Cryptids of North America #6: Rhode Island

Image credit: Roadrunner from Hell on DeviantArt

One would expect that the smallest state in the contiguous United States would not have any nooks or crannies for mysterious creatures to hide in. Yet, in my research, I found more cryptids than New Hampshire, which is surprising given that the latter is several times its size. Admittedly, many of these so-called “cryptids” are less “hidden animals” and more obviously supernatural in nature. There are also a fair number of sea monsters on the list, fittingly enough for a place that calls itself the Ocean State.

Once again, a big thanks to Monica Gallagher’s graphic designs on Etsy, which have been a massive inspiration for this series. I couldn’t use her Rhode Island entry as a header this time because I couldn’t find a version in the .jpeg or .png formats, so I used a map created by DeviantArt user Roadrunner from Hell instead.

Now, let’s see what kinds of cryptids H.P. Lovecraft’s home state has to offer.

Big Rhodey

Not to be confused with the largest rhododendron bush in the UK, this Big Rhodey is Rhode Islanders’ affectionate nickname for their version of Bigfoot. You would hardly suspect the hairy giant would find room enough to hide in the smallest US state, but apparently, Big Rhodey finds a way.

Notable Rhode Island sightings are as follows:

October 15, 1998: A biker was training for an upcoming mountain bike race outside Glendale in the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, accompanied by his dog (a Labrador/German Shepherd mix), when they noticed what appeared at first to be a dirty white blanket hanging off a tree. But when the “blanket” stood up on two legs and walked off into the woods, the biker realized it was actually a bipedal apelike creature. The biker would bump into a hunter four years later who claimed to have seen a “white gorilla” in the same area, although the individual he saw was eight feet tall, while the biker’s was six feet.

October 2006: A hiker claims to have found a stick formation about three feet high in the Great Swamp outside South Kingstown next to a young tree that had been snapped in half about six feet off the ground. Interestingly, the hiker also claims to have heard stories of a white Bigfoot that was seen around the Great Swamp in the 1970s.

April 15, 2010: A motorist had just crossed the border from Connecticut into the town of Foster on Route 6 when a two-legged form suddenly crossed the road in front of their car. It stepped over a guardrail and disappeared as quickly as it first arrived.

2010: Professional Bigfoot hunters Dina Palazini and Kris Stepney are on an expedition near Ten Rod Road in Exeter when they capture a slightly hunched bipedal figure peering at them from behind a tree. While they describe the creature as brown and hairy with a sloped forehead, the video is too blurry to make out details.

Their colleague, Carl Johnson, claims to have had an encounter outside Cumberland in September of that year. He says he was doing some “tree-knocking” and claimed to have heard a strange thumping sound (similar to an elephant’s footsteps) in response.

The Block Ness Monster

This strange carcass was hauled up from the briny depths of the Atlantic Ocean off Block Island on June 27, 1996, by the crew of the Mad Monk, named after their main prey of monkfish. What they found that day was no monkfish, however. It was a 14-foot-long serpentine skeleton with no fins, a spear-shaped skull, and strange fleshy whiskers coming off the side. It was displayed on the breakwater by the Point Judith ferry for two days until Lee Scott, a biologist from New York, decided to take the carcass for himself, intending to send it to the National Marine Fisheries Service in Narragansett for study and identification.

Some locals, however, didn’t take kindly to the idea of the unique specimen being taken away from the people who first discovered it. So they stole the carcass from Scott’s freezer and tried to collect a ransom via several telephone calls. The kidnappers eventually said they planned to donate the remains to the local historical society. However, the carcass never materialized, and the Block Ness Monster thus faded into memory.

Naturally, some have speculated that the carcass may belong to a mutant or an undiscovered species of deep-sea fish. However, most experts who have examined photos of the creature tend to agree that it is the badly decomposed remains of a basking shark. When these 26-foot filter feeders die, their bottom jaws quickly drop off due to the weakness of the muscles attaching them to the rest of their skulls (the supposed “whiskers” could easily have been what was left of the shark’s gills). The resulting deformation can not only make the carcasses unrecognizable; they can even make their dead bodies resemble Mesozoic-era plesiosaurs, as in the infamous Zuiyo Maru incident.

Fingernails Freddie

No, it’s not Freddy Krueger we’re talking about here, although some Rhode Islanders believe he may have been one of the inspirations behind the Springwood Slasher (citation needed).

This Freddie is said to haunt the woods around Camp Ker-Ana in Cumberland and has a much more tragic backstory. The legend says that he was an ordinary man living in the woods with his wife and children sometime in the 1800s. That all changed, however, when a group of unusually sadistic neighborhood delinquents burned down his house, leaving the hideously scarred Freddie as the sole survivor.

Driven mad with anger and heartbreak, Freddie let his fingernails grow long and sharp and, to this day, still attacks anyone who wanders onto his former property. He also seems to hate it when the Ker-Ana campers make too much noise, leading them to warn each other, “Don’t make any noise at night, or else Fingernails Freddie will come and claw you.”

That’s probably something to remember if you plan to camp out in the area.

The Foster Witch

Not to be confused with Ann Alcock Foster, one of the victims of the infamous Salem witch trials, this witch story is arguably even more tragic.

The legend goes that the Foster Witch used to be Dolly Ellen Cole, a natural healer who lived in the woods with her daughter in the Providence County community in the 1800s. Some variations of the legend state that she was also a sex worker with a penchant for dressing in men’s clothing. Suspected of being a witch, an angry mob stormed her house and burned it down, killing Dolly’s daughter in the process. Dolly laid a curse on the town, and her ghost has been seen stalking the surrounding woods ever since.

Another variation of the legend, as argued by local historian Thomas D’Agnostino, states that Foster is actually haunted by the ghost of Betsy Grayson, who drowned in Dolly Cole Brook in 1860. D’Agnostino even recounts his own encounter with the restless spirit along the brook during a fishing trip when he was 12 years old. His story and others can be found in this article.

The Glocester Ghoul

While this scaly hybrid beast is known from only two encounters, it certainly left quite the impression on the small town that lent its name.

The first encounter was sometime in the 1830s (this Strange New England article claims that the incident occurred in the summer of 1839, while an issue of The Providence Journal from May 5, 1889, gives the date as November 13, 1833). The story goes that a group of 4-6 young men were hunting for buried treasure at Paige Farm, which they believed had been left behind by the legendary pirate Captain William Kidd. Their dig was interrupted, however, when a monstrous creature suddenly emerged from the surrounding woodland. One of the witnesses, Albert Hicks, gave the following description:

It was a large animal, with staring eyes as big as pewter bowls. The eyes looked like balls of fire. When it breathed as it went by flames came out of its mouth and nostrils... It was as big as a cow, with dark wings on each side like a bat's. It had spiral horns like a ram's, as big around as a stovepipe. Its feet were formed like a duck's... The body was covered with scales as big as clam shells, which made a rattling noise as the beast moved along. The scales flopped up and down. The thing had lights on its sides like those shining through a tin lantern. Before I saw it I felt its presence and I smelled something that was like burnt wool as it went by. I had a feeling of suffocation when it came near me. The monster seemed to come from nowhere and to go away in the same manner.

Incidentally, Albert Hicks has since gone down in history as a notorious pirate in his own right who, upon being sentenced to hang in 1860 for the gruesome murder of his three shipmates on the oyster sloop A.E. Johnson, claimed in his biography that he had murdered hundreds of people across the Americas and the South Pacific. While the dragonlike beast he allegedly encountered is never mentioned in the biography, it seems to have been a famous local story if the Journal is to be believed. The article adds the detail that a meteor strike heralded the beast’s appearance.

The only other reported encounter with the Glocester Ghoul comes from The Evening Hour's January 15, 1896 edition. The article claims that Neil Hopkins had been chased by a hideous monster while on his way home from work in Putnam, Connecticut, two days before. Hopkins didn’t give many details, as the monster vanished as quickly as it appeared, but he noted that the beast was as big as an elephant, had no tail and that he felt its hot breath and heard “a metallic sound, like the clanking of steel against steel.”

Fortunately, despite its fearsome appearance, the Glocester Ghoul seems content with frightening its victims rather than physically harming them. Then again, Hicks claimed in his biography that the devil had possessed him. Maybe whoever sees the Ghoul is marked in some way…

The Headless Skeleton of Swampton

This legend, centered on the swamps of North Kingstown, was recounted in Charles M. Skinner’s 1896 book Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. In it, Skinner offered two theories on the origin of the Skeleton. The first is the ghost of an African-American boy who, according to one account, once launched themselves into space, leaving a trail of light behind him.

The more popular story, though, is that the Skeleton belongs to a Native American, most likely a Narragansett warrior who died in the Great Swamp Massacre of December 19, 1675. This apparition is said to haunt the boggy wilderness around Indian Corner Road, especially favoring a boulder under which is said to be a mass grave of Indigenous casualties of the Great Swamp Massacre. Indeed, many locals believe the Skeleton is guarding the corpses of his slain brethren. Other rumors say the boulder bleeds when the full moon shines, although some argue that the “blood” merely comes from the iron-rich soil.

One of the most well-known stories surrounding the Skeleton involves a roadmender who found its skull and decided to bring it home. The roadmender’s wife refused to let him bring the morbid souvenir inside, and so he hung it on a pole outside. Later that night, as a thunderstorm rolled in, the couple heard a clattering outside and were shocked to see the Headless Skeleton making frantic movements as if searching for something. Accounts vary as to how the situation resolved itself. Skinner’s recounting states that the roadmender whispered the skull’s location to the marauding cadaver, allowing the Skeleton to reclaim its head, shake its fist at the cabin, and run off into the night. Strange New England states that the couple simply hid under their bedsheets until morning when they discovered that both Skeleton and skull had vanished.

Whatever its origin, it’s clear that the Headless Skeleton is a relic of America’s racist past. So remember to be respectful and wary if you ever find yourself passing the boulder on Indian Corner Road.

The Palatine Light

Artist credit: ALBERT BIERSTADT, *THE BURNING SHIP*, CA. 1871.

This harrowing ghost story was popularized in an 1867 poem called “The Palatine,” written by Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. It tells the story of a ship carrying German immigrants to Philadelphia that was blown off course by a series of gales. As it bore down on the sandy shores of Block Island on the Saturday between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the locals set up a false beacon that caused the ship to run aground near Sandy Point. The unscrupulous islanders looted the wreck of its cargo, murdered the starving and frostbitten passengers, and burned it, with one female passenger who had gone insane being left to go down with the flaming hulk.

Since then, the Palatine wreck has returned as a ghost ship, most often seen during the liminal space between Christmas and New Year’s, with the madwoman’s screams echoing across the salty winter air. Block Islander Dr. Aaron C. Willey, who claimed to have seen the ship in February 1810, described it like this:

The people who have always lived here are so familiarized to the sight that they never think of giving notice to those who do not happen to be present, or even of mentioning it afterwards…The light looks like a blaze of fire six or seven miles from the northern part of Block Island. Sometimes it’s small, like the light from a distant window. Sometimes it’s as big as a ship and wavers like a torch. It was large and gently lambent, very bright, broad at the bottom and terminating acutely upward. I saw it again on the evening of December the 20th. It was then small, and I supposed it to be a light on board of some vessel, but I was soon undeceived. It moved along, apparently parallel to the shore, for about two miles, in the time that I was riding one at a moderate pace.
-Dr. Aaron C. Willey, letter to Dr. Samuel Mitchell, 1811, quoted in John G. Whittier: The Poet of Freedom, William Sloane Kennedy, Funk & Wagnells Co., New York, 1892

Another witness, Benjamin Congdon, has this to say about “the burning Palatine ship:” “I may say that I have seen her eight or ten times or more. In those early days, nobody doubted her being sent by an Almighty Power to punish those wicked men who murdered her passengers and crew.”

As fantastical as this story may seem, there is a real story behind it. In reality, the ship behind the Palatine legend was a British vessel named Princess Augusta, which set sail from Rotterdam in August 1738 with 240 passengers and a 14-man crew under Captain George Long. The name “Palatine” comes from the location in Germany where most passengers originated, roughly corresponding to the modern-day state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The voyage quickly went awry when the ship’s water supply became contaminated, leaving 200 passengers and half the crew dead, including Captain Long, who was replaced by first mate Andrew Brook. Brook quickly proved himself a capricious shipmaster, forcing the surviving passengers to pay for their rations. The ship was battered by numerous storms that drove it off course. By the time it ran aground near the north tip of Block Island on December 27 in the middle of a snowstorm, the Augusta was a leaky and miserable sight.

Contrary to mainlander myths that Block Island was a den of wreckers and thieves, depositions collected in the immediate aftermath of the wreck argue that the locals immediately started a rescue effort. They even confronted First Mate Brook when he tried to save himself and the crew while leaving the passengers behind and forced him to go back. Sadly, another 20 passengers died that day, including one Mary Vanderline, who had been driven insane by the horrors she had witnessed and refused to be rescued. The spot where the Augusta was wrecked was marked by the Block Island Historical Society in 1947.

The final fate of the Princess Agusta remains something of a mystery. Most accounts state that the vessel was declared a total loss and either pushed out to sea to sink or burned, with Mary Vanderline possibly being accidentally left aboard. Other accounts suggest that the ship was successfully repaired and finally made it to Philadelphia after all. The latter theory is supported by the fact that no wreck matching Princess Augusta’s description has been found in the region.

Stormalong and the Giant Octopus

The story of Captain Alfred Bull Stormalong is far too ridiculous to be an actual cryptid story, but it’s still a fun one, nevertheless.

Captain Stormalong is, in many ways, New England’s answer to Paul Bunyan. He was said to be a thirty-foot tall giant who washed up on Cape Cod as an eighteen-foot baby. He would gain fame as the captain of a massive clipper ship named either the Courser or the Tuscarora, which was so large that his crew needed a horse team to ride from one end to the other and even needed hinged masts to avoid scraping the Moon! It’s also said the clipper was large enough to get stuck in the English Channel and form the Cliffs of Dover as it scraped its way out and created the Panama Canal when it ran aground in Central America.

The giant octopus was Stormalong’s lifelong nemesis, which Wikipedia even identifies as being the Kraken of Norse myth and legend. Among the stories told of the giant captain’s battles with the giant octopus include finding it hung up on the clipper’s anchor after it gets knocked loose during a storm, causing Stormalong to have to wrestle it off. After failing to kill the beast, he became demoralized and settled on a farm in the Midwest. However, he eventually decided to take up his white whale once more and finally trapped it inside a whirlpool from which it could never escape.

Accounts as to how Captain Stormalong died vary. Some say he died from a heart attack caused by the stress of a transatlantic race. Others say that the captain's massive appetite eventually led to a bad case of indigestion induced by a meal of six sharks. Others say that one day, he rescued several ships caught in a hurricane off Florida’s coast and, after safely beaching the vessels, sailed off into space on a massive gust of wind.

The Teddy’s Beach Sea Monster

While not quite as common as Massachusetts tales of sea beasts, especially around Gloucester, it was probably inevitable that the Ocean State would have its own stories of sea serpents. Sightings of anomalous organisms in Rhode Island waters date back to at least 1817 when a 70-foot many-humped creature with a horselike head was spotted in the waters off Newport.

A more recent story comes from this 2002 broadcast from Channel 12 Eyewitness News, which tells the story of a couple from Fall River, Massachusetts, who were startled by a fifteen-foot creature while relaxing at Teddy’s Beach in Portsmouth. Rachel Carney was floating past a sign reading “danger” when she was surprised by a hissing sound that issued from what she described as a basketball-shaped head with large, sharp teeth and white underparts. The creature dove and rubbed against Rachel’s leg, which she described as feeling scaly. Her fiance, Dennis Vasconcellos, dived into the water and threw his hysterical girlfriend on the shore. The creature then turned its attention onto him, hissing and spitting water at him. The couple later came to believe that the animal had been attracted by the smell of blood from a wound on their fishing buddy Joey Mailloux’s leg. The couple seemed to display lasting trauma from the encounter, with Rachel sobbing and openly distraught through the interview and Dennis claiming to have nightmares about slimy sea beasts strangling him.

Assuming the couple wasn’t simply making up the story for attention, one must wonder what they saw that day. Many commenters on the YouTube video and this post from r/HighStrangeness have speculated that the creature was a wolf eel. While it certainly has the right head shape and ghastly teeth, wolf eels are native to the North Pacific and have never been observed to grow more than eight feet long. Then again, another commenter on the Reddit post, Used Yoghurt, talked about theoretical oversized eunuch eels, which are “unable to breed, so they basically live forever as hungry teenagers just constantly eating and growing. Imagine a fifty-foot-long eel cruising around a lake or river, never having to surface for air.” Is this theory biologically sound, or is this Redditor just talking out of his ass?

The Vampire Mercy Brown

The story surrounding Mercy Lena Brown is one of the most famous stories from the wider vampire panic that swept across New England in the 1800s. We already discussed the Vermont side of the panic in a previous “Cryptids” article, so let’s see how that story climaxed in Exeter in 1892.

The macabre story began in December 1882, when Brown family matriarch Mary Eliza succumbed to tuberculosis, followed by her eldest daughter, Mary Olive, in 1884. The other children, Mercy and Edwin, contracted the disease in 1891. Mercy died the following January, aged 19.

Naturally, given the poor understanding of infectious disease at the time, locals turned to folklore and superstition for answers. Friends and neighbors pushed Mary Eliza’s widower, George, to exhume the corpses of his loved ones, convinced that one of the deceased Browns was coming back from the grave to feed off their family members’ life force. He eventually agreed, with the hunt for the Brown family vampire commencing on March 17, 1892.

The two Marys showed all the proper signs of decomposition for a pair of corpses that had been in the ground for a decade at that point. Mercy’s corpse, however, was immaculate and still had fresh blood in her heart. Now, given that Mercy had died in January and had been lying in an above-ground crypt all that winter, a more scientifically-minded person might conclude that the cold weather was to blame for the lack of decomposition. But the residents of Exeter were out to stop the undead, and in their minds, they had caught their culprit red-handed.

Their solution for Edwin’s sickness was to burn Mercy’s heart and liver and mix them in water for him to drink. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work, and Edwin passed away two months later. George went on to live a healthy life until his death in 1922. Just a year earlier, French bacteriologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin managed to synthesize the BCG vaccine, which finally put an end to consumption’s centuries-long reign of terror.

And that’s another state full of scary monsters and super creeps in the bag. It may be a while before I do the next one about Connecticut, as the Jurassic Park birthday retrospective will be my biggest priority over the next two months. So stay tuned for that, as well as the first part of my “best animated series of 2023” list, which should finally be coming out later this month. So, until next time, stay safe, stay away from suspiciously undecomposed corpses, and I’ll see you all again very, very soon. Bye, folks!