The Devil's Washbowl: Home of the Pigman?

Tony and I recently took a weekend trip up to Vermont. Our final destination was Montpelier to see an old friend, but we made a few stops along the way. Some people visit Vermont to see fall foliage and quaint towns. We wanted to see the Pigman!

The Pigman is the resident monster of Northfield, Vermont, a cute little town best known as the home of Norwich University, the oldest private military college in the United States. But if you journey outside the charming downtown and into the dense woods, according to legend you might encounter the half-human, half-porcine horror known as the Pigman. He's said to lurk most frequently in an area known as the Devil's Washbowl, a densely wooded, rocky, and remote area. 

Way back in 1971, a Northfield farmer's twenty-year old son disappeared from home. Perhaps he had run away to the big city, the police suggested. He was never found, but shortly after his disappearance various animals went missing around town as well: mostly dogs and cats. Were these things connected? 

One night a farmer heard something rummaging through his garbage cans. Thinking it was a raccoon, the farmer flicked on his outside light. It wasn't a raccoon. It was a naked man. His body was covered in short white hair, and he had the face of a pig. The man - creature? - ran off into the darkness. 

A few weeks later, during a high-school dance, four students were smoking and drinking in a sand pit behind the school. As they talked, they saw something move towards them in the night. It was a naked man with the hideous face of a pig. Terrified, the four students ran into the school gymnasium and told their friends what they had seen. A group of students ran out to see the creature, but it had vanished, leaving behind only beaten-down undergrowth as proof it had been there. 

Jeff Hatch was one of the students that rushed out to find the Pigman, and many years later he told Vermont author Joseph Citro about the creature. Citro included the legend in his book Green Mountains, Dark Tales, and in subsequent books, like Weird New England and The Vermont Monster Guide. According to Hatch, locals at first suspected the Pigman was living at a nearby pig farm (which makes sense), but many motorists that year reported seeing a strange white creature near the Devil's Washbowl, a stony hillside depression that a stream runs through. A young couple that had parked their car near the Devil's Washbowl for a romantic interlude also claimed the Pigman had attacked them, and the young man had the claw marks on his body to prove it. 

Small piles of bones and piles of hay, which seemed to have been used as bedding, were found in caves near the Devil's Washbowl, further lending credence to the idea it was the Pigman's lair. Jeff Hatch claims the police went to investigate, but never found anything. 

Some people want to see the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids. Ever since reading this story, I've wanted to see the Devil's Washbowl, so we made it a stop on our Vermont trip. Devil's Washbowl Road is easy to find on Google maps, but when we visited it was not marked by any street signs. (It looked like they had been stolen by vandals.) It's a dirt road that wends its way along a steep, wooded hillside. There are a few houses and farms along the road, but mostly you're in the woods. Devil's Washbowl Road is pretty, but it also reminded me of the beginning of a horror movie, particularly as we were two city boys out of our element. 

I had asked Joseph Citro how to find the Washbowl itself, and he told me I would see it when the road passed over a culvert. After mistakenly thinking a small stream was it, we came to the actual Devil's Washbowl. Many geologic features in New England bear the Devil's name, often because they are rough and vaguely inhospitable to humans. This is one of them. A stream runs down a rocky hillside, empties into a rocky basin, and then disappears into the woods. I haven't found a specific legend explaining the origin of the Washbowl's name, but it does look like someplace where the Devil would wash his hands after committing a nefarious deed. 

Would you go down there? We did not...

We pulled over and got out of the car to take some photos. Other than the sound of rushing water, it was very quiet. I debated climbing down into the Washbowl itself to find one of the caves, but I (wisely) decided not to. My main concerns: breaking a leg, getting Lyme disease, touching poison ivy, getting eaten by the Pigman. Four good reasons to stay near the car. And then Tony noticed a good reason to get back in the car: a big piece of animal scat, relatively fresh. Was it from a bear, or maybe a coyote? Or perhaps it was from a half-man, half-pig, humanoid monster? We didn't stick around to find out. 

Jeff Hatch seemed to think the Pigman was actually the farmer's son who went missing in 1971, who somehow devolved after living in the woods. That's the original theory, and there are a few other theories circulating these days about the creature's origin. One suggests that he is the unholy offspring of a lonely farmer and a much beloved swine. I won't comment on that one, other than to say I don't think that's how biology works.  

Another, more detailed story about the Pigman's origins seems to have appeared online around 2013. This story claims he was originally a teenager known as Sam Harris. On October 30, 1951, Sam went out to cause mischief in Northfield. The night before Halloween was called Picket Night in Northfield, and it was the designated night for kids to wax windows, egg cars, and throw toilet paper in trees. Sam left home that night but didn't return... until three years later. Sam appeared on his parents' front porch one night in 1954, naked, squealing and tossing bloody pig innards on the porch floor. The sight supposedly drove his mother to suicide (she threw herself into a pen full of ravenous hogs), and a teacher who tried to debunk the legend was found dead with the words "PICKET NIGHT" carved on her body. 

Still not going down there...

In 2014, another addition to the legend appeared online, this time from horror author William Dalphin, who grew up in Northfield. Dalphin claims that in the 1980s, a group of teenagers camping near the Devil's Washbowl encountered the Pigman, who clubbed one boy on the head and dragged him off into the woods. The boy was never seen again, except possibly by one local man who said he had seen the teenager rummaging through his trash, wearing just a pair of torn jeans. His body was covered with short white hair and his eyes had a hollow expression. Dalphin intended his story as fiction, but it has since been cited as part of the actual legend. 

Northfield is not the only place in the United States that is supposedly terrorized by a pigman. A bridge in Denton, Texas, is said to be the home of a pig-headed madman who menaces teenagers. He is either a local hunter transformed into a were-pig after being bitten by a feral hog, or he is the disfigured victim of gangsters who cut off his nose and sliced open his cheeks. Also haunting bridges are the the Pigman of Hawkinsville, Georgia, the Pigman of Angola, New York, and the Pigman of Shelby County, Tennessee, who is said to appear near the bridge at night if you shout, "Pigman" three times. A similar legend is told about Pig Lady Road in Hillsborough, New Jersey, where a monstrous Pig Lady appears if you say her name three times. 

I enjoyed my trip to the Devil's Washbowl, even if it was a little creepy. Perhaps next year I could road-trip across the country, visiting assorted haunted Pig People locations? I suppose I could, but maybe that would be pushing my luck. I should probably count myself lucky I didn't see the Pigman on our trip to Northfield. 

Pickets, Cabbages, and the Pigman: Halloween Lore

I used to have a neighbor from Detroit, Michigan. One day in the fall while we were discussing the neighborhood trick-or-treaters he told me that he wasn't a big fan of Halloween.

When he was a kid in Detroit the night before Halloween was called Devil's Night, and it was a night for arson and vandalism. Teenagers would light fires across the city and burn down abandoned buildings, of which there were a lot at the time. In 1984, there were more than 800 fires in Detroit on October 30. Yikes! Happily things have gotten much better since then and in 2018 there were only four fires on Devil's Night.

His experience in Detroit was much different from mine growing up in the 1970s in Haverhill, Massachusetts. The night before Halloween didn't have a special name or any activities (criminal or otherwise) associated with it. Kids might pull some pranks on Halloween night itself (egging houses, throwing toilet paper in trees) but nothing as serious as arson. The main focus was on trick-or-treat (before it was banned because of a poison candy scare) and Halloween parties. And it was definitely only a one day celebration. There were no other days with special names.

Vintage photo from this site.

I assumed that's how things always were but I was wrong. Like all holidays Halloween changes and evolves over time. When my mother was a child in Haverhill during the 1940s there were three nights of activity around Halloween. Three! Here's an account by Charles W. "Charlie" Turner that appeared in The Haverhill Gazette's October 27, 2005 issue. Charlie's looking back nostalgically to his childhood in the Acre, a dense urban neighborhood in Haverhill:

"It all began on October 28, which was known as Cabbage Night. ... Many families raised cabbages in their gardens and young men went there to steal them. Afterwards, they raced through the streets throwing the plants at houses along the way. Ma warned me to stay away from the windows just in case..." 

"The second night, Oct. 30, was called Beggars-Night. This was the night when children put on their costumes and went from door to door in search of treats. ..." 

"On Oct. 31, Halloween came and most everybody stayed home. This was the night for mischief ... a return to those places that ignored a child's request for a treat. Most of the time it was cut clotheslines and soaped windows in our neighborhood. However, on the other side of Main Street, things could be worse. There were broken windows, messes on porches, and even an occasional tipped car." 

It turns out that special names for either Halloween or the days surrounding it were once common across the country. Most of them were coined after the pranks that kids pulled. Baltimore had Moving Night (because you moved things out of your neighbor's yard), Ohio had Doorbell Night (because of ring and run) and Vermont had Clothesline Night (because you'd throw toilet paper on clotheslines).

Are any of those special names for Halloween or the days surrounding it still in use today? Well, I think the citizens of Northfield, Vermont still observe Picket Night on October 30, when kids steal pickets from fences.

I know this because Northfield is supposedly home to one of New England's creepiest monsters: the Pigman! This porcine terror is associated with Picket Night and Halloween. According to one version of the legend, on October 30, 1951 a high school student named Sam Harris left his house for some Picket Night fun. He was planning to egg houses, throw toilet paper, and steal pickets with some friends. But he never showed up at the rendezvous point to meet his friends, and he never went back to his parents' house either. Sam Harris was never seen again. It was as if he vanished into thin air.

Did he vanish, or was he transformed? Later that fall someone (or something?) strange was seen in the woods outside town. It had the body of man but the head of a hideous pig. People in Northfield whispered that it was really Sam Harris and that he had sold his soul to the Devil. He had become a hideous pigman. 

Image from American Horror Story.

The town historian responded to these rumors with a column in the local paper. There were no such things as monsters, she wrote, and Sam Harris had been a good boy and a model citizen. But the day after the column was published the historian was found murdered in the Devil's Washbowl, a desolate area in the woods. The words "PICKET NIGHT" were carved into her flesh. The message was clear: the Pigman was real. Something monstrous and piglike is still said to be lurking in the woods outside Northfield to this day...

How's that for a story? There are several different legends associated with the Pigman but that one is particularly creepy and very appropriate for Halloween. It's nice to know that weird old folklore is still being celebrated in New England. Have a safe and happy holiday but whatever name you celebrate it!

Weird New England News: Goat Elected Mayor, Haunted Supermarket, Vermont Pigman and UFOs.

There are lots of strange things happening around New England lately. To begin with, a town in Vermont recently elected a goat as mayor. The good citizens of Fair Haven (population 2,500) have chosen Lincoln, a three-year old female Nubian goat, as their new leader. I suppose there's some joke in there about politics going to the dogs (or the goats) but I'm unable to find it right now.

Her honor the mayor. Photo: Boston Globe.

Happily, Lincoln is only the honorary mayor and will not be making any major civic decisions. That's probably a good idea, since during her first day of office she defecated on the floor of Town Hall. Fair Haven is actually run by a board of selectman and a town manager, and it was the town manager's idea to elect an honorary mayor as a way to raise money for a new playground. Lincoln beat out several other candidates, including a hamster named Crystal, to win the job.

It all seems like good-natured fun, but The Boston Globe points out that sometimes these things can take a dark turn. For example, in the 1980s a goat named Clay Henry was elected mayor of Lajitas, Texas. Clay Henry became a tourist attraction for his ability to guzzle beer but was violently killed by his own son, Clay Henry Jr., during a fight over a female goat. Clay Henry Jr. took over as mayor and local beer-drinking beast. His son, Clay Henry III in turn became the town's third goat mayor but was castrated by a neighbor who became furious when he saw the goat drinking beer on Sunday, a day when liquor sales were illegal. The mayor survived the attack. Hopefully things stay more peaceful up in Fair Haven.

Meanwhile, shoppers have reported a ghost at a Market Basket in Wilmington, Massachusetts. Market Basket, a locally-owned supermarket chain beloved for its fresh produce and low prices, was founded by Greek immigrants Athanasios and Efrosini Demoulas in 1917. In recent years the chain has been at the center of multiple lawsuits by members of the Demoulas family fighting for ownership, and in 2014 thousands of employees protested to support the rights of Arthur T. Demoulas, who is now the current owner. The ghost is perhaps just the latest chapter in the ongoing saga.

Photo: CBS Boston.

People who have seen the ghost report that she appears as a young woman in Victorian garb.Why is a modern supermarket being haunted by a Victorian ghost? No one seems to know but at least one person said she had earlier seen the ghost in her home, which is located nearby. Perhaps the ghost just wants to see what's on sale? A spokesperson for Market Basket made the following comment:

“As far as we know all of our stores are ghost-free,” Justine Griffin said in a statement to the Globe. “But if there’s anything to it, she’s probably attracted to our Victorian-era prices.”

Apparitions may be haunting Market Basket, but UFOs are haunting the skies of Connecticut. The Connecticut Post notes that eleven UFOs have been reported in the state so far this year. A wide variety of phenomena were seen, ranging from classic saucer-shaped objects to those that were large and triangular. Several witnesses in different towns reported seeing strange green flashes in the sky on different days. Last year 100 UFOs were reported in Connecticut so perhaps sightings are slightly down this year? 

Image: Connecticut Post.

No one in Connecticut has reported any strange extraterrestrial humanoids yet. Perhaps this is a blessing, since personally I find ET sightings to be kind of spooky. If you do want to learn about a spooky humanoid, I can direct you to the New England Legends podcast. This week they are talking about the Pigman of Northfield, Vermont. They also give a shout out to this blog!

Image: YouTube.

The Pigman is one of my favorite New England cryptids. This swine-headed monster was first seen lurking outside a high school dance in the 1970s and gained notoriety in the 1990s through the books of Vermont writer Joseph Citro. Is he a missing teenager who went feral? The unholy offspring of a lonely farmer and a farm animal? A high school trickster who sold his soul to Satan on Halloween? Accounts of his origin vary, but people in Northfield agree that he still lurks in the woods outside of town. One of these days I hope to visit Northfield and visit the Pigman's stomping grounds. Here's hoping I don't find him. 

Special bonus: here's an image of the Pigman looking buff that I found on Pinterest. I guess the feral life is good for your physique? The covered bridge in the background adds the right New England touch. 

Image: Pinterest.

 

The Pigman Cometh! Vermont's Porcine Horror Returns.

It is Halloween, and every Halloween I become jealous of the citizens of Northfield, Vermont. I'm not jealous of their clean country air or access to great dairy products. No, I'm jealous because Northfield has its very own special monster associated with Halloween.

I am jealous because they have the Pigman.

The Pigman first trotted into the public eye in 1999 when author Joseph Citro published Green Mountains, Dark Tales, a collection of spooky Vermont folklore and stories about the paranormal. Citro included an allegedly true story about a creature known as the Pigman, which lurked outside of Northfield in an area called the Devil's Washbowl. Citro heard the story from a Northfield man named Jeff Hatch at a public reading he was giving, but Citro estimated that hundreds of people were also familiar with the Pigman.

The Pigman's fame grew through subsequent books that Citro published, through para-normal themed TV shows, and through the internet. If you are not familiar with the Pigman, here are the basics.

In 1971 a group of Northfield high school students snuck out of a school dance to smoke and drink beer in the woods behind the school. Their illicit fun was spoiled when a naked hairy humanoid with a swine's head lurched out from the trees, grunting. The teens fled back into the school in panic. What was this creature and where had it come from? No one was quite sure. Some locals thought it was the offspring of a farmer who was inappropriately affectionate with his livestock, while others thought it might be a teenage boy who disappeared the previous yet and had gone insane. Others murmured ominously about gnawed animal bones found in caves near the Devil's Washbowl and a pale white thing that menaced teens in parked cars...

Another pig-headed monster appears on this year's season of American Horror Story.

That's the original basic story told by Citro. Another origin story appeared in 2013. According to this version, in 1951 the Pigman was just an average Vermont teen named Sam Harris. On October 30, Sam went out with some eggs and toilet paper to vandalize his neighbors' houses. October 30 is called Picket Night in Northfield, and it's the night that kids cause their Halloween mischief. (Coincidentally, that is tonight!) Unlike his peers, Sam never came back home after egging houses. The police and hundreds of volunteers searched for the boy but he was never seen again.

Well, maybe he was. A male figure seen wearing a pig's head was seen roaming through the gloomy autumn woods. People whispered that Sam had given himself to the Devil the night he disappeared and now was a force of evil. His parents dismissed these rumors, preferring to believe he was dead, until the night Sam appeared briefly on their porch, squealing like a hog and chewing animal entrails. His distraught mother killed herself thirteen days later by throwing herself into a pen full of hungry swine. Later, a local historian who tried to defend Sam's reputation in the newspaper disappeared and was found dead in the woods with the words "Picket Night" carved on her forehead. No one defended Sam after that. Instead, they just feared the Pigman.

Those are the two basic Pigman stories. People still report Pigman sightings, though, and every year around Halloween I search the Web for some new tales of this porcine horror. This year, I didn't even need to look! Someone posted a Pigman story as a comment right on one of my old posts. Here it is.

My father was a very practical man who was well grounded ... not one for an interest in strange sightings. There was a time, however, he told me about two encounters he had with what he described as seeing " A DOG WITH A HUMAN HEAD "... they happened in 1984 and 1985. I believe what he saw was the Pigman as they both occurred in the Northfield, Vt area, specifically West Brookfield, and Brookfield. My brother-in-law was with him when they witnessed the first encounter. My mother was present during the second. He ran inside his home to get a rifle to shoot it because he said it didn't look natural and needed to be killed (I wouldn't have killed it ... I would have reported it to the police) but it was gone when he came back out. It REALLY shook them up .. I even found a cryptozoology sighting form in a dresser drawer he obviously decided against mailing out.

I'm not giving my name because I know what kind of backlash there would be... I don't need it ... but every word I've written is true. 

I'm grateful to whoever left me this little Halloween present, although it leaves me with questions. Did someone's Dad really see the Pigman AND then mistake it for a dog with a human head? Where does one get cryptozoology sighting forms? There probably aren't good answers to those questions, but it's the time of year for scary stories, whether or not they're 100% true.

Of course, I write that from the safety of my well-lit home in the city. If I lived up in Northfield, I'd probably be a little more nervous now that the days are short and the woods are very, very dark.

*****

If you want to read more about the Pigman, you can see my other posts here, here and here. Oh, and here too!

The Pigman On TV: "Half Human, Half Hog, 100% Hideous"

Here's a little history about one of my favorite monsters, the Pigman of Northfield, Vermont. 

Way back in 1999, University Press of New England printed Green Mountains, Dark Tales by Vermont folklorist Joseph Citro. Towards the back of the book was a story told to Citro by Jeff Hatch, a resident of Northfield. The story was about a horrible humanoid monster that lurked in the woods outside town: the Pigman.

As his name implies, the Pigman has a humanoid body and the head of a pig. He is most often seen in a wooded area called the Devil's Washbowl, where he likes to menace teenagers at night. Jeff Hatch thought he was a missing a farm boy gone feral, or perhaps the "consummation of blasphemous backwoods bestiality." Joseph Citro estimated that hundreds of people in Northfield were familiar with the Pigman story.

That number was destined to grow. In 2005 Citro's book Weird New England was published by Sterling Publishing Company. Hard cover and filled with color illustrations, Weird New England was more widely distributed than Green Mountains, Dark Tales and could be found in bookstores across New England. The Pigman legend spread.

Soon, the Pigman appeared on the Web, often accompanied by the illustration from Weird New England or Citro's later book, The Vermont Monster Guide (2009). I've posted about the Pigman three times:

1. In 2011, the basic, original Pigman story. In 1971, teenagers drinking beer in the woods see something horrible - is it a missing farm boy gone feral? But if it is, why does he have a pig's head?

2. In 2013, I posted an updated Pigman story that was circulating on the web. According to this story, the Pigman was really a missing teenager named Sam Harris. Sam had gone out to cause trouble on Picket Night, which was the local name for the night before Halloween. He was never seen again, but something returned to his parents' house three years later, leaving madness and insanity in its wake...

3. In 2014, I found another Pigman account that was circulating on the Web. According to this story, in the 1980s a group of teenagers were camping overnight in the Devils' Washbowl when one was clubbed over the head and dragged into the night by a man wearing a pig's head. I had found the story on a website that presented it as true, but it turns out that particular story was actually written by horror writer William Dalphin. Fact and fiction are intertwined in the Pigman legend...

This February, the Pigman got his widest exposure yet when the TV show Monsters and Mysteries in America ran a segment on Northfield's favorite monster. With taglines like "Half human, half hog, 100% hideous" and "Where the man ends and the pig begins is anybody's guess", the show featured some of the familiar Pigman stories, but also included some that were new to me. For example, a young man making out with his girlfriend in the Devil's Washbowl is attacked by something that leaves claw marks on his stomach, and a group of teenagers encounter something pale and swine-like that tosses branches at them as they walk in the woods.


 
The Pigman stories have always seemed like they were shaped by basic horror movie tropes: misbehaving teenagers, dark woods, and sexual transgression. The Pigman himself is often described as naked, pink, hairy, and sometimes muscular. He's a terrifying walking libido. One older Northfield resident even says teenage boys would tell the story to get their girlfriends to cuddle a little closer. Anyway, Monsters and Mysteries presents these stories in an appropriately lurid fashion, or as lurid as a basic cable show can get away with.

I'm sure this isn't the last of the Pigman saga. Now that he has appeared on TV I'm sure that more stories about his porcine terror will pop up. Whether the stories are true or false, it's interesting to watch as a legend takes shape.

The Pigman: Fact, Fiction, Freakishness

It was great to see people at the Tewksbury Library this past week and at the Boston Book Fair, where I was promoting my book Legends and Lore of the North Shore. At the book fair I also met Sam Baltrusis, author of Ghosts of Salem and Ghosts of Boston, and Dee Martin, author of Boston in the Golden Age of Spiritualism. If you get a chance please check out their books! They're full of the weird stories and interesting legends that I really love.

Speaking of weird legends, Halloween is this Friday, and when Halloween rolls around I think of my favorite New England monster, the Pigman. An overall creepy fellow, the Pigman haunts a woodsy area outside Northfield, Vermont called the Devil's Washbowl. Just who is the Pigman? Some stories say he's the half-human offspring of a local farmer and a friendly pig. Others say he's a local teenager who ran into the woods and became feral.

The most detailed story claims he's Sam Harris, a teenager who set out to cause some mischief on October 30, 1951. October 30 is called Picket Night up in Northfield, and it's the designated night for teenagers to make pre-Halloween trouble by throwing eggs, toilet papering houses, and probably at one time stealing pickets from fences. Sam set out on that chilly October night many years ago an innocent teen, but went missing. Three years later he briefly returned home for just one night. Now a squealing madman, he strewed pig innards on his parents' porch, only to disappear again. His mother was driven mad by even this brief glimpse of her now monstrous son, and committed suicide by throwing herself into a pen of hungry hogs. Locals whispered that Sam had sold his soul to Satan, and that he now lurks in the woods wearing the head of a pig to cover his own deranged visage.

I first read about the Pigman in Joseph Citro's Weird New England, but I've found other legends and rumors floating around on the web. Here's one that appeared last year. Dim the lights for maximum creepy effect. 

 Back in the 1980s a group of high school seniors decided to go camping overnight in the Devil's Washbowl. There were some caves in the area, and recently hunters had found pig bones (freshly gnawed) in some of them. Were they the remains of the Pigman's dinner? The seniors thought they were and hoped to get a glimpse of the town's resident monster. 

I think they were also hoping for some romantic action, since as the sun set they split up into couples, each taking a sleeping bag and flashlight and each settling into a different cave for the night...

I'll just interject here and say that anyone who has ever seen a horror movie knows this was a bad decision. Frisky teenagers. Dark woods. Separating the group. A hideous monster. I guess these were the rare teenagers who had never seen a scary movie. 

Back to the story. The teens were settling in for a night of snuggling when they heard screams coming from one cave. Grabbing their flashlights they all ran to see what had happened. Inside the cave they found one of the girls, screaming hysterically. Her boyfriend was nowhere to be seen.

When she calmed down enough to speak, the girl said that as soon as she and her boyfriend had settled down to sleep a large man wearing a pig's head came into their cave. They shouted at him to leave, but without even hesitating he grabbed a rock and clubbed the boyfriend on the head. The Pigman threw the unconscious boy over his shoulder and stalked off into the night.

The teens frantically drove back to town and told the police what happened. Search parties looked through the woods for days, and although heavy footprints were found leading away from the Devil's Washbowl the searchers lost the trail in the leaf-strewn forest. No sign could be found of the boy or his abductor.

Desperate for leads, the police put up posters with the boy's photo around around Northfield. Only one person came forward. A man said a few nights ago he had been in his kitchen when he heard something rummaging around outside in the trash. Thinking it was a racoon, he turned on the porch light and went to chase the animal away. But it wasn't a racoon digging through his trash, it was the missing boy. The man recognized him from the poster.

But the poster wasn't quite accurate, the man said. He had definitely seen the same boy, but his eyes were strangely hollow looking, and his body was covered in long white hair. 

Is this story true? It appears on a sight called Phantoms and Monsters, which is focused on UFOs, the paranormal, etc. It's written anonymously as a first-person account ("My sister and a couple of her friends went out to the Devil's Washbowl...") which would lead one to believe someone, somewhere said this all really happened.

However, a little poking around on the web showed that this version of the Pigman story was first posted on Reddit last year by  a user named William Dalphin. Dalphin writes horror fiction, so maybe this story isn't true. Or at least not entirely. It's in a section of Reddit for both true and fictional scary stories, so there's a little confusion. And the other Pigman stories are supposedly true, so I can understand why people think this one is.

The Pigman legend is relatively new, apparently first appearing in the 1970s. It's changing and growing over time, incorporating tropes and themes from popular horror movies and fiction. Will this story be passed on as true? For me, the Pigman stories are like good campfire tales told by someone who's seen a lot of horror movies. I'll be interested to see what new ones appear over time.

And the Pigman could be real, even if the stories about him change. Perhaps there really is some anomalous monster lurking around Northfield and people are just trying to describe him using the stories and themes that are familiar to them. Perhaps it's the only way the locals can wrap their heads around the hideous, porcine enigma. He's a monstrous blank slate for them to write their fears on.

I suppose the only way to settle the question of the Pigman's existence is for someone to spend the night in the Devil's Washbowl. I'll leave that to someone braver than myself.

My other Pigman posts are here and here, if you really want to stay awake all night. 

H.P. Lovecraft's "The Unnamable": Fiction, Fact and Humanoid Monsters

Trigger warning: if you don't want to read about monsters and some unusual romantic encounters, skip this post and come back next week! Now, here's the post:


I grew up reading the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, but they were sometimes a little more intense than I could handle. I can remember the first time I checked out a Lovecraft book from the library when I was very young, and being just too terrified to finish reading "The Dunwich Horror." The vivid description of Wilbur Whateley's bizarre body dissolving on the library floor and the scenes of a giant invisible whatsit eating residents of central Massachusetts were just too much for me to take.

I did ultimately finish the story, and haven't stopped reading Lovecraft since. Sometimes I still get a little creeped out by his work, but now I also appreciate the stories' humor, metaphysical overtones and, most relevant to this blog, references to New England history and culture. Sometimes it's hard to know where Lovecraft's invention stops and real New England history begin.

Let's take his 1923 story "The Unnamable" as an example. It's a relatively simple tale. Two men are sitting in an old graveyard in the Massaschusetts town of Arkham. One them, the story's narrator, is a horror writer named Randolph Carter. The other is Joel Manton, a high school principal who has "New England's self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life." 

The two are discussing the author's habit of using words like "unnamable" and "unmentionable" to describe horrible monsters. Manton feels it's a bit of a cheat that Carter (like Lovecraft himself) ends so many of his stories with a narrator driven insane by seeing some indescribable monster. Why can't Carter just describe what these monsters look like?

Carter responds by claiming that one of his most recent stories, "The Attic Window," was based on a real situation. "The Attic Window" tells how a cow in Puritan New England gave birth to a hideous humanoid child after a local man had carnal knowledge of the cow. The man is executed, but the half-bovine monster is raised in secret by its human grandfather in the attic. The monster grows to adulthood and creeps through town at night, peering in people's windows and murdering the occasional lone traveler. When its grandfather dies the monster remains locked in the attic...

Carter claims he based his story on a passage from Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, and also on an old diary he found in an abandoned house. The house was the same one where the monster supposedly had been hidden, and when he found the diary he also found a humanoid skull - that had four inch horns growing from it.

By this time the sun has set, and Manton asks "Where was this house?" Carter says, "Oh, it's right next to this cemetery." They hear the creaking of an old attic window, sense the approach of something through the darkness, and wake up the next morning covered in blood and hoof prints.

Unable to describe the creature (or ghost creature?) that attacked them, the story ends with Manton stuttering, "Carter, it was the unnamable!" The end.

Lovecraft has some meta-fictional fun with "The Unnamable" by blurring the lines between reality and fiction. The town of Arkham is a thinly veiled version of Salem, and Randolph Carter is Lovecraft's fictional alter ego who appears in several of his stories. The cemetery where Carter and Manton sit was based on Salem's Charter Street Burying Ground, and Manton is a fictionalized version of one of Lovecraft's friends. The story itself is a defense by Lovecraft against critics who didn't appreciate his particular style of cosmic horror.

But surprisingly, the central conceit of the story is not fictional at all. Fictional incidents of inter-species love do appear in a lot of Lovecraft's stories, like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (humans and hideous fish monsters), "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (humans and albino apes), and "The Dunwich Horror" (humans and amorphous extra-dimensional space gods).

However, for "The Unnamable," Lovecraft used a case of man and beast romance which really is in Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. In book six of this epic work, Cotton Mather describes the following:

...There was a beast, which brought forth a creature, which might pretend to something of a human shape. Now, the people minded that the monster had a blemish in one eye, much like what a profligate fellow in town was know to have. This fellow was hereupon examined; and upon his examination confess'd his infandous Bestialities; for which he was deservedly executed...

Magnalia Christi is full of gruesome examples of sinfulness and divine punishment - this example of bestiality if just one of many unpleasant stories that Cotton Mather includes. Of course, modern genetics teach us that a man and a cow cannot conceive a child together, but folklore and mythology want us to think otherwise.

One of many paintings Picasso did of bulls and minotaurs.

 The most famous such child would be the Minotaur of Greek mythology, a bull/human hybrid that sounds strangely similar to the monster in "The Unnamable." The Minotaur is born to Queen Pasiphae of Crete after she and her husband refuse to sacrifice a beautiful bull to the god Poseidon. In revenge, Poseidon makes Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. Much like Lovecraft's indescribable bovinoid beast, the Minotaur is hidden away, but in a labyrinth rather than an attic.

A little closer to home, the Pigman of Northfield Vermont is sometimes said to be the offspring of a pig and an inappropriately amorous human farmer. Like the Minotaur and Lovecraft's monster, the Pigman is dangerous if not murderous.

Symbolically, I think these monsters represent taboos that have been violated and secrets that refuse to remain hidden. You can hide your secret monster babies away, but sooner or later they get hungry and need to be fed. Many of Lovecraft's stories are concerned with the boundary between the human and the inhuman, and the horrible things that happen when that boundary is crossed.

Was a monster really born in Puritan New England "which might pretend to something of a human shape?" I am very, very skeptical about the truth of Mather's story. However, it's also interesting that Mather never indicates what happened to the monster. The father was executed, but what happened to his child?

In the safety of my house on a sunny June day I can say Mather's story is false, but if you stumble upon a horned human skull while exploring an old attic, I'd suggest leaving as fast as you can.

The Pigman Returns!

A couple years ago I posted about the Pigman of Northfield, Vermont. It was one of my more popular posts, but I didn't think I had much more to say about this porcine creature of the night.

However, while poking around on the web recently I found some more Pigman stories. I usually try to cite books or other traditional sources for this blog, but even thought the Pigman stories are just on message boards they are too good to resist. I like to think of these as good campfire stories, but the campfire is my computer. (If you're not up to speed on the Pigman, you can read my original post here.)

The newer version of the Pigman story claims that way back in 1951 the Pigman was just a normal seventeen year old boy named Sam Harris. On October 30, the night before Halloween, Sam set out with some eggs and toilet paper to cause trouble and vandalize his neighbors' houses. It was a tradition for the local teens. You see, in Sam's hometown of Northfield October 30 was called Picket Night, and it was the designated night for mischief.

Unfortunately, Sam never returned. His concerned parents called the police and hundreds of volunteers searched the woods around Northfield, but they found nothing. Sam Harris was never seen again.

But something else was seen that gloomy autumn, something disturbing: a hideous humanoid with the head of a pig. The creature was seen lurking in the woods at night, particularly in an area called the Devil's Washbowl, where he terrorized teenagers in parked cars. The rumor began to spread that this monster was really Sam Harris, and that he had given himself to Satan. People said he ate the raw entrails of pigs, and wore the head of one over his own.

Sam's family and friends were outraged at the rumors, and a local historian wrote an article debunking them in the local newspaper. She disappeared shortly after it was published. Her body was found several years later in the Devil's Washbowl with the words "Picket Night" carved in her skull.

One morning in 1954, Sam's mother told a neighbor that Sam had come to her house the previous night. He had dragged a pile of pig entrails across the porch floor as a gift for her, and squealed with feral glee at the bloody organs before disappearing into the darkness. His eyes were like an animal's. Thirteen days later, Mrs. Harris committed suicide by throwing herself into a neighbor's pig pen, where the hungry swine devoured her.

Ever since, the Pigman has roamed through the dark woods around Northfield. The creature has been blamed for many animal deaths and several human disappearances, but has never been caught.

******

There's the new Pigman story. It's entirely possible this tale is just being spread by one person on message boards across the web, but there are some things about it that I find interesting.

As I've mentioned before, the nights around Halloween often have different names in different areas. I find it interesting that October 30 is called Picket Night in this story, which seems like it could refer to a real tradition in Northfield. If you know anything about Picket Night, please leave a comment - I'd love to know more!

It's also significant that the Pigman lurks around the Devil's Washbowl. Areas named after the Devil tend to accumulate legends about supernatural happenings.

Finally, there seems to be some implicit message about men and women in this story. Sam Harris begins the story as mischievous teen, and then devolves from boy prankster all the way to a hideous man-beast that lives outside of society and eats raw flesh. The female historian who tries to defend his reputation and symbolically reclaim him as human meets a horrible fate, while poor Mrs. Harris is destroyed by the realization that her son really is an animal who has resisted all her years of mothering. I don't think it's true, but the message seems to be that men are wild, and women are doomed in their attempts to civilize them. It sounds like a great topic for someone's Master's dissertation!

Places Named After the Devil In Northern New England

A while ago I was looking through Loren Coleman's Mysterious America, and noticed that Appendix V lists places named after the Devil. He mentions a couple in New England, but I knew there were more out there. I thought, Wouldn't a list of devil-named places make a good blog post?

I was wrong.

I simply underestimated how many geographic features are named after the Evil One in this part of the country. There are a lot, so it's going to be two blog posts. This week I'm just listing those devilish places in northern New England, with my commentary at the bottom. Next week I'll write about southern New England.

And please note, this list only includes sites or locations with the word "Devil" in them. I left out all the places named after Hell, Purgatory, or Satan. I had to rein in this evil list somehow! Otherwise people would think our region is just a hissing cauldron of demonic activity.


Maine:


Devil's Back Trail, Harpswell
Devil's Back, Louds Island
Devil's Bog, Skowhegan
Devil's Bog Brook, Skowhegan
Devil's Chair Trail, Waterville
Devil's Den, Andover
Devils Den, Sanford
Devil's Elbow, Bristol
Devil's Elbow, Penobscot County
Devil's Footprint Rock, Manchester
Devil's Half Acre, a former neighborhood in Bangor
Devil's Half Acre, Bar Harbor
Devil's Head, Calais
Devil's Head, Hartland
Devil's Head, John's Island
Devil's Head, St. Albans
Devil's Horseshoe, Bear
Devil's Horseshoe, Grafton
Devil's Island, Jonesport
Devil's Island, Stonington
Devil's Limb, Bristol
Devil's Snowshoe Track, Milo
Devil's Wall, a mountain peak near Mattawamkeag Lake

The Devil's Bean Pot, Mont Vernon, New Hampshire. From Wikipedia.

New Hampshire:

Devil's Bean Pot, Mont Vernon
Devil's Den, Alton
Devil's Den, Mont Vernon
Devil's Den, New Durham
Devil's Footprint, Mont Vernon
Devil's Hopyard, Groveton
Devil's Slide, Stark

Vermont:

Devil's Den, Bradford
Devil's Dishpan, Stevensville
Devil's Gulch, Eden
Devil's Gorge, Clarendon

Devil's Hill, Peacham
Devil's Perch Outlook, Eden
Devil's Potholes, Bolton
Devil's Rock, Lake Willoughby, Westmore
Devil's Washbowl, Northfield

Path to the Devil's Den, New Durham, New Hampshire. From Wikipedia.

First of all, Maine is the clear winner for devilish names. The Maine tourism bureau markets the state as Vacation Land, but clearly something else is hiding just under the state's placid, pine-forested surface. I always thought Steven King was writing fiction, but maybe not.

My favorite name in Maine is the Devil's Snowshoe Track, an imprint on a rock in the town of Milo. According to a local legend, the Devil and his dog were hanging around in Milo one winter. I suppose they were there to cause trouble and steal souls. Luckily, a extreme cold spell set in. Being used to warmer temperatures, the Devil hightailed it out of town to find someplace warmer, imprinting a rock with his snowshoe on the way out. Before leaving town he also blasted out a cave called Satan's Cave, thinking it would keep him warm, but it didn't work.


Did he strap the snowshoes to cloven hooves, or to human-like feet? This is probably one of the most troubling theological questions of our time. Horseshoe shaped marks, suggesting Satan indeed has hooves, are found in Bear and Grafton, Maine, but a cursed rock in Manchester, Maine that bears his footprint quite clearly shows five toes. The human-shaped footprint he left in Mont Vernon is seven feet long!

What do the names tell us about the Devil's activities? Other than lurking about in multiple dens, the Evil One seems interested in the domestic arts, since a washbowl, a dishpan, and a bean pot are all named after him. But even cooking takes an evil turn when the Devil's at the stove. According to Charles J. Smith's History of the Town of Mont Vernon (1907), the Devil disguised himself and invited the local church elders to a bean supper in the woods. Beans take a long time to cook, particularly when you're heating them in a stoney depression, so he summoned a little hellfire to cook them faster. Unfortunately for the Devil, but luckily for the elders, the heat melted the rock around his feet. As he pulled out his foot he swore like the fallen angel he truly is, and the elders fled back home. Both the bean pot and footprint can still be seen today.

I'm not sure how much washing the Devil did (or does) in the Devil's Washbowl in Northfield, Vermont, but it is associated with the mysterious Pigman who lurks around that town, who has probably not bathed in years.  

There is a theory floating around that places named after the Devil were gathering spots for Native Americans. The local Indians were the Puritans' enemies, so their Puritans named the Indian gathering places after God's enemy. In reality, the Indians were no more evil than the Puritans themselves.

Some legends say that the Devil's Den, a cave in Alton, New Hampshire was indeed used as a lookout by the local Indians, but others say it was used by bootleggers and smugglers to hide their contraband. A similar story is told about the Devil's Den in Bradford, Vermont. Oh, that delicious but devilish liquor.

Next week, I'll unearth the devilish places in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut!

The Pigman of Northfield, Vermont

The time? 1971.

The place? A high school dance in picturesque Northfield, Vermont.

I'm sure you can imagine the scene. Crepe paper streamers, teens dancing to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven", bell bottom jeans, mediocre orange punch. A scene of small town serenity.

However, small towns often have weird secrets, and Northfield's most shocking secret came to light that night when a group of students ran into the dance. They looked scared, and some of them were in tears.

They had been drinking beer in a sandpit behind the school, they said, when something strange came out of the woods. It was tall, naked, and covered in white hair. And although it walked on two legs, it had the face of a pig.

Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of the teens - they even abandoned the beer in their panic! Some of the braver students ventured out of the dance to investigate the sandpit. They didn't see the monster, but did find the grass and underbrush had been trampled down. Something had been there. And thus the Pigman appeared in Northfield.

Artist's rendering of the Pigman from Joseph Citro's Weird New England.

After the dance was disrupted, the locals made some strange connections. A farmer said he had seen a hideous naked figure rummaging through his trash a few nights earlier. More eerily, people remembered how a teenage boy disappeared from his family's farm six months ago. At the time authorities thought he had run away, but now people wondered if something more sinister had happened. Could he have been transformed into this strange monster? Or perhaps been eaten by it for dinner? A monster had to eat, and an awful lot of animals had gone missing recently...

The Pigman was seen in Northfield off and on for years, often around an area called the Devil's Washbowl. Motorists saw him run across the road, and teens who went to make out in the Washbowl sometimes had a surprise guest disrupt their romantic interlude.

Although the creature himself was somewhat elusive, physical evidence suggested he was real. A local man named Jeff Hatch and his friends found some caves near the Washbowl filled with animal bones, and found a similar stash of gnawed bones in the town's only pig farm. Strange cloven footprints were also found in the soft ground.

I don't know if we'll ever know who (or what) the Pigman is. The top two theories are that the missing teenage boy somehow devolved and became feral, or that some lonely farmer and a particularly friendly pig ... well, you know what I mean. I don't think genetics work that way, but try telling that to the teens in Northfield, who still get spooked at night when they go drinking out in the woods.

You can read more about the Pigman in books by Vermont author Joseph Citro, particularly Weird New England and Green Mountains, Dark Tales.