Most of the oldest roads in New York followed Native American transportation trails. Spiritually speaking, those roads would have been all right for travel; their use disrupted nothing of sacred significance. The main streets of most of our towns were once these footpaths. They were simply widened into cart tracks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then paved for the use of cars in the twentieth. But countless new ones have been made, with no regard for local tradition. They include vastly intrusive interstate projects.
A couple of highways that go to and around Syracuse are only decades old. A lot of grading’s been going on in this heart of the Iroquois territory, and not all has gone according to plan.
Cutting In on the Rez
When Michael Bastine was a boy, some highway work was done near Syracuse. He remembers hearing that it was work on I-90, but it might have been the mid1960s expansion of Route 57 into 481, which crosses I-90 and arcs the city on the east from the south to the northwest. The eastern 481 certainly comes close to the sacred Green Lake.
“Whatever path they were taking was going to cause some kind of interference or damage,” says Michael. “And it wasn’t just because they were cutting in on the rez. The Onondagas knew something was under there, and it wasn’t going to be good for anybody to mess it up.”
The Onondaga tried talking to the state authorities. Road construction kept up in the meantime, with two crews a day. The potential pathway was already graded and covered with crushed stone when Cayuga medicine man Peter Mitten and his student Mad Bear answered the call. “And I mean, on the medicine level,” says Michael. They told the Onondaga that they were going to call upon the ancestors. This was one of the heaviest ceremonies they could do.
“This was done with a lot of forethought,” says Michael. “They went to the Onondaga elders and asked permission to call up the dead on their territory. They looked at the stages of the moon and whatever else. They did all the proper ceremonies beforehand, announcing their intent. They went around the day before and told everybody to stay inside after sundown and not come out until daybreak. They told people to keep a special eye on children and their animals, who could be much more sensitive to the medicine.” Then they asked the dead to walk.
People in their homes felt the effects. Some heard sounds, a horde of footsteps walking on the loose stone. Others opened their shutters after dark and saw a faint migration of pale shadows and trees rocking though no wind was blowing. It was awe-inspiring—and terrible. “When Mad Bear told you this story, you got goose bumps,” says Michael. It lasted into the early dawn.
The first crews to show up early that morning caught an eyeful, we hear, and immediately left work. In the words of a witness who talked to Michael, “The workers messed their pants. Stones were rolling as if people were kicking them.”
“I knew Mad Bear could use the energy of other people,” says Michael. “I’d seen him do it a lot of times. What came clearer to me later in life was that Mad Bear had done it with the dead.” He shakes his head. “That’s never done lightly. You don’t go, oh, I think I’ll call the ancestors tonight.” The course of the Thruway had to change, with a bow in it that doesn’t show on the big state maps. It may have shifted its arc only a quarter mile.
“The old cultures hang on to that stuff,” says Michael. “This is what keeps us connected to the spirit world. The ancestors are here to help us if we need them. As long as we keep looking out for them.”
THE LIVER TREE CURSE
Twentieth-century shaman Mad Bear Anderson was a spiritual crusader. He felt, as do Michael and I, that one of the best ways to improve the conditions of the Native Americans was to raise the consciousness of the world. As a way of accomplishing this, Mad Bear believed in uniting Native American nations in shared goals and in involving people of all origins in Native American causes. His inclusiveness helped him make his point, but it didn’t work for all parties. Some Native American purists may have thought it just divided and watered down the message. Some who opposed his message surely worked against him. Many of his confidants openly believed that Mad Bear was involved in an occult cold war that now and then heated up. He was the occasional target of group attacks.
Mad Bear had lived in a couple of different houses on the Tuscarora Reservation, and at all of them he did a lot of medicine work. People who knew him wryly called each of his homes Fort Knox because of the reinforcement of the walls and the points of entry. It was widely presumed that any place Mad Bear lived needed to be fortified: When he went on his astral journeys in the form of a bear, his material body lay inert and vulnerable. Those who wanted to hurt him would never get a better chance.
It was also presumed that his homes were protected in another way, too—with medicine. His enemies were not only going to strike in material ways. In fact, the material attacks were probably only signs that the metaphysical ones had failed.
Mad Bear took special precautions, especially against what couldn’t be seen. He had a couple of False Faces looking out for him, but from all we hear, he left nothing to chance. All the unusual artifacts that came with them were potential avenues for spells and curses directed against him, thus he took special ceremonial care of his place, particularly the doorway. He put medicine at the symbolic entrances, too, the windows, keyholes, and hearth, by which supernatural influences might also make their entry. He redid the work a few times a year. Still, it didn’t stop people from going after him.
An Odd Mad Bear Story
In the late 1970s, when Mike was just getting to know Mad Bear, he heard an odd story from one of their mutual friends. The friend and Mad Bear had just stepped out of the latter’s cabin on an early November twilight when they looked up into a tree at something odd and terrifying.
A grisly thing roosted like a balloon in the high, frail branches, so raw and biological that it could have been an internal organ. It looked “like a liver,” said the man who saw it. It was twitching and making strange sounds: gurgling, coughing, hissing, like it was trying to breathe or even speak without a mouth.
“Uh-oh,” said Mad Bear. “I know right away what I got to do.” He ran into his cabin and commenced a mighty rite. He didn’t let his friend even watch or listen. The process for Mad Bear was a long one; it took about half an hour.
When he came back out, he walked right up to that tree, still decked with its biomorphic bauble, and started talking to it in Tuscarora. The friend reported that words in a ghastly, hissing voice came back to Mad Bear from somewhere in the same language. When he was done with his inquisition, Mad Bear dismissed the thing with a backhanded, open-palmed gesture like a karate slash: “Get out of here, and go back to who sent you.”
The man reported that the strange organ rose higher in the branches of the tree as if it were losing gravity by the second. A breeze caught it, and it drifted out of the branches and soared off like a weary helium balloon. He could see the thing dangling its tubes and veins till it drifted over a hill.
Before long there was a reaction. Some Canadian Mohawk suffered such a plague of accidents and illnesses that they were sure Mad Bear had witched them back. They started calling him, writing him, and pestering him to take his medicine off them. “I can’t do anything about this,” Mad Bear told them. “It’s what you sent after me. I just turned it around.”
Next they tried to bribe him, even promising to deliver an envelope full of money to his mailbox every week. “Why are you wasting my time?” Mad Bear said. “When you start things, you better be able to stop them.”
At about this time Mad Bear started getting a reputation as a man of power, and this incident may even have been the start of it. Those Mohawks weren’t quiet. They told everyone who they thought was after them. To this day, some people still think of Mad Bear as a witch.
Michael suspects that the curse had started with some Canadian Mohawks, possibly acquaintances of the healer Daisy Thomas. They’d gotten it in for Mad Bear because of some political dispute, wangled some medic
ine out of Daisy, and launched an attack, most likely without her knowledge. “They had to be beginners,” says Michael. All of them learned a lesson. One may have lost his life. For quite a time, envelopes full of bills kept appearing in Mad Bear’s mailbox, even though he said he didn’t want them.
THE DUST DEVIL OF BOUGHTON HILL
The Celtic people of Europe associated the wind swirls and dust devils we see now and then with the passage of the Good People, the Fair Folk, and other names applied to the fairies. To them, their own Little People were powerful but not inherently negative.
Among many Native Americans, particularly of the Southwest, these curious natural wind forms were dreaded, thought to signal the passage of a witch or wizard. At other times, it was thought that a human spirit was within them, and not that of someone who had recently died. It was the mighty spirit of an old one.
Ganondagan (ga-NON-da-gan) is a New York state historic site and park near Rochester, with a preserved Seneca village. While many whites find it a spiritual place, even a pilgrimage site, others sense unrest in the area. After visits to Ganondagan, some non–Native Americans have reported troubling dreams. The young daughter of a Rochester college professor had a nightmare about an old Native American climbing the outside of her house to get at her second-floor bedroom. Some figure like him has surfaced as a ghost reported on the roads near Boughton Hill, among a bevy of less distinct apparitions not all so surely Native.
Those negatively affected by Ganondagan sense an indignation that seems vaster than that of a single human spirit. It could be the psychic echo of a battle. Ganondagan was the site of a cruel first-strike invasion from a French expedition and a collection of Native enemies in 1687. Surely that must be it. Most battlefields attract psychic folklore, and New York state is saturated with them, including ancient Native American ones. Not many of the folks who live and work over these older clash points know what went on there before them.
The late historian Sheldon Fisher (1907–2002), from Fishers, New York, was a treasure trove of regional lore. In the ninety years of his familiarity with Ganondagan, almost all the households near it reported psychic encounters of some sort. This story about a family on Boughton Hill is one Sheldon told us.
The Invisible Being
One September afternoon, members of a family were raking leaves outside their house. The youngest child went inside then ran back out, leaving the front door open. As the mother glanced up her jaw dropped, and the rake fell from her hands.
A breeze in the yard had picked up bits of leaves and dust and spun them into a man-size whirlwind. It held its shape and form so well and long that anyone could fancy a presence within it. Soon all of them were watching it. This little tornado meandered about the yard as of to throw everyone off, but the mother noticed that it kept moving as if purposefully toward the house. As it neared the porch, the mother started running to the front door, but it beat her and vanished as it crossed the threshold. It was as if an invisible being had taken up a dusty veil like a cloak and shed it as it entered the house.
The mother ran in and looked around. The house was still, but something felt different. In the weeks to come, the feeling would become a certainty.
Family members were on edge. Old problems came back. Plants died, pets acted strangely, no one slept well, and psychic phenomena broke out. Strangely, they never connected matters to the odd episode in the yard.
One family friend was an old Seneca who dropped in a couple of times a year. A mutt was his constant companion. He and his sidekick came by one October afternoon. As he waited in the kitchen for the tea water to boil, he noticed his dog tracking something across the room with its eyes, as if an invisible guest had taken up residence.
He did his best not to look concerned. “Get everyone out of the house for a few hours,” he said. “Now. I need to get some things and come back.”
When the family returned hours later, the house felt different, as if it had been restored to peace. Things settled down. They could only conclude that their Seneca friend had worked a ritual to banish the force, whatever it was. It was probably a housecleansing using sage or cedar.
The Cursed Circle
A doctor and his wife built their dream home on a circular cul-de-sac off the road between Lakewood and Jamestown. The house in West Ellicott was ninety-five feet long, with a full basement, rec rooms, playrooms—the works. The doctor remembers good times, especially at first. Woods and wildlife were there, and old farmhouses nearby. They had a dozen pleasant neighbors. They could walk to the southern shore of Chautauqua Lake. They skated on the pond and sledded on a hilly clearing like a ski slope. But from the start, their children were unhappy. Was this an early sign?
Soon, there were others. When they drilled their well, the plumber called the water the best he had ever tasted. Within weeks, it had turned too salty even to be used for cooking. Soon they had to run a water line in from the main road.
The doctor’s wife had dreams of water; then they woke and found it in their basement. Flooding became so routine that the doctor put in a pump, which was soon clotted by gravel and rendered useless. A fine chandelier in the foyer spontaneously fell to the floor. Home at the time, the doctor’s wife heard the crash.
The aged doctor was quite lucid when we interviewed him in 1997. He recalled a file of tragedies that befell others who lived on the circle. Boating accidents killed one neighbor’s child and badly injured another. One neighbor lost his business, and another suffered a miscarriage. A young man had a fatal heart attack while running around the circle. A boy was killed in the woods nearby. A mother fell on the stairs in her basement and suffered migraines; soon thereafter, her big, seemingly stable family was in tatters. A heart attack killed a circle resident exercising at the YMCA. Another, who suffered a stroke, learned from his misfortune and moved. The doctor, too, finally sold his house after only four years. Two months after taking over the home, the new owner killed himself.
Families on the circle were looking for answers. The only one that made sense surfaced by accident. One of the county’s first settlers had once owned the land, and a descendant still in the area remarked that it was a Native American burial ground. “Had we known,” said the doctor, “we never would have built there.” Was there anything else there, too?
These circular formations are suspicious. People like the circle. It’s the mandala form. We tend to build circles everywhere. But when the form appears in upstate street-making, it raises the possibility that something old and Native American was there first. Many an American city plan has followed the pattern of an ancient circular monument.
The settlers shaped Circleville, Ohio, around a big henge, as did the citizens of Auburn, New York, with Fort Hill Cemetery. Joseph Ellicott’s descriptions of the flat-topped, circular rise at the site of Buffalo’s future center, Niagara Square, remind us of a tumulus like Silbury Hill in England.
Many of the ancient monuments that draw so much psychic karma were reported around Lake Chautauqua, whose Seneca name means “bag tied in the middle.” Maybe people just didn’t handle it right, like the circle in West Ellicott. Maybe some of these sites are too strong to live on.
As if the curse had sated itself on human tragedy, the last decades, we hear, have been happy on this ring of fine houses. It’s not unusual for things to “act up” and then stop, for reasons of their own. Maybe the medicine people got word of the matter and took care of it.
Feasts of the dead have been held all over the world. The contemporary American version of one is Halloween. On this night in their society, the old Celts invited the spirits of their dead. Some Native Americans invited the corpses.
Many Native American ideas are totally unlike those of Europeans. Attitudes to the human body are not the least of them. In The Jesuits in North America (1896), Francis Parkman (1823–1893) describes a Huron (Wyandot) rite that would shock many of us.
As in many Native North American societies, the Huron kept the village dea
d in ossuaries or grand burial sites. Every couple of years, the bones were hauled up, dressed and ornamented by their former families, set at a feast, and literally “fed” bits of food. Then they were returned to the earth with gifts that beggared the village till the next such event. And so they were treated until there was nothing left of them to dig up. This ritual was a profound expression of the acceptance of all the phases of material existence, and of reverence and even tenderness to the family members whose spirits had left the world. It was also a connector of generations, a way to include the departed in life as they were in memory. The event seemed macabre and even fiendish to the first Europeans to witness it.
The Huron/Wyandot are an Iroquoian people sharing much in common with the Longhouse nations. We hear that the Neutral Nation of western New York, also Iroquoian, maintained this custom. The Six Nations may once have held similar rituals, and it may have been the influence of the Peacemaker and Hiawatha that caused them to go a different way. Could these extreme ceremonies linger, occasionally, as medicine?
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 20