A Giant Woman and A Man-Faced Dog: Strange Encounters in The 19th Century

Today's post is about strange stories and how they don't always make sense. 

People report seeing a lot of weird things, but most of them can be placed into certain categories. Did you see a large hairy humanoid in the woods? We'll categorize that as Bigfoot. Did you see a glowing light in the sky? We'll call that one a UFO. You saw a semi-transparent person in an old house? That was a ghost.

You get the picture. As humans we like our world to be neat and orderly, and that includes even the weird things that are in it. Putting things in categories helps us make sense of the world. If something can be named it becomes less threatening. But not everything can be easily categorized or named. People sometimes report things that are unique, unusual and don't have an easy explanation. And they've done so for hundreds of years. 

I was recently reading John Greenleaf Whittier's 1847 book The Supernaturalism of New England. Whittier was a popular 19th century poet who was born in my hometown of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and he had an abiding interest in New England folklore. Some of his most popular poems were based on old legends, but The Supernaturalism of New England is not a book of poetry. It's a collection of legends and what we modern folks would call "paranormal encounters."

Some of these stories are easily categorized: witchcraft tales, accounts of premonitory dreams, haunted houses. But some are much stranger and harder to categorize, including the following story which was told to Whittier by a neighbor who was walking near Haverhill's Kenoza Lake when she witnessed something otherworldly.

It was a warm summer evening, just at sunset. She was startled by the appearance of a horse and cart the kind used a century ago in New England... The driver sat sternly erect, with a fierce countenance; grasping the reins tightly, and looking neither to the right nor the left. Behind the cart, and apparently lashed to it, was a woman of gigantic size, her countenance convulsed with a blended expression of rage and agony, writhing and struggling... Her head, neck, feet and arms were naked; wild locks of grey hair streamed back from temples corrugated and darkened. The horrible cavalcade swept by across the street, and disappeared at the margin of the pond. (Whittier, The Supernaturalism of New England, edited and with an Introduction by Edward Wagenknecht, 1969, p.75)

Whittier notes that "I have heard many similar stories, but the foregoing may serve as a sample of all." Sadly, he doesn't tell any of the similar stories so it's hard to understand what is going on here. Although the cart is old-fashioned I don't think this is just a ghost story. Perhaps the woman is being taken to Hell by the Devil, which was a common theme in New England legends? But if that's the case, why is she gigantic and so enraged? And why is she being dragged into Kenoza Lake? It's a really puzzling story.

Image from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Whittier also includes this next story, which was told to him by a friend who was "a man of strong nerves, sound judgment in ordinary matters, and not particularly superstitious." Still, this unsuperstitious man also encountered something creepy in Haverhill:

... He was standing one moonlight evening, in a meditative mood, on the bridge which crosses Little River near its junction with the Merrimack. Suddenly he became sensible of a strange feeling, as if something terrible was near at hand; a vague terror crept over him. "I knew," said he, in relating the story, "that something bad and frightful was behind me - I felt it. And when I did look round, there on the bridge, within a few paces of me, a huge black dog was sitting, with the face of a man - a human face, if ever I saw one, turned full up to the moonlight. It remained just long enough to give me a clear view of it, and then vanished; and ever since, when I think of Satan, I call to mind the Dogman on the bridge. (Whittier, Supernaturalism, p. 53)

Aaah! That's an unnerving little story. It sounds more like the description of a nightmare than something encountered in waking life. Was this dog-creature the Devil, a vision, or something else? Whittier doesn't really say but he does include it with others about the Devil. Does the Devil normally appear as a human-faced dog? And if it was the Devil why didn't he say or do anything? Again, it's another puzzling story.  

Image from Cryptomundo

Interestingly, there are Japanese folktales about human-faced dogs called jinmenken. These creatures are said to be omens of ill-fortune but not particularly evil. When spoken to they usually say "Leave me alone." The dogman that Whittier describes sounds a little more sinister than that. 

I don't have any big conclusions to draw about these two stories. As I said earlier, sometimes people encounter weird things that don't fit into any clear categories. Giant women being dragged into lakes. Dogs with human faces. People saw weird things in the 19th century and people still see weird things today. And sometimes those things don't make sense. I guess it's just part of being human.

Bigfoot .. and His Dog?

It was late at night in 1980. (Or maybe it was 1981 - memory is a tricky thing!) Two people working the late shift at a small manufacturing firm on Route 151 in Mashpee, Massachusetts noticed something odd across the street at a garden center.

It was around 2:00 am, and the garden center was closed for the night, but the two workers saw someone lurking around the center's entrance. As they watched they realized the person was quite tall, and covered with long dark hair. The person wasn't just a person - it was Bigfoot.

As if Bigfoot wasn't strange enough, the two workers saw that the hairy humanoid also had a large, black dog with him. That's right - Bigfoot had a dog.

Most modern Bigfoot accounts state that dogs are scared of Bigfoot. Dogs bark whenever one of the creatures is nearby, and some people even claim Bigfoot kills dogs. That doesn't seem to be the case here in New England. This part of the country is more liberal, and even our mysterious monsters are kind to animals.

This doesn't mean that dogs necessarily like Bigfoot. In 1979, a man named Peter Samuelson and his girlfriend Holly were hiking on Bald Mountain in New Hampshire with their dog Kat. When they were near Connor Pond they came upon a stone hut whose roof was thatched with tree branches. Curious, they stuck their heads inside the doorway. It was dark inside, but as their eyes adjusted they realized they weren't alone. A large, hairy humanoid creature was also standing inside with its back to the door.

Kat growled at the creature. It turned around and growled back. Peter, Holly and Kat hightailed it away from the hut and out of the woods. Much later Holly was at the Wolfeboro Library and found an interesting story. One winter in the 1890s a man living on the shores of Connor Pond saw that a dog had fallen through the pond's ice. The dog was too far from shore for him to reach, and he watched helplessly as it struggled to escape. Suddenly, a huge, hairy manlike creature ran out from the woods. It grabbed the dog with its long apelike arms, pulled it to shore, and then disappeared back into the snowy trees.

Peter Samuelson eventually went back to Bald Mountain looking for the hut and its occupant, but when he reached the hut's location he was surprised to find it was no longer there. There were no traces of it at all. The hut had been made of many heavy boulders, and Peter was puzzled as to how it had vanished so completely.

These are puzzling stories overall, but really interesting. A lot of people think that Bigfoot is some type of apelike animal, but to me these two stories hint at something else.

Let's look at the story from Mashpee. Would an apelike animal really be walking down a highway with a dog? It seems doubtful to me. That the dog was black seems significant. Black dogs have long been associated with the paranormal and the supernatural, and I'd suggest that is the case here. It's probably also significant that the sighting happened near Edwards Air Force Base (now called Camp Edwards). Paranormal phenomena of all kinds are often reported near military installations in the US. Rather than an apelike animal, I'd say those two men saw something supernatural.

The creature seen on Bald Mountain also doesn't sound like an ape, or even a physical animal, to me. The vanishing hut seems more like something from a ghost story or fairy encounter than the behavior of an animal. An animal might abandon a lair, but would it carry off each stone until there was no trace it had even existed? This also sounds more like a supernatural encounter as well.

Of course, saying Bigfoot is supernatural or paranormal doesn't really answer any questions. Where does he come from? What does he want? Is he a ghost, an alien, a visitor from another dimension? Is he a visitor manifesting from the collective unconscious?

I don't know the answer, but it's good to know Bigfoot likes dogs.

I got this information from T.M. Gray's New England Graveside Tales, Loren Coleman's Cryptomundo site, and the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

Black Dogs, a Swamp, and some UFOs

I enjoy writing about old folklore, as a quick glance at my blog will show. But all the weird stuff in New England didn't suddenly stop in 1900. It's still going on. In fact, sometimes the same weird stuff has been happening for hundreds of years.

For example, a a few years ago I posted about the Black Dog of West Peak, a spectral dog who foretells doom on a Connecticut mountain. Stories about this sinister pooch were collected in the 1800s, but eerie black dogs are a staple of folklore in Europe and America. One of the most famous is the Black Shuck, a terrifying black hound who haunts East Anglia in England. (Many of the early Puritan settlers actually came from East Anglia, so maybe they brought their monsters with them.) In Irish folklore, a fairy called the Pooka sometimes also appears as a black dog - with a terrifying grin.

The Pooka and Black Shuck sound so quaint, like creatures from a fairy tale, that it's hard to believe people encounter phantom black dogs in modern New England. But they do.

In his book Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, Maine's own Loren Coleman relates two such encounters.

The first is from 1966. One spring night a group of people drove from Portsmouth, New Hampshire up to Eliot, Maine, where many UFOs had been recently seen. The Portsmouth folks parked their cars in a gravel pit where they had an unobstructed view of the starry sky.

They didn't see a UFO, but instead saw something even stranger. As soon as they got out of their cars an enormous black dog bounded past them through the gravel pit and into the woods. It was the largest dog they had ever seen, and they decided to follow it into the dark trees. As they ran after the dog the person bringing up the rear noticed an odd smell.

He stopped, and saw a murky form gliding towards him. The weird odor was coming from the from. Even though it didn't speak, he knew the form wanted him to follow it.

Wisely, he didn't! Instead he ran back to the parked cars, and his friends followed after him. After hearing his story they decided to leave the gravel pit. As they prepared to leave the man who saw the form was filled with an uncontrollable urge to run off into the woods, and had to be restrained by his friends as they drove away.

It's an evocative if cryptic story, and Loren Coleman quotes it from a letter written by Betty Hill, one of the world's first alien abductees, which makes it even weirder.

This isn't the only story where a black dog is associated with UFOs. In his excellent book Daimonic Reality, English writer Patrick Harpur mentions a UFO abductee who saw a black dog inside a UFO, and Loren Coleman's second New England black dog story comes from southeastern Massachusetts' Hockomock Swamp. This area is called the Bridgewater Triangle by paranormal researchers, and is a hotbed for UFO sightings and other unusual activity.

In 1976 Coleman investigated reports of a large black dog that terrorized the town of Abington, which is inside the Triangle. A local fireman who owned two ponies had gone to check on his animals, and was horrified to see them lying dead on the ground with a huge black dog chewing on their necks. The dog disappeared into the woods.

The Abington police searched for the dog but were unable to find it. In the following days they received thousands of phone calls from concerned residents. Children were kept inside during recess, and local homeowners stocked up on ammunition in case the monstrous canine should attack.

Finally, after several days, police officer Frank Curran sighted the dog walking along some train tracks. Curran shot at the dog, but it ignored him and his bullets and walked off. The dog wasn't seen in Abington after that.

Once again, the story is spooky and inconclusive. Why do these dogs appear, and where do they come from? There's no way to know, but I bet people 100 years from now will be asking the same questions.

Sally Somers, the Witch of Southwest Harbor

Which is scarier - a ghost, or an evil witch? If you visit Southwest Harbor, Maine you don't have to choose because it's haunted by an evil witch's ghost. You'll get two supernatural creatures for the price of one!

Sally Somers was born in 1791 to Elsie Somers, a witch who was known for extracting tribute from sea captains to guarantee safe passage of their ships, but also for using herbs to heal the sick. I suppose you could call Elsie morally neutral, since she was just trying to make a living from her dark arts.

Sally, on the other hand, was just no damn good.

Sally bewitched a young man named John Clark into marrying her. He spent much of their marriage wandering around in an enchanted, zombie-like daze. John tried to escape Sally's spell by booking passage on a ship bound for Europe, but disappeared before the it set sail. Everyone suspected Sally, but since his body was never found she wasn't charged with a crime.

According to another legend, Sally sacrificed two black dogs on the top of a nearby mountain so she could assume their form when she sent her spirit out to cause mischief. These devil dogs roamed through the area, terrifying the locals and sometimes drinking blood. Creepiest of all, they were said to have human eyes.

Like all successful witches, though, Sally's preferred to take the form of a black cat when she wanted to cause trouble. In this shape Sally would spy on her neighbors and find out if anyone was gossiping about her. Those who did usually came to a bad end. This black cat was also said to have human eyes.

Sally's reign of terror ended when one of her neighbors, tired of all the witchy shenanigans, fashioned a silver bullet and shot the spectral black cat. It died instantly, and Sally passed away three days later.

That was in 1832, but Sally's malefic influence supposedly still lingers around Southwest Harbor. The apples that grow on a tree near her house allegedly cause illness, accidents and even death to anyone who eats one.

In 2004, a woman named Daisy Harper was concerned for her mother's well-being because she was working in Sally's former home. Hoping to appease Sally's ghost, Daisy dropped an offering of colored stones into a crack in the apple tree's trunk. The stones fell for a long, long, long time before they hit the bottom. I don't think we want to know what's lurking under Sally's tree.

Daisy had good reason to be concerned about her mother. The furniture in Sally's house sometimes moves on its own, and it's said that anyone who breaks a pane of glass will die shortly afterwards. One window that overlooks the harbor even has an imperfection in it that looks like a witch.

If you ever go hiking near Southwest Harbor, be careful. The locals say a large black cat with human eyes haunts the woods. I guess Sally's spirit is still out there causing trouble.

I found this story about Sally in Marcus LiBirzzi's Ghosts of Acadia. If you like lurid stories about ghosts, this is the book for you.

October Monster Mania: the Black Dog of West Peak

A small, non-descript black dog is said to live on West Peak, a mountain near Meriden, Connecticut. He's cute and friendly, but a little unusual. His bark is soundless, and he doesn't leave any footprints, even in the snow. But still, how dangerous can a little black dog be?

Quite dangerous if you see him three times. There's a local saying about the black dog: "If a man shall meet the Black Dog once, it shall be for joy; and if twice, it shall be for sorrow; and the third time, he shall die." (Note to self: Don't visit Meriden more than twice!)

Legends about the black dog were described by the New York geologist H.W. Pynchon in an 1898 article in Connecticut Quarterly. Unfortunately, Pynchon himself became part of the dog's legend.



In his article, Pynchon writes he first met the black dog while riding his buggy towards West Peak on a beautiful spring day. The little canine trotted beside his carriage, climbed with him up and over the mountain, and even waited outside while he had lunch in a tavern. Pynchon enjoyed the dog's company, but it ran off as evening came on.

A few years later, Pynchon returned to West Peak with a fellow geologist. As they climbed, Pynchon told his friend about the black dog he had seen years ago. "Funny," said the friend, "I've seen that dog twice before while climbing this mountain in the past." (Cue ominous music here.)

As they continued their climb, the two men noticed a small shape waiting for them on a high ledge. It was the black dog, happily wagging his tail. Suddenly, Pynchon's friend lost his grip and fell hundreds of feet to his death. He had seen the dog three times, and died. Pynchon had now seen dog twice, and his day ended in sorrow.

That's all Pynchon wrote in Connecticut Quarterly. You'd think he would avoid West Peak, but he didn't. Several years later, he once again climbed the mountain, this time alone. He never came down alive. Instead, his body was discovered at the bottom of the same cliff where his friend died. Had he seen the black dog for the third fatal time? Only the mountain and the dog know for sure.

A little black dog might seem like an unusual monster, but monstrous black dogs are very common in British folklore, where they too are often portents of death. The most famous black dog in the U.K. is the Black Shuck, who has haunted East Anglia for centuries, and has even caused church towers to collapse. The rock band The Darkness recorded an obscenity laced ode to the Black Shuck. Sadly, there's no real video available, just music.



The black dog of West Peak is less outrageous than its British cousins. After all, he does live in Connecticut, a state known for its good taste.

(This story is well known, but I got my information from David Philips' Legendary Connecticut. Traditional Tales from the Nutmeg State.)