A Terrible Critter with Eyes Like Fire Coals: Revisiting the Dogtown Werewolf

A few years ago I blogged about the Dogtown werewolf, but it seems like a good time to revisit this topic. I was just recently researching this topic for my friend Sam Baltrusis's upcoming book about haunted crime scenes, and a producer from a paranormal show had also asked me what I knew about the topic. But most importantly, I really like werewolves!

New England folklore is filled with stories about witches, ghosts and the Devil himself, but there aren't very many about werewolves. Although the French Canadians of Vermont and Maine tell some tales about the loup-garou you don't find many werewolf stories in southern New England. One of the few comes from Dogtown on Massachusetts's Cape Ann.

Dogtown Common is a large park situated between the cities of Gloucester and Rockport. Once a thriving Colonial village, today Dogtown is 3,000 acres of forest, swamps and boulders. The ruins of the old village can be still be seen among the trees, along with boulders that wealthy Gloucester financier Roger Babson carved with motivational slogans. It's a weird landscape that has inspired artists and poets, and is haunted by legends of witches and strange disappearances.

Dogtown may also be home to a werewolf, at least according to the late author Robert Ellis Cahill (b.1934 - d. 2005). Cahill is an interesting figure in New England folklore. Before becoming a writer Cahill had worked as a Massachusetts politician and spent four years as Essex County sheriff, operating out of nearby Salem in that latter job until he suffered a major cardiac arrest in 1978. Heart attacks had long been a professional hazard of Salem's sheriffs, a problem supposedly dating back to the witch trials of 1692. During those trials accused wizard Giles Corey supposedly cursed Sheriff George Corwin, who died of a painful heart attack at a young age. Many of his successors suffered from heart attacks as well. The curse only ended after the sheriff's office was moved from Salem to nearby Middleton.

Robert Ellis Cahill (from Wikipedia).

Perhaps his encounter with a folkloric curse led Cahill to the next phase of his career, which was writing books about New England's weird and spooky history. He published more than thirty short books which had titles like New England's Cruel and Unusual Punishments, New England's Mountain Madness, and Haunted Ships of the North Atlantic. It was in one of these books (New England's Things That Go Bump in The Night) that he discussed the Dogtown werewolf.

On the evening of March 17, 1984 a Boston man named David Myska saw a large, mysterious animal loping along the cliffs near Crane Beach in Ipswich. Myska thought it might be a mountain lion, but those felines have been extinct in Massachusetts for centuries. Myksa claimed it was too large to be a coyote. So what was it? The creature was also seen in nearby Rowley, and four days later a dead deer was found near Crane Beach. Its throat had been slashed and large tooth marks were found around its neck and chest. Oddly, none of the deer's flesh had been eaten.

Ipswich and Rowley are not Dogtown, but they are located just a few miles away across the Annisquam River. Could the animal seen in those towns been the same one sighted a few days later by two teens running down Raynard Street in Gloucester? They described it as “gray monstrous dog-like animal… It had big teeth and was foaming at the mouth.” Yikes. Raynard Steet leads directly into Dogtown.

According to Cahill, the history of Dogtown is littered with hints about werewolves. For example, he claims that the Indians who originally inhabited Cape Ann said they were descended from a race of dog-headed men. He claims they also believed that anyone who ate the wolfbane plant would revert to their ancestral form: hairy, fanged, clawed, and lupine. I haven't seen this folklore anywhere except in Cahill's book, so take it with a grain of salt. And whatever you do, don't eat wolfbane, which is highly poisonous, with or without salt.

Dogtown is famous for the witches who lived there in the 18th and early 19th century, and Cahill notes that one of these witches, Daffy Archer, wore a wolf's tooth around her neck as a pendant. Witches are famous shape-shifters, so I suppose it's not much of a leap to connect witches with werewolves. If Peg Wesson, an infamous Gloucester witch, could send out her soul in the shape of a crow perhaps some other witch could transform into a wolf.

Me in Dogtown. I didn't see a werewolf that day (that I know...)

Cahill also interprets a famous incident from Dogtown's history as a possible werewolf attack. On September 10, 1892, a Gloucester sailor named James Merry drunkenly decided to wrestle a bull pastured in Dogtown. The previous year Merry, inspired by toreadors he had seen in Spain, had successfully wrestled the same bull to the ground, so why not try it again? In his drunken stupor Merry forgot that bulls grow quickly, and the bull was much, much larger than it had been twelve months earlier. It won the rematch and gored Merry to death. The sailor's lifeless body was found the next morning in the pasture.

That's the official story, but Cahill claims that the moon was full the night of September 10, and that Merry was found with his throat torn out, something no bull would do. Cahill asks: could Merry have been killed by a werewolf?

I would say this is all pretty slender evidence for a werewolf, but Cahill does cite one story that makes me hesitate in saying he concocted the whole thing. In her 1879 book Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian, Sarah Emery tells the following tale about Amos Pillsbury, a man who lived in Dogtown and worked for her Emery's father as a laborer. One night Pillsbury was walking home from work, a route that took him through thick woods. As he traveled this dark road he encountered a "terrible critter":

"A terrible critter? What was it like Pillsbury?" father inquired.

"Oh, Mr. Smith, it was a terrible big critter, as big as Brindle's calf; its eyes were like fire coals, and it ran past me through the bushes, about a rod from the road, with every hair whistling like a bell. It must have been the wolverine."

"The what, Pillsbury?"

"The wolverine. My old granny used to keep us young 'uns quiet with stories about the wolverine out beyond in the woods. I used to be afeared to stir ten yards from the door o' nights; but, as I had never seen the critter afore, I had begun to think it was one of granny's stories, but I seed him last night, sartin sure ; and his eyes were like fire coals, and every hair whistled like a bell." 

Pillsbury here is using the word wolverine to refer to a wolfish creature, not to the Hugh Jackman character from the X-men movies or the large burrowing animal found in Alaska. It was something his grandmother had told him about since childhood, and he was so obviously scared by seeing it that local men hunted for the creature for two days. They didn't find any sign of it.

So does this all add up to a bona fide werewolf? I'd like to think so, but it might just be wishful thinking on my part. If it is, I'm not the only one who feels that way. A couple years ago we went to a performance/haunted house in Salem called Gallow's Hill, which re-enacts legends from the North Shore's past. According to the performers at Gallow's Hill, the Dogtown witches used werewolves to guard their houses. So, whether it's true or not, the legend of the Dogtown werewolf lives on.

The Dogtown Witches

Most of the witches in New England history bore that label unwillingly. They were innocents accused of witchcraft during one of the area's witch crazes, or they were social outcasts called witches by their suspicious neighbors.

But in a desolate part of Massachusetts's Cape Anne, a group of women seemed to have taken on the mantle of witch deliberately as a way to survive harsh economic times. They were the Dogtown witches.

Their story starts in the early 18th century. In the year 1721 the town elders of Gloucester, Massachusetts decided to open up more land for settlement. This coastal community north of Boston had been growing for almost 100 years, and space was growing tight in the main part of town.

Dogtown is very, very rocky.

When Gloucester was first established much of the land was covered with thick forest. Over time most trees had been cut down for firewood or lumber, and by 1721 a high, rocky plateau just outside town was almost completely treeless. The elders named this plateau the Commons Settlement and encouraged young families to build homes there.

At first all went well. The land was too rocky for farming, but craftsmen like barrel makers, blacksmiths and millers settled the area. Livestock grazed among the plateau's many large boulders. The Commons Settlement thrived.

Things were good for several decades, but when the Revolutionary War began many of the Commons' men were called away as sailors and soldiers. To make matters worse, Gloucester's meeting house was relocated. The meeting house was the town's civic and religious center, and it was originally located close to the Commons Settlement. However, wealthy families who lived on the waterfront resented the long commute to Sunday services and eventually persuaded the town to move the meeting house closer to the harbor. With this move the Commons Settlement changed from an up and coming neighborhood to an isolated backwater.

Old boundary walls in Dogtown.

Families began to leave the settlement for better locations, abandoning their homes and businesses, and people from the lowest levels of Gloucester society began to move into the empty houses. Freed slaves and elderly widows soon made up most of the Commons' population. Wealthier Gloucesterites began to derogatorily call the place Dogtown, and the nickname stuck.

The area is officially called Dogtown Common even today. Legend says it was called Dogtown because of the feral dogs who roamed its empty streets. That's quite possible, but there are other poor marginal communities in the US that share the same name. It may just be a standard American name for a bad place to live.

Boulder marking the site of Dogtown's old public square, now overgrown with trees. 

Some of the Dogtowners survived on charity and working menial jobs in town, but many of the elderly widows made their living as herbalists... and witches. This was of course risky work. Less than 100 years earlier the Salem witch trials had wreaked havoc in Massachusetts, but the Dogtown witches somehow avoided legal problems or violence.

Some of the women positioned themselves as healers and fortune tellers. For example, Daffy Archer sold a medicine made of snail mucous. Rachel Rich also sold a healing tonic, but hers was made of fox berry leaves, spruce tops, and other herbs, which sounds less icky. She also told fortunes by examining coffee grounds. Her daughter Becky did similar work but preferred to use tea leaves instead.

The Riches were mostly benevolent, but some of their neighbors followed a more malevolent path. Molly Jacobs was also a fortune-tellers but also threatened anyone who didn't give her money. Luce George operated in a similar way, but the most-feared witch in Dogtown was Thomazine "Tammy" Younger, Luce's niece.

House foundation.

Tammy Younger lived in a collapsing house near the main road that passed through Dogtown to Gloucester. Whenever she heard a wagon or horse approaching her house she would throw open the shutters and glare at the oncoming travelers. Then Tammy would threaten to curse them unless they gave her money to pass by safely. She was quite fearsome in appearance and was quite successful at collecting tolls from terrified travelers.

Tammy's reputation lingered even after her death in 1829. When she died her nephew ordered a coffin from John Hodgkins, a local carpenter. The Hodgkins family was used to having coffins in their home, but Mrs. Hodgkins felt an unnatural chill around Tammy's coffin - even though it was empty. She believed Tammy's ghost was lurking around their house and demanded that her husband move the coffin to the barn.

The last inhabitant of Dogtown, a freed slave named Cornelius Finson, died in 1839. After his death the settlement became the ghost town that it still is today. For many years it was a popular spot for picnickers, and wealthy philanthropist Roger Babson hired local masons to carve motivational slogans into some of the boulders. Babson came from one of Gloucester's prominent families, and he wanted people to remember the hard-working craftsmen who founded the settlement, not the witches who lived there at its demise.

One of Babson's boulders.

Over time the forest reclaimed Dogtown, and it's now 3,000 acres of thickly-wooded, rock-strewn wilderness. It's beautiful, magical and kind of spooky. Babson's boulders are still there, but they're hidden by the trees, and whenever I visit I don't think about hard-working craftsmen. I think about the Dogtown witches.

*****

There are quite a few books about historic Gloucester and Dogtown, but one of the best is probably Elyssa East's Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town (2009). If you decide to visit Dogtown go with a friend. It is large, rocky, and there have been a couple murders there. The locals also claim there have been some unexplained disappearances.

Me wandering through Dogtown.

Roger Babson's Dogtown Boulders

I've been working this winter on a book about the legends and lore of Massachusetts's North Shore. The title? Legends and Lore of the North Shore, of course!

While I was researching the book Tony and I took a trip up to Dogtown Common, the Colonial-era ghost town on Cape Ann. Dogtown is famous for many things, including witches and maybe a werewolf, but one of its most visually interesting features are the boulders carved by Roger Babson during the Great Depression.

Stone walls delineate former farms in Dogtown Common.

Roger Babson was a very successful financier in the early part of the 20th century, and accurately forecast the Depression. Descended from some of Gloucester's earliest settlers, Babson was unhappy with how people thought about poor, abandoned Dogtown. Rather than focusing on the village's uncanny history and Yankee Gothic atmosphere, he felt people should instead celebrate the hard-working colonists who had founded Dogtown.

Boulders, boulders, boulders!

To rehabilitate its image, he proposed hiring a group of local masons to carve motivational slogans into some of the boulders that are scattered across the Dogtown plateau. And there are a lot of boulders there! The rocky, unproductive soil was one reason the settlers ultimately abandoned the place.

The Gloucester city leaders agreed to Babson's odd proposal. He was willing to pay the masons himself, and since it was the depths of the Depression the men needed the money. Babson also sweetened the deal by donating five hundred acres of land to Gloucester so the city could have a new reservoir.

In the end, the masons carved Roger Babson's slogans into thirty-six boulders across Dogtown Common. They also carved numbers to mark the cellar holes of the settlers' abandoned homes, and a boulder indicating the former village's main square.

Roger Babson died in the 1960s, but I think if he were alive today he might be disappointed at the effect his boulders have. Rather than diminishing Dogtown's creepy atmosphere, they actually increase it. The boulders might have been cornily motivational in the Depression when Dogtown was mostly meadow, but since that time it has become a dense forest.

The carved rocks actually make the forest seem more desolate, not less. They're just another abandoned human endeavor, like the ghost town itself. Whenever I stumbled upon one hidden among the trees, I wasn't motivated to work hard or save money. Instead, I was reminded that time and Mother Nature will ultimately overturn everything, whether it's a village founded by Puritans or boulders carved by an eccentric millionaire. Roger Babson did contribute to Dogtown's reputation, just not in the way he thought.