Cryptids of North America #9: Delaware

Not what I had in mind, but I guess it fits the theme (Artist credit: Jonathan Dodd on Artstation)

The so-called First State to ratify the US Constitution, the second smallest state in the Union, has gained a (probably unfair) reputation of being one of the most boring states, especially compared to its immediate neighbors (Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania). I can promise you that its cryptids are anything but, however. It’s not quite as vivid a menagerie as the painting I used above (titled “Cryptids Crossing the Delaware”), but it’s still got twelve monstrous urban legends waiting for us to discover.

As always, Monica Gallagher provided the bulk of the cryptids I discovered for this list. Additional information came from Hunter Whitman, this graphic on r/delaware, and the comments on that Reddit post.

So what, according to these sources, are the twelve cryptids lurking in the state where Joe Biden hangs his hat?

Bigfoot

It’s evident that no matter how small the state, Bigfoot will turn up in its wildlands sooner or later. To be fair, though, going by the BFRO’s statistics, Delaware is tied with Rhode Island for the fewest reported Bigfoot sightings, with only five each. All of Delaware’s reported sightings come from Sussex County, the largest and southernmost county in the state. Here are all of them in chronological order:

February 1998/99: Two teenagers were on a late night drive down Route 24 between Angola and Lewes when an animal twice the size of a deer ran onto the road on all fours. The witnesses say it paused in the middle of the road and stared at them with glowing red eyes before crossing to the other side. The boys became especially terrified as they drove past the spot where the creature crossed and saw a humanlike silhouette staring at them.

June 7, 2003: A father and son from Annapolis, Maryland, were returning from a trip to Cape Henlopen State Park down Route 404 when they stopped to let some deer cross the road in front of them just past the intersection with Route 1. The pair were shocked to see something else cross the road alongside the cervids: A pair of bipedal creatures, one shorter than the other. They were gone too quickly for the witnesses to discern much detail other than a general height estimate. The father said the larger one was taller than his son, who stood 6’, while the son stated that it could have looked basketball player Yao Ming (who stands 7’6”) in the eye.

January 13, 2004: A student at Delaware Technical Community College in Georgetown was driving home from a night class when he illuminated a humanlike figure standing next to a telephone pole as he drove down Old Furnace Road. He described the figure as 7-8 feet tall and covered in black hair. The creature spent most of the encounter with its back to the witness. When it turned to look at him, the witness lost his nerve and sped away from the area. He would later provide a drawing of the creature he saw to the Bigfoot Field Researchers’ Organization.

August 16, 2010: Motorist Betty R. was driving her family home from vacation in Bethany Beach when, as she was driving down Route 1 near the exit to Milton, she saw something dark brown standing in a cornfield about 300 feet away from the road. She described the figure as standing 7-8 feet tall with shoulders three feet wide. She saw its face in profile and claimed it sported a prominent brow ridge, nose, and mouth. She does not think it was a scarecrow, human, or farming equipment.

November 13, 2012: A couple living near Redden State Forest had just returned home from a shopping trip when the husband was startled by “the most blaring scream I have ever heard in my life,” followed by four loud knocks. When the husband called his wife outside, she responded with skepticism at first, only to be frightened in turn by four more loud knocks and the sound of something large moving through the trees. The witness estimates they were no more than 100 feet away and recalls his dog heavily marking the area the next day.

The Blackbird Forest Entities

Blackbird Forest State Park, which straddles New Castle and Kent Counties just north of Smyrna, is probably best known for its five primitive campsites, made for people who really want to get close to nature. Those who wish to do so should take heed of the ghost stories that have come from the park over the years. Some of the apparitions reported in the park include a Revolution-era horseman forever searching for his missing comrades, whispering voices among the pines, and a dilapidated log cabin that vanishes and reappears at random.

I was first alerted to the spooky goings-on at the Blackbird Forest by a few comments on this Reddit thread. One commenter, whose account has since been deleted, claims to have been at a party deep in the forest around mid-June 2008 when they and a friend passed out drunk in the commenter’s car. They woke up around 4 am to what they thought was a cop trying to open the car door. But as the witness got a better look, “I saw what looked like a woman who had been living in the woods. Her eyes were black as obsidian. No white. Nothing. She opened her mouth at one point like she was trying to talk, but all you heard were animal noises.”

Another commenter named lil_b_b claimed to have been hanging out in a car with some high school friends smoking weed when someone claimed to hear people outside their vehicle. The group cracked the windows and heard footsteps approaching from the woods. They turned the car on, and a group of bald white men dressed in all black were illuminated in the headlights. The commenter also claims to have seen UFOs over Townsend, so maybe it was an unusually dramatic Men in Black encounter. In any case, the commenter says she refuses to camp or hunt in the forest and will only visit the picnic area in daylight.

Strange entities still seem to be hanging out in the forest. Two years ago, a video shot at campsite B08 was posted on r/GhostVideos. It shows a pair of glowing eyes ducking behind a shed as the camera pans across the site. Let’s hope the comments are correct and it’s just a cautious raccoon.

Not all of the horrors in Blackbird State Forest are supernatural, though. On September 20, 1986, University of Maryland student Jane Prichard drove to the forest to study wild peanut plants. Her dead body would be discovered later that evening, partially undressed and shot through the neck and shoulder. A squirrel hunter she was seen talking to that morning was arrested after he changed his story but was later exonerated by DNA evidence. Her killer has never been found.

Deer Man

This cervine-hominid hybrid has been reported in several states in the US. Witnesses describe a human-like creature with an antlered deer head, a muscular torso, quick speed for its size, and apparent powers of transformation. The Cryptid Wiki lists three eyewitness reports from Ohio, the Witchita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma, and, most importantly for the purposes of this article, the tiny hamlet of Hockessin, Delaware, located in New Castle County right next to the border with Pennsylvania.

The alleged Hockessin sighting dates to around 1993 and involves a then-eight-year-old witness who was staying with his grandparents in their woodland home. At one point that night, he was surprised to see a deer standing just outside his bedroom window. However, his wonder turned to utter fear when the deer suddenly transformed into a muscular young man who bore no resemblance to his father or grandfather. The man looked side to side for a few seconds and then strode into the woods, leaving the terrified witness to wonder whether or not he had hallucinated the encounter.

Much like Deer Woman of Indigenous Southeastern and Plains folklore, Deer Man may also have roots in Native American legend if the Cryptoville blog is to be believed. The blog tells of a Cherokee myth involving hunters taking more than they need from the forest, promoting the deer to send an envoy named Awi Usdi (Little Deer) to set some terms and conditions to stop the indiscriminate killing. From then on, hunters had to perform a special ceremony and gain the animal’s permission before killing it, or else suffer rheumatism so bad they would never be able to hunt again.

Cryptoville also suggests that newspaper columnists, such as Jerry Moriarty of Binghamton, New York, and David Clarke of Kewanee, Illinois, may have helped spread the legends. Whatever the origin of the legend, it’s clear that it speaks to man’s awe and fear of the great outdoors.

The Fence Raildog

Delaware’s answer to the common folklore motif of the “black dog” is said to haunt the stretch of Highway 12 between the Kent County communities of Frederica and Felton, locally known as the Midstate Road. It gets its name from its height at the shoulder, which is 4 feet (thus making it level with standard fence rails) and 10 feet long. Its general description is said to match either a large black wolf or a dark-colored hyena. The Dog is most often seen running alongside cars, staring at motorists with its glowing red eyes. According to Pennsylvania-based folklorist Charles J. Adams III, the Rail Dog also shows up at car accidents on the Midstate Road, possibly as a psychopomp.

Several legends speculate about the Rail Dog’s origins. One states that the Dog is the ghost of an outlaw who took his own life rather than be captured. Others say that the Dog is the ghost of a 12-year-old enslaved child who was murdered by his master and came back as a canine ghost to search for a proper resting place. Another variant states that the Rail Dog once belonged to a landlord who was murdered by a vengeful tenant and that the Rail Dog was forced to eat its owner’s ground-up corpse before being murdered itself. Now, it roams the sparsely populated central region of Delaware, seeking revenge against any who would dare harm another.

Despite such terrible backstories, the Rail Dog does not seem to be aggressive, and mainly contents itself with racing alongside motorists on dark, rainy nights. Some sources, like the Pine Barrens Institute blog, have tried to connect the Rail Dog with the Shunka Warak’in, a wolflike cryptid said to lurk in the northern Plains region of the Midwest and Canada, but this seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

The Frankford Catman

Pictured above is the Colonel Armwell Long Cemetary in Frankford, named after a veteran of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, in which he served as a lieutenant colonel. If you ask local teenagers, however, the area is better known for a different person: the Catman.

The legend here centers less on a literal cat/human hybrid and more on a fully human cemetery caretaker who was said to have unusually catlike features. He seems to have taken his job very seriously, as he was frequently said to chase off teenagers who tried using the secluded cemetery as a hangout spot. When the Catman died, he was interred in an aboveground crypt that sadly had to be torn down in 1994 due to frequent threats of vandalism. Those who saw the tomb before its demolition claimed to see markings resembling cat scratches on its exterior.

Even in death, however, the Catman’s ghost still watches over the cemetery and chases away any teenagers seeking a bit of mischief. One legend says that if you tap the brick wall at the back of the burial ground three times, the Catman will sabotage your vehicle so that you can’t drive away (which seems a bit counterproductive, but I’m no graveyard worker, so what do I know?)

Overall, this case seems similar to stories like the Danbury Frog People or the Hoboken Monkey Man in that it feels less like a monstrous humanoid and more like some normal human with a possible deformity who was just doing his job and was unfairly persecuted for it. Seriously, did those teenagers not have any better places to hang out that didn’t disrespect their dead ancestors? That warning also goes for any potential ghost hunters who might want to go poking around for the Catman’s ghost: respect the local laws against trespassing and try to get permission from the owners first.

The Holly Oak Mammoth

It may not have the notoriety as the Piltdown Man or the Paluxy River Man Tracks, but the Holly Oak forget (or pendant) still holds a special place in the canon of archeological hoaxes.

The pendant was first brought to the attention of Frederic Ward Putnam, a prominent anthropologist and biologist, in 1889. His assistant, Hilbourne Cresson, claimed to have found it 25 years earlier near the railroad station in Holly Oak, near the top of the state along the banks of the Delaware River. If genuine, it would have been a staggering find, demonstrating that humans had existed in North America since the Upper Paleolithic (50,000-12,000 years ago) and were making art on par with their Eurasian counterparts during that time.

Putnam and his colleagues, however, did not seem impressed, and the pendant only briefly circulated through museums and world fairs before it faded from the public eye. In December 1891, Cresson was fired from the World’s Columbian Exposition Survey for stealing artifacts from Hopewell archeological sites in Ohio and subsequently took his own life.

Indeed, the type of shell the pendant is made from has since been established to come from the Ohio River valley rather than the Delaware. Several paleontologists, both then and now, have also noted similarities between the mammoth depicted on the pendant and another mammoth depiction found on a tusk at the Abri de la Madeleine site in France. Neither depiction shows the mammoth’s feet, as the artist on the tusk ran out of room.

What finally proved the inauthenticity of the pendant beyond a shadow of a doubt, however, was a radiocarbon dating test conducted in 1986. The test showed that the shell dates to the 9th century C.E., long after mammoths went extinct in North America. Indeed, considering Cresson initially claimed to have found it in a peat bog, the shell should have long since dissolved if it had been there for 10,000 years.

Incidentally, the Holly Oak gorget isn’t the only archaeological forgery involving mammoths found in the Delaware River valley. The Lenape Stone, found in Pennsylvania in 1872, supposedly depicts Eastern Native Americans interacting with woolly mammoths. Much like the pendant, however, the Lenape Stone is widely considered a hoax thanks to several anachronisms in its depiction (the Lenape never used tipis, bows and arrows didn’t exist in North America 10,000 years ago, etc.) and the fact that the stone is broken and the two parts of the engraving don’t match.

Mhuwe

Mhuwe can be considered the Lenape people’s answer to the Wendigo. The monster is described as an ice giant with a ravenous hunger for human flesh that towers high over the trees. It is said to be created when a person succumbs to cannibalism or wintertime-induced insanity. Thus, the Mhuwe myth serves a similar purpose to the Wendigo myth: to encourage tribe members not to give in to their worst impulses during times of starvation and to act in the community’s best interests.

Fortunately, though, Lenape legend also tells that a Mhuwe can be turned back into a human if one treats them with kindness and feeds them a civilized meal of fruits, vegetables, and animal meat. It’s somewhat similar to the “Girl and the Chenoo” story I covered in the entry on Maine cryptids.

The Prime Hook Swamp Creature

Officially, the Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge, a 10,000-acre stretch of coastal land east of Milton, is known as a refuge for horseshoe crabs and migratory birds. Unofficially, though, it has gained a reputation for a much stranger critter said to be living in its confines. No, it’s not a lizard man like the one in South Carolina’s Scape Ore Swamp. This creature is something altogether more weird.

One of the most publicized encounters with the swamp creature comes from Helen J., who claims to have been driving along Broadkill Road with her daughter in July 2007 when they saw a strange creature along the side of the road. “It stood about 2-1/2 to 3 feet tall with long legs, a tan body, a flat, almost puggish face, and a long tail. It had small ears and looked to be about 30 pounds.” Helen claims that her other daughter and a friend saw a similar creature run in front of their car one night and that a local store owner saw it while dirt biking with her father. Helen made inquiries at the Prime Hook Visitors Center, but none of the park staff had any idea what it was she’d seen.

Given Helen’s rather vague description of the creature (she didn’t even specify if it walked on four legs or two), it’s pretty challenging to narrow down the list of suspects. Blogger J.A. Hernandez offers several possible explanations in his article about the creature, including that it was a species not endemic to the region (wolverine, caracal, etc.), that it was a misidentified coyote, that it was a canine with a rare condition called short spine syndrome, etc. Or maybe it was a genuine unknown animal. Who can say?

Pukwudgies

Artist credit: Creepwerks on r/Cryptozoology

Did you think we were done with these troublesome little imps once we left Massachusetts? Nope! Pukwudgies can be found all across the legends of Algonquin-speaking natives of the Northeast, from the Wampanoag of Massachusetts to the Ojibwe of the Northern Great Lakes to (you guessed it!) the Lenape of Delaware, New Jersey, and surrounding areas.

Sadly, though, I haven’t found any online resources about the Pukwudgies specific to Delaware or the Lenape people. It’s mostly just the same information I and many others have provided in several other articles. I couldn’t even find any information on the nuances of the Lenape people’s relationship to the spiky humanoids (or, for that matter, whether or not the Pukwudgie actually does play a part in Lenape myth). One comment on the Reddit thread I linked above mentions a “Beast of Cypress Swamp,” which straddles the border between southern Delaware and Maryland, but that turned out to be a dead end as well (well…sort of).

I’m sorry if that disappoints you, but other writers, including myself, have covered them in depth elsewhere, so you could check there instead.

The Selbyville Swamp Monster

I may not have been able to find anything about Pukwudgies in the Great Cypress Swamp, but there is a beast legend endemic to that boggy wetland. The swamp has a rich history as a home to a maroon community during the days of slavery, the mostly unsalvaged wreckage of a plane that crashed there in 1969, and several fires that have swept through the swamp. One in June 1782 was so fierce that the glow could be seen from 70 miles away.

The legend of the Swamp Monster supposedly dates to a second fire in 1930, when an exploding moonshine still started a fire in the swamp that burned its way through the peat layers for eight months (unsurprisingly, locals often refer to it as the Burnt Swamp). One of the victims of the blaze was reputed to be an old single maker, and the Swamp Monster was said to be his restless ghost, frightening hunters with his unearthly screams. He even became a local bogeyman, with parents threatening to leave misbehaving children in the swamp for the Monster to find them.

The Swamp Monster received a Bigfoot-style makeover in 1964 when several locals reported encountering a hairy, bipedal monster wielding a club. The Monster would leap out at them as they wandered the various nature trails that wound through the swamp. Some were even frightened enough to leave offerings of dead chickens to the beast.

It wasn’t until 1987 that the 1964 wave of sightings was exposed as a hoax perpetrated by newspaper editor Ralph Grapperhaus and his friend Fred Stevens. Stevens had performed as the Monster using a costume made from a Halloween mask and his aunt’s raccoon fur coat. It was fun initially, with Stevens being particularly amused by the bloody chicken offerings. Soon, however, he began to fear for his safety as hunters started combing the swamp for the beast. He and Grapperhus quietly retired the costume to avoid getting shot.

But let’s not be hasty in dismissing the whole story as a hoax. Stevens has made it clear that stories of the Swamp Monster preceded his hoax, and sightings have continued to trickle out for the region in the years since. Some sources have even claimed that the Lenape told stories of a creature in Great Cypress. What do you believe?

The Underwater Panther

I’m a bit hesitant to fully describe this beast of Indigenous legend in this article, as I haven’t been able to find any solid confirmation that this creature is endemic to Lenape myths. The tales of the underwater panther (also known by its Ojibwe name Mishipeshu, meaning “water lynx”) are widespread across the Algonquin-speaking Northeast, featuring mainly in Anishinaabe stories but also sometimes among the Innu and Shawnee, with some experts arguing that they originated in the Mississippian mound builder culture. But I haven’t been able to link them with the Lenape concretely.

I especially wonder if the Walam Olum might play a part in this. For those unaware, the Walum Olum is a collection of Indigenous myths compiled by the French polymath Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1836, which he purported to be a creation myth of the Lenape people. In the many years since its publication, however, it has since been widely dismissed as a hoax, as several myths have been demonstrated to come from non-Lenape sources, like the trickster hero Nanabozho (or Nanabush), who is actually a figure from Anishinaabe legend (native-languages.org claims that a similar trickster figure called Moskim or Tchimammus does exist in Lenape myth, which may have confused Rafinesque). I can’t help but wonder if that’s the reason the underwater panther showed up in the Hunter Whitman graphic that I used to help source these stories.

Sorry if you wanted to learn more about these fascinating creatures of native legend, but I think I’d rather hold off until I reach the Great Lakes region, where I know these creatures are actually endemic.

Speaking of hoaxes, though, let’s close off this article with another one!

The Zwaanendael Mermaid

This close cousin of P.T. Barnum’s Fiji Mermaid is named after the Dutch colony that used to occupy the spot where the town of Lewes sits today. It was common in the 1800s for hoaxers to sew the top half of a mummified monkey carcass to the back half of a fish and try to pass it off as a genuine sea creature. The practice was apparently inspired by some similar specimens that appeared in a type of Japanese carnival called misemono, where the barkers tried to pass them off as juvenile ningyo. The specimen that occupies a glass case in Lewes’ Zwaanendael Museum was originally acquired by a prominent local family called the Martins via an old sea captain, who later lent it to the museum in 1941. The town later bought it from the Martin estate in 1985, thus making the mermaid a permanent exhibit.

However, the obvious nature of this hoax specimen has not stopped stories of actual mermaid sightings around the Cape Henlopen region. At least one source even claims that a sighting by the original Dutch settlers in 1632 led them to abandon the colony entirely. In reality, though, Zwaanendael was abandoned due to a devastating Lenape raid that killed all 32 settlers.

Other sightings have trickled in over the following centuries. One report from the 1700s tells of a beach walker who spotted one standing on the shore (though how it did that without legs is anyone’s guess). In the 1800s, a woman fishing in the bay claimed to have seen one swimming near her boat. In the 1900s, a group of children saw one swimming in the surf, and a kayaker even claimed to have seen one as late as the 2000s. It is described as a classic mermaid except for its glowing green eyes and ability to move through the water quickly.

And that’s another state full of cryptids in the bag. The next time I tackle this subject will be Maryland, home not only to our nation’s capital but also to the Snallygaster, Chessie, the Blue Dog of Fort Tobacco, and many more. But before I do that, it’s time for me to finally put my retrospective of 2023 animation behind me and list my favorite animated films that I didn’t include in Part One of the list. I hope to see you all for that one as well.