Vermont's Giant Prehistoric Frog

Have you ever seen the movie Trog (1970)? It's a British horror film and was the last movie that Joan Crawford made before she died. It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it is one of my favorites.

The basic premise is this: some handsome young spelunkers are exploring a cave when they encounter something terrifying. The surviving spelunker is driven insane by what he saw, but anthropologist Dr. Brockton (Joan Crawford) believes he has seen a prehistoric hominid. She manages to capture the creature, names him Trog, and tries to teach him to be human. Of course it doesn't go well and by the end of the movie Trog is ripping off people's arms, setting fires, and terrorizing small children.

There are many things to like about Trog: Joan Crawford, stop-motion animated dinosaurs, bad dialogue, and a gory ending. But I really like the idea that lurking underneath our mundane landscape are ancient, prehistoric beings frozen in time waiting to emerge and amaze us. It's been the premise of a lot of horror movies, but none are quite as good as Trog.

I don't think anyone now really believes that there are prehistoric monsters sleeping in suspended animation below our feet, but in 1865 some miners in Vermont discovered something deep under the Green Mountain State. It was not Trog, but was instead a frog. The New York Herald ran the following article on October 20, 1922:

Vermont's Monster Frog

Unearthed 114 Feet Underground by Workmen In a Mine Shaft

To The New York Herald : In the summer of 1865 workmen while digging in a new shaft at an ochre mine at Forestdale, Vt., unearthed a huge bullfrog at a vertical depth of 114 feet underground. The frog lay dormant in a sort of pocket or miry hole, and aside from the fact of its being found at so great a depth its large size and its excellent state of preservation attracted attention.

The frog was 14 inches long from the tip of its head to the end of its spine, which is really big, but otherwise resembled an ordinary bullfrog. At first the miners just thought it was dead, but it soon began to twitch and eventually revivified. After showing it to several townspeople the miners brought it to a pond, where it lived and croaked loudly for many years.

The reporter goes on to speculate that the giant frog had been hibernating for thousands of years, and had been frozen underground during an ice age. (This is almost exactly the same plot as Trog!) The frog story was told to the Herald reporter by one Frank Rogers of Brandon, Vermont, who claims to have seen the frog emerge from the mine when he was 15 years old.

Sadly, I think this story is probably a hoax, and it was not the only story of its kind. Joseph Citro cites several similar ones, some dating back to the 1700s, in his book Weird New England. This 1922 story may just have been the latest version of a long folklore tradition. Giant frogs also figure in some Native American myths from New England, like this one about how the hero Glooskap defeats a giant frog, so the local obsession with monstrous frogs could be something that predates English settlement.

I recently read Alan Moore's Lovecraftian comic series Providence. One character proposes the following interesting idea: the subterranean, the past, and our subconscious are all the same thing. According to this character, when we dig underground we are digging into our past, and also digging into our subconscious dreamworld. So perhaps those Vermont miners found something subconscious that wanted to see the light of day. Hopefully it was happy croaking in that pond.

Glooskap and the Giant Frog

A few weeks ago I borrowed a copy of John Hanson Mitchell's 1984 book Ceremonial Time from the library. It's a fascinating book that tries to tell the history of one square mile of Littleton, Massachusetts over 15,000 years. 

Let's face it, 15,000 years is a long long time. Littleton probably only has about 300 years of written history, so Mitchell turns to some unusual methods to unearth what happened in the past. For example, at one point he encounters what he thinks may be the spirit of an ancient Paleo-Indian shaman in the woods near his house. To help him understand this experience he enlists the help of some local American Indians.

One of them, a woman named Tonupasqua, tells him several stories about Glooskap, the mighty culture hero of the New England Algonquins. I've written about Glooskap before. He's a gigantic, super-strong, ancient magician who helped make the world safe for mankind. Sometimes he's a little bit dim, but in other stories, including this one from Ceremonial Time, he's a trickster.

A state of Glooskap in Nova Scotia.

According to the story, a long long time ago when the world was young a gigantic frog lived in New England. He was quite greedy, and built a huge dam to contain all the water in one enormous lake. This lake flooded the land where the humans lived, but they were powerless against the gigantic frog.

Unfortunately, the frog wasn't the only monster people had to deal with. There was also a giant bear whose favorite meal was human flesh.

The humans asked Glooskap to help them with these monsters. Glooskap tried several times to fight the frog, but whenever he got near it it would hide in the lake.

One day while it was sitting underwater the frog devised a sinister plan. Glooskap lived nearby in a large cave - why not hide at the back of Glooskap's cave and eat him when he came home? So it hopped out of the lake and hid at the back of the dark cave.

Glooskap came home from hunting, but hesitated outside his cave. He could sense something was wrong.

"Cave, are you glad to see me?" he said.

The frog said nothing.

Glooskap said, "Magic cave, are you glad to see me? Every evening when I return home you greet me. If you don't greet me I'll know something's wrong."

This was, of course, a lie. His cave never said anything, but the frog didn't know this. Pretending to be a magic cave, the frog croaked out, "Welcome home Glooskap!"

His suspicions confirmed, Glooskap quickly rolled a giant boulder across the entrance and trapped the frog inside.

At this point, the monstrously huge man-eating bear came strolling along. It said, "What's in the cave, Glooskap?"

Glooskap said, "Sweet, tasty humans who are hiding from you. I'll roll back this boulder so you can go inside and eat them. Sound good?"

The bear thought this did indeed sound good, so Glooskap rolled back the boulder.

The bear stuck his head in the cave, and the frog immediately shot out his giant sticky tongue and pulled the bear into the darkness. As the two giant animals began to fight Glooskap once again rolled the boulder across the entrance.

The bear and the frog fought for a long time. They fought so hard that the earth shook violently, which caused the frog's dam burst, releasing all the trapped waters. Finally, the two giant animals died, each mortally wounded in the battle.

When Glooskap told the humans what had happened they rejoiced, and the land once covered by water became fertile land where they could garden and hunt without fear of the giant bear.

There are several different versions of this myth, but I like this one. It definitely provides a different perspective on our landscape!