Weird Things Culture Researcher Matt Finaly takes a weekly look into the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

A lake isn’t a lake without a lake monster. Or, so it would seem. With more than 250 serpentine leviathans of varying size and ferocity trolling the dark reefs and hidden inlets of lakes worldwide, these arcane monstrosities are to inland bodies of standing water what Zagat ratings are to classy restaurants, providing immediate validation by way of an instantly identifiable symbol – a dark, long-necked silhouette asserting a mysterious vigilance in the dying warmth of deep orange light squeezed from a setting sun.

Sometimes more mascots than monsters, these aquatic behemoths are often as much unwitting chamber of commerce employees as they are enduring mysteries of cryptozoology. While Nessie, the stalwart cover girl of lake monster commercialization, may be the most ubiquitous of these creatures, North America has its own heavy-weight lacusine cryptid, with an equally cloying nickname – Champ.

For a supposed Mezozoic-era reptile hidden deep within the black, icy craw of Lake Champlain, Champ has become a surprisingly active community member in the various cities and towns that hug the shores surrounding the 125-mile-long body of water. His solemn reptilian visage adorns a variety of commercial signage, his wooden doppelganger smiles confidently from the courthouse lawn in Port Henry, New York, and his mere existence is lauded via fly balls and grounders by the Vermont Lake Monsters, Vermont’s only minor league baseball affiliate. Since the first reported sighting in the early 1870s, everyone from research scientists to P.T. Barnum have felt the scaly allure of this North American legend. As the world amasses an ever-growing role call of lake monsters to shout from dockside tea-shirt stands and minor league baseball stadiums, it seems appropriate to take one such monster, America’s own Champ, and look at the lake, legends and lives that, in just the right light and from enough of a distance, almost look like a giant, aquatic serpent posed stoically against the horizon.

The legend of Champ, or, at least, the legend that became the legend of Champ, actually pre-dates the first sighting by centuries. Both the Iriquois and Abenaki tribes, who lived beside the dark, glacier-wrought lake before it bore the name of French explorer Samuel De Champlain, traditionally submitted offerings to an entity that they claimed was hidden beneath the lake’s still, black waters. Still, most of the polytheistic native cultures had water spirits or other aquatic deities that they ritually attempted to placate and satisfy in order to ensure full harvests and good health. The Iriquois, who supplicated a being in Lake Champlain (then called Lake Ondakina), also made offerings to the nearby Niagara falls, annually pitching a white canoe, filled with fruits, vegetables and a virgin, over the roaring cataract and onto the foam-addled rockbed below. Researching America’s many lake monsters reveals that almost every one can be traced back to a Native American legend that, more often than not, was boorishly literalized through the polarizing lens of European culture, turning a tale like that of Champ from a story about the living soul of the water into a story about a giant friggin’ lake snake.

The first few reported sightings occurred between 1871 and 1873, around the time that an increasingly industrialized America began seeing mountains and lakes as geological obstacles to be overcome, rather than natural spectacles to be wondered over. As such, the first sighting occurred when a group of men working on laying one of the four railroad lines that carried packed train cars over the water-logged expanses of New York, Vermont and Quebec that compose the lake witnessed a giant snake-like creature in the water. The next encounter was reported after a sight-seeing steamboat either collided with, or was disturbed by the wake from (reports are, at best, sketchy), some sort of underwater beast. The third sighting, made by a child who saw the creature at a distance from the shores of the lake, is worth mentioning in the context of the others because, in the child’s report of the event, he explicitly stated that the animal made “a noise like a steamboat.”

These sightings all underscore a larger point about the changing landscape of America and the development of technology that, in cases like that of the tourist steamboat, allows, and in cases like that of the railroad workers, forces, people to come in contact with formerly unfamiliar natural environments. The third sighting demonstrates this strange dichotomy – as new and exciting technological developments enter the cultural vernacular, so, to, do previously rarified elements of the natural world. In the eyes of a child, the natural thing that astounds him – a sea monster – is described in terms of a corresponding technological development that astounds him – a steamboat. A lot of these folks had only recently been given the opportunity to chuff out into the black center of the lake, borne out by exhalations of pressurized steam, or stare out, between hammer strikes, across a sprawling, adjacent plane of bruise-colored water. A common animal of uncommon size would be monstrous, fantastical and unfamiliar to an observer unaccustomed to the thriving, multifaceted eco-system of the lake. Not to mention, once one person believes that they’ve seen something extraordinary, others follow suit.

With the railroads quickly turning America into a manic stitch-work of spikes and ties, it only made sense for P.T. Barnum to purchase a train and make the most of his profession. “P.T. Barnum’s Traveling World’s Fair, Great Roman Hippodrome and Greatest Show on Earth” was already proving hugely successful for Barnum when he got wind of the increasing number of lake monster sightings coming out of the New York and Vermont areas. Always as much a debunker as a showman, Barnum immediately offered $5,000 for the carcass of Champ, stating that if such a creature existed, he had to have it as part of his fantastical cabinet of allegedly natural curiosities. If the fevered testimony of a dozen amazed eye witnesses wasn’t enough to convince the American Northeast that a reptilian goliath was swimming figure-eights beneath the growing number of railroad trestles, ferries and lighthouse beams that criss-crossed and skirted each other across the surface of Lake Champlain, the winking endorsement of the Prince of Humbugs certainly was. The local obsession that, over the past century, has, ultimately, done more good for the binocular industry than any facet of modern biology, was born.

In the 20th century, after many obsolete steamboats were scrapped and rail lines were torn up or abandoned to make room for highways, other technological advancements, especially the development and production of consumer-grade photography equipment and video cameras, ensured an enduring audience for America’s most notorious sea monster. Champ has been embroiled in photograph doctoring scandals, subjected to state-of-the-art echolocation techniques and even forced to brave the emoticon banner ads and inane talkbacks of YouTube, starring in a highly disputed, recently-removed video in which he darted beneath a fisherman’s boat.

As the legend perpetuated, giving way to the aforementioned statuary, logos and mascotdom, Champ has taken on a kind of mythic status, larger and more indelible than the enigmatic sum of 300 reported sightings. More than just an urban legend or cautionary rejoinder delivered in the name of safe swimming, Champ represents the life-effusing quintessence of a region; he is bound to the lake, but master of its waters, and possessed of eyes that have witnessed the triumphs and tragedies of Champlain’s beaches, inlets and people – people who, in turn, claim to have, in fleeting seconds lost quickly to the white glare of the afternoon sun or the eldritch darkness of evening water, witnessed him.

In this way, Champ has once again become the stuff of Iriquois legend, bestowing fortune upon towns who offer up small tokens, like car wash signs and minor league baseball, in tribute to his enduring existence.

Weird Things Culture Researcher Matt Finaly takes a weekly look into the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

It’s really only a certain type of person who, upon seeing a group of several human/reptile hybrids caught in the glare of his headlights as they crouch together in the humid darkness beneath a bridge, shifts his car into park and sits back in his seat, waiting to see what’s going to happen next.

Back in May of 1955, in Loveland, Ohio, this person was an exhausted businessman driving home at 3:30 AM along the snaking road that ravels lazily along the Little Miami River. The creatures, which the witness described as child-sized bipedal frogmen, their glistening heads dappled with creases and wrinkles, were grouped in a squatting huddle and, for several minutes, seemed indifferent to the harsh incandescence being cast over their clandestine commiseration – that is, until one of the frog people turned to face the man and lifted its hand above its head. In the heavy stillness of the night’s muggy quiet, the witness saw that the creature’s raised hand was clutching some sort of cylindrical rod that was issuing a blinding spray of bright sparks out into the damp air. As quickly as he had made the decision to pull over and watch the monsters’ nocturnal rendezvous, the man started his car and screeched off down the road towards town, where he startled local enforcement with his incredible tale.

Be they H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional Deep Ones or the gator-man that a profusion of real-life New Jerseyites claim is stalking the outlying Garden State swamps, Lizard people, amphibious humanoids and other monstrous reptilian chimaeras have hollowed out an impressive lair for themselves in the landscape of 20th century American folklore. 1954, the year before the Loveland sighting, saw the release of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, an extremely popular 3-D horror film produced by Universal Studios. In the movie, a group of scientists exploring the Amazon discover evidence of a missing link between amphibians and humans, which turns out to be very much alive in the form of an aggressive gill-man with whom the scientists are forced to do battle.

What brought a vision of a similar grotesque, shambling oddity to the sprawling Cincinnati suburb of Loveland? And what might a history of flash floods, near-extinct specters of depression-era railroads and rumors of the importation of haunted European antiques have to do with it?

After making a decisive split from the brawny Ohio River, The Little Miami idles and flows for 100 scenic miles of lush woods, teeming beds of rare mussels and small, idyllic towns. Loveland is one of these towns, and was built as a summer resort, its downtown area constructed to bask in the breeze that picks up the coolness and quiet whisperings of the river’s water, dispersing them out over the village, which initially billed itself as “Little Switzerland.” For all of the wealthy tourists who came to luxuriate along the banks of the Little Miami, so, too, did intermittent disasters, as the proximity of the town center to the river often led to flash flooding and water damage. In the rainy spring of 1913, the river reared up and pounced on the town, leveling a corn mill and laying waste to the Loveland Bridge. The seasonal threat presented by the unassuming Little Miami has plagued Loveland throughout its early existence, until a dike was finally built in the early ‘60s. On average, May is the rainiest month for Southwestern Ohio, feeding rivers into bloated, rushing stupors. The sight of high, charging waters tumbling parallel to the quiet, darkened early-morning silhouette of the town would make any local anxious; exhausted, nighttime visions of the tumbling, swollen river could easily lead an anxious Ohioan to dread, aquatic visions of the web-toed denizens of a flooded Loveland.

Along with its central waterway, Loveland serves as a hub for the criss-crossing network of hard wood and hot iron that bear various rail engines and cars across the expanses of forest and farmland that constitute the American Midwest. With the town situated along the mainline of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad during the acme of rail transit in the United States, dozens of trains, both freights and passenger carriers, chugged through the town each day. Its quiet surroundings and convenient position along the busy tracks made Loveland, and, in fact, the entire Cincinnati area, including Northern Kentucky and Eastern Illinois, popular hobo territory. Throughout the depression era, rail-hopping transients, with little more than anemic bindles and healthy work ethics, piled silently out of the myriad boxcars that rumbled along the local Ohio freight lines.

Eventually, tightening of rail yard security and the passing of the GI bill (many hobos were all too happy to trade in their rucksacks for an M1911 pistol) and the Housing Act of 1949, however, drastically reduced the need and opportunity to live the dangerous, nomadic life of a hobo, making the once-ubiquitous sightings of these restless wanderers more and more anomalous. Still, throughout the early 1950s, a small group of Americans still embraced the rattling thrill of life on the rails, curling up in open boxcars and relying on fire pits and canned foods for survival. It’s easy to picture a group of these scraggly anachronisms huddled beneath a Loveland bridge in staunch defiance of the modern age, and even easier to imagine the confusion that a passing witness might feel as the shadows of the culvert and the mists of history settled over their hunched, wind-battered forms to create the nightmarish illusion of an inhuman cabal.

The railroads had as much influence in attracting a permanent population of families as they did in transporting drifting, migrant workers in and out of the Loveland area. By the late 1800s, over 40 passenger trains a day roared through, showing off a town that had scenic beauty, a tight-knit local community and an interesting pre-history, as demonstrated by the areas many strong Native American ties. In the 1920s, as an even larger incentive to draw people to the Loveland area, The Cincinnati Enquirer ran a promotion offering a free plot of land along the Little Miami to anyone who purchased a year-long subscription to the paper’s daily edition.
It was through this offer that Scoutmaster Harry Andrew obtained the two pieces of land upon which he and his troop built The Loveland Castle, a large stone replica medieval castle, complete with battlements and a throne room. Construction began in 1929, and by the mid-‘50s, when the population of Loveland had begun to grow by more than 500 people each year, various rumors and legends began to circulate among the expanding populace. These tales, mostly based around haunted artifacts with bloody histories being imported by the eccentric Harry Andrew from ghost-infested European castles, had no basis in fact, but, nevertheless, spread, imbuing the impressive stone behemoth, and its surrounding gardens, with a strange sense of foreignness that had both nothing and everything to do with the structure’s apparent visual incongruence with the rest of the small Midwestern town. Viewed from the road like some fairy tale manse brought to life, with the rushing river waters flanking it like an unfinished moat, the castle’s merlons dark against the gray sky, the idea of an accompanying group of magical creatures crowding beneath a nearby bridge seems almost logical.

In 1886, some Loveland townies were poking around an ancient gravel pit when one of them exposed the unmistakable white, osseous fragments of a skeleton. An organized dig revealed the complete skeletelized corpse of a Mastodon and a proliferation of various ancient stone tools. The discovery represented a physical tie, tethering Loveland to its history, even as the town advanced, propagated and grew. By the 1950s, as Loveland hurdled forward, its near-geometric expansion existed in perfect harmony with the past, such that ancient bones, a medieval castle and the last remnants of an evaporating American rail culture brought as much identity to the area as the booming industry of Cincinnati and the sterile splendor of sub-divisions.

Meanwhile, pop culture, by way of Universal Studios, re-wrote the history of man to include an amphibious missing link alive and well in the dark jungles of Southern America. It seems almost fitting that in the cluttered gravel pit of an anxious mind, so, too, would this imagined history find a place for itself along the grassy shores of the Little Miami, next to the ramparts and just down the rushing river from the nearest freight yard cooking fire.

Weird Things Culture Researcher Matt Finaly takes a weekly look into the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

photo credit: tvol

Werewolves and Wisconsin have shared an epic, decades-long romance that’s spanned forests, farmland and highways. The bipedal lupine beasts have been sighted horking down road kill and lumbering at locals throughout the southern region of the state for over 70 years. It all started one night in 1936 when a lone man driving down a dark stretch of US 18, just east of Jefferson City, saw a strange, hairy creature that stood at least six feet high and had a canine muzzle and strange three-fingered hands.

The beast was digging up one of the many Native American burial mounds that dapple Wisconsin’s countryside. The witness, a local named Mark Schackelman, drove on, but returned the next night to see if he could find evidence of the creature. Schackelman reports walking over to the mound, only to find the man-wolf standing there, stinking of decaying meat and growling a strange, three-syllable word that sounded like “Gadara.” The witness goes on to report that, understanding the creature to be some agent of evil, he began praying and slowly backing away until he reached his car and was able to escape.

In the ensuing years, more and more reports of werewolf encounters began circulating the state, culminating in the 1990s, when, with dozens of sightings and an investigative book penned by a local journalist, the so-called Bbecame a fixture of Wisconsin’s popular urban lore. Looking back at the sighting that started it all, one has to wonder what truths can be excavated from Mark Schackelman’s bizarre report of his initial visual confrontation, his puzzling late-night return to the site and the talkative monster that he subsequently found there. A Federal program dedicated to the mass poisoning of wolves, religious fervor and wild talk of cannibalized human remains buried deep beneath an ancient city are just the tip of this hairy, snarling, depression-era iceberg.

Wisconsin may be lousy with wolfmen, but during most of the 20th century, the state was almost entirely bereft of wolves. Through the mid 1800s, the animals had flourished throughout the northern United States. Once cattlemen and livestock herders began moving into the Midwest and outlying western regions, however, the beef-coveting predators came to be regarded as little more than mammalian locusts, and organized extermination campaigns were initiated. In 1865, the State of Wisconsin began offering a bounty for executed wolves, and in 1915, the federal government began its own national mass poisoning program. Wisconsin’s expanses of green pastures and sprawling wilderness became a perilous landscape of steel traps, baited trip lines rigged to shotgun triggers and great stinking slabs of raw beef, marinated in cyanide and placed upwind of known hunting grounds. By 1936, any wolf encounter, especially one as far South and as close to a large town as the supposed werewolf sighting reported by Mark Schakelton, would have been rare and shocking, both because of the animals’ scarcity and in light of the spurious media-spun reputation of the creatures as ferocious, blood-thirsty enemies of man.

(Note that the Wisconsin wolf population boom that finally occurred in the 1980s and ‘90s, thanks to conservationists and nature-conscious legislators, coincided exactly with the sudden increase in werewolf sightings throughout the state.)

If there’s one biographical factor that must be considered in accurately reshaping the lens through which Mark Schackelton viewed this terrifying beastie, it’s the witness’ devout Christianity, which Mark himself mentioned in his account, and which was later confirmed by his son, who was interviewed about his father’s experience more than a decade later for a newspaper article about Wisconsin werewolves. “Gadara,” the name of the city in which Jesus cast thousands of demons out of a single man and into a herd of swine, is the word that Schackleton heard rasped out into the night air on the hot, feral breath of some hulking anonymous nocturne.

Clearly, Schackleton not only had such (at least subconscious) familiarity with the New Testament as to know the proper names of locations associated with Jesus’ miraculous acts, but also some larger, penetrating fear that lead him to hear the name of that place – a place of demons – sounded out by a snarl in the darkness. The bible is rife with passages that use the wolf as an analog for all things sly, deceptive and traitorous, portraying the carnivore as a savage fiend that feeds on the weak and ignorant; a person with a deep knowledge of, and respect for, scripture might, in coming face to face with a wolf or other wild canine, feel a spiritual dread that reaches even deeper than the inevitable primal pangs of the fight/flight dilemma. But if man of faith turned irrational, demon-haunted coward seems a bit too pat, consider the larger backdrop of Southern Wisconsin, a place with myriad legends of things prone to bumping long and loud in the night.

After all, amidst the fevered prayer and talking animals, it’s easy to forget the third major player in Schackleton’s account: a Native American burial mound. Jefferson, Wisconsin, is situated just to the North of the area where, sometime around 800 BC, the Woodland people began building giant effigy mounds in the shape of various animals (including wolf-like water spirits), and just south of the ancient city of Aztalan, which was built circa 900 AD by a large group of mound-building Middle Mississippians who migrated from farther south. Since archeological digs began in 1919, Aztalan has provided Wisconsin folk legend with some of its most enduring tales. Though scientists were mainly concerned with studying the mound architecture, pottery remnants and trading materials found at the site, unsubstantiated rumors of fragmented human bones, split for easy marrow consumption and riddled with teeth marks, quickly began spreading among the area’s citizenry.

Even before the archeologists arrived, eerie whisperings about Aztalan’s founders began circulating when, in 1900, people reported seeing giant underwater pyramids at the bottom of Rock Lake, just three miles from the borders of the ancient city. The existence of the mysterious stone piles wasn’t confirmed until an official diving expedition was made in 1937, during a dry summer when the water level was at a record low. Once they were investigated, it became clear that, at the time the structures were built, the lake was either non-existent or in the earliest stages of formation. At the time of Schackleton’s encounter, however, the tales of local cannibalism were accompanied by stories of the odd sub-surface structures and the strange, unnatural secrets that no doubt lay drowned and buried, entombed in ancient stone at the bottom of Rock Lake.

The notion that the very essence of the region – the amniotic fluid upon which Wisconsin’s fetal history fed – was formed out of flesh eating, ritual sacrifice and inhuman constructions led to further gossip and campfire stories, until people began saying that all of Aztalan was cloaked in some invisible pall that found visitors to the area afflicted with goosebumps, raised neck hair, irrational paranoia and a pervasive sense of inexplicable dread. Morris Pratt even chose Whitewater, Wisconsin, a town just 30 miles south of Aztalan that was rumored to house a sizeable coven of witches, as the site of the Morris Pratt Institute (locally knows as the spook temple), a school of spiritualism that trained mediums and taught the art of the séance (interestingly, the school had just re-opened in 1935 after a few dormant years due to the depression). As this sensationalist folklore dispersed, it became common knowledge that the wind on the long dark roads and the silent air around the looming mounds was tainted with treachery and magnetic with ghosts.

In the summer of 1936, a record heat wave plopped its scorched, muggy weight down onto North America. In Southern Wisconsin, a lone man left his car and walked cautiously out toward a burial mound that sloped high and dark against the blanched, milky light of the moon. Though it’s uncertain what he saw their, hunched and digging through the hot, heavy dirt, something in the scene before him coaxed the word “Gadara” out of his mind and appended it to the whispered growl of the animal. And in the quiet presence of dark specters in the still breeze, amidst the cold rattle of molar-scarred bones vibrating up through his feet and just out of earshot of the low, ebbing hum of ancient magic vibrating out from below the still surface of Rock Lake, the man prayed low to himself, until he cut through the oppressive exhalations of the night with the loud, coughing roar of his car engine and the comforting certainty of headlights. And whether the lone animal digging around the layers of ancient clay found stone tools and pottery shards or a poison-drenched government flank steak, we’ll never know.

Weird Things Culture Researcher Matt Finaly takes a weekly look into the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

In 1837, something dark and quick began hunting women on the streets of London, pouncing upon them from the shadows and going to work on their clothes with razor talons and flaming breath, only to disappear seconds later, leaping silently over impossibly high hedges and rooftops, leaving behind only the shrill, hollow ghost of maniacal laughter and, of course, a panicked victim.

Descriptions of Spring Heeled Jack varied over the 65 years that he laid siege to London’s gas lit back alleys and dark urban bowers, but early witnesses (somewhat) consistently agree that he sported large pointed ears, an equally pointy nose, bulging eyes, sharp claws, the ability to breathe fire and a penchant for agile escapes via inhumanly powerful jumps (hence his media-coined moniker).

John Thomas Haines’ 1840 play, Spring-Heeled Jack, the Terror of London, marked the first official appearance of Jack in a popular entertainment (he had already become a staple of various Punch and Judy street puppet shows), which was followed by a rash of both sightings and corresponding sensationalized fictionalizations throughout the 1840s and ‘50s. In the name of both topicality and word economy, however, we aim to focus on the years prior to Jack’s assimilation into the everyday pop cultural dialogue of Victorian England.

Accepting, as many experts do, that the initial attacks between 1837 and 1838 were perpetrated by a still-anonymous (though one Henry de La Poer Beresford, dubbed “The Mad Marquess,” is a prime suspect) malicious, costumed prankster, and noting that the perpetrator’s image and misdeeds became the stuff of pop culture legend, the question must be posed: What overriding cultural factors contributed the specific physical attributes that the misogynistic hoaxer built into his monster? In short, why was a quick-footed, fire-breathing demon the obvious avatar for blind dread and mass hysteria in 19th century London?

While some details remain fuzzy (one witness reported that Jack actually had pointy ears while another insisted that he wore a large helmet with two points on it), it’s a given that, with the claws and the various points and the long black cloak, Jack’s intention was to appear as much like the devil (or some other lesser, equally stereotypical demon) as possible. With the post-enlightenment era in full swing and the upper-class spiritualist revival still pending, it’s easy to imagine Jack’s rationale: the upper class is retreating into academies and coffee houses to argue over the need for faith and spirituality in a supposedly enlightened society, while the lower class, fearing both the moral and technical ambiguities of science, keeps a firm (but, suddenly, somewhat unsure) hold on not only religion, but also folklore, both of which are rife with demonic and satanic imagery. Imagine being relieved of the possibility of eternal damnation by an academically driven cultural reformation centered on reason and the explicability of the natural world, only to be attacked by a fire-breathing monster. Invoke the devil at a time when society is certain of his existence, and it only serves as terrifying confirmation – invoke the devil at a time when his existence is in question, and chaos ensues.

Moreover, Jack targeted women. Barring all discussion of spiritual terror or academic ennui, the largest threat to women in 19th century England was the prevailing social hierarchy. Women were often married off to distant relations, to the highest bidder or to the highest social advantage, meaning, in many cases, to strangers or casual acquaintances. Innate to English womanhood was the knowledge that, someday, you will leave your home and move in with a husband you don’t know outside of carefully regulated social gatherings and courtship rituals (if even those) – a man whose true personality and domestic demeanor are a complete mystery. You know, and fear, that your husband could turn out to be a slovenly boor, an inattentive malcontent or, worse, a temperamental, abusive monster. There’s something, then, of the hidden evil in men, worn outwardly by Jack, that would seem particularly frightening to the young women he victimized. Admittedly, it’s ridiculous to suggest that Jack’s victims, or Jack himself, consciously contemplated this dimension of Spring Heeled Jack’s imposingness, but the obvious sex profiling that was paramount to Jack’s victim selection justifies the point, and it’s worth considering the perpetual state of psychological duress that the patriarchy held women in, even before someone donned finger blades and started leaping out of darkened alleys.

And what of the spring heels? By 1837, the industrial revolution was enjoying its heyday in London, including the mass production of all nature of machine components, like coiled springs, which began being manufactured in bulk during the 1780s. The wide availability of mechanical sundries, combined with an alleged spate of urban legends involving the devil pursuing a man over the rooftops of the city, could have easily led Jack to the idea of constructing some kind of springed footwear (the first patent for spring shoes wasn’t filed until 1889, but the materials required to build them existed for decades prior) as a means of further solidifying his demonic persona by increasing his jumping ability. Though the construction of a viable pair of such shoes, equipped for both running and jumping, would require certain metallurgic skills and resources, it seems that he did have metal claws constructed for his fingertips. At the same time, Jack’s agility could have just as easily been an inadvertent concoction of hysterical witnesses – an attempt to rationalize the sheer suddenness of the assaults – that was then co-opted and reiterated by policemen who now had an excuse for their inability to apprehend jumping Jack. And though it was two 1837 assaults involving clawing and leaping that earned Spring Heeled Jack his name, it was two 1838 attacks involving fire breathing that transformed the public’s general wariness into bona fide panic.

Most theories of Jack’s true identity cite that he probably came from an upper class, if not aristocratic, background, and his tendency toward flame exhalation only reinforces this notion. The 17th and 18th centuries had seen two prominent British fire eaters gain notoriety among the aristocracy, and, during the 1820s, fire eating and breathing became a common popular upper-class entertainment. A growing fascination with the strange and seemingly mystic cultures of Britain’s Eastern colonies was mounting, and, with the Mughal Empire defeated and India under complete company control, more and more British noblemen were travelling throughout India, where they were captivated by the wondrous and unfamiliar practices of the Hindus, including fire eating and fire breathing, which some Hindu sects utilized in performances demonstrating spiritual attainment rites. It was the perfect time for an aspiring prankster to see and learn the art of fire-breathing, which the returning young aristocrats had re-purposed from a religious ritual into a cheap parlor trick.

While many working class Londoners would have been altogether ignorant of the practice, even those who had seen a fire breathing performance in a theatrical context would be wholly unprepared to see the art used randomly (and threateningly) on the streets of London, and (even if the person performing wasn’t dressed as a demon) would find it frightening. Take the analog of today’s guerilla magic fad – guerilla magic works precisely because, by removing the traditional physical environs of a performance, the intangible barrier between performer and audience is shattered, creating extremes of both surprise and veracity that don’t exist naturally within the confines of traditional spectatorship. Jack exploited this fact to add the last (and most convincing) attribute to his marauding devil – hellfire.

As if all of the physical trappings of a demon weren’t enough to send the women of London into a collective fit, Jack added one more thing: self-awareness. On February 19th, Jane Alsop heard at knock at the door of her father’s house. Upon opening it, a man concealed by shadows told her he was a police officer and asked her to fetch a light. “We have caught Spring Heeled Jack here in the lane” he said. Upon handing him a candle, the man threw off his cloak, revealing pointed ears and bulging eyes. He spewed flame towards the girl and then began to tear at her clothes and her skin with his claws until, finally, her sister came to her rescue, and the assailant fled.

To think of a monster that haunts the dark streets and stalks prey out of an unquenchable, instinctual thirst for blood or violence is scary, but the idea of a creature calling out its own name, a name assigned to it by its victims, as a means of exploiting that fear, is something all together more terrifying. As much as you can blame popular culture for later propagating the legend of Spring Heeled Jack through Penny Dreadfuls and stage plays, leading to further sightings and, supposedly, copy cats, it was only weeks after appearing in the news that the man who was Jack began propagating his own legend, breathing the three chilling syllables – Spring Heeled Jack – into the air of a warm London home, before spitting fire and baring his claws and insisting with every pouncing, cackling ounce of his being that this monster was real.

In retrospect, though, away from the fog-shrouded gas lights and the sharp echo of boots on cobbled streets sounding out into the wind-haunted spaces between buildings, it’s this self-awareness (self-centeredness, really) that most belies the true mortal nature of Spring Heeled Jack. After all, Bigfoot isn’t known for pyrotechnic displays and sponsorship deals, and Nessie has yet to strike poses mid back flip. Jack may as well have said, “Pay no attention to the man behind the cloak.”

Matt Finley is a regular contributor to Weird Things and is currently based in Cleveland. His works can be found at Finfizzler.wordpress.com.

Tear Up The Town is a weekly column investigating the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

On September 12th, 1952, brothers Edward and Fred May, along with their friend Tommy Hyer, watched a flaming spacecraft streak across the West Virginia sky and crash into the nearby hills.

After running home to tell their mother what they had seen, the boys, along with Ms. May and three other local children, rushed out into the darkness to find the wreckage. After arriving at the top of a hill, the group saw a pulsating red light and, nearby, illuminated by a flashlight they’d brought, a 10-foot tall creature with two bright glowing eyes and a head (or, possibly, cowl) shaped like the ace of spades. The creature made a hissing sound, hovered toward them, and then turned and fled. The group ran screaming from the site and back down the hill into their small town of Flatwoods.

The Flatwoods Monster has gone on to be featured in books, television shows and video games. The creature has been identified as everything from an extra-terrestrial visitor to a cousin of fellow WV-based cyptid, The Mothman, to a startled barn owl. The story has been thoroughly debunked by skeptics, who, along with the barn owl explanation, cite that residents across three states (West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland) reported meteor sightings that night, and say that the red light was almost certainly one of the many aircraft hazard beacons that dot the West Virginia countryside.

What the debunkers fail to address is why a group of seven people would mistake three separate common objects and occurrences for a spaceship crash and an enormous hissing monster. Could Hollywood’s commie-as-martian mania, a 19th century Thunderbird encounter, and the Trans-Allegheny Asylum for the Insane have something to do with it? Tear Up the Town says, “yeah, you know…it’s possible.”

The 1950s marked a strange era in America’s history. General social conservatism and a newly vigilant focus on family values existed alongside new and revolutionary cultural institutions, such as Playboy magazine, the Kinsey reports and the Beat Generation. At the same time, with tensions between the U.S. and the Soviets growing, pop culture was occupied in constructing sensationalist cold war narratives and allegories. And what better way to fictionalize one of America’s largest cultural concerns than by combining it with another? 1951 saw the theatrical release of The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing From Another World, which both delivered 90 minutes of cold war paranoia in the form of vintage 1947 Roswell hysteria. Additionally, as Hollywood released film after film in which Mars, the red planet, stood in for the Soviet red menace, Entertaining Comics (previously Educational Comics) was busy taking advantage of the fact that the comic industry, unlike Hollywood, had yet to come under any industry content regulations, allowing EC to produce a plethora of kid-targeted grotesque, gratuitously violent and overtly sexual horror and sci-fi comic books (including Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, Two-Fisted Tales and Shock SuspenStories) without official recourse.

Six of the seven witnesses to the Flatwoods Monster were under the age of 18, and, as a result, were inundated not only with news stories about very real Earthly terrors, but also with sensationalist movies and extreme comics that placed monsters and aliens alongside Soviet nukes and communist infiltration of the government in the cultural rogues gallery. Meanwhile, Ms. May, the one adult witness, was at once aware of the broader socio-political fears that were sweeping the nation, in an understandably heightened state of anxiety, and in the position of sole responsibility for not just her two children, but also four others. These elements alone show how easily a meteor could become a plummeting saucer and how an aircraft hazard beacon might appear as an extra-terrestrial road flare, but a barn owl as an unearthly creature?

The 50s were also a transformative time for West Virginia. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, miners and their families had been flocking to the region’s prosperous coal mines, pushing the state’s annual population growth well above the national average. Unfortunately, with the standardization of mechanical mining equipment, fewer human workers were needed (remember, John Henry was supposedly a West Virginia native) and, after peaking at just over 2 million residents in 1950, West Virginia’s population began to steadily decline.

The same boom that had vastly increased West Virginia’s general population over the prior half-century had concordantly introduced a growing population of the mentally ill, many of whom were housed in the Trans-Allegheny Asylum for the Insane (later re-named Weston State Hospital). Opened in 1864 with the capacity to house 250 patients, the asylum underwent massive growth over an 80 year period and, by the 1950s, housed more than 2,400 epileptics, drug addicts and myriad other so-called “uneducable mental defectives.” The asylum is also just over 30 miles from Flatwoods. After a revealing piece in the Charleston Gazette in 1949, which portrayed the hospital as a nightmarish, unsanitary, over-crowded hell, already rampant rumors about the asylum’s conditions, treatments and patients were embraced as facts. These confirmations added to the discomfort of families in the area who already couldn’t help but construct dread speculations about deranged escapees. Living in Flatwoods in the early ‘50s, it would be difficult to venture out into the darkened forests and hills without some underlying sense of dread at the knowledge that just a bit farther out into the woods, in an isolated, ever-expanding compound packed to overflowing with mistreated mental patients, experimental surgeries, some using ice picks and electricity, were being performed in dirty operating rooms.

Even more to the point, in the same way that stories and rumors spread about the asylum, Appalachian folktales and legends dispersed and persisted throughout the state. West Virginia, like all of Appalachia, has always occupied a certain cultural niche because, while it’s geographically poised to adopt social and cultural trends along with the rest of the country, its population remains somewhat insular. In part, this insularity is a result of the mountainous terrain, which makes travel outside of major thoroughfares difficult, but, mostly, it’s a result of the state’s lack of industrial diversity. With coal as the area’s only major viable resource, the pre-‘90s population primarily consisted of semi-migrant blue-collar communities whose search for local identity led them to retain, and revel in, the rich cultural history of the mountaineers who first traversed West Virginia’s rocky terrain and discovered the valuable coal reserves beneath it. While much of the extant Appalachian lore is based around stories of these pioneer characters, herbal remedies and general folk wisdom, a proliferation of Cherokee Indian mythology, including thunderbird legends, is vital to the tradition’s underlying framework.

To the Cherokee (and many other tribal nations), the thunderbird has rich, nuanced religious and cultural implications. To the colonists, and in prevailing Appalachian lore, they’re really just regarded as giant flesh-eating birds of varying species, including owls (often dubbed “Bighoot”). They are, in fact, such a prevalent part of Appalachian lore, that beginning in the 1800s, a rash of Thunderbird sightings were reported around the United States, including a series of incidents in 1895 involving a giant avian creature consuming both livestock and humans over a weeklong period in Addison, West Virginia, less than 30 miles from Flatwoods. Flatwoods residents, then, would not only be pre-disposed to hearing legends about fearsome, man-eating birds simply through the extensive oral tradition of the Appalachian region, but would also be doubly aware, and perhaps subconsciously wary, of the creatures, given the existence of an exceedingly horrific local account dating back less than 60 years before the encounter with the alleged Flatwoods Monster.

Given all of this dissonant input, from Hollywood’s equation of the red scare with an alien menace to local fears of escaped mental patients and giant birds, it makes sense that a child of Appalachia who sees what he interprets as a spaceship could then read a nearby barn owl (the shape of the Flatwoods Monster’s head, the sound the creature made and its erratic towards-then-away movement are all consistent with this species), which already bears a sinister connotation, and it’s elongated shadow as the creature from the ship.
A final note: I understand that it might read as contradictory that this piece suggests that these children are both at the forefront of American pop culture, enabling them to see a meteor as a space ship, but also shut-in, out-of-touch hillbillies who rely on folk legends to interpret the world around them, so an owl becomes a monster. Really, it’s the co-existence of these two factors, which is the result of the gradual culture and population shift that began mid-century in West Virginia, that allows the Flatwoods Monster to exist.

These children, due to equal parts chronology and geography, belonged to one of the only generations given the opportunity to subconsciously fuse, in a manner both thematic and terrifyingly physical, rarified traditional American folklore with the all-consuming technocentric xenophobia of the atom age.

Matt Finley is a regular contributor to Weird Things and is currently based in Cleveland. His works can be found at Finfizzler.wordpress.com.

Tear Up The Town is a weekly column investigating the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

For two warm spring nights in 1977, a monster trolled the quiet streets of Dover, Delaware, haunting passersby with its large, almost-featureless head and glowing, empty stare.

When one considers that none of the witnesses to the so-called “Dover Demon” (dubbed as such by the press) were in direct contact immediately before or after the alleged sightings, and all of their descriptions of the creature varied slightly (orange eyes versus green eyes, etc.), an orchestrated hoax seems unlikely. But a microcosmic case of teenage mass hysteria built around a confused infant moose and a pop cultural zeitgeist that piled a brand-new sensationalist Leonard Nimoy television program onto known UFO tracking at a local airforce base, a rampaging serial killer and an imminent star war?

Many skeptics believe it isn’t a coincidence that all three witnesses (Bill Bartlett, age 17; John Baxter, age 15; and Abby Brabham, age 15) to the spindly, large-eyed, four-foot-tall, melon-headed creature, which was witnessed clambering along Dover roadsides on April 21st and 22nd, 1977, were adolescents; even after disregarding the high school prank theory, some experts believe the Dover Demon, a veritable celebrity among American cryptids, was probably a woefully misidentified baby moose. Others admit the possibility that it could have been the product of a covert genetic engineering experiment. Sure, certain spirit hunters and cryptophiles with a new-age bent believe that the witnesses’ age demographic suggests that the alleged creature was related to a poltergeist, appearing only to those whose hormones and bio-rythyms were in continuous flux, and phrases like “extra-terrestrial” and “inter-dimensional being” have been tossed around, but the same trixy pubescence that collectively robs the witnesses of credibility also helps explain how a demon was born.

Though the Hollywood extra-terrestrial boom that began in 1977 with the May release of Star Wars (followed almost immediately by the November release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind) was still a month away when 17-year-old Bill Bartlett saw the bulbous head and shining eyes of an unearthly quadruped reflected in his headlights as he drove home through Dover on April 21st, a cultural obsession with UFOs and the paranormal was already a fixture of American life. Starting with the release of the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage in 1967 and the publicized discontinuation of the U.S. Air Force’s UFO research division, Project Blue Book, in 1969, and bolstered by a sudden spike in reported UFO sightings in 1973 (The fact that the government was no longer searching for the truth about flying saucers clearly put the perceived responsibility back into the hands of the public), the culture was in the throes of an obsession.

Meanwhile, New York City, just three hours north of Dover, was caught in a media frenzy as the .44 Caliber Killer, later identified as David Berkowitz, roamed through the city committing a mounting series of violent shootings. More than half of his, as of that time, 11 victims were teenagers, one of whom had been killed on April 17th, just four days before the first Dover Demon sighting. With news of the seemingly random killings and the ensuing investigation garnering play-by-play national coverage, it’s not unreasonable to imagine a country of teenagers, suddenly confronted with the truth of their own mortality, feeling, understandably, on edge.

And that’s not even taking into account that Dover Air Force Base, which tracked and verified several local UFO sightings throughout the early ‘70s, is located just southeast of the city. Local teenagers who were already exposed to, and demographically poised to take the brunt of, a burgeoning cultural interest in the paranormal would have certainly been aware that within the corporate limits of their hometown existed a government facility that was on record as having monitored unexplained phenomena.

Certainly after the release of Star Wars (and well after the Dover sightings), a rash of alien-themed narrative television shows and films appeared, including Battlestar Galactica, Mork and Mindy, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Alien, etc. (1978 even saw a short-lived television adaptation of Project Blue Book, entitled “Project UFO”). Based on these dates, one might draw the faulty conclusion that the Dover Demon sightings seem to hold more water as legitimate evidence of an undeniably ridiculous looking cryptid stalking The Blue Hen State, given that they occurred before the start of the pop cultural science fiction renaissance, but I would argue that it actually makes more sense, and verges on unsurprising, that sightings like those reported in Dover happened prior to the debut of the above popular entertainments.

Pop culture isn’t a proactive phenomenon. It simply reacts to the wider cultural milieu, absorbing current social, political and scientific thought trends and translating those into the narrative structures that humans seem to require to bring already-present ideas into the sphere of general consciousness. This description, of course, is a gross oversimplication, but the point is that by the time TV and media started addressing instances of paranormal phenomena, the country was already deeply concerned with, and afraid of, all things unearthly.

Next, I’d like to posit that, in assimilating national fears and then reproducing visions of them, pop culture goes through two stages: addressing the fear and answering the fear. For example, in the late ‘60s, supposed Bigfoot footage landed all over the news and the government stopped officially researching UFOs. These and other events (the promise of continued manned space exploration, a sudden spate of books about The Bermuda Triangle, the continuing growth of the new age movement, etc.) led to a growing, unarticulated fear of the paranormal and the supernatural in America. As in every instance of irrational national fear or obsession, the first things the entertainment industry begins to produce are documentaries and dramatizations of actual events. 1975 saw the airing of a made for TV movie called The UFO Incident, which portrayed the supposedly true story of an East Coast couple who, years after a strange experience on a mountain road, discover, through hypnosis, that they were abducted by, and experimented on, by aliens. Even more telling, on April 17th, 1977, just four days before the first Dover Demon sighting (and on the night of the fifth and sixth Berkowitz murders), “In Search Of…”, a Leanord Nimoy-hosted television documentary series that investigated all corners of pseudo-science and sensationalist natural anomalies, ranging from UFOs to Atlantis to The Elephant Man, premiered with an episode about communicating with plants and, more importantly, an opening title sequence that featured a laundry list of topics to come, including extraterrestrials, witchcraft and monsters.

It’s only after a fear is addressed through such documentaries and dramatizations, like those stated above, which simply reduce and collate the most striking and mysterious aspects of the terrorizer in question into a comprehensive consumable piece, that people begin to create answers to the fear by constructing fictions that both put a face to the unknown and present a clear resolution in which, generally, the physical manifestation of our terror is either destroyed or robbed of its power over us. For example, after “realistically” re-enacting the nation’s collective UFO fear in “The UFO Incident,” Close Encounters of the Third Kind presented a fictionalized version of an alien encounter in which the aliens abducting humans and staging high-speed flyovers are reveled to be friendly explorers reaching out to humanity through a simple, delightful tune. Fear momentarily allayed.

The Dover Demon sightings took place in the middle of a cultural shift wherein all of the country’s supernatural curiosity and fear was out in the open, being actively documented and dramatized, but few contemporary fictions had been created to soothe the American psyche. On a spring night, in a quiet town, as the cultural climate around the adolescent witnesses erupted with teen murders, supernatural documentaries, UFO sightings and commercials for film after film about cosmic misadventure, who knows what the hormonal, pubescent mind will do when confronted by something as atypical as a newborn moose, much less some disgusting genetic experiment gone awry. Add Fleetwood Mac’s then-top-selling album Rumours into the mix, and it’s a shock that there wasn’t significant property damage.

Matt Finley is a regular contributor to Weird Things and is currently based in Cleveland. His works can be found at Finfizzler.wordpress.com.