot blogs and websites recently. Several have posted to the effect that the whole deal is dubious at best, mostly due to the involvement of Tom Biscardi (best known for his association with the infamous 'gorilla suit in an icebox' Georgia Bigfoot hoax).

The sighting supposedly took place on the Appalachian Trail. The section of the Trail in Dauphin runs along the top of the mountains directly north of Harrisburg. The Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society has recorded only one sighting from Dauphin County, and that was considerably further north along the Susquehanna River directly across from the town of Liverpool.

Those individuals who have speculated that the Bigfoot was actually a branch may not be too far off. It is reported on the BFRO website that the witness in this case initially submitted the film to them, which apparently was of not a Bigfoot but of a leaf appearing human-sized due to forced perspective. After he was told this, he repossessed his film from the BFRO and resubmitted to Biscardi. In this instance, Biscardi may be vindicated - it seems as if he was duped rather than the culprit.

The incident at Liesenring and other Bigfoot/UFO reports

Over on Blogsquatcher, today's post is on the connected sightings of Bigfoot and UFOs. The Bigfoot/UFO connection has been present for years, and if all accounts are to be believed, before they were even called UFOs. Pennsylvania and Maryland are home to several reports of this connection.

The Sykesville, Maryland monster flap began in the early summer of 1973. Tony Dorsey was the first witness to the monster on the evening of May 29 at his home on Norris Avenue. According to The Bigfoot Casebook by Janet and Colin Bord, Dorsey's sighting came after he witnessed a UFO dropping an object of some type into a reservoir. Mark Opsasnick notes that Dorsey saw two luminous red eyes about the size of half-dollars, but did not see any sort of body ("Monsters of Maryland: Bigfoot", Strange Magazine 3).

The Chestnut Ridge area, which is Pennsylvania's Bigfoot hotspot, has seen the bulk of the UFO-related sightings. One of these was in 1975 in Jeanette. On May 19, a motorist saw a Bigfoot running quadrupedally, later rising onto two legs and running off into the forest. A UFO had been sighted in Jeanette on May 18. Other reports of synchronous Bigfoot and UFO sightings were reported from Midland and Uniontown. In the 1974 Uniontown sighting, several individual Bigfoot creatures were seen, as was a UFO. When one Bigfoot was shot at, it disappeared into thin air. In 1975, a report from Jumonville surfaced of a Bigfoot creature which, oddly, floated rather than walked and was later enveloped by a mist. When the mist receded, the Bigfoot was gone. Could the mist have been a sort of UFO? Many of these sightings were collected and investigated by Stan Gordon.

The most famous and bizarre humanoid report in Gordon's files, though, took place on October 25, 1973 in the small town of Liesenring near Connelsville. I'll post the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society's description of the incident:

A man and two boys saw a UFO land in a field. Upon investigating, they observed 2 tall, hairy bipedal creatures walking along a fence line. The creatures had matted, dirty brown hair, glowing green eyes, broad shoulders, and small necks. They walked stiff-legged giving them an overall robot-like appearance. The man shot at the creatures, which caused the spherical UFO that had landed in the field, to leave the area immediately. Although the witness felt he didn't miss, the shots had little effect on the strange creatures. They simply turned around and traversed their way back along the fence line. A luminescent ring on the ground remained where the UFO had once been. The witness left the area and returned later with a Pennsylvania State Trooper. Although the glowing ring near the ground was still visible, its intensity had diminished. Several hours later the luminescent ring completely dissipated.

Of barking deer and climbing groundhogs

First, there's a nifty video on YouTube of a barking roe deer. I've also found recordings of white-tailed deer, the ubiquitous Pennsylvania species, making similar noises.

And over on Marcus Schneck's blog, there's a post indicating that groundhogs can climb trees, though they must do so very rarely.

Move over, Punxsutawney Phil

Just after Christmas, 2006, on December 29, public workers near the intersection of South Gilpin and Cypress Streets noticed a large fish lying on the shore of the Mahoning Creek. Upon examination, the fish turned out to be a three-foot bonnethead shark. Officer Heath Zeitler of the Punxsutawney police said "it might have been disposed of by some who had caught it while fishing elsewhere, or had previously kept it in a personal aquarium - a very large personal aquarium."

We might never know exactly where this shark came from. It had been theorized on Cryptomundo that the Punxsutawney shark could have wandered in from the Delaware River and through tributaries and such - while it is true that sharks have been known to wander into the Delaware, Jefferson County is extremely far from that river, and the Mahoning Creek empties into the Allegheny, anyway. Pittsburgh has seen several out-of-place animal reports over the years.

Ilya back home

Ilya, the manatee that made trips to the Chesapeake Bay and New England before being trapped in a tiny New Jersey creek, is back in Miami.

The ghosts of college mascots

In 1857, Pierson and Andy Lytle brought a Kentucky mule named Coaly into Pennsylvania to be part of a team of pack mules working on excavation and construction of the Penn State campus in State College. When the mule died in 1893, his remains were displayed in the Old Main building he helped construct. If this seems morbid, remember that the University College in London displays the preserved remains of philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

Over the years, the remains of the mule now known as "Old" Coaly were moved several times. When a fire damaged Old Main in the early 1900s, Old Coaly's body was moved into the basement of the Watts Hall dormitory. In the 1960s, he was displayed in the Agricultural Building, and his skeleton is now in the HUB Robeson Building.

But apparently, Old Coaly's spirit doesn't know of his resting place - or perhaps his stubborn mulish nature just keeps him bound to where he was. The braying of the mule is still heard in the hallways outside of his resting place in the basement of Watts Hall, and occasionally his form is seen standing in the corridor.

The Penn State campus in McKeesport is also home to an animal apparition, this time of a large sixteen-point stag named Duke. The stag is long dead, but a sixteen-point buck is still seen roaming around campus.

The Phantom of O'Donnell Heights

In July of 1951, the east Baltimore district of O'Donnell Heights was prowled by a phantom. The black-robed, black-capped figure made his forays from a graveyard, jumping six-foot fences topped with barbed wire and leaping off of roofs in the manner of the British phantom Spring Heeled Jack, all without leaving a single track or trace. And for the two-week period the ghostly prowler patrolled the streets, late-night music was heard emanating from the graveyard's chapel.

The figure was reported to lurk underneath cars, calling out to young girls, beseeching them to "Come closer, my dear." He also apparently broke into old women's houses, and several people claimed that they heard him running on rooftops. Men armed with clubs, guns, and knives patrolled the streets, attempting to run down the phantom. At one point, they gave chase and the leaping phantom vanished in the graveyard. This was the last he was to be seen. By August, he had vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared.

According to an article on Maryland ghost stories appearing in the Baltimore City Paper, there were instances in which rooftop pipes and German Shepherd dogs were mistaken for the Phantom. There were also numerous instances which saw teenagers causing trouble and blaming it on the Phantom. By August, when the Phantom vanished, the police had begun arresting teenagers trespassing in the graveyard.

Whether the Phantom of O'Donnell Heights was a true Spring-Heel manifestation, a product of mass hysteria, or a real-life criminal given supernatural attributes may never be known.

As a reporter for the Baltimore Sun said on those hot nights during the Cold War,

The question of the prowler of O'Donnell Heights however, continued to be not one of phantoms, but of real people reacting to (and possibly creating) the unknown with their imaginations.

The horned skulls

It's one of the oddest and most-repeated stories of Pennsylvania's weird lore. A group of archaeologists working near an Indian burial mound in Sayre find many gigantic skeletons, 7 feet tall on average. Incredibly, a few of these had horns sprouting from their foreheads.

A good story, but not quite the way it happened.

In 1916, Professor W.K. Moorehead of Phillips-Andover College led an excavation team to Spanish Hill. Spanish Hill is a Native American site located in the center of town in South Waverly, Bradford County. This hill was the site of a Susquehannock village known to explorer Samuel de Champlain as Carantouan.

Soon after the Moorehead Expedition, in 1921, Louise W. Murray wrote an article about old Carantouan for American Anthropologist ("Aboriginal Sites In and Near 'Teaoga', now Athens, Pennsylvania"). Murray was a witness to the discovery of the horned skulls. In her words:

While the writer was present, one of the men in working a grave exclaimed, "There are horns over his head!" [Professor A.B.] Skinner said that indicated chieftainship. Later this was found to be a bundle burial, completely covered with antlers of Virginia deer. A passing visitor, however, heard the exclamation and attempted to verify it by interrogating a fun-loving Maine workman, and the story grew and was printed from coast to coast that one or more skulls had been found with horns growing from its forehead!

It is almost incredible to me that the story of the horned skulls has been repeated and retold for more than 90 years after the truth of the matter was known.

It is a fact, however, that many skeletons of Susquehannocks of unusual size have been found. Some were, indeed, over six and even seven feet tall. So perhaps at least the skeletons' stature was not exaggerated.

The Black Dog of Warfieldsburg

According to Ann W. Whitney and Caroline C. Bullock in Folk-Lore from Maryland, in 1887 two men on horseback were near Warfieldsburg's Ore Mine Bridge, in Carroll County, saw a large black dog on the other side of a fence. The dog passed through the fence, crossed the road, passed through a fence on the other side, and disappeared from view. Whitney and Bullock record that one of the men was amazed at the dog's size - apparently, the fact that it passed through two fences wasn't worthy of his mention.

They also record that a man was told that he could see a phantom dog if he stood underneath a tree near a bridge for an hour. He did so, and sure enough, the dog appeared. He stated that the dog then followed him for a little way. This is similar to the British black dogs, which often follow travellers. Another sighting which bears a parallel to British lore was one by a man driving a wagon down the road, who said that he saw the phantasmal dog dragging a chain. Barghest of the Yorkshire Moors is reputed to engage in just such a chain-dragging activity. This is also a feature of Cadejo of Central American lore, a black hound with hooved feet.

The black dog of Warfieldsburg can supposedly only be seen by an individual once. A cracking whip near the dog will make it vanish. This theory was unsuccessfully tested in the 1920s by one witness, whose whip passed right throught the dog.

The sadly deceased Mark Chorvinsky has recorded a sighting of a phantom hound near Warfieldsburg in 1975 ("Phantom Dogs in Maryland", Strange Magazine 19). Several people driving along the road heard a thud as the car impacted a large black dog. Some of the witnesses distinctly felt the creature underneath the wheels. Yet when the car stopped, the passengers "were amazed to see the dog standing on its huge paws. The beast bared its teeth, showing an ugly red mouth, then vanished as suddenly as it had appeared."

Luck be a Pig Lady tonight

In 1814, numerous people throughout the city of London, England reported seeing a pig's head silhouetted by gaslight from within the confines of a passing carriage. At times, they even saw a piggish snout protruding from the carriage window. The legend of the Pig Lady was born, and through discussions in various newspapers, the theory was reached that it was a wealthy young woman from Manchester Square - this was none-too-complementary to the young woman in question! St. Bartholomew's Fair in London exhibited the "Pig Lady", which was actually a shaved bear in a dress.

It is tempting, however, to speculate whether the English could have imported the legends when they settled Cecil County, Maryland, because legends of the Pig Lady exist in Elkton and Rising Sun, both in that county.

The Elkton variant has it that she was a survivor of a house fire who fled into the forest, eventually taking up residence underneath Pig Lady Bridge near town. Sometimes the squeals and grunts of a pig are heard, but usually she magically makes your car stall and then she comes out and kills you with an axe. This makes her yet another of the bloodthirsty half-humans of Maryland lore, and she takes her place in the urban legend pantheon alongside Bunnyman, Boaman and Goatman.

Oh, she's also sometimes supposed to be an inbreeding Dupont, which ties the legends of the Pig Lady in with those of the Devil's Woods in Chester County, Pennsylvania. I'm not exactly sure why she's haunting a bridge in Elkton, Maryland rather than her family's estate, the Cult House, but there it is. One wonders if this helped to influence the swinish look to the monsters in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, filmed in the Devil's Woods.

The versions in Rising Sun make her a a denizen of Lover's Lane - well, sort of, as she attacks the cars of necking teenagers in the Rising Sun town dump, surely one of the most romantic spots I can think of. This Pig Lady bangs on the side of the car until the teenagers drive away in search of a spot where they can continue their amorous encounter in peace.

Or maybe she haunts another old wooden bridge. Sometimes passersby's cars will stall and they'll hear scraping sounds. Then when they finally manage to drive away they'll find the hoofprints of the Pig Lady indented on their car.

Maybe the idea of a murderous, swine-faced humanoid sounds to you like a reject from the Saw movies or something out of an Insane Clown Posse song, but the stories have been around for generations.

The Warren spook wolf

In his book American Myths & Legends (1903), Charles M. Skinner gives this account of a lupine creature he called "The White Wolf of Venango":

On Cornplanter's reserve in Venango County, Pennsylvania, lived an Indian family named Jacobs; big, athletic fellows, full of hard sense and afraid of but one thing: the white wolf. For to see the wolf was "bad medicine"; to chase it, death. There was never a doubt as to its being a real wolf; it had eaten too many hens and sheep and killed too many dogs to leave room for any question on that point. Yet traps would not catch him; dogs in packs could not bring him to bay; bullets either missed him or glanced from him. A young member of the Jacobs family engaged to guide a party of hunters through this region, and all went well until they had reached the head of the Clarion. On breaking camp at this spot Jim Jacobs took no part in the preparations. He smoked a silent pipe and said that the others must go on by themselves; for he had seen the white wolf, and that meant bad luck. They joked and gibed him without moving him in the least. He finished his pipe, told them by what trails they could reach McCarty's trading station, bade them adieu, struck into the forest labyrinth, and went home. He was killed in an accident soon after.

The hunters, scoffing at Jacobs's superstitions, kept on. They got the help of a trapper, who kept a number of dogs, and decided to leave the deer to their liberty for a time and hunt down this hoodoo. After much luring and watching they came upon the fellow's tracks and on a quantity of pheasant feathers, for he had left his lunch in a hurry, and presently, near Baker's Rocks, they saw him: white as a polar bear, three feet high at the shoulder, bristling and snarling. The eyes of this beast seemed to shoot red fire. Four rifle-shots rang out, and the wolf was gone, with the dogs in hot pursuit. In an hour he was overtaken again, and again the guns were emptied. The animal leaped over a cliff, sixty feet, into a stream, almost at the moment when the shots were fired. No blood was visible, no splash was heard. The dogs found no scent. It was the last time that the white wolf was seen, but in a few months every member of the hunting party was dead.

An examination of Henry W. Shoemaker's essay "Wolf Days in Pennsylvania", found in Extinct Pennsylvania Animals, Vol. 1: The Panther and the Wolf (1917), reveals some corroborating information: Jim Jacobson (Shoemaker refers to him once as Jacobs, and from then on as Jacobson) was born Samuel Jimmerson Jacobson in Potter County. Shoemaker later says:

In 1865, several wolves were killed by the Faddy boys, Seneca Indians, on the Cornplanter Reservation in Warren County. Wolves were plentiful on Cornplanter's Reservation and on Kinzua Creek as late as 1870 ... Jim Jacobs, the old Seneca elk hunter, was conspicuous among the redmen who hunted the last wolves in Warren and McKean Counties. According to some authorities, this mighty Nimrod was killed by a train near Bradford in 1880, although John C. French of Roulette, Potter County, declares that he saw him on the Seneca Reservation alive and well in September 1881.

Jacobs(on) was still alive at the beginning of Skinner's tale, although it is noted that he died shortly after. Given this statement by Shoemaker, we can possibly date the tale of the white wolf to the late 1870s or even 1880. After this, we are left with determining where, exactly, the story may have taken place. Unfortunately, that's much easier said than done. The only "Baker's Rocks" I could find were the Baker Rocks near Wrightsville in Warren County.

Gyantwachia, or Chief Cornplanter, was a war chieftain of the Seneca Iroquois, who as told in several sources, inhabited this area of Pennsylvania, later sharing it with the Lenape; after they were crowded out of the Delaware Valley, they moved westward and were allowed to settle here by the Iroquois. It should not go unnoticed that it was the Wolf clan, the Munsees, that settled here. The Cornplanter Reserve mentioned by both Skinner and Shoemaker was most likely a reference to the Cornplanter Tract or Grant, which was destroyed in the construction of the Kinzua Dam and is now almost wholly beneath the waters of the Allegheny Reservoir (Lake Kinzua).

In fact, Shoemaker refers to the following:

Edwin Grimes, while hunting in the Kinzua Valley in 1860 with Benjamin Main, killed a record grey wolf. The hide sold to the veteran wolfer LeRoy Lyman who pronounced it the biggest he had seen in his long experience in the forests of Northern Pennsylvania. John C. French, in commenting on the size of the Kinzua Valley wolf, says Edwin Grimes, Sam Grimes, and Ben Main agreed that the grand daddy wolf was at least two inches higher at the shoulder than average wolves and one inch taller than the largest they had ever seen. Continuing Mr. French said: "The wolf was not measured, but it must have been seven feet long without the tail. Ben Main, who was 5 feet 8 inches tall, could not swing the carcass free from the ground by taking an ear of the wolf in each hand and lifting the head at arms' length about his own; but Edwin Grimes, who stood 6 feet 2 inches, could just do so.

"Spook wolves" of the type mentioned in this tale infested northern Pennsylvania, with Shoemaker also recounting a supernaturally-charged white wolf from the Sugar Valley in Clinton County and also a number of werewolves from Wayne Township, also in that county. Given the fact that he elsewhere says that the spook wolves of the northern counties were usually gray, it is tempting to wonder whether the huge wolf killed in 1860 near Kinzua was given supernatural attributes and served as the basis of Skinner's story. If so, it was in Warren County, not Venango.

Cryptozoologically, it's most tempting to wonder whether the skin purchased by Lyman is still in existence.

Chesapeake manatee trapped in New Jersey

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story on October 17 about the manatee Ilya, which was last seen near a refinery along the Arthur Kill in northern New Jersey. Story here.

Ilya is the same individual seen in the Chesapeake Bay several times, and then near the mouth of the Susquehanna River. He later wandered into waters off of New England.

Delaware River whales, sharks and monsters

From the Universal York blog, this post on a whale displayed in a York County barn belonging to one Samuel Spangler sometime in the first half of the 1800s. The whale is described as having been caught in the Delaware River. This wouldn't be unheard of.

The Philadelphia Inquirer (December 6, 1994) reported that a 30-foot right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) dubbed "Waldo the Wrong-Way Right Whale" was found in the Delaware between Philadelphia and New Jersey. Wildlife officials managed to point it back towards the sea, but in early 1995 the whale had returned and was beached temporarily at an oil refinery near Pennsauken, New Jersey. "Waldo" was last seen in waters off Canada.

In April, 2005, NBC's Today carried reports on a beluga whale that had been seen around Trenton and Beverly, New Jersey. The animal was identified as one called Helis, whose native territory was in the St. Lawrence River. Helis had left the Delaware Bay around April 18, but by the 29th he was back in the river near Burlington Island. He was later seen near the Walt Whitman Bridge moving south. There were a few reports of the beluga from the Schuylkill River, but I don't know whether these were confirmed. By the end of the month, he had again moved out of the river.

The New York Times (May 1, 1922) reported that a 12-foot shark "said to have been of the man-eating variety" was killed by Joseph Fletcher in Tacony, Pennsylvania.

Several species of sharks live in the Delaware Bay and may make their way up the river; the Tacony shark is most likely to have been a bull shark. Other dangerous species such as the hammerhead and thresher exist in the Bay, but these prefer open waters and would not likely be found upstream. The bull shark is also the likely culprit in the attacks at Matawan, New Jersey in 1916.

The book Totally Bizarre Pennsylvania mentions a sighting of a supposed sea monster near the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in August, 1975. Peter Evangelidis reported that he and his girlfriend were along the river at Penn's Landing when he saw what he first thought to be a "bunch of black inner tubes or tires floating down the river, about 30 yards out" but that was moving against the current of the river. After a moment there was a violent splash and "this sleek head of an animal that should not have existed sprung its head out of the dark river no more than 30 feet from us". A canal cuts across Delaware, joining the Chesapeake Bay to the Delaware Bay. Evangelidis wondered whether the Chesapeake Bay sea serpent, Chessie, could have made it through the waterway and into Philadelphia. 1975 also saw reports of both sharks and whales from the Delaware, so it conceivably could have been one of these.

The above is the photo Evangelidis took of the creature.

Annville pythons doing better

From the Lebanon Daily News, October 18, an update on two pythons found in Annville this summer, as posted on Cryptomundo on August 4 of this year.

Jellyfish found in quarry

The Lancaster Intelligencer Journal/New Era reported on October 16 that freshwater jellyfish had been found in an unnamed quarry in Lancaster Township on October 11. An online comment on the story says that it took place at the Wabank Quarry on Wabank Road.