Henry W. Shoemaker, Part V: Undead mountain lions

Shoemaker recounts several tales of various superstitions held about the mountain lion, including several of animated taxidermy mounts. The stories of the animated cougars seem to be unique to Snyder County and environs.

In Centerville (Snyder County), in 1864, a hunter killed a mountain lion and mounted it on the roof of his home. The lion's mate is supposed to have leapt upon the roof and knocked the mount to the ground, scooping it up and carrying it into the forests of Jack's Mountain, where the mounted cougar is supposed to have returned to life. A similar tale originates from Troxelville, again in Snyder County. Here, the skin of a mountain lion left mounted in an attic is reputed to have been encountered, still mounted, stalking the forests of the White Mountains.

The body of a mountain lion killed by Lewis Dorman on Shreiner Mountain on Christmas Eve, 1868 as well was reputed to leave its case at a New Berlin museum on Halloween and to hunt mice! The panther's body is now kept at Albright College.

The Senecas (an Iroquoian tribe living around what is now Warren County) believed that the souls of tyrants and unfaithful queens passed into the bodies of panthers, and for this reason the cougar was hunted. The early German settlers believed that cougars glowed at night, and that their eyes flashed green fire.

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 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.

The Wooo-Wooo and the Delaware Water Gap Hooter

On April 13, 1968 the Blairstown (NJ) Press reported on somehting encountered by zoologist and author Ivan T. Sanderson at his farm near Columbia, NJ (in Warren County). Sanderson and Walter McGraw heard a strange hooting cry. Both Sanderson and McGraw felt the sound was emanating from a large bird they saw flying along the Kittatinny Mountain. A similar cry came moments later from the opposite bank of the Delaware River. Mark A. Hall writing in Thunderbirds! The Living Legend of Giant Birds has called this creature the "Wooo-Wooo" after the mens' description of the sound and feels it is a representative of his hypothetical "Bighoot", a giant owl.

Pocono Ghosts, Legends and Lore by David J. Seibold and Charles J. Adams III reports on the presence in the Delaware Water Gap area (on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware opposite Sanderson's home) of a creature called the "Hooter", which has been heard by hunters and hikers in the woods. It can be theorized that the second call Sanderson heard may have been the Hooter.