Cryptids of North America #2: Vermont

Welcome, boils and ghouls, to the second installment in my ongoing monster-hunting road trip across the U.S. and Canada. This time, we shall look at the ghastly grotesques gallivanting across the Green Mountain State, just across the great Lake Champlain from my home state of New York.

I should note that this is one of the states not covered in the series of prints by Etsy user Monica Gallagher that inspired this series of articles. Instead, I have relied on the graphic I used as the header for this article (created by artist Robert Brunelle Jr. based on research by folklorist Joseph Citro) and a graphic by Hunter Whitman. Much of the information on these beasts that I couldn’t find online was procured via the book Monsters of the Green Mountain State by David Weatherly. But enough of all that. Let’s talk cryptids!

The Awful

This flying beast haunted the towns of Berkshire and Richford (in Franklin County on the border with Quebec) first in the 1920s and again in the mid-2000s. It had grey skin, a serpentine tail, huge claws, and a 20-foot wingspan. Several witnesses compared it with a griffin, a legendary creature described in ancient Greco-Roman texts as coming from central Asia that looked like a winged lion with an eagle’s head.

It was reportedly first sighted in 1925 by a pair of sawmill workers who saw it perched on a rooftop, staring at them as they crossed the Main Street bridge in Richford. One of the workers suffered a heart attack and was plagued by nightmares for several weeks afterward. Most other sightings followed a similar pattern, with the Awful doing nothing more threatening than staring. One witness claimed to have seen it carrying away an infant, but seeing as there are no records of infants going missing in the area at the time, they likely confused the desperate cries of a small animal with a human baby. Another witness, Oella Hopkins, saw the creature on the roof of her farmhouse after she went out to see what her dog was barking at. She then hid under her bed and refused to leave for several hours.

Sightings of the Awful seemed to peter out over the few years. However, according to an article written for the October 19, 2006 edition of the Enosburg Falls County Courier by H.P. Albarelli Jr., the Awful had returned. The article states that weeks previously, a man reported seeing a giant winged monster pluck a crow from the top of a pine tree and then circle his house. In subsequent articles, Albarelli would describe further sightings, including that of Lisa Maskall, who claimed to have seen a creature resembling a pterosaur while she was playing on the shore of Trout River as a child, and an anonymous 60-year-old who claimed that the Awful had been hanging around the town of Montgomery for the past 25 years.

Questions about the reliability of Abarelli’s information regarding the monster have been raised. Some of the more wild claims he makes include his claiming to have sent the Awful’s jawbone to the University of Vermont for identification and that no less a figure than H.P. Lovecraft became interested in the beast and came to Franklin County to search for it. This is news to several Lovecraft fans, myself included, who have never heard this story from any other biography of the man’s life. He seems to give conflicting answers when asked where one can find the letters where Lovecraft mentions the Awful. Some have even accused him of making up the entire story whole cloth, as they haven’t found any reference to the beast earlier than the 2006 article.

Still, HubPages writer Darcie Nadel allows that the people mentioned in Abarelli’s articles really did believe they saw something and that Abarelli really does believe that Lovecraft mentioned the Awful in his letters. Indeed, only a fifth of the 100,000 letters he wrote in his lifetime survive today. But given the man’s atheism and his attitude toward working-class people (which was only slightly better than his views of black and brown people), I’m not inclined to believe that Lovecraft would have even bothered with such rural superstition.

Bigfoot

The infamous Frank Siecienski photo from September 2010

Much like its neighboring state, New York, Vermont has a long history of Bigfoot sightings, perhaps owing to its mountainous terrain and large stretches of sparsely populated woodland. Indeed, the book Monsters of the North Woods, which I referenced in my article on New York cryptids, also catalogs several sightings in Vermont.

One of the earliest recorded sightings in the state was in 1879, when two hunters stumbled across a five-foot-tall hominid covered in bright red hair in the woods outside Williamstown. One of the hunters shot at and wounded it, angering the beast so much that the men dropped their weapons and fled the wilderness. The book Monsters of the Green Mountain State by David Weatherly lists a wave of sightings that supposedly took place in August of 1861 around the town of Stamford in Bennington County that eventually ended when a college student claimed to have faked it via a gorilla suit.

The main body of sightings in the state seems to be concentrated in the southwest, including Addison, Rutland, and Bennington Counties. Some more modern sightings include (in chronological order):

-February 1951: Lumberjack John Rowell and a friend are working near the Sudbury Swamp in Addison County when they discover that a 450-pound oil drum has been inexplicably transported several hundred feet from its original location. They find twenty-inch-long human tracks around the drum and take photographs.

1961-62: Farmer and Plainfield resident William Lyford goes out to investigate why his cows are making a commotion when he sees a large and hairy creature with an upright posture that runs off when he shines a light on it.

Mid-1960s: Stockbridge resident John Ross and several companions are riding in a pickup truck when they see an eight-foot-tall creature covered in grey fur cross the road in a single stride.

March 1974: Two men stop outside Barre to relieve themselves, are startled by a shriek, and see a tall, dark figure run across a field with its arms swinging past its knees.

March 1977: A Chittenden housewife glances out her window to see two apelike creatures standing in a slouching posture. They vanish in the time it takes for her husband to fetch a gun and confront them.

Summer 1977: Clarendon residents John and Nancy Ingalls are driving home after a night out when they see a “half-human, half-animal” creature whose eyes glow red in their headlights. John returns to the spot the next day and finds 14-16” humanlike footprints.

October 1977: An anonymous Rutland County businessman is hiking a nature trail outside Chittenden when he decides to take photographs. While he doesn’t notice anything strange, he later notices an anomaly in one of the photographs: a hulking humanoid shape covered in dark hair with a light-colored ring around its face.

March 1983: A couple driving outside Tinmouth is startled to see what they describe as a “giant” moving quickly and nimbly along a roadside ridge. They describe the giant waving its arms at them as if trying to get their attention before returning to its “gymnastics.”

Spring 1984: A Chittenden resident using the pseudonym Edmund Pike reports a dramatic encounter in which he was awoken by a scream so terrifying that he found himself paralyzed with fear in his bed. The creature then proceeded to rip the two-inch solid oak doors to his cellar off their hinges and rummage around before leaving. A foot and handprint are later found at the scene.

April 1984: Hartland resident James Guyette is driving on Interstate 91 near the Hartland Dam when he sees a tall, lanky creature covered in hair walking down an embankment about 100 yards away.

September 20, 1985: Members of the West Rutland Davis family head outside at 8:30 p.m. to investigate strange noises and are confronted by a seven-foot-tall gorilla-like creature that starts throwing rocks at them. The animal runs away when the men throw rocks at it, and it runs off, giving off a “grassy or swampy smell.” The hominid goes on to harass the Davis family for several days afterward.

October 1, 1986: The West Rutland Bigfoot appears to a group of students from Castleton College, who nearly run the thing over. They describe it as having black hair as long as a collie’s and a light-colored face.

Summer 1994: An anonymous young Chittenden County resident claims to have seen a six-foot-tall humanoid covered in short hair while playing hide-and-seek at 10:30 in the evening. The creature stopped in the middle of a field and stared at the witness with eyes that glowed green in the glow from a flashlight before it disappeared behind a tool shed.

January 1999: A hunter from Ludlow claims to have seen a Bigfoot scale a steep ledge. It was covered in reddish-brown hair that hung in clumps, almost as if the beast was shedding.

September 1999: An anonymous witness living near the Rutland city limit was distracted by heavy breathing coming from outside while getting ready for bed and saw a 7-8 foot tall half-gorilla, half-human creature that just stood and stared before walking off into the nearby forest.

January 1, 2005: A couple is driving near Troy in Orleans County when the man goes out to scrape ice off the windshield wipers and is startled to see a seven-foot-tall Bigfoot in the middle of the road. The creature, in turn, is startled when the girlfriend blows the truck’s horn and runs off.

October 8, 2005: A Ludlow resident and his daughter see a heavily built creature with a “pronounced arm swing” cross the road fifty feet in front of their car.

September 3, 2010: The image I used as a header for this section is captured by Hubbardton resident Frank Siecienski when he sets up a trail camera to see what’s been stealing fruit from his apple orchard. He is surprised to see what he describes as a “Sasquatch” bending down to pick fruit off the ground. He even points to what looks like a small hand clutching the figure’s arm to suggest that it’s a mother carrying her baby. However, others have argued that there are much more down-to-earth explanations for what is depicted in the photograph (an owl, a bear, a prankster in a ghillie suit, etc.).

Summer 2019: A retired pilot is staying at a summer cabin in Lamoille County when her Chihuahua starts barking at something. She is startled to see a black, humanoid figure walk past the driveway and into the woods. She finds prints the next day, although the gravely nature of the soil means they’re not very good.

In addition to these reports, some individual Bigfoots have gained their own names in the state, including:

The Goonyak: This unusually violent Sasquatch-like being terrorized residents of Orleans County in the fall of 1978. The beast’s reign of terror started when it tore the doors off a barn in Craftsbury and dragged out a thousand-pound prize Holstein bull. The farmer went out with a gun to save it and was confronted by an eight-foot-tall humanoid with large claws on its fingers. It made sounds similar to an elephant and had broken the bull’s neck. The enraged farmer ten fired ten 30.06 rounds into the monster’s chest, killing it, and sent its corpse to the University of Vermont for examination.

At least, that’s what the story says, or at least one variation of it. An alternate account declares that game warden John Kapusta slew the monster. Either way, almost everyone who has examined the story has come away with the conclusion that it was a hoax and the corpse was most likely a skinned bear.

The Bennington Monster: This Sasquatch is one of several types of paranormal phenomena associated with the so-called “Bennington Triangle,” which I’ve previously discussed on this blog. I discussed the supposed incident from the late 1800s where the beast tried to run a stagecoach off the side of Glastenbury Mountain during a thunderstorm in that article. Some have placed the blame for the so-called “Patch Hollow Massacre” (Middie Rivers, Paula Jean Weldon, James Tedford, Paul Jephson, and Frieda Langer) on the Bennington Monster, especially in light of the strange death of Carl Herrick, who was found in November 1943 surrounded by footprints and crushed to death.

Many of the Bigfoot encounters reported in the region have not been quite so violent in more recent years. One 28-year-old was hunting on Equinox Mountain on November 12, 1978, when he saw a seven-foot-tall black humanoid creature that walked on two legs but appeared to be tracking something as it kept getting on all fours and sniffing the ground. The hunter also noticed the creature carrying what looked like a stick or bone in its hand.

Another account from the Bennington Triangle comes from a commenter on Chad Abramovich’s Obscure Vermont blog, calling themselves “Lokisgodhi.” He claims he was driving near the ghost town of Glastenbury during the autumn months of 1992 at 2 or 3 in the morning when he saw a dark bipedal figure cross the road in front of him. He was so startled that the car spun around as he hit the brakes, and he lost sight of the beast.

In September of 2003, Winooski resident Ray Dufresene was driving back home after dropping his daughter off at Southern Vermont College when he encountered a six-foot-tall black creature walking across a field somewhere between Bennington and Manchester that walked off in the direction of Glastenbury Mountain. Later that same month, on the 16th, San Francisco-based writer Doug Dorst saw a similar creature in the same remote area along Route 7 while driving to give a reading at Bennington College, although he described the creature as having a tan-colored face. Dorst dismissed it as a prankster in a costume, as did Sadelle Wiltshire and Ann Mrowicki, who saw it the same night. Dufresne, on the other hand, is an experienced hunter and remains convinced that the creature he saw was an animal unknown to science.

Coonigators

Illustration by Traci Shepherd for The Compendium of Arcane Beasts and Critters

This bizarre hybrid creature is said to roam the woods outside Vermont’s capital city of Montpelier. At first glance, they appear similar to any other regular raccoon, with their striped bushy tails and thick grey fur. But upon closer inspection, they reveal something unexpected: They have heads resembling those of an alligator. Some have even compared them to the diminutive alien creatures from the 1986 horror-comedy film Critters. Like their non-hybrid cousins, the coonigators are often spotted at night while raiding dumpsters and garbage cans.

Theories for their origins are varied. While it’s doubtful that they are the product of alligators and raccoons who (ahem) love each other very much (I’m sure any alligator would sooner eat a raccoon than mate with it), people who believe it is a real animal have come up with several ideas as to how it may have evolved. Some say it’s an evolutionary offshoot of normal raccoons that evolved to accommodate a more carnivorous diet. Others say it’s a reptilian creature that evolved to develop fur and warm blood to acclimate itself to the harsh New England winters.

I’m personally inclined to believe that the coonigator might be Vermont’s answer to the Australian drop bear; a tall tale or in-joke created to scare tourists for the locals’ amusement. I could be wrong about that, but I highly doubt it.

Giant Snakes

According to science, the biggest snakes in Vermont are the timber rattlesnake and the eastern racer, which can grow up to 60 inches long. According to local folklore, there are snakes much bigger than that slithering through the deepest corners of the state’s wilderness.

Reports go back as early as 1826 when two youths who were out fishing in an unspecified part of the state claimed to have seen a thirty-foot reptile that was colored red with black spots that crawled out of a cave and slithered toward them. An anonymous resident of Hardwick in Caledonia County was reportedly startled in 1833 when he saw a 20-30-foot-long snake cross the road in front of him. He remained the subject of ridicule until 20 years later when Mr. B. Harrington found the skeletal remains of a giant snake that were later lost in a fire. Another snake supposedly prowled the woods around West Mountain in Bennington County in 1848, described as 12 feet long and colored dark brown.

At least one giant snake is connected with a traveling circus that was the victim of a railroad accident. According to the St. Albans Messanger, a train transporting a circus broke down on a bridge outside Richmond in Chittenden County in 1872. While trying to fix the engine, several giant snakes escaped and terrorized the locals, apparently holing up near the farm of Jonathan Fay. They seemed to resurface six years later, in July 1878, as William Fields was walking along the railroad when he was startled by two six-foot specimens that he described as colored like boa constrictors. A few days later, Dr. Bromley was driving on the Fay farm when he claimed to have seen a ten-foot serpent cross the road in front of him. Some workers on the farm later claimed to have discovered a snake skin measuring 10-12 feet in length. Of course, one has to wonder how a colony of boa constrictors managed to survive six harsh New England winters.

Yet another report comes to us from Windham County in September 1879, when a group of berry pickers discovered a giant black snake coiled around a rock. The snake attacked them when one threw a bucket at it, prompting another to kill it with a sickle. The carcass measured 11’5” and had a head as big as a tea kettle.

Groton’s Godzilla

An outdated depiction of a *Megalosaurus* displayed in London’s Crystal Palace Park bearing a relatively strong resemblance to the monster described by Jane Desorda

The story of Groton’s Godzilla is one of the handful of incidents where Vermonters claim to have seen dinosaur-like beings (if you don’t count lake monsters like Champ and Memphre). The only recorded sighting of this strange animal was near Big Deer Campground outside Groton in Caledonia County on a sunny summer day in the late 1960s.

Jane Desorda (a resident of Waterbury in neighboring Washington County) was taking her family on vacation when she noticed something strange by the side of the road. Imagine her astonishment when she saw “a dinosaur” slither across the street into a dense, swampy area on the other side of the road. Jane’s husband, driving a separate vehicle, also saw the beast (the children were asleep and missed it). They later described the creature in an interview with Joseph Citro as being 8-10 feet long and tan in color, with an arched neck, a two-foot hump on its back, and a walking posture similar to that of an alligator, with its legs splayed out to the sides. The creature they describe resembles the outdated statues of Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and other saurians displayed in London’s Crystal Palace Park.

Another dinosaur-type creature was reported in Bloomfield, Essex County, in the summer of 1971. P.G. Levesque was out walking near a 200-year-old farm owned by his father when he saw an animal slightly larger than a woodchuck that he described as being similar to a stegosaur in appearance, albeit without the plank-like plate armor along its back and with a thick coat of black fur. A local hermit he talked with also claimed to have seen a similar creature since he came to the area in 1912.

A more recent dinosaur encounter occurred around 2007 when a woman calling herself Janice claimed to have seen an animal resembling a small ankylosaur in her backyard in a rural area on the outskirts of Burlington. The animal was about twice the size of an average raccoon, with armor plating on its head and a turtle-like carapace on its back. It also had short, stubby legs and a ball-shaped club on the end of its tail. By the time Janice had managed to fetch her husband. However, the beast had vanished into the early summer morning.

Of course, the idea of any form of dinosaur, even the relatively small saurians reported in these accounts, surviving the 66 million years between the K-T extinction event and today undetected in the fossil record seems highly unlikely. Still, the coelacanth managed it, so maybe others did, too (although I wouldn’t bet money on it).

Lake Monsters

Speaking of prehistoric beasts, let us look at some of Vermont’s lesser-known lake monsters. We already covered Lake Champlain in the last entry, as the lake is shared with my home state of New York. But a few other aquatic beasts are lurking in the Green Mountains’ murky depths:

Lake Bomoseen: This lake, located in Rutland County, is the largest contained entirely within Vermont’s borders. It also has its fair share of weird stories, including the tale of a phantom rowboat that leaves no wake and giant eels. One notable sighting, recorded on Chab Abramovich’s blog Obscure Vermont, occurred in 1986 when a couple out fishing on the lake was spooked by an eel that measured 20 feet long (three feet longer than their boat) and 8-9 inches in diameter. A commenter named Seth Brugger claimed to have had his own encounter in the mid-80s when he hooked a giant eel while fishing with his father. Brugger claims four feet of the eel broke the surface before his terrified father cut the line. Brugger was so frightened by the encounter that he refused to swim in the lake for the rest of the summer and gave up fishing for a long time.

Lake Willoughby: This glacial lake, lying in Orleans County, is part of what is known as Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, a region well-regarded for its natural beauty. According to local legend, however, there is a monster lurking within the lake’s 320-foot depths.

The monster, dubbed “Willy” by locals, seems to have first surfaced in August of 1868 when twelve-year-old Stephen Edmonds was startled by a giant snake on the shores of the lake and proceeded to cut it in two with a sickle. The bisected reptile was measured as being 23 feet in length.

Sightings have continued since then. One story tells of a group of Navy divers who went searching for the body of a person who died in a boating accident on the lake in the 1950s, only to stumble across a colony of eels measuring up to eight feet in length. Many local fishermen have also claimed to have caught eels in the lake’s waters, even though their presence has never been scientifically confirmed.

Audrey Besse claims to have seen “a dark, long creature with two or three humps swimming toward the south end of the lake” sometime around 1971. David Weatherly found a report dating to 1976 about a man who claimed to have seen what he described as a black creature that looked like a long-necked seal. In January 2006, Mark Richley, former president of the American Alpine Club, was climbing an ice pillar with his friend Joe Terravechia when they noticed a 20-25 foot creature with a humped back that swam around the lake’s unfrozen surface for 45 minutes before diving out of sight. Joe has dismissed it as a sturgeon, but Mark isn’t so sure.

But the most notable lake monster in the state (aside from Champ, of course) really deserves its own entry…

Memphre

Lake Champlain isn’t the only body of water within Vermont’s borders rumored to harbor a Nessie-type beast. Lake Memphremagog, running for about 31 miles between Magog, Quebec, and Newport, Vermont, has been the host of monster legends since the days of the indigenous Abenaki people, who feared the lake even though it was a bountiful source of fish and game. When European colonists first arrived, they were warned not to win or bathe in the lake unless they wanted the monster to get them. A Viking petroglyph depicting a serpentine creature was reportedly found on a mountain overlooking the lake.

Sightings have been documented since 1816 and reportedly occur most often when the water is still. Memphre is often described as being 40 feet long with a large body and horse-shaped head. The name Memphre was popularized by Quebecois cryptozoologist Jaques Boisvert, who made over 7,000 dives in the lake looking for the creature before he died in 2006.

Notable sightings include one in 1961, when two fishermen claimed to have seen a 40-foot creature swim past their boat, and in 1994 when four people in two separate boats claimed to have seen a 30-foot black creature with three humps. Other recent sightings include August 12, 1997, when Patricia de Broin took pictures of a strange animal she saw swimming near the Three Sisters Islands; June 4, 2000, when Joanne, Sege, and Bruno Nadeau encountered a 75-foot serpent with a horse-like head in Seargent’s Bay; and May 18, 2003, when a fisherman John Grenier saw a thirty-foot creature resembling a whale while traveling across LaFrenaye Bay that dove out of sight when he tried to approach it.

As with all other lake monsters, some have argued that Memphre is a prehistoric beast that has survived to the present day. Others, like tour boat operator Patrick Corcoran, speculate that it might be an unidentified species of large fish that hides within Lake Memphremagog’s 360-foot depths. Whatever this creature is, it certainly is one helluva fish story.

Northfield Pigman

Artist credit: “The Pigman of Northfield, Vermont” by bgscgs on DeviantArt

We’ve already examined New York’s iteration of the Pigman legend and even looked at blogger Jason Roberts’ argument that the town of Angola holds the secret to the legend’s origin. But other small towns across America have their own stories of a porcine-human hybrid running around, including Northfield, located only ten miles north of Vermont’s capital city of Montpelier.

This Pigman story begins around 1971 when a local farmer heard something rummaging in his trash can. Thinking it was a regular vermin running around the neighborhood (raccoons, squirrels, stray dogs, or cats), he flicked on the outside light to scare it off. He was shocked to discover instead a humanoid creature covered in white hair and sporting a pig’s face. The Pigman stared the farmer down briefly before hightailing it to the woods.

He would reappear a few days later at a high school dance, where he scared the living daylights out of a group that had gone out back to indulge in some alcoholic beverages. Upon listening to the hysterical drinkers’ story, several other students went out to investigate. While the Pigman himself was gone, traces of his presence were still visible. One of the students, Jeff Hatch, suggested exploring an abandoned pig farm near Union Brook for signs of the monster’s presence. They not only found some five to six-hundred-pound pigs still living there, but they also found what looked like a bed made from flattened straw surrounded by animal bones. Another candidate for the Pigman’s lair is the Devil’s Washbowl, a local geographic depression so deep that sunlight never reaches its depths. Indeed, Hatch later claimed to have found caves in the Washbowl filled with bones.

The road running alongside the Devil’s Washbowl subsequently became a hotspot for Pigman sightings, likely due to its popularity as a lover’s lane. There were reports of the Pigman leaping on car hoods and staring through the windshield, and running across the road in front of motorists. One particularly dramatic encounter occurred when a teenager and his girlfriend took advantage of the road’s privacy for a bit of intimacy. When the boyfriend stepped out of the car to relieve himself, however, he was attacked by the Pigman, who proceeded to slam him against the car doors and slash him with its clawed hands. The young man would later claim the creature had stood between 5’8” and 5’10”.

Theories about the Northfield Pigman’s origins include the idea that he may be a Bigfoot suffering from a birth defect or horrible injury. Another theory revolves around a young man named Sam Harris.

No, not that Islamophobic New Atheist guy!

The story goes that Sam went out on Mischief Night, 1951 and was declared missing after he hadn’t returned home by Halloween morning. When search parties failed to locate him, he was doomed to roam the wilderness alone. How he became the Pigman is anyone’s guess. Some say he made a deal with the Devil. Others say he wears a pig’s skull as a mask. Others say the Pigman is the son of Sam and his unnatural union with a sow.

Joseph Citro and David Weatherly, on the other hand, have come to believe that the Northfield Pigman is merely a hoax, as they couldn’t find any newspaper archives or police reports to back up the stories, and the Pigman himself seems to have vanished since the early 70s. Of course, this is roughly the same area where coonigators are said to hang out. Maybe it’s something in the water over there…

Side Hill Cronchers

Painting of a Sidehill Gouger by Walter Bender (1972)

The Sidehill Croncher, also known as the Sidehill Gouger, the Sidehill Hoofer, the Sidehill Galoot, the Gwinter, the Prock, the Hunkus, and far too many other names to be listed here, is one of the so-called “fearsome critters” that lumberjacks used to claim lurked around their logging camps to pass the time and frighten greenhorns.

Gougers are characterized as quadrupedal animals with a unique adaptation for grazing on mountainsides: the legs on one side of their bodies are shorter, thus allowing them to walk on steep hillsides. This means that they can only travel in a perfect circle their entire lives and are forced to fight to the death whenever they encounter a Gouger coming from the opposite direction.

The Vermont variation of this legend mainly centers on Mount Mansfield in Chittenden County, which, at 4,395 feet, is the highest mountain in the state. There, the Gouger was known as the Wampahoofus and was said to resemble a cross between a boar and a deer. The sexes could be told apart by which direction they traveled; males traveled clockwise and females counterclockwise. Local legends even say that farmers interbred them with cows so their cattle could more easily graze on mountainsides.

Sadly, the Wampahoofus is said to have gone extinct when their mountain-facing legs grew so short that they could no longer travel, let alone graze or mate. Today, all we have to remember them by is the Wampahoofus Trail, named after a rock formation that Professor Ray Buchanan thought resembled the beast, and the Side Hill Cronchers Snowmobile Club, based in the town of Ludlow in Windsor County.

Interestingly, the Abenaki natives had their own legendary beast that they said lived on Mount Mansfield (or, as they called it, Mozodepowadzo, or Moosehead Mountain). They called it Gici Awas, meaning “great bear/beast,” which in some respects resembles Bigfoot, except that all its hair has fallen out due to its consumption of human flesh. Some experts on Native American folklore have classed them alongside similar beasts (like the Innu/Cree Katshituashku or the Shawnee/Lenape Yakwawiak) as “stiff-legged bears.”

Slippery Skin

The story of this creature first appeared in the 1937 novel Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts, which told the story of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Rogers and his Rangers as they conducted raids behind enemy lines during the French and Indian War. The encounter allegedly took place in the aftermath of the St. Francis raid on October 4, 1759, in which a primarily Abenaki village was burned and over 200 inhabitants slaughtered, ostensibly as part of an effort to stop the natives from using it as a base from which to raid colonial settlements.

In addition to suffering pursuit by vengeful indigenous and Fench soldiers on their way back to Fort Crown Point and experiencing starvation to the point that some resorted to cannibalism, one squadron of the 142-man expedition was allegedly stalked by a bear-like creature near Lake Memphremagog that threw pinecones and nuts at them from the trees. Some natives within the group called the beast “Wejuk,” meaning “wet skin.” This name would later mutate into the white settlers’ name for the creature: Slippery Skin.

Slippery Skin would go on to harass the locals in several towns in the northeast corner of the state in Essex and Orleans Counties. It would often go on destructive rampages, tearing up fences and gardens, dragging trees through fields of crops, scaring farm animals, hunters, and children by throwing rocks at them and sabotaging farm equipment by tangling stones and barbed wire in the gears. It exclusively ran on two legs and was smart enough to evade pursuing hunters, often by backtracking over its own footprints.

It reached the point that Jonas Galusha, who served as governor between 1809-1813 and 1815-1820, decided to hunt down the beast himself as part of a reelection bid. Despite getting the monster to chase him, he failed because his hunting party got scared and ran away. Another attempt to capture Slippery Skin by a party out of Morgan went awry on the slopes of Elon Mountain when the monster rolled a large tree trunk at them.

Fortunately, Wejuk seems to have left the area in peace since the Civil War era. What became of him is anyone’s guess.

Vampires

One may be surprised that Vermont is mentioned as a hotspot for vampire lore. Then again, you probably wouldn’t imagine New York City being the host of an alcoholic vampire dwarf, either.

One incident involving alleged Green Mountain vampires comes from Bennington County in 1790 when the young and beautiful Rachel Harris died of tuberculosis only a year after marrying Manchester resident Captain Isaac Burton. A year later, Burton married Hulda Powell, who also fell ill with tuberculosis. All the best doctors money could buy were unable to help her. Soon, her relatives began to suspect that Rachel was returning from the grave to drain Hulda’s blood. As such, Rachel’s body was dug up three years after her burial (some sources give the date as February of 1793) and had her heart, lungs, and liver cut out and burned in the local blacksmith’s forge. Sadly, it didn’t work, as Hulda is recorded to have died on September 6.

Another vampire was supposedly lurking around the town of Dummerston in Windham County around the same period when nine members of the Spaulding family perished between 1782 and 1798. The head of the family was Leonard Spaulding, a war veteran and state representative. The great dying-off began in the spring of 1782 with his daughter Mary (age 20), followed by Sarah (19) the same year. Both died of tuberculosis. They were followed by Esther (16) in July 1783 and then Leonard himself in 1788. The deaths continued until 1798, when the grave of an unspecified family member was dug up and had their organs burned. This time, the cure apparently worked, as records indicate that an Anna Spaulding survived until 1849. Interestingly, this account includes a detail not common in other stories involving vampires: an underground vine that connects the graves of all the family members affected by the vampire curse unless the disembowelment of the current vampire disrupts it.

Another story starts after Frederick Ransom died of tuberculosis while studying at Dartmouth College in 1817. This time, his father didn’t wait for the curse to spread to his other family members. Shortly after his interment in his hometown of Woodstock in Windsor County, Frederick’s body was exhumed and his heart burned. His younger brother Daniel, who was only three then, would later write about it in his memoirs.

This wouldn’t be the last time vampire hysteria would seize the residents of Woodstock. In June of 1830, an unspecified male member of the Corwin family died of tuberculosis. Suspicions were raised when his younger brother fell ill shortly afterward. When the older brother’s body was disinterred, it was discovered that his heart was undecayed and still oozing liquid blood. It was burned, and the ashes were buried in a hole that was sprinkled with bull’s blood. It did not save the younger Corwin’s life. The account goes on to say that about a decade after the incident, a group of legend-trippers decided to exhume the body themselves out of a sense of morbid curiosity. They were greeted by a roaring sound and the sulfur smell, prompting them to refill the hole and run like hell. The grave continued to quake and belch smoke for several days afterward.

Unlike with the other cases, however, the primary source for this story appears to be an older woman interviewed by the Boston Transcript fifty years after the fact, and the town records do not indicate that a Corwin family ever lived in Woodstock. Then again, maybe the vampires are just really good at covering up their tracks.

And so the veil has been lifted on the mysterious cryptids of the Green Mountains. I must say, writing these lists has been the most fun I’ve had writing anything in a long time. There are several cryptids mentioned in Brunelle’s map that I couldn’t find any information on (either on the Internet or in Weatherly’s book), like the human-faced bats or calf or the 300-pound leech near Camp Downer in Sharon. Oh well, maybe I’ll have better luck when I look at New Hampshire (or maybe some Vermonters might find this article and leave a comment, hint, hint, wink, wink). But that’ll have to wait until a later date. Until then, stay safe, stay away from the Bennington Triangle, and I’ll see y’all very, very soon. Happy Halloween!