Cryptids of North America #1: New York

Artwork by Monica Gallagher of LipstickKissPress

(Originally published on Squarespace on September 30, 2023. Yes, that’s right. It’s my first article on this version of Preston Posits not originally published on WordPress (barring a few update posts, of course).)

Welcome my newest ongoing series on Preston Posits, where I’ve chosen to tour the darkest nooks and crannies of the U.S. and Canada and indulge in an old childhood hyperfixation of mine: cryptozoology!

This series was inspired by a series of prints created by Monica Gallagher, a graphic designer based in Austin, Texas, who sells them under the name “Lipstick Kiss Press” on Etsy. I kept running across them while scouring Pinterest looking for items to fill my “Cryptozoology” board and eventually started thinking, “Hey, I could use these!” I found them especially intriguing since some cryptids were listed on them that I’d never even heard of before.

And here we are! I decided to start with New York mainly because it’s where I live. Plus, the whole idea of the series seems like a good way to start the spooky season, as September inevitably gives way to October.

But enough of my rambling introduction. Let’s see what creepy beasts of legend are lurking in the wildlands of the Empire State.

Beamoc

This strange fish comes to us, appropriately enough, from the hamlet of Roscoe in Sullivan County, the self-proclaimed “Trout Town U.S.A.” The town gained said epithet from its location at the intersection of Beaverkill River and Willowemoc Creek, both popular fly-fishing destinations for anglers worldwide. Indeed, said intersection, known to locals as the Junction Pool, is considered the best fishing spot on the Beaverkill. It is also the home of the Beamoc, according to local legend.

This particular trout is distinguished by its two heads, which allegedly developed out of indecision over which river to swim up. As the portrait above shows, some have also claimed it has deer antlers and a beaver tail.

The legend’s popularity gained a jumpstart sometime in 2000 when the local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record, published a story about a close encounter with the creature. According to writer Steve Israel, Paul Dahlie, the executive director of the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum, had gone out to Junction Pool for a spot of night fishing. At the stroke of midnight, he says, something big caught on his weighted pheasant-tail nymph fly hook. After a short struggle, the line went limp. Then the fish jumped, and Dahlie had to catch his breath as he saw that the fish had two heads (one of which, he thinks, severed the line to save the other).

I should note that the Times was a tabloid then, and the story was published on April Fool’s Day of that year. Even so, it’s one hell of a fish story.

The Beasts of Sherman

These creatures are only known from a single entry in the 1970 book Strange Creatures from Time and Space, written by John Keel of The Mothman Prophecies fame. It allegedly came from a 15-year-old boy living in Sherman, tucked neatly into the state’s southwest corner in Chautauqua County. Per the Cryptid Wiki, the letter the high schooler wrote to Keel reads as follows:

I am writing because about three or four years ago, [circa. 1965-66] I saw a white monster in a swamp beside our house. I have been seeing these things ever since then and close to our house. One night it came down in our yard…It stands between twelve and eighteen feet high, it has a long tail between six and eight feet long. It is all covered with hair. They are always white. I have seen them alone or two at a time. It can walk on two feet or four feet. It is almost a double for a Prehistoric Sloth. My whole family has seen this thing and I know of two more men who have seen them… I am fifteen years old and I am not kidding. I have seen these things and they are real.
-Anonymous, quoted in Strange Creatures from Time and Space by John Keel, 1970

If one were to believe the boy was telling the truth, then it seems there were ground sloths that had survived the Quaternary extinction event 10,000 years ago and had staked out a living in the rural areas of New York’s Southern Tier. Problems arise, however, when you consider that the teen described the beasts as 12-18 feet high. While the largest ground sloths, like Megatherium and Eremotherium, could reach heights of 13 feet standing on their hind legs, those species only lived in South America (or as far north as Florida for the latter). Even the largest North American ground sloths, like Northrotheriops and Megalonx, weren’t much bigger than modern-day cows.

Of course, given that no one else has come forward to report sightings of these animals in the half-century since they were first reported, it’s probably safe to say the letter John Keel received was simply a simple teenage prank.

Bigfoot

While more famous for their cousins in the West, lurking along the foothills of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges, there’s plenty of Sasquatch activity going on east of the Mississippi as well, and New York is no exception. Perhaps the definitive book about New York (and Vermont) Bigfoot sightings is the 1992 book Monsters of the Northwoods, co-written by Paul and Robert Bartholomew, William Brann, and Bruce Hallenbeck. That book traces the history of Sasquatch-like creatures in New York, dating back to indigenous legends of wendigos and “Stone Giants.” The “Stone Giants” are creatures unique to Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) legend that were said to throw stones at their enemies, uproot trees to show off their strength, and practice cannibalism.

There are a few communities in modern-day New York that seem to be hotspots for Bigfoot encounters, including:

Belmont: The woods around this Allegheny County village are said to be inhabited by a Bigfoot who differs from his cousins in that he has albinism, hence the name “the White Bigfoot of Belmont.” He has also been called the “Black Creek Whodat” and, appropriately enough, the “Abominable Snowman.” The “Whodat” first appeared in 1973, when a group of high school students hanging out in a log cabin were frightened by something running around the place, although the dogs chased it off before they got a good look at it. In 1975, a camper was walking in the woods when he suddenly came face to face with a white humanoid beast. They ran in opposite directions, and when the camper reunited with his friends, they accused him of making it up. They continued to believe this even after the camper went home, and something started banging on their cabin walls until they saw the dents the following day and learned that their friend had never left home the previous night.

The Whodat continued to harass the residents of Allegheny County for the next few years, accompanied by strange lights and noises coming from the swamp and often offended with its fetid skunk-like body odor. It was also blamed for a cattle mutilation based on the smell it left behind afterward. It seemed to move on from the area sometime in 1976 after it startled two men sleeping in a pickup truck, and they let their dog out to chase it away. It disappeared into the woods and was never seen again.

Kinderhook: The hometown of MotNw coauthor Bruce Hallenbeck has its own Sasquatch, known locally as the “Kinderhook Creature.” The Hallenbeck family has often been central to the creature’s activities. Indeed, the first sighting of the beast recorded in MotNw was in December of 1978 when Hallenbeck’s grandmother, Martha, saw a “big, black hairy thing all curled up” on her lawn as she was in the kitchen making breakfast. The thing had vanished by the time she took a second look, and she later found that her garbage bin had been raided. Bruce’s cousin, Barry Knights, had found three-toed tracks in the woods that same month and would later report seeing four ape-like beings crossing a creek on December 6, 1979, while setting traps on Cushing’s Hill.

Sightings of the creature continued throughout the following decade, especially to the Hallenbecks and their relatives. One particularly frightening incident occurred on the night of September 24, 1980, when Barry Knights, along with his aunt Barbara, her daughter Chari, and her infant daughter Melanie, were staying at Martha’s house when they were startled by screaming, moaning, and groaning coming from behind the house. The monster only stopped when Barry fired three shotgun shells at it. Knights and his cousin Russell Zbierski had another encounter later that November when they saw five humanoid creatures with cone-shaped heads while on a night walk. A female friend claimed to have seen a Bigfoot stealing from her trash the same night. Bruce, for his part, often heard vocalizations that didn’t sound like any animal he’d ever heard before and found three-toed tracks in February 1981 that were strangely duck-shaped. In one bizarre incident, on May 5, 1982, Bruce heard what sounded like “chattering monkeys” and then saw a white ball of light that vanished with a sound like a balloon popping.

The Kinderhook Creature even showed itself to people not related to the Hallenbecks. In May 1982, retired school district employee Michael Maab was fishing near a dam on Kinderhook Creek when he noticed a hairy reddish-brown humanoid looking at him. It stood eight feet tall and had small red eyes and black fingernails. On June 14, 1985, Margaret Mayer described seeing a creature she described as a cross between Bigfoot and Big Bird from Sesame Street, with yellow eyes and feathers.

Fittingly enough, though, the last person to encounter the creatures was Susan Hallenbeck on October 9, 1988, who was woken in the middle of the night by sounds similar to the gorillas in the film Gorillas in the Mist, released just weeks before. Since then, the legend of the Kinderhook Creature lives on solely through occasional weird animal noises and tracks.

Staten Island: It might strain credulity to say that one of the five boroughs of New York City is a hotspot for Bigfoot sightings. Yet the historic Richmond Town area of the island and the adjacent Greenbelt was haunted by waves of sightings in the mid-1970s and early 2000s. Due to its urban surroundings, this apeman has earned the somewhat ignoble nickname of “Trashquatch.”

The sightings seem to have begun in December 1974 when two hikers were confronted by a monster covered in brown hair. The following month, on January 21, the Trashquatch was spotted in a church parking lot and was nearly run over as it darted across the road to a garbage dump. It was also reported to roar at unsuspecting passersby as if warning them to stay out of its territory.

It announced its return around 2000 when tracks were discovered leading into a nearby swamp. New York Press columnist Tom Modern decided to camp in the Greenbelt in 2002 as part of his research into the legend. He was greeted by the sounds of branches being knocked against tree trunks, rocks being thrown around, whole trees being uprooted and snapped in half, and what sounded like something large and fast tearing through the brush.

It all seems unbelievable that Bigfoot could live so close to one of the biggest cities in the world undetected. Then again, the Greenbelt is a 2,800-acre forest (compared to Central Park at only 843 acres), so who can say?

Whitehall: This small town, located at the southern tip of Lake Champlain, might very well be the Bigfoot capital of New York, to the point that they have even declared him their town mascot and host one of two annual Sasquatch-themed festivals in the state (the other being in Chautauqua County).

Sightings date back to 1959 when a farmer reported seeing a bearlike creature standing on two legs. Like with many New York hotspots we’ve discussed, however, the sightings really started to pick up in 1975, especially after Clifford Sparks, the owner of the Skeen Valley Country Club, reported seeing an eight-foot-tall creature resembling a sloth running across the first green of his golf course.

The most well-publicized encounter with the Whitehall Creature became front-page news in the Glens Falls Post-Star on August 30, 1976. Police officers Paul Gosselin and Martin Paddock reported that they had been on their way to a campsite around midnight five days previously when they were startled by a two-legged creature that stood 7-8 feet tall. They described it as having coarse brown hair and large red eyes. The animal made a noise like a cross between a pig squealing and a lady screaming and charged at them. When they reported the incident to the police, no one believed them at first. But when they convinced their fellow officers to follow them back to Abair Road, practically everyone saw the beast and heard its awful screaming. The following night, Paul’s older brother Brian saw and shone a light on the creature. It held its hands up to shield its eyes and ran away screaming. Brian had his pistol drawn but couldn’t bring himself to shoot it due to its humanlike appearance.

Other notable sightings from the region include Royal Bennett and her granddaughter Shannon the following March, who saw a “stump” in the middle of a field while driving down Fish Hill Road. They were startled when the “stump” unfolded itself into a honey-colored creature standing 7-8 feet tall and walked off. Sometime in 1979, an anonymous witness and friends saw the creature casually step over a fence. In February 1982, two police officers saw a Bigfoot cross Route 22 near the Washington County Highway Department Garage.

Unlike the Kinderhook Creature, the Whitehall Creature still seems to be hanging around the woods in the region. As recently as 2008, a man driving his daughter to school was startled to see a Bigfoot leap onto the road from an overhanging ledge and stare at them as it ran away on two legs.

The Blob Monster of Kinderhook

This being was supposedly first sighted in the Columbia County community of Kinderhook in 1962 by 10-year-old Bruce Hallenbeck and his 7-year-old cousin Chari in the woods behind his grandparents’ house. Hallenbeck, who later became a professional screenwriter and cryptozoologist, recounted the story in his 2013 book Monsters of New York.

He says that he heard a whistling noise coming from the direction of a large pine tree. He turned to see what he called “a huge, amorphous blob” peering at him from behind the tree, although he also states that it had no eyes with which to do so.

The closest I can get to a description of the thing is that it looked something like Casper the Friendly Ghost of animated cartoon fame: it had a big round “head” and there was a bluish tint to it. My cousin didn’t really take time to look; I told her we should get out of the woods and we both ran down the hill at great speed. We never looked back.
-Bruce Hallenbeck, Monsters of New York

The Blob would come into Hallenbeck’s life again just before his twelfth birthday when his friend Jerome Miller claimed to have been chased down a hill by a “big white blob” that flew through the air (he even claimed to have cleared a six-foot-wide pond in a single bound in his terror). The boys armed themselves with pitchforks and set out into the wilderness to hunt the creature down. But when they saw the Blob hovering in the trees, they dropped the pitchforks and ran for safety.

The Blob continued to harass Hallenbeck’s family intermittently over the following decades. In 1978, his cousins, Barry Knights and Russell Zbeirski, claimed to have seen “a white, bell-shaped kind of thing” gliding down a hill toward them while camping under a self-made lean-to. In 1993, Hallenbeck’s father was on his tractor doing outdoor work when “something big and white” flew over his head. He would later compare it to a “shmoo,” a creature that appears in the comic strip Li’l Abner.

The Blob is apparently still hanging around the woods outside of Kinderhook if this post on the r/hudsonvalley subreddit is to be believed. The Redditor Human-Still-6949 claims that in February 2017, he was building a shed in the middle of the woods to hang out in when he heard a whistling sound. The whistling sounded like it was getting closer with every repetition until it was literally circling him. As he headed home, he saw a grey humanoid figure circling counterclockwise above him. He made it back to his house, and the figure and whistling sound vanished.

That same year, Owen Farley and Anthony Malanowski claimed to have seen the Blob while walking in the woods at night. They say the creature’s appearance was heralded by a sudden drop in temperature and a loud screech. A seven-foot-tall white blob charged at them and chased them out of the woods.

So, what is the Kinderhook Blob Monster? A ghost? An alien? A hallucination born of overactive imaginations or drugs (the Redditor admits that he had a cold at the time, and it could have been a NyQuil-induced hallucination)? Who knows?

Champ

Closeup of the creature supposedly depicted in the infamous Mansi photograph.

The monster that supposedly lurks in the depths of Lake Champlain, straddling the border between New York, Vermont, and Quebec, is undoubtedly one of the most famous lake monsters in the entire world, rivaled only by the Loch Ness Monster and British Columbia’s Ogopogo. Some say that the lake’s namesake, French explorer Samuel de Champlain, was the first European to spot it in 1609 (although the creature he describes in his writings seems closer to a sturgeon or gar). Others argue that the Mohawk people knew it as Onyare’kowa, their iteration of the ubiquitous “horned serpent” legend. Whatever Champ is, he certainly seems to share many features with his Scottish cousin; a long neck, a humped back, and a shy disposition that often frustrates would-be photographers.

One of the earliest of the more than 300 reported sightings of the creature comes from a report in the Plattsburgh Republican dated July 24, 1819. It tells of a scow captain identified only as “Captain Crum” who saw what he described as a 187-foot-long black serpent with a seahorse-shaped head, three teeth, and eyes the color of a peeled onion, with a white star on its head and a belt of red around its neck. The location of the sighting, Bulwagga Bay, located near the community of Port Henry in Essex County, has since become known as “Champ’s home base” due to the large number of sightings there. There is a plaque on the bay’s shore listing several sightings, and the town even passed a resolution declaring the lake a safe haven for the monster.

The sightings seemed to reach critical mass sometime around 1873 after the New York Times published a story about a railroad crew reported seeing an enormous serpent with reflective scales. Later that same year, the Clinton County sheriff reported a sighting, and passengers on a steamship claimed their vessel almost capsized after colliding with the beast. It reached the point that P.T. Barnum put a $50,000 bounty on the creature’s hide. No one ever came forward to claim the prize, though.

What really brought Champ to the world’s attention, however, was another New York Times article from 1981 that published the famous “Mansi photo.” The photograph’s namesake, Sandra Mansi, claimed that she was picnicking on the Vermont side of the lake near St. Albans in Franklin County when she noticed turbulence in the water near where her children were swimming. She was shocked to see a serpentine creature rise from the turbulence, resembling a Mesozoic-era plesiosaur, swiveling its head in several directions as if trying to gain its bearings. Mansi managed to snap the incredible photograph above before it slipped out of view again.

While no evidence has shown that the photo was doctored in any way, several factors still may speak against its authenticity. For instance, in the four years it took for Mansi to come forward with the photo, she lost the negative and forgot the exact location from where she took it, making it harder for experts to authenticate what she took a picture of. In addition, some skeptics have noted that the bay where the creature supposedly surfaced is only 14 feet deep, making it harder for a fully grown dinosaur-like animal to move around. Indeed, some have argued that Mansi saw a floating log. The 2005 book Weird New York even shows a 1983 photograph of Eddie Green, a resident of Cumberland Head in New York’s Clinton County, posing with a six-foot piece of driftwood that bears more than a passing resemblance to the object in Mansi’s photo.

Even though a colony of 200-foot plesiosaurs almost certainly shouldn’t be able to hide this long, reports keep coming out. In 2003, a crew making a Discovery Channel documentary claimed to have captured sounds similar to those made by dolphins or beluga whales, neither of which are endemic to the lake. Champ made headlines again in July 2005 when fisherman Dick Affolter and his stepson Pete Bodette claimed to have caught the creature on video as it swam under their boat. While two retired FBI analysts who reviewed the tape have said they can find no evidence of the video being doctored, they also noted that “there’s no place in there that I can actually see an animal or any other object on the surface.”

Even if there’s scant evidence of an actual prehistoric monster in the lake, that hasn’t stopped local residents from embracing it as a tourist attraction and symbol of community pride. Vermont baseball team, the Lake Monsters, has adopted Champ as their mascot, and there is even a Netflix Original movie about the monster called Lucy and the Lake Monster coming out later this year. Suffice it to say, there’s little evidence the legend of the Lake Champlain Monster is going away any time soon.

The Copenhagen Devil

This hellish albino beast was allegedly spotted by Lewis County residents Homer Ward and J.D. Dryden on the evening of May 22, 1900, while they were returning to Ward’s farm via horse and buggy after visiting a friend in Deer River. As they were passing an empty fenced-in lot, Dryden saw what he later described to the Watertown Daily Times as a “large white object” that he quickly realized was “a gigantic animal at rest.”

Ward hopped the fence and threw a rock at the creature, which immediately woke and bolted. Ward ran back to the buggy and rushed his horses back home, where his partner, Nancy Kline.

Kline somehow convinced the men to return to the scene, even as night began to fall, armed only with a lantern and their wits. They were startled by a snort and turned to see the monster sitting in the middle of the road. They noticed that the beast had horns on its head and a long tail as thick around as a man’s body. Apparently annoyed by the lantern’s glare, the Devil hopped a fence and disappeared into the night, never to be seen again (as far as we know).

The Flying Head

This fearsome beast comes from Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Wyandot (Huron) folklore. They are described as a class of cannibalistic flying monsters resembling misshapen decapitated human heads, bigger than a full-grown man (sometimes four times bigger). They often sport wings like a bat or bird and talons to snatch their unsuspecting prey. They feed on anything that moves, whether human, dog, cow, or anything else.

They roosted on a hill on the shore of Great Sacandaga Lake, where a tribe that predated the Haudenosaunee used to live before the Flying Heads virtually wiped them out. The heads themselves were said to belong to a group of elders who had denied a request to move their tribe during a famine, resulting in them being decapitated and their heads thrown in the lake. Their heads revived, however, and they became the monsters we know them as today.

Despite their ravenous nature, they can be tricked. One story tells of a Head landing behind a woman, intending to eat her, only to be scared off when it mistakes the roasted acorns she’s eating for hot coals. Another version of the tale states that the monster instead tried to take some acorns for itself but accidentally grabbed hot coals, ate them, and flew away in agony, never to return.

Indeed, the Heads seem to have vanished in the post-colonial age. However, their roosting hill is still said to be cursed today. Three hotels have been built on the site, and all have mysteriously burned down. Now, the Hamilton County government buildings are near the location. Here’s hoping they remain intact.

The Hellhounds of Wales

These devilish canines are just one of the ghosts that supposedly haunt the Goodleburg Cemetery in Wales, one of the so-called “Southtowns” of Erie County (named for their location relative to Buffalo). They are undoubtedly descended from similar tales of black dogs that roam the British Isles, acting as either harbingers of death or as Satan’s attack dogs.

The ones that haunt Goodleburg are said to travel either as one or in packs, usually gathering during the evening and night. Their eyes glow red or green, and they howl in a manner described as “terrifying and evil.”

Other strange phenomena reported from Goodleburg include the ghost of Albert Speaker, a doctor who allegedly lived next door to the cemetery during the late 1800s and specialized in abortions. When locals discovered that Speaker had been burying the bodies of women and children who had died under his care in the cemetery, he hanged himself. To this day, his spirit and those who died under his care are said to haunt the graveyard.

A curse is also said to be placed on anyone who removes objects from the cemetery. Any person who does so is said to suffer extreme misfortune, physical injury, and even death. Of course, one wonders if the owners made it all up to discourage looting and trespassing after dark.

High Hat

This beastly figure haunted the indigenous Seneca people who lived in what is now Cattaraugus County long before the Allegheny Indian Reservation and the city of Salamanca were established in the 20th century. He gets his name from the stovepipe hat he wears, which gives him an appearance akin to Abraham Lincoln if his vampire hunting career went horribly wrong.

Dwelling within the marshes surrounding the Allegheny River, High Hat is said to be a vicious cannibal with a mouthful of sharp teeth and a fondness for children’s flesh. He is alleged to have stalked the workmen who constructed the Kinzua Dam in the early 1960s, which ended up flooding a full third of the Reservation’s territory and led to widespread protests, including protest songs by the likes of Buffy Sainte-Marie and Johnny Cash. The crew apparently got so used to the figure’s appearances along the north shore of the river that they would frequently ask each other, “Anybody see old Abe Lincoln today?”

If High Hat was trying to scare the white people away, he didn’t do a good job.

The Hobgoblin of Fort Niagara

Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Ad Meskins

Originally constructed by New France in 1726 to guard the Lake Ontario entrance of the Niagara River, it was taken by the British in 1759 during the French and Indian War and later ceded to the United States in 1796, who occupied it until its decommissioning in 1963. In the years since, the historic landmark has gained a reputation as the most haunted location in New York State.

Aside from the usual creaking doors, disembodied voices and footsteps, dark shadows captured on video, muffled sounds of battle echoing across time, dancing lights, and objects moving by themselves, the Fort has two famous apparitions to its name: Henri the Headless and the hobgoblin.

Henri LeClerc is said to be a French soldier who died in 1759 after challenging another Frenchman to a duel to win the heart of a young Seneca woman. His head was thrown into Lake Ontario, and his body into a well in the basement. To this day, Henri’s ghost searches the Fort for his lost head.

Meanwhile, the hobgoblin is said to haunt the local cemetery and the “black hole,” a fearsome dungeon under the mess house where prisoners were often tortured, starting around 1815. Hobgoblins originated in English folklore as household spirits, similar to brownies, except they were much fonder of pulling pranks. They even appeared in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the mischievous Puck is identified as a hobgoblin.

Lake Monsters

We’ve already discussed Champ in great detail earlier in this article, but there are many more mysterious aquatic beasts allegedly slinking through New York’s freshwater depths. Here are some other lakes and rivers that boast tales of monstrous beasts:

Cayuga Lake: This lake is the longest of the so-called Finger Lakes in New York’s western panhandle. Appropriately enough, it also boasts “Old Greeny,” a serpentine creature that the January 5th, 1897 issue of the Ithaca Journal claimed had made an annual appearance for the previous 69 years (nice!). The same issue also told of a driver who claimed to have seen a “large, long sea serpent.” Amusingly enough, though, a “tramp” who also saw the creature dismissed it as a muskrat.

Other notable sightings include two 12-15 foot serpents that were seen in 1929, a 1974 incident in which the monster allegedly attacked a teenage boy and broke his arm, and a 1979 sighting by a professional diver who saw Old Greeny while submerged to a depth of 30-35 feet.

Hudson River: This river monster, roaming what is undoubtedly New York’s most famous body of freshwater, has been dubbed “Kipsy” by locals, possibly referencing the city of Poughkeepsie. According to the city’s National Art Honor Society, several historical ships encountered the beast. They claim Henry Hudson’s Half Moon stumbled upon Kipsy in September 1609. However, the actual journal places the encounter with their three-humped snake-headed sea creature in Barnegat Bay, within New Jersey’s barrier islands. The world’s first steamship, the North River Steamboat (also known as the Clermont, although never officially named as such), also allegedly encountered the beast. There hasn’t been much in the way of confirmed sightings, although a large manatee was discovered in the river in 2006.

Lake George: The so-called “Queen of American Lakes,” nestled in the southeast corner of the Adirondack Park, was the site of a lake monster hoax in 1904 when a mysterious beast was reported to be swimming in Hague Bay. Thirty years later, however, famous painter Harry Waldrous revealed “Georgie” to be nothing more than a 10-foot piece of driftwood that he painted with red fangs, a large mouth, and a large tongue hooked to an underwater pulley system. He had created it to scare his fishing rival, Colonel William Mann after he learned that the 40-pound trout Mann had supposedly caught was actually a fake. There have been intermittent reports of a monster in the lake since the hoax was unearthed, but for now, it’s probably safe to say that the real “Georgie” is safely locked away in a display case in the Hague Town Hall.

Onondaga Lake: The birthplace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, located northwest of Syracuse, has also allegedly been home to a monster since pre-colonial times when it was known as “Mosqueto.” Nowadays, though, the beast has been redubbed “Oggie” by locals. One would think that Onondaga, of all lakes, would be the last to host a monster, considering it has become heavily polluted due to sewage and runoff from a nearby nuclear power plant.

However, local legend argues that it was that pollution that created the beast. The story goes that a Boy Scout had taken a salamander home with him to Syracuse that got flushed when the boy lost interest. From there, it found its way into Onondaga Lake, where it mutated into the “dragon” that Boy Scout Troop 400 allegedly saw swimming in the lake in 1977.

Whatever its origin is, Oggie has been embraced by the local community, appearing as a 14-foot fiberglass statue at the regional Halloween parade, and has even been embraced by Troop 400 as its mascot.

Seneca Lake: Cayuga Lake’s neighbor shares many similarities with its fellow Finger Lake. It’s named after one of the Haudenosaunee tribes and features its own lake monster, although, unlike Old Greeny, it doesn’t seem to have earned its nickname. Speaking of the Haudenosaunee, they told stories of monsters in Seneca Lake, which they believed was bottomless. It is the deepest of all the Finger Lakes, reaching a maximum of 618 feet.

The Seneca Lake Monster would resurface in a big way on July 14th, 1899, when the captain of the sidewheel steamer Otetiani spotted an object in the water that he mistook for a capsized boat. However, as the ship approached within 100 yards, the “boat” swam off. The captain chased the beast, which flashed its sharp fangs at the vessel until he finally managed to ram the serpent, killing it. A local doctor examined the corpse, describing it as a 25-foot creature with a triangular head, a tapered tail, round eyes, and a body covered in a rigid armor resembling a turtle shell. One passenger, a geologist named George R. Elwood, compared it to Clidastes, a small mosasaur that lived during the Cretaceous Period 85-80 million years ago and could grow to lengths of 20 feet. Sadly, one of the workers holding the ropes lost his grip, and the monster sank back into the depths.

Sightings have continued to be reported since then. In 2015, the Geneva City Council passed a resolution forbidding anyone from hunting or trapping the monster.

The Leaping Loopy of Leicester

Much like High Hat, this creature, which haunted Livingston County in the 1870s, has connections to Seneca folklore, according to local folklorist Mason Winfield. As he puts it, the Genesee River valley is well known for sightings of what he calls “altered-animal form” apparitions, which apparently appear to white people if they trespass on sacred land.

Whatever the Leaping Loopy was, it was undoubtedly a strange animal. It was similar to a Bigfoot, except it could hop like a kangaroo and fought like a bear.

Ludwig the Bloodsucker

This strange little man comes to us from the streets of New York City, stalking the German-American residents of Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhatten during the latter half of the 19th century. The legends say he was a “squat, swarthy German with an enormous head crowned with a shock of bristly black hair.” He grew hair out of every orifice, especially his ears, and even one sprouting from the end of his nose. He also stood only three feet tall and would hang around outside bars, waiting for drunken patrons to be thrown out for starting fights. He was especially fond of Bismarck Hall and the House of Commons (both of which have long since closed).

Oddly enough, he seems like one of the more (for lack of a better word) harmless vampires from all the various legends I’ve heard. He preferred drunk victims because of the buzz he got from their blood alcohol content and chose to let his victims live rather than kill them or turn them into vampires.

Ludwig the Bloodsucker has been dismissed as an urban legend for many years. However, the “Asbury’s Gangs of New York-Annotated” blog has found a newspaper story from the National Police Gazette that mentions Franz Ludwig Hellreigel, “a short, swarthy man” born in Germany in 1824, who worked as a tailor in Bowery. His taste for human blood started due to his marriage falling apart and his wife accusing him of having a taste for blood. A prideful Ludwig doubled down, arguing:

Yes, it is true that I drink blood and it's good for me. It is a good medicine. It makes me strong. The Germans eat blood sausages and they all say it is good. But when I drink mine they say it is bad and they call me blood sucker. Now what is the difference whether I take the blood before it is made into sausage or afterward? They make a fuss about nothing.

He admitted to biting his wife and told of how he was a sickly child who was the only one of his parents’ six children to make it to adulthood. He attributed this to a meat and blood-only diet that a local doctor prescribed him.

And here’s the icing on the cake: neither the “Asbury’s” blog nor the “Misfits and Mysteries” blog could find any records of Ludwig’s death. Granted, this is more likely because the documents have been lost over the years, but it’s certainly a fitting conclusion to the story of “America’s first vampire.”

The Manitou Road Demon

This flying monstrosity originates from a road in Monroe County, just on the outskirts of Rochester. The creature is fast, bears sharp fangs, and has a penchant for chasing cars and beating against bedroom windows, including those of local folklorist Shirley Cox in the 1940s.

Mason Winfield speculates that the word “manitou” might have something to do with the beast’s appearance, given its spiritual significance. “Manitou” originates from an Algonquin word that referred to an omnipresent spiritual lifeforce that permeated every living being and natural environment, similar to the Chinese Dao or “the Force” from the Star Wars franchise. While the indigenous Seneca people who inhabited what is now Rochester did not speak an Algonquin language (they were part of the Haudenosaunee, aka the Iroquois Confederacy), they had a similar concept in their language called “orenda.”

Is it really true that just naming a street “Manitou” gives it the power to summon legendary beasts? Who can say?

The Montauk Monster

This strange little beastie became a viral sensation in the summer of 2008 after it was found washed up on a beach outside the business district of Montauk in Suffolk County, right near the eastern tip of Long Island. While Jenna Hewitt and her three friends are often credited for discovering the carcass on July 12, she claims that there was already a crowd gathered around the creature when she came upon it.

The story first broke on July 23 in the F-22 Raptor, which dubbed it “the Hound of Bonacaville,” a pun referencing the colloquial name for residents of the town of East Hampton (of which Montauk is a part) and the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. The photo displayed above would appear in a Gawker.com article titled “Dead Monster Washes Ashore in Montauk” on July 29, and the Montauk Monster’s journey to national stardom was complete.

But what exactly was the Montauk Monster? Given the organism’s strange appearance, which at first glance seems like a bird’s head on a mammal’s body, many quickly became convinced that it couldn’t be a known animal. Naturally, it appeared on the “History” Channel’s Ancient Aliens, and some, like Hewitt, speculated that it may have come from the nearby Plum Island Animal Disease Center, either as a victim of a rare disease or the product of genetic testing. Some have even gone as far as to connect it with the so-called “Montauk Project,” a conspiracy theory that states that the Montauk Air Force Station (now Camp Hero State Park) was the site of secret experiments involving time travel, teleportation, psychic powers, and extraterrestrials, and was also supposedly involved in faking the moon landings.

In reality, though, the Montauk Monster has since been proven to be nothing more than a decomposed raccoon carcass, primarily based on its skull structure and the shape of its front paws. Noted paleozoologist Darren Naish provides more details on his Tetrapod Zoology blog. Suffice it to say, I think we can definitively label this mystery solved.

The Pigman of Angola

Big man! Pig man! Ha! Ha! Charade, you are!- Pigs (Three Different Ones) by Pink Floyd (Artist credit: JSMarantz on DeviantArt)

Much like the Hellhounds of Whales, this story also comes from one of Erie County’s “Southtowns,” specifically centering on Holland Road. Some believe the area became cursed due to the “Angola Horror” of December 18, 1867. The Buffalo-bound steam engine New York Express was crossing the bridge over Big Sister Creek when the last car suddenly derailed and pulled the next car into the icy gorge with it. The stoves overturned and set both cars on fire, spilling hot coals on the passengers. Forty-nine people died that day, and their spirits are said to haunt the area to this very day.

The story of the Pigman is equally dreadful. The legend says he started his life as a butcher with a penchant for displaying severed pig heads around his property to deter trespassers. However, when a trio of high school boys didn’t get the memo, he displayed their heads as a stronger deterrent. The butcher vanished shortly afterward, likely into the woods to escape local law enforcement.

And this is where he still roams to this day, squealing at anyone who parks on the road and chasing them off. Many who have encountered the Pigman say he now has the face of the pig. Whether that’s because he’s wearing a pig’s face as a mask or because he’s somehow mutated into actually looking like a pig is up for speculation.

But is there any real-life person that could have spawned the legend? Blogger Jason Roberts claims to have found the original Pigman.

The story starts with Elijah Derricks, who built a home on Holland Road in 1855, just west of the future train wreck site. His two sons, Loring and Henry, often collected pieces of coal that fell from the passing trains. Local lore even blames them for the Angola Horror, alleging they removed two ties from the railroad track to repair a fence and that their neighbors helped cover up their involvement in causing the disaster to prevent their whole town from becoming a pariah.

The brothers lived in Angola until 1906, when Henry left after being blamed for starting a fire that consumed several buildings. Loring was also blamed for an accident involving 4th of July fireworks that injured several children and resulted in the town being sued for $12,500.

Roberts’ Pigman suspect entered the story when Loring married Betsy Crabtree, the daughter of two first cousins. Their son, William, was born on April 17, 1913. He was afflicted with frontonasal dysplasia, a congenital deformity resulting in a split nose, widely spaced eyes, and a cleft lip. Their fellow Angolans dismissed it as God’s punishment for Loring’s evil deeds.

As a result, Loring and Betsy became reclusive, denying William a formal education. However, William ended up befriending a one-armed boxer who rescued him from an oncoming train, hired him as an intern at his butcher’s shop, and introduced him to the circus and sideshow industry, where he worked until sometime in the 1940s or 50s. William then settled down and, like his father, married his first cousin, Mildred Crabtree, and later got a job at a garbage dump that opened next door to his house. While it’s often reported that William and Mildred had two daughters, Roberts could find no record of their existence. Mildred died in 1966 and was buried on the property. William’s children mostly stayed with the Crabtrees, according to local lore.

William Derricks really started to turn into the Pigman after the dump closed in 1969, leaving his neighborhood mostly abandoned. This attracted teenagers who wanted an isolated place to throw parties or indulge in more romantic activities. In his desperation to chase them away, William started skewering dead animals along his driveway and running vehicles off the road in his rusty Ford pickup. The nickname “Pigman” almost certainly comes from his frontonasal dysplasia, which, unfortunately, often does make the sufferer resemble a pig.

When utility worker Harris Thompson went missing in 1973, authorities visited his home, which they were appalled to find was filled with garbage and animal droppings. Even worse, a young boy, presumably William’s son, also lived there. Before CPS could respond, however, the house burned down (on Halloween, no less), and William and the boy disappeared, never to be seen again. However, piles of trash were found piled on the side of the road for several years afterward, including after another Holland Road house burned down in 1978 while the owners were on vacation.

At least, that was the story according to a local author that Roberts found. Further fact-checking on his part produced many discrepancies between local lore and actual history. For example:

-There was never any suggestion during the investigation behind the Angola Horror that human tampering with the tracks was ever proposed as a cause of the derailment.

-A one-armed boxer did indeed rescue a boy from an oncoming train, but the boy had no deformities and went on to live an uneventful life in California.

-There was no record of any large fires or firework accidents at any point in the town’s history.

-And finally, Roberts could find no records of a Harris Thompson going missing in 1971.

-Roberts did find a news article from 1931 about a butcher from Angola named Steve Soleki being murdered. Despite never being convicted for the crime, local rumor blamed local businessman Tony Amico, who was allegedly trying to get a foot in the door with the Buffalo Mafia.

-While Roberts never found any evidence that a William Derricks ever lived in Angola, he did learn about another sideshow performer with frontonasal dysplasia named Williams Durks, who went by the stage names “The Man With Two Faces” or “The Man with Three Eyes.” He shares Willaim Derricks’ birthdate and also married a woman named Mildred, aka the “Alligator Skinned Woman.” Durks, however, was born in Alabama and died in Florida in 1975, having never lived in New York. Still, Roberts speculates that he may have unintentionally inspired Pigman legends all across the United States.

It’s certainly food for thought. Wouldn’t you agree?

Sewer Alligators

Sewer gators are almost certainly one of the most well-known urban legends to come out of the United States. The stories from New York City are especially famous, to the point that Manhatten has even declared February 9th to be “Alligators in the Sewers Day.” The gators are said to have been novelty pets sold in Florida that were flushed down the toilet when they grew too big for their owners’ comfort. They are said to feed on a diet of rats and raw sewage and grow much bigger than their Southern cousins. They also have poor eyesight and albino skin due to the low-light conditions. But how much truth is there in the legends?

Most tend to agree the legend has roots in several sightings of misplaced alligators in various parts of the city in the 1930s. The most famous of these sightings is undoubtedly the one recounted in “Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer…Whence It Came is a Mystery,” a story from the February 10th, 1935 edition of the New York Times. The story recounts how sixteen-year-old Salvatore Condulucci, an East 123rd Street resident, heard a commotion in the sewer below where he and his friends were having a snowball fight. They looked down into it and were astonished to see a fully-grown alligator thrashing about. They pulled the hapless reptile out using an improvised slip knot made from a clothesline, then ended up beating it to death with snow shovels when it snapped at them. When they dragged the beast to the Lehigh Stove and Repair Shop to get it measured and weighed, it was eight feet long and 125 pounds.

Subsequent mentions in books in the coming decades would help solidify the legend. First was Robert Daley’s 1959 nonfiction title The World Beneath the City, in which he recounted the story of how the sewer gator population had supposedly become so numerous in the 1930s that Teddy May, the sewer commissioner, had to send in teams of sewer inspectors armed with rat poison and .22 caliber rifles to cull their numbers. This account was fictionalized in Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V, which mentions the main character, Benny Profane, getting a job as one of the sewer inspectors sent to destroy the surplus gator population.

Reports of sewer gators continue to trickle out of the city occasionally. As recently as August 2010, the NYPD caught a two-foot baby gator in the sewers under Queens. However, it is doubtful that the NYC sewer system could support a sustainable population of adult crocodilians. Snopes.com quotes nature writer Diane Akerman saying:

[T]hey couldn't survive for any length of time in the sewers, only a few months at the most, because they can't live long in salmonella or shigella or E. coli, organisms that one usually finds in sewage. Also, alligators live at temperatures between 78 and 90 degrees.
-Diane Akerman

Indeed, NYC’s Chief of Design, John T. Flaherty, has stated that in the 28 years he has worked in the sewer, he hasn’t heard of anyone ever seeing an alligator in the sewers. I should also point out that (as Snopes says in the article I linked above), out of all the sightings of misplaced reptiles reported in the New York Times between 1905 and 1993, the Salvatore Condulucci case was the only instance where the animal was actually sighted in the sewer, as opposed to near a drain or somewhere like that. Finally, as for Teddy May’s testimony, other sewer officials have often described him as “a spinner of colorful yarns.”

So yeah, there probably isn’t a colony of giant albino gators harassing sewage engineers under the Big Apple. And we know that’s true for sure because, according to Flaherty, “not a single union official has ever advanced alligator infestation as a reason for a pay increase for sewer workers.”

And so concludes my sampling of the cryptozoological menagerie that New York State has to offer. The next state on my list for this series is Vermont, with its lake monsters, Bigfoots, and “coonigators.” Before we learn what the hell that is, though, we first need to get some of my WordPress Halloween specials out of the way, so tune in next time when I list my top ten favorite stories from cult cosmic horror author Thomas Ligotti. So stay safe, stay away from Bigfoot hot spots, and I’ll see you all again very soon. Bye!