Margaret knows a local nature expert who offered the possibility that the light she had seen was nothing more than swamp gas, also called a will-o’-the-wisp or ignis fatuus. Swamp gas has been reported as a ghostly light appearing over a bog at night or twilight. Science has explained the phenomenon as methane gas being released from rotting vegetation after a spring thaw. The methane rises into the air and ignites when coming into contact with oxygen. Much folklore surrounds the lights and many still believe they represent fairies or the souls of the dammed trying to escape from hell.
When I heard these tales, I almost laughed out loud—back in the sixties, Dr. J. Allen Hynek suggested that a rash of UFO sightings in Michigan was the result of swamp gas igniting and glowing. Dr. Hynek never lived down his swamp gas statement—many UFO skeptics later used “swamp gas” to jokingly explain away sightings they did not want to address. Throughout his eighteen-year position as a scientific consultant with Project Blue Book, Dr. Hynek was told to explain away all sightings at any cost.[10] I have seen swamp gas on two occasions: it appeared to be a bluish glowing flame, rising up from the ground and then exploding with a “pop!” Although there have been reports of the phenomenon lasting several minutes, the two I witnessed were no more than three seconds in duration.
Margaret and her family never saw the light or the creatures again. I find it hard to believe that “swamp gas” was responsible for the glowing light, and that the creature sighting was nothing more than three panicked women’s overactive imaginations. The swirling, glowing yellow sphere in the swamp may have been a portal that opened a doorway to our world from another reality. The creatures that came through acted more like animals than intelligent beings—could they have been gathering information for their masters or were they simply hunting?
[1]. “High Strangeness” was coined by the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek in his attempt to classify UFO encounters.
[2]. This would make it the year 2012—strange coincidence?
[3]. Ms. Guiley has compiled an online database of encounters with shadow people (http://www.visionaryliving.com/2008/10/06/
category/shadow-people), and has been collecting reports for nearly twenty years.
[4]. The silver spots were very similar to what Betty and Barney Hill found on their car after their close encounter and contact experience in New Hampshire in 1961. Betty also described the spots’ “magnetic properties” in an interview I conducted with her in 1986.
[5]. Tests were done by me during the interviews. Details on this procedure can be obtained by emailing me at the address in the appendix of this book.
[6]. The time of these nighttime visitations was always about three in the morning. This is interesting since most paranormal events of this type also have been reported at this hour.
[7]. The Twilight Zone: 1961, season 3, episode 31.
[8]. Richard Matheson, born February 26, 1926, is an American writer whose work often appeared on Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone television series. Now in his eighties, Richard continues to write science fiction and fantasy.
[9]. I was going to use Kate’s story in my book, Interdimensional Universe (2008) but decided against it because the case involves a considerable amount of high strangeness and is more applicable here.
[10]. Project Blue Book was one of a series of systematic studies of Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) conducted by the United States Air Force (U.S.A.F.). Started in 1952, it was the third revival of such a study. A termination order was given for the study in December 1969, and all activity under its auspices ceased in January 1970.
The Ghosts of the Lost Mines
The story of Robert’s experience from the previous chapter describing a network of underground bases and tunnels in the town of Brewster, New York, intrigued me enough to do more research on the subject. Despite my efforts at the time, however, I couldn’t find any data pertaining to any type of underground paranormal activity or locations of old mines. It wasn’t until March 1983 after the UFO sightings in the Hudson Valley that all types of paranormal reports started to be brought to my attention; many were from that particular area. At the time I was already occupied with investigating the hundreds of UFO sightings that had recently taken place so I didn’t think too much more about underground tunnels and mines until the summer of 1983 when two letters appeared in the editorial section of the New York Daily News.
Mystery Tunnels
The letters were from concerned residents in the towns of Brewster and Southeast who claimed the U.S. government was doing little or nothing about the recent rash of UFO sightings. One letter, from a Southeast resident, claimed that he lived near the old abandoned mines and on numerous occasions he saw military vehicles heading down the narrow dirt paths that lead to the entrances. One letter writer claimed he also observed large cargo helicopters of the Chinook class landing somewhere in the hills behind the mines. Needless to say, this caught my interest but the name of the person who wrote the story was not published and the editor at the paper told me it was signed “Anonymous.” Several days later I had a water leak in my study; the files that contained most of my recent work on the mysterious tunnels were severely damaged, but I was able to save one of the editorial letters dated July 1983.
An Interesting Letter
Why are people seeing all these UFOs, all of a sudden in the Hudson River Valley area? The answer is simple: there seems to be some kind of underground activity in the Brewster area, in the old abandoned iron ore mines. Some years ago the Government went out of its way to purchase the land that the mines are located on and people who live in the area including myself have seen military vehicles entering the dirt roads and they never come out. Also, we have seen helicopters landing in the hills close to the mine entrances. These areas have quite a few sightings of UFOs and people who live close to the mines have reported strange sounds and unusual lights as well. I feel that the Government has established an underground base in which some type of experimental aircraft is being kept. There is also a possibility that the mines are being used by our government and an alien intelligence to hide some type of operation in the area.
Signed,
Anonymous
If this letter printed in the Daily News was not enough to get my interest, three years later (1987), just after Night Siege’s first publication, I received a call from a friend who is a CIA operative living in the southwestern United States who read my book. Part of my past military background was dealing with the Intelligence community, and I still had limited contact with individuals who are working not only for the CIA but also military intelligence. This person told me he came across a number of documents that were actually supply requests for an underground operation in the Brewster area. The documents said that the operation was located in an old iron ore mine near that town, but it failed to mention which mine and its exact location. My informant also told me that according to what he found out, the underground base was a lab that was being jointly used by a special operations unit. The underground lab’s purpose was unknown, but he told me he saw equipment lists that might be used in biological experiments. I told him that I was going to investigate the matter and go out there to see what I could find out. His last words to me were to “stay away from this, just let it go. The people involved are too powerful and are protected by the National Security Act.” Shortly after the phone call, I couldn’t reach the contact. It seems he no longer had an active phone number and all mail sent to him was returned “address unknown.”
My next course of action was to get detailed maps of the area and mark locations I thought should be explored. Doing so would save a considerable amount of time—the area in question has very steep hills with thick brush and few apparent roads and paths. I also purchased a topographic map for the area that included elevation, and locations of pits, swamps, caves, tunnels, and mines. As I studi
ed the maps, I wondered where the entrance to these mysterious mines and underground tunnels might be found. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that several isolated dirt roads around the Croton reservoir had the names “Lower Magnetic and Upper Magnetic Mine Road.” This was promising: many hiking trails and secondary roads are named after something in the immediate area. There was also a path marked “Reservoir,” which seemed to be more of a road rather than a trail. Reservoir Road connected to Stoneleigh Avenue, which in turn ended in Route 6, a major traffic artery for the towns of Carmel, Southeast, and Brewster. To my dismay, the topographic map showed no symbols indicating where the mines might be found. My next step was to drive there and survey the area. I picked a clear, warm day in April of 1988 and drove to the destinations eager to explore the locations marked on my maps. As I drove around the secondary roads, nothing really stood out so I decided to pay a visit to the nearby Brewster Museum, the Putnam County Records and Archives, and the Putnam County Historical Society.
The Old Mines of Putnam County
My first visit was to the Brewster Museum, located on Main Street right in the center of town. Although the museum was small, it did have a good number of artifacts left over from the mining days in addition to a number of photographs. I entered, thinking I had found the right place but despite the wealth of available information, I could not find the location of the mine entrances. I spoke with the curator who wasn’t sure exactly where they were, but she heard that one entrance to the Brewster Mine was located on Marvin’s Mountain behind the train station. She suggested I visit the Putnam County Records and Archives located just one mile away. I took her advice and found a great deal of historical information about the towns in Putnam County and the old mining days that seemed to have been almost forgotten by current residents. To my disappointment, the people working at Records also had no idea where the mine entrances were located but the clerk was sure they had all been sealed off sometime in the early part of the twentieth century and are now inaccessible.
Although I could not get a clear answer as to why all the mine entrances were sealed, one person, a volunteer, told me quietly that it had something to do with the local legend of “ghosts and devil worship.” This statement furthered my interest enough to spend the rest of the day carefully reading documents dated back to 1790. The hours seemed to pass quickly and before my research was completed, one of the volunteers asked me to leave—it was closing time. I returned every day for four days early in the morning to continue my research. I spent hours going through piles of materials that included old news clippings, several of which were so incredible, they would result in months of research and numerous field explorations. However, before I go into further detail, let me give you a clear understanding about the history of the mines and how they were formed; it will act as a cohesive to bind this chapter’s materials together.
An Ancient Beginning to the Mystery
A very long time ago, our planet Earth was much different than it is today. The continents were in different positions and part of the northeast section of the United States was at the bottom of an ancient sea. Six hundred million years ago, the body of water we call the Atlantic Ocean did not exist; another smaller ocean lay in its place. A geologist would know this ancient ocean as Iapetus, named after the Greek mythological figure, father of the titan Atlas (for whom the Atlantic Ocean of today was named).
During this time period, much of the eastern coast of New York lay at the fringe of proto-America; what was to be the state of Connecticut was divided into a number of sections mostly located on the floor of the ancient Iapetus ocean. After about two hundred million years, North America and Africa came together and closed the Iapetus Ocean and combined with other land masses to later form the supercontinent of Pangea.[1]
The African and North American plate collision pushed the Iapetus Ocean floor upward, creating Connecticut in addition to the Appalachian mountains. As the two continents continued to collide, a great metamorphic process took place on the border where the Iapetus Ocean and the North American plate met: granite was changed into gneiss and quartz was fused into quartzite. If you drive along the highways of southeastern New York and Connecticut, you can still see the effects on the rock today as they are twisted and bent into bands. As the plates collided, many rocks, minerals and ores were also melted and forced to the upper crustal layers. These included serpentine, talc, chrysotile, and a highly desirable iron ore in a very high-grade form called magnetite. As the iron ore was melted from the friction of the two plates moving into and over each other, it was forced upward in a dramatic uplift that formed veins of ore between the layers of gneiss in the hills that were to become the towns of Carmel, Brewster, and Southeast. This geological history allowed settlers to find some of the purest iron ore in North America; it was mined for much of the late eighteenth and all of the nineteenth centuries. The mining days in New York are long past and the mines themselves have been closed for about a hundred years. Many residents who moved into the Brewster area within the last fifty years have no idea the mines even exist and that underneath their homes is a complex network of tunnels.
Mine History
There are five major mines in the Brewster area, and they all produced a high-grade iron ore, but Tilly Foster in Southeast was the largest. The mine was first owned by James Townsend from 1810 to 1830 and during this time, high-grade iron ore was taken out of the earth and shipped to Danbury, Connecticut, where it was then transported by railway to several cities in New England for further processing. The iron ore was almost pure magnetite with low levels of impurities (such as sulfur and phosphorus); this high-grade ore was in great demand by steel manufacturers, so the mining industry in Brewster began to flourish. In 1830, Tillingham (“Tilly”) Foster purchased the mine and surrounding farms. Although the Foster family never used the land for its mineral and ore rights, it still bears his name. I found this very strange since according to the records Mr. Foster paid a considerable amount of money for the mine and the land surrounding it. There is no historical record to indicate why the family never exploited the riches of the area, but there is a local legend that may explain it all.
The story goes that shortly after purchasing the mine in 1830, Mr. Foster couldn’t sleep one summer night and decided to go for a walk. The night was clear and warm and he decided to walk to the mine entrance. As he approached the path that led to the mine, Mr. Foster felt a very cold wind that seemed to be coming out of the opening. He stopped dead in his tracks and saw a glowing mist emerge from the adit (mine entrance). As Mr. Foster stared at the mist, he noticed the center of the cloud was glowing much brighter than the rest of it. The mist took the shape of a human and started floating toward him—when this took place, a violent wind kicked up and he thought he heard a voice speak in an unknown language. He watched in terror as the figure slowly drifted by him and returned to the mine entrance where it vanished. He later talked about his apparition sighting at the local tavern in town where a very old local Native American medicine man told him that what he saw was the ghost of a Native American princess who was buried in or near the mine and was upset that her tomb had been violated. Legend says that because of this ghostly encounter Mr. Foster never took the iron ore out of the earth; he was concerned the ghost would come back or put a curse on his family.
Mr. Foster died in 1842 and his widow sold the mine in 1844, but it wasn’t until 1853 after General Thomas Harvey brought the land that the ore was once again extracted. In 1848 with the arrival of the Harlem railroad, transporting the ore became economically feasible. Shortly after his acquisition of the Tilly Foster mine, General Harvey also purchased the nearby Brewster and Theall-McCollum mines. The Brewster Mine produced three hundred tons of iron ore in two years and in 1849 part of the land was sold to a Mr. Aaron Marvin who built a home on top of the highest point of the mountain; today this area is called “Marvin’s Hill.”
Sometime in 1850, Walter Brews
ter opened a number of shafts around town that connected to the main mine tunnels.[2] This was an easy way for workers who were staying at local homes to go to work. All they had to do was go into the basement of the house and climb down a shaft that led to the main part of the mine. These shafts still exist today in the basements of the older homes. I wonder if the current owners are aware that somewhere in their cellar is a doorway that leads to a forgotten underground world. The last big mining boom was in 1870; by 1880, the Brewster mine had not been in operation for a while and was sealed off.
Satan’s Cave
General Harvey purchased the Theall and McCollum mines in 1848, located two miles southwest of Brewster, on the west bank of the Croton River and mined them until his death in 1880. A year later, a John Cheever bought the mines and connected the two together with a 1,400-foot adit (horizontal tunnel), thus the Theall and McCollum mines were now known collectively as the Croton Magnetic Mine. The Croton Magnetic Mine was in operation from 1882 until 1899. During this time it produced more than one hundred thousand tons of high-grade magnetite before closing down. The reason the mine closed was unclear to me at the time, but it seemed to be the location of a considerable number of paranormal events, including sightings of unexplainable lights on the ground and in the sky.
After the mine was closed, the entrance was sealed sometime in 1904; shortly after, local residents called it “Satan’s Cave”—in the early part of the twentieth century, a local cult of “devil worshippers” known as the Fallen Ones went into the mine to perform rituals. According to police documents dated from that time period, local residents accused the group of being responsible for a number of missing children. Although no evidence ever connected any cult members with the alleged crimes, information I uncovered indicated local authorities dealt with and forced the cultists to stop. How they were dealt with seems unclear. To this day, the “old timers” whose families still live in the area will not discuss it. The actual number of people that belonged to this “devil worshipping group” is unknown, but the description from state police documents indicates they wore dark red robes with hoods. When I read this, chills went down my spine: at the time, a number of reports had come my way describing sightings of ghostly hooded beings near Reservoir and Lower Magnetic Mine Roads, very close to the entrance of the Croton Magnetic Mine. It became clear to me why the mine was now known as “Satan’s Cave.”
Files From the Edge Page 9