A sampler of New England’s animal oddities
Leave a commentFebruary 1, 2016 by Bret Kramer (aka WinstonP)
Having just covered Massachusetts’ “Sacred Cod”, I thought I would share with our blog readers some other stories of strange creatures (or creature strangeness) I mentioned on the Sentinel Hill Press G+ group:
- Maine – The Spectral Moose: “One particularly vivid report came from a man only known as Houston, who was on his way back to camp after a timber cruise around Chesuncook Lake… About 80 yards from the main herd, just inside the timber line, Houston spotted three big, impressive bulls. The interesting part was that one bull dwarfed the other two and made them look like ‘pygmies,’ even though they were by no means small specimens themselves. Houston described this enormous moose as a ‘monster’ and mentioned that it had an almost luminous white coloration.”
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Definitely not a Mi-go.
New Hampshire – Strange 3-toed footprints: “Here, indeed, in objective form before my own eyes, and surely made not many hours ago, were at least three marks which stood out blasphemously among the surprising plethora of blurred footprints leading to and from the Akeley farmhouse. They were the hellish tracks of the living fungi from Yuggoth.” Wait, that’s a quote from ‘The Whisperer in the Darkness’. Sorry.
- Vermont – The Strange Assault on Barnard, Vermont: “Something strange was happening in the Fall of 1783 in the village of Barnard, Vermont. Animals that normally fled from the approach of settlers wandered across the rutted cart-roads unafraid. Pairs of foxes and wolves were spotted on the edges of fields, sometimes fighting, sometimes simply watching the livestock.”
- Connecticut – The Black Dog of the Hanging Hills: “Nearly every account… dutifully mentions that the first report of the creature comes from the account of the geologist W.H.C. Pynchon in the Connecticut Quarterly… I would hazard that not many modern paranormal reporters have actually read the Pynchon account since, despite the tales implicit suggestion that the narrator too perished after a third encounter with the Black Dog, a few facts tend to dispute this version of events and, indeed, call the whole story into question.”
Rhode Island – The Cat Who Sensed Death – “After about six months, the staff noticed that Oscar, just like the doctors and nurses, would make his own rounds. Oscar would sniff and observe patients, then curl up to sleep with certain ones. The patients he would sleep with often died within several hours of his arrival.”
Category: New England Folklore, Useful Links | Tags: Barnard VT, Oscar the 'Death Cat', The Black Dog of the Hanging Hills, The Spectral Moose of Maine