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    Monsters of Massachusetts: Mysterious Creatures in the Bay State
    Monsters of Massachusetts: Mysterious Creatures in the Bay State
    Monsters of Massachusetts: Mysterious Creatures in the Bay State
    Ebook130 pages2 hours

    Monsters of Massachusetts: Mysterious Creatures in the Bay State

    By Loren Coleman

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    Loren Coleman is the first and last name in cryptozoology. He's blazed the trail for so many of us. Massachusetts mysteries like the Dover Demon and the Bridgewater Triangle have names because Coleman discovered and named them. His years of research gathering the cryptid sightings, physical evidence, and details of these strange creatures and legends have paid off in a big way in Monsters of Massachusetts.
    --Jeff Belanger, author of Weird Massachusetts
    Bizarre beasts of the Bay State featured in this volume include . . .
    • Dover Demon
    • Gloucester Sea Serpent
    • Hockomock Swamp's Beasties
    • Pukwudgees
    • Bigfoot
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStackpole Books
    Release dateAug 1, 2013
    ISBN9780811753050
    Monsters of Massachusetts: Mysterious Creatures in the Bay State
    Author

    Loren Coleman

    Loren Coleman, M.S.W., has researched the Copycat Effect for more than two decades. Coleman has been an adjunct professor at various universities in New England since 1980 and a senior researcher with the Muskie School for Public Policy. He is currently the primary consultant for the State of Maine's Youth Suicide Prevention Initiative. The author, coauthor, or editor of more than twenty books, including the critically acclaimed work Suicide Clusters, lives in Portland, Maine.

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      Book preview

      Monsters of Massachusetts - Loren Coleman

      INTRODUCTION

      There is no denying that the old colonial feel of New England lives on in its creaky farmhouses, steepled churches, and stone walls dotting the landscape. What is less known is that the local residents of rural and backwoods Massachusetts, from the wilds of the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to the swampy areas just south of Boston, have routine experiences with creatures, critters, and monsters that inhabit the night, dawn, dusk, and sometimes, most frighteningly of all, the daylight of the region.

      Monsters of Massachusetts will serve as your guide to some of the most mysterious monsters and related mysteries to be encountered in New England. Many will be described in full detail, and among them, the following will be covered:

      •  The Dover Demon. Seen for one brief week in April, in Dover, Massachusetts, the little sandpaper-skinned, bright-orange creature shook up a town, state, and nation in 1977, beyond its wee size. The impact and weirdness of the Dover Demon lives on today, in its appearance on reality cryptozoology programs, in comic books, on T-shirts, and as toys.

      •  Hockomock Swamp’s Beasties. There is no area in New England more bizarre than Massachusetts’s fabled Bridgewater Triangle, which overlaps with the Hockomock Swamp. Giant birds, Bigfoot, giant snakes, Pookas, and other monsters are said to live in the area.

      •  Black Panthers and Tawny Mystery Cats. Melanistic, or black, panthers are not supposed to exist zoologically, but they and their deer-colored kin are the most frequent cryptozoological specimens seen in the woods of western Massachusetts. They have been described as sleek and silent felids. Wildlife biologists, police, and common citizens have been the eyewitnesses and the skeptics.

      •  Gloucester Sea Serpent. The legacy of the Gulf of Maine’s Great New England Sea Serpents came to a head in the years 1817–1819, when the huge Gloucester Sea Serpent was seen. Sightings go back to the 1600s and have been recorded as recently as this century.

      •  Out-of-Place Critters and Other Monsters. The Silver Lake Monster is often said to resemble a great snake. Local reports also tell of alligators in the Ware River. This book will sort out the quicksand of accounts and sightings. Natives talk of the similar things hereabouts too, before the colonists landed. Why are some said to be Giant Frogs and others Giant Beavers?

      •  Specter Moose. Giant monster moose roam throughout the forests of New England, including Massachusetts.

      •  Giant Squid. Massachusetts, having the highest population density in New England, has no shortage of other strange creatures, but the beached Kraken on Plum Island is unique in that it figured in Dan Brown’s most recent novel.

      In the back of the book, an appendix offers seven spots to go to see Massachusetts’s monsters. You’ve read about them. Now can you find them?

      What is Massachusetts?

      We all think we know what Massachusetts is, but Massachusetts lives more than in a place. It lives in history. It dwells in a past that is broader than the location we know today as Massachusetts.

      What is Massachusetts? would seem to be a relatively easy question to answer, but it is not. And indeed, the answer in time and space has some bearing on the Bay State’s cryptozoology, literally the study of the monsters of Massachusetts.

      In what is termed the New England region of the northern United States of America today exists the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The state is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north. The state of Maine is only a few miles away from its border, through New Hampshire. To the east of Massachusetts is the Atlantic Ocean.

      Massachusetts is the seventh-smallest state. As of the 2010 census, more than 6.5 million people live there. It is the most populous of the six New England states, is the third-most densely populated state in the country, and has the nation’s sixth-highest GDP per capita. The state features two major metropolitan areas—the Boston metropolitan area in the east and the Springfield metropolitan area in the west. Approximately two-thirds of the state’s population lives in Greater Boston, most of which is either urban or suburban. Western Massachusetts features one urban area—what is called the Knowledge Corridor along the Connecticut River, formed by a mix of university towns and rural areas.

      The prehistoric and historic background of the state has a direct relationship to the names, stories, and records of the monsters that inhabit it. Tribes of the Algonquian language family, such as the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pocomtuc, Mahican, and Massachusett, originally inhabited Massachusetts. The first English settlers of Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, established their settlement at Plymouth in 1620, and they developed friendly relations with the native Wampanoag.

      Massachusetts always seemed to be at the center of action in the New World. It was where the Revolutionary War began in 1775. It was also a center of abolitionist activities in the pre-Civil War era and a major contributor to the Union in the American Civil War.

      But few today realize that from the time the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established in 1630, and through 1780, when the commonwealth’s constitution was ratified, until 1820, all of what today is Maine was part of Massachusetts. Maine voted to secede from Massachusetts and was admitted to the Union as the twenty-third state on March 15, 1820, as part of the Missouri Compromise. Maine had been first a contiguous and then a non-contiguous part of Massachusetts all during this time. It therefore is worth noting that Massachusetts was a huge mass of land for 190 years, and any sightings of cryptids, creatures, and monsters from the area that is today Maine would have been recorded, most properly in that time, as accounts from Massachusetts. Therefore, pre-1820 accounts may be confusing as to their location.

      A Note on Style

      Why are animal names sometimes capitalized, sometimes in lower case, and sometimes in italics? The style used in this book follows the manual of style adopted by the International Society of Cryptozoology and its peer-reviewed scientific journal, Cryptozoology. The journal’s editor, Richard Greenwell, detailed the proper capitalization of cryptozoological names, before and after discovery, in a footnote on page 101 of the 1986 issue of Cryptozoology. Greenwell followed the same manual of style used in systematic zoology.

      Greenwell is very clear in his example:

      Native name: okapi;

      Western name for presumed, undiscovered animal: Okapi;

      Common name after discovery and acceptance: okapi.

      For extended use, this translates into the following form:

      Native name: nahuelito;

      Western name for presumed, undiscovered animal: Nahuelito;

      Common name after discovery and acceptance: nahuelito.

      Native name: naitaka;

      Western name for presumed, undiscovered animal: Ogopogo;

      Common name after discovery and acceptance: ogopogo.

      Therefore, as Lake Monster, Sea Serpent, and Nessie have not been technically accepted by systematic zoology as of this date, the capitalized form is employed in this book.

      The Dover Demon

      Most mysterious creatures that frequent the byways, forests, and swamps of the world grow into legend over many years. As generations come and go, folklore combines with further sightings to propel these monsters into our collective conscious. Not so with the Dover Demon. A few brief sightings in the late 70s are all it took to make this creature legend, though nobody seems to have seen it since. . . . The eminent cryptozoo-logical researcher Loren Coleman . . . coined the term Dover Demon.

      —Jeff Belanger, Weird Massachusetts (2008)

      What has turned out to be one of the most memorable monster moments in the history of Massachusetts began, as they all do, with a quiet, local encounter. All stories must start someplace, and this one begins in Dover. The cover of this book acknowledges the worldwide notoriety this weird but simple creature has acquired since it first appeared. As I wrote in Mysterious America in 1983, The Dover Demon is a true enigma, an animate anomaly that intersected the lives of four credible young people that lonely week in April, 1977. But it all goes back to Dover.

      Dover is one of the wealthiest towns in Massachusetts, a mere fifteen miles southwest of Boston, with more horses than people living there during the 1970s. The location is heavily wooded, with alternating areas of pastures and fields. Often grand houses, some barns, and lesser bungalows are spaced several hundred feet apart. Nevertheless, it is hardly a place in which one would expect to encounter a strange creature, but that’s exactly what happened during a twenty-five-and-a-half-hour period in April 1977.

      Bartlett Encounter

      The bizarre series of sightings began at 10:30 P.M. EST on the evening of April 21. Three seventeen-year-olds, Bill Bartlett, Mike Mazzocca, and Andy Brodie, were driving north on Dover’s Farm Street. The night was clear, stars were visible, and weather records confirm that it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit at the time of the sighting.

      Bartlett, who was behind the wheel of his 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle, spotted something gingerly creeping along a low wall of loose stones on the left side of the road. At first he thought it was a dog or a cat until his headlights hit the thing directly, and he realized it was nothing he had ever seen before. (The location was almost opposite what

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