Out Of Place Alligators

On April 22, 2007, the New York Times reported a fascinating news story, namely that a two-foot long alligator had been found sunbathing by a small lake in Huntigton, N.Y., and had been captured by county police. At the time of the article's publication, the police were still looking for the owner of the animal, presumebly to press charges against the person for illegally owning an alligator. To the uninitiated, this would just seem to be a simple case of an escaped pet, but those of us who tend to look at the world through "Fortean-tinted glasses" (to borrow a phrase from Scott Maruna) will immediately think of the "crazy croc" phenomenon, which has been extensively documented by researchers such as Loren Coleman, who discussed it in his classic book Mysterious America.

Out of place animals are nothing new to the American landscape, and alligators in particular have popped up everywhere, making appearances in environments far outside their native territories. With this in mind, it is no surprise that even Long Island has had encounters with runaway alligators, although as in other cases they were always placed into the "escaped pet" context. Take for example, an article from the June 4th, 1896 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

In this case, as is noted in the article, the feral alligator seen around Woodsburgh was said to be the escaped pet of a Mr. Reiner, sh0wcasing an early example of this explanation that has since been regularly used by police and the media to account for "crazy croc" reports. There are no known followups in the local media on this report, so the outcome remains sadly unknown(if anyone has any extra information related to this case, please email me).

Manhattan has also had its fair shares of OOP (out of place) alligator reports, which may have subsequently given rise to the urban legend of alligators that live in the sewers of New York City (again, as discussed in Loren Coleman's book Mysterious America). Most of the reports have already been uncovered and examined by Coleman and other researchers, but there may still be reports out there that have yet to see the light of day, such as one from Sept. 22, 1899, once again from the BDE:

Back in September of 1899, some boys witnessed something peculiar at 175 McKibbin street, located in the Eastern District. As the author of the article notes:

All those who came to see the animal at the Bock residence were puzzled over how it had come to wind up in a puddle in the Eastern District of Manhattan, with the boys even declaring that they had seen another alligator of similar size that they had been unable to capture. It was even speculated that there may have been more alligators lurking in the cellar, but whether this was ever proven to be true sadly remains unknown at the moment. As with most other cases of this type, the alligators were explained as being escapees:

Forget about drugs, the number one trade of illegal goods in this country must apparently be in alligators..

The Mapleton Phantom

As mentioned in my last post, in 1894 the town of Mapleton, Long Island experienced a ghost scare that would excite the imaginations of the town's residents and remain forever unequaled in the history of the island. The Mapleton Phantom received quite a bit of fame in its day and seems to have had even the scientific community curious about its identity. The apparition had several ghost-hunting expedtions after it in search of proof of its existence, and so this particular case is an oddity in the history of ghostly encounters and hauntings. Never again would a ghost create such excitement as to have scientific expeditions put together to track it down, and Long Island wouldn't again become famous for ghosts until the Amityville Horror hoax almost one hundred years later..

*NOTE* All articles taken (as always) from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

1) Mapleton Slights Its Ghost (Aug. 11, 1894)

This tongue-in-cheek article, the first known mention of the Mapleton Phantom, laments that the residents of Mapleton seem to have been ignoring their resident apparition, despite a spectactular multiple-witness sighting from a train that had taken place the prior morning. Indeed, to quote a recounting of the event by Richard Larke, superintendent of the road, who was a passenger on the train at the time,

"We had just passed Woodlawn, the only station between Coney Island and Mapleton, without stopping, and had rounded the curve, when Fireman Van Pelt pulled my coat sleeve and pointed ahead, over to the left of the track. I saw what seemed to be a tall white figure. It seemed motionless at first, and you may believe me or not, but I'll take my oath that it was standing, or appeared to be standing, just where last Sunday's suicide occurred. It was tall and shadowylike. It had the appearance of a substance gradually melting into a filmy white nothing, and seemed to be covered with a long white, filmy vail. Two seconds after I saw it it began moving over toward the railroad track. It moved slowly at first, waving its long draped arms. I could see distinctly, as we approached nearer, that it motioned to us, gesticulating as one would do trying to stop a train. Engineer Mailon then saw it. He began to blow his whistle with a sucession of sharp toots and put on brakes. The thing didn't get out of the way, though it was careful to avoid the light of the head lamp, and the train was brought to a standstill. Just as the train stopped the thing glided off the track and skimmed along toward the woods, all the time gesticulating as if motioning someone to follow. It disappeared in the woods."

While the appearance of the Phantom in this particular instance was rather indistinct, the article provides a more detailed description of the apparition, presumeably based on (as of yet undiscovered by this author) prior encounters:

"It is tall and shadowylike. It melts into filmy white nothing. It has a white, filmy vail. Its arms are draped, or else it has puffed sleeves. It is about the size of a woman. It crouches. It has eyes of fire and is as big as a tree, but gets smaller when you look at it. It may have geunine feet, but perhaps they are imitation, for what use would feet be to a ghost? It can wail in a lonesome and despairing manner. Of course, it can glide. The most ordinary kind of a ghost can glide."

Scores of people riding the train claimed to have seen the ghost, but residents of Mapleton were skeptical of any claims of the paranormal, namely due to the fact that none of them had seen the phantom. Indeed, according to the Eagle article, the universal sentiment in Mapleton was that any claims of a ghost were "ridiculous". Hence, this explained why the author of the piece had lamented at its beginning that Mapleton was apathetic towards its resident ghost and its residents displayed no interest or curiousity.

Interestingly enough, as is noted above in the first quotation, the phantom had been seen right where a Margaret Barning had recently killed herself, providing a possible identity for the mysterious entity that would eventually become the hot topic of Mapleton.

2) The Ghost Bobs Up Again (Aug. 13, 1894)

Two days later the Phantom made news again, terrifying a work crew that had gone out after midnight on the Sea Beach railway, which was near the spot where the ghost had appeared to the train full of people two days prior, on August 11th. This new incident can be summarized as follows, in a direct quote from the article:

"Saturday night the Sea Beach railway had a work train out in charge of Conductor Hilger and Engineer Kirk. A gang of laborers was along. This train was on a side track just below Mapleton, near Woodlawn, waiting for the 1 o' clock train from Coney Island to pass. The latteh (sic?) train was running in two sections to accommodate the crowd. After the first section of twelve cars had gone by, Mike Clooch, one of the laborers on the work train, emitted a blood curdling yell, pointed toward the woods, where the ghost had been seen to retreat, and made for the locomotive. Everyone divined at once the cause of his fright. The other employes caught the alarm and a general panic ensued."

There was another witness to the appearance of the Phantom:

"Hilger, the conductor of the work train, declares that he saw the specter start up out of its favorite field and fly across the railroad track. This was after the first section of the 1 o'clock train had passed. It seems to indicate that the ghost had made a mistake as to the hour, and set out a little ahead of time. None of the employes on the second section of the train saw the ghost, so it seems not to have reappeared from the woods at once. So far as reported, the people on the work train were the only ones who saw it Saturday night."

In addition, other residents of Mapleton claimed to have encountered the apparition, with a Mr. Jere Lott and his coachman being among the first to run across the shadowy specter. John Hennessey, the coachman, had a particularly interesting experience with what he thought to be the Phantom, as he himself related:

"I'm the first man, I believe, who ran against that ghost. Thursday morning, about 12:30 o'clock - and that was a whole twenty-four hours before the train stopped out here to let the thing get out of the way - I was awakened by hearing a tapping at my window pane. It was gentle at first. Then it got louder and oftener. I woke up with a kind of a start, but lay right still. I thought it was birds at first, but soon found it was no bird's sound. Then I began to get up, and, as I stirred about, the tapping stopped, and I heard a brushing sound against the window and then all was still. Next morning, when I had the ghost had been seen by the train folks I knew that's what I'd heard."

Other witnesses included two servant girls working at a house near the Mapleton station who claimed to have seen the Phantom the same night of the mass sighting from the Sea Beach train, describing it as a "tall white figure skimming along over the ground". A flagman named George Washington Mills claimed to have heard a "low, despairing wail", and was indignant that his neighbors believed him to have heard nothing more supernatural than the wail of a neighborhood cat.

Just as in modern times, skeptics and debunkers put forth "explanations" to try and debunk the entire mystery, including that it was all in the minds of the witnesses or even that the ghost was nothing more than a stray pig! The Mapleton residents who claimed to have seen the specter were understandably resentful of being told that they were so ignorant or mistaken as to mistake a pig for a ghost.

3) Scientists Look For A Ghost (Aug. 22, 1894)

By now, almost ten days after the last article, a scientific expedition led by a Professor Edward Drinker Cope of the University of Penn. was put together in order to track down the mysterious Phantom. Oddly enough, the expedition was split between the scientific end and a military end, led by a Colonel John L. Burleigh. According to the article in the Eagle, the expedition met with failure as it failed to spot anything despite being camped out by the spot where Margaret Barning had shot herself, since general consensus in Mapleton by this date was that the ghost was of Margaret Barning, who was haunting the site of her suicide. However, the expedition did manage to find many more witnesses who claimed to have sighted the bizarre entity, bringing the number of people who allegedly claimed to have seen the Phantom well into the hundreds.


Although there are some elements of the different newspaper articles that are questionable, if all the accounts are to be believed, there was a genuine mystery in the town of Mapleton in 1894 that still remains unsolved over one hundred years later. My research into the case is still ongoing, but the Mapleton Phantom can safely join the ranks of strange and mysterious beings that invade our reality for a brief time only to eventually vanish back into the night.

The Freeport Ghost

As every student of Forteanea knows, during the past 70 years there have been numerous monster and "phantom attacker" scares in different parts of the country that typically shared the same characteristics: sightings of some type of bizarre entity would be reported, the locals would become scared and organize into groups to hunt down the invader, and the creature would disappear, never to be seen in those parts. Cryptozoology can point to the Momo case as one of their most famous, while the Mad Gasser of Mattoon has become one of the most widely studied "mass hysteria" incidents in Fortean history, studied not only from a Fortean point of view, but from a sociological perspective as well. However, one never hears about ghost -hunting expeditions, which makes the following account, taken from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, all the more interesting:

As reported in the Nov. 19th, 1893 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, several residents of Freeport, Long Island encountered a bizarre phantom and described it as being eight feet tall and running silently near the speed of a "trotting horse", with a long and "spooklike" beard. It first chased a Martin Beacon and, according to the article, very nearily caught him until Beacon managed to get home and slam the door shut in the face of his pursuer. Interestingly enough, the next witness, an Austin Ellison, heard a strange voice calling his name before turning to see the being dissolve into nothingness, though Ellison was able to note that the face of the figure was covered with "long white hair". It next attacked John R. Losse, who reported that it looked like a man in very ragged clothes, and then chased after Joseph Bennett and Pauline Klein, both of whom were unable to clearly describe their pursuer. At the end, the writer notes that a ghost-hunting expedition had been put together to go out and search the night after the article was published.

It is possible that some or maybe even all of the reported encounters could be chalked down to a mentally unbalanced homeless man, and the fact that Bennett and Klein were unable to describe their pursuer could mean that it was just someone suffering from a mental disorder and not a paranormal incident. However, a strike against this theory is the claim by Ellision that he saw the alleged ghost dissolve into thin air, not to mention the strange speed displayed by the phantom, who was almost able to overtake Beacon in his pursuit. The fact that Ellison also allegedly heard a voice speak to him first before he saw the ghost is interesting as well, since in most cases ghosts tend to be largely silent and not prone to speaking to witnesses (though if I am wrong on this, someone please correct me).

Up next: The Mapleton Phantom - Long Island's Great Ghost Scare

*Note* - I am very bogged down with work for classes right now, 18 credits is killer, so as I said in my last post I am trying my best to update and get back to everyone. I plan to get the Mapleton post up by Sunday night the latest, so please be patient, if you read this and I have not responded to your email yet, I will, just give me some time. Thanks.

The Long and Winding Road..

hey everyone, I apologize for such a long delay in updating, but I've been trying to get work done for my classes and so I've been a little behind in other areas that I've wanted to work on. In the next few days I plan on both writing a decent blog entry detailing ghost hunting expeditions on Long Island in the 19th century and also to get back to people who wrote me through email, so I ask you to please bear with me. For now though, here are two pieces I wrote a while ago, they are more op-ed pieces than the ones I usually write, but for now they will have to do:

"The Native Americans have many names and legends about the creature that the white man has come to know as Bigfoot or Sasquatch, but probably the most prominent one is that the creature only shows itself when there is big change on the horizon. "The Big Man", as is one name for the animal, is held to be a spirtual being, only showing itself to those who respect nature, and so the recent surge in reports has many of the tribes convinced that big change is coming soon, though they hold that change to be neither good or bad, but simply being what it is.
With the surge in recent years of reports of not only Bigfoot, but other anomalous happenings, it seems that change is indeed coming soon that may very well impact us all. UFO sightings continue to come in from across the globe, leaving no region of the Earth immune from their mysterious purpose and design. Crop Circles increase in complexity and design, culminating in the first ever 3D design recently found in an Oxfordshire field. Sightings of strange animals, encounters with bizarre entities, falls of fish from the sky, ghostly happenings, mystical occurrences...all of these reports are building up to something huge, something that has never been seen before in this planet's history and probably never will be seen again. 2012 is inching closer and closer with every new day, is this what is being built up towards? It is very possible, but not absoulte.
Big change is coming soon, now it is up to us to pay attention and keep our eyes and minds open for the new and possibly grand changes that are on their way."

and

" In 1955 a farmhouse in Kentucky was beseiged for an entire night by small, goblin-like creatures that proved resistant to bullets and would float away into the darkness come the morning.
In 1966 a headless, black winged humanoid flies around a town in West Virginia for an entire year, scaring the locals senseless and coincending with a wave of other strange activity, including UFO activity, poltergeist occurrences, and Men in Black visitations.
In 2003 a report is submitted telling of a bonfire gathering in the Illinois woods that is interrupted by the arrival of about thirty "stick people", who stand completely motionless but still manage to completely terrify the witnesses.
Now all three of these reports sound like something out of a science fiction or horror novel, but, with the possible exception of the last report, they are all true, and they all happened. They are not the only cases however, for plenty of other reports exist of encounters with winged humanoids, lake monsters, hairy bipeds, fairies, otherwordly beings, and strange creatures and entities that by all logical sense should not exist and certainly should not be generating reports in this manner. Yet, assuming the witnesses are telling the truth, and there is no reason to think that most of them aren't, then what could the appearance of these beings possibly mean? One reader at the Fortean Times forums submitted his theory that the purpose of these entities may be "to break us out of the box of our own thinking. And with that achieved, there really is no need to provide proof of their existence, or even very frequent exposure. The task is accomplished - our minds are freed to relate to the universe again with a re-opened sense of wonder and healthy curiosity." I find myself in agreement with this statement, though I wish to add that this doesn't mean I would say to give up searching for evidence of their existence, because this would be a faulty way of thinking, as evidence and proof must always be sought, not just for cryptozoology and its more paranormal branches, but for all fields of Fortean inquiry. Rather, I would say that it is the hunt itself that brings the most enrichment for the hunter, for it forces him/her, as said above, to open ones mind and expand the intectual horizons, adopting a new view of the universe that may have been impossible to formulate before the hunt began. These types of things will never be taken seriously by the mainstream public at large, due to the admitted bizarre nature of the reports, forver remaining on the fringe, but that is inconsequential at best, for there will always be those who walk to the beat of a different drummer, and who strive to bring light to the darkest and most bizarre corners of the world that all else have neglected. Even if there prove, for example, to be no such thing as stick people running around in Illinois, one will still be richer for the experience of looking, and will benefit tremendously, intectually and even spirtually from daring to pursue the parts of reality that have been deemed "impossible", and yet, still are."

Ghosts of Long Island

While Long Island may not be known as a ufological or cryptozoological hotspot to most, if there's one thing that the island does have plenty of, it's ghosts. The most famous case from Long Island would without a doubt have to be the "Amityville haunting", spawning a series of movies and national interest in the events that took place in "High Hopes" despite the case eventually being exposed as a hoax. Regardless of this fact, reports of hauntings and ghostly experiences have being noted in local newspapers for over a century, serving as a documentation of the island's paranormal history. While there are many cases that could be discussed and analyzed, for now a small catalog of reports taken from that most Fortean of newspapers, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, shall serve as a quick illustration of the nature of ghost reports near the end of the 19th century:

1) Visits The Earth Again - The Screams of a Murderer's Ghost Heard in Port Jefferson (Aug. 11, 1889)

The residents of Port Jefferson were terrifed in this year by mysterious, ear-piercing screams issuing from a barn on the Emmet Darling property. It was known to the local residents as a place where a double murder had taken place many years prior, ending with the murderer, a Mr. Waters, hanging himself in said barn. The eerie screams are said to have begun soon afterwards, lasting for several decades and always ringing out from the barn roughly around midnight. Conventional explanations, such as a creaky weather vane or the call of a nocturnal bird, were put forth in order to explain the phenomenon, but all were ruled out as not being able to adequately explain the phenomenon. The screams eventually died out, but returned with a vengeance shortly before the article was written, despite that Emmet Darling's aunt, who lived at the property at the time, denied ever hearing the screams (one suspects that she might have been in denial). This article is interesting, not only because it took place in the town next to mine, but because strange, highpitched screams have long been a staple of Fortean phenomena. Indeed, as Loren Coleman writes in his book Mysterious America, "This peculiar sound - also described like that of a baby crying- often spills out of hanuted houses to bathe the locale in eerie vibration. Strangely, the awesome Bigfoot seem to emit this sound, as well as those elusive phantom panthers that prowl the landscape. And, of course, the legendary banshee is famous for its terrible scream. Often, a myriad of "unrelated" unexplained phenomena have the same element in common."

Now, of course, no honest or sensible researcher would try to link haunted houses to phantom panthers, or Bigfoot to the banshee, but it has been increasingly noted by researchers that many other types of phenomena do share many similar aspects. Whether this has any significance towards their meaning, however, still remains a subject of debate. (Note: In a later post, I plan on returning to the characteristic of high pitched screams in anomalous phenomena reports, and how it has been consistently included in reports throughout the decades).

2) A Lively Ghost - Which Is Causing Consternation Near Far Rockaway (Dec. 7th, 1885)

As the heading of the article noted, the specter that was seen regularly by "scores of persons" in the belfry of the Methodist Episcopal Church was indeed a playful character, jumping and dancing throughout the belfry. It also exhibited other curious behaviors, such as "enlarging and decreasing in size according to the angle of observation", or following certain witnesses and hanging around their homes for hours. Some people even claimed to hear the bell of the church ring at odd hours of the night. In fact, one night, as the article notes, "Half the village declares that at precisely ten o'clock the bell was tolled, and the other half is laughing at the superstitution, as they call it. Immediately after the tolling, three hearty amens were heard, and then the specter flattened itself out on the roof. This was interpretated to be an attitude of prayer."

It is noted that, appropriately enough, the ghost supposedly makes its appearance from a graveyard, though there are no reports in the article of any witnesses actually seeing the ghost appear in the adjacent cemetary. Jerome Clark, in his book Unnatural Phenomena, reported a news story from Arkansas in 1894 dealing with the appearance of a ghost in a belfry that was also alleged to have rung a bell, showing that at least some apparitions seem to have a fondness for church belfrys. Interestingly enough, although not related to ghosts and hauntings, Rockaway Beach was experiencing a "wildman scare" during this same period, with many people claiming to have witnessed a strange wildman on the nearby beach, and who was theorized to be an insane shipwrecked sailor (these reports and others from the island will be the subject of an upcoming post).

3) A Firey Tongue - The Latest Long Island Ghost Story (Dec. 18, 1885)

The "firey tongue" noted in the title of this piece belongs to a specter that was seen regularly on the Centerville race course just south of Woodhaven, and just like the stories from Port Jefferson and Far Rockaway noted above, it not only reappeared after a span of five years but was witnesses reguarly by scores of people every night. The ghost was seen to first appear in the vincity of the stables at the old Centerville Hotel and then moving at a quick speed across the race course, stopping at certain intervals and even reportedly saying "Whoa!". Disagreements (perhaps inevitably) arose between the witnesses on certain details such as whether the apparition was wearing a robe of white or a garment more the color of sheep's wool, and whether the specter was the ghost of one of two jockeys murdered on the track, or perhaps the troubled spirit of the murderer responsible for one of the bloody deeds. However, as the article notes, "But on one other point there is no disagreement - the ghost spits fire like a foundry chimney and leaves a sulphurous odor behind it."
The characteristic of fire spitting is something that does not come up in ghost reports very often, making this an unusual case if we stick mainly to looking at reports of ghosts and hauntings. If we broaden our range and look at other Fortean phenomena, however, we will notice that fire spitting is a detail that appeared in some Spring-Heeled Jack reports, to continue the train of thought noted earlier about similarities between anomalous phenomena occurences. While I would not advance the theory that Spring-Heeled Jack was a ghost, and the reports of his spitting fire may have very well been exaggerated, it remains an interesting coincedence none the less.

While these three accounts are but a small sample of the avilable reports from Long Island, and indeed I have some in my files that I have not touched upon yet, they represent the kind of ghostly experiences that Long Islanders have reported over the years and that form part of our paranormal history. In my next post, I plan on discussing the periodic "ghost scares" that have overtaken parts of the island from time to time, and which even led to the creation of ghost hunting expeditions. Stay tuned.

Of Dragons and Dinosaurs - Part 3

Thus announced the December 8th, 1901 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, telling the strange story of a hunter's discovery in the Florida Everglades of what appeared to be an actual living dinosaur. The event is described in the article as follows:


Interestingly enough there is a dash of what seems like conspiracy thrown into the equation as well:

This article from 1901 is an amazing historical piece, not just because of the alleged shooting of a dinosaur, but because it effectively describes the field of cryptozoology decades before the likes of Sanderson and Heuvelmans. As told to the paper by an anomoyous source either within or connected to the group, it discusses a secret group of scientists who, according to the article, worked in secret to uncover living fossils and provide proof for their beliefs that many mythological creatures, such as dragons and griffins, were in fact based on medieval sightings of these living fossils. It then goes on to state that, given the type of climates that dinosaurs are known to have preferred, this group of scientists narrowed down the possible areas to search in in North America to two different areas: the Florida Everglades and, interestingly enough, the Dismal Swamp, between Virginia and North Carolina. Of these two, the Everglades seemed the more probable of the two, and thus the shooting as described above was the alleged result.

Why wasn't this discovery, and also the alleged discovery of proof of living mammoths, made public and announced to the world? The anomoyous source explains as follows:


The cryptozoological literature has spoken for years about the rumors of surving mammoths in Alaska and Siberia, and indeed there are documented newspaper accounts from over a century ago that discuss sightings of such animals. There are even accounts of brave explorers killing surviving mammoths to gather their skins and pelts, though such claims are few and far in between and some have been exposed as hoaxes. The newspaper's mysterious source goes on to describe one such hunting expedition that led to the death of a mammoth and the obtainment of its body as proof. As the source describes the final moments of the hunt:


What eventually happened to the remains?:



The newspaper account, when compared to the known hoax cited above, seems possibly to be a hoax, and that may indeed be the likely explanation for the whole piece, as newpaper hoaxes were notorious in the early days. However, assuming for the sake of argument that it is true and a valid report, could there have actually been a secret group of cryptozoologists going on expeditions back in the late 19th-early 20th centuries and obtaining the proof that modern cryptozoologists have struggled to obtain ever since? To put it into a larger context, can we believe any of the previously discussed reports dealing with dragons and dinosaurs to be true, or are they all newspaper hoaxes? Are some true, and others fake? If they are true, then what are we dealing with here? Some type of zooform phenomena, some now-extinct undiscovered animals, or something else? What do you think?

Bookmark

Just a quick note for anyone who might actually be reading this, but I am aware that I haven't updated in a week, just need to find the time to do so. Once I get the time, I plan on finishing my "Of Dragons and Dinosaurs" posts and then head back to Long Island to write about the ghosts of LI and then the wildmen and gorilla reports on the island from the late 19th-early 20th centuries. This post will be removed with my next update, but for now it's going to serve as a bookmark.

Brian