Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  He showed people the troubled areas and told them to keep children away after dark. “Kids are vulnerable. They’ll see things the parents won’t.” He worked a ceremony to ease the site and minimize harm to the living innocent. Then he headed up to Rochester.

  The old healer found our Seneca friend toiling in his office over a block of stone studded with bones and artifacts. Without a word, the elder took up one troublesome femur like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle. It popped into his hand like the rock had decided to spit it out. Then he put it back. The Seneca went to pull it out again and found it as stuck in the stone as King Arthur’s proverbial first sword.

  “It’s all about the intent,” the old healer said. “If your intent is for the good of the world, a lot of these problems will go away for you. If you’re selfish, the old ones will know it. And they’ll never get out of your way.”

  SIGNS OF SUPERNATURAL WAR

  The undercurrents of an occult culture clash could be seismic in some sensitive circles and yet run far beneath the radar of almost every white. How would you know if something is brewing behind the scenes? How would you know if war has been declared? If the clash is a stalemate or just one eruption in a long series, you may never know for sure. But you might learn to spot the signs of an unrest that may be the omens of a conflict.

  It could be when a diminutive old Native American man is spotted pitching powder on the city hall building in Albany. Was it witch or medicine powder? What did he want the city to do or stop doing?

  It could be when an otherwise responsible nineteen-year-old from one of the Niagara region reservations steals a car and tears out inexplicably into the night, howling east toward Batavia on a road that follows a trail that was already ancient when the whites arrived. As if some devil came after him, he may have hit eighty-five in the village zones and stopped only when he was killed in a crash. Who sent what after him? Why?

  It could be when a middle-aged Seneca man is found killed with no explanation on the Cattaraugus Seneca Reservation. Was it a simple crime?

  It could be when the heads of dozens of dogs are found on the St. Regis Reservation. Someone, it seems, in Mohawk country was sending someone else a message, with at least the signs of a powerful spell.

  It could be when a man is found in his car in the parking lot of an Onondaga country hospital, drowned in his own blood, his face and upper quarters so badly slashed by fang and claw that authorities are at first unsure what animal could possibly have done it. Maybe to keep things at their simplest point, a pit bull attack is publicly blamed.

  It is up to you if you believe or fail to believe in the power of any of the subjects of this book. One thing you cannot deny, though, is that the tradition of an ancient and indigenous supernaturalism is still active in New York state. It would be best to respect it.

  7

  Power Spaces

  It demonstrates . . . that there was once indeed something strange and irresistible, which can be seen today in legend, symbol, and ruined monuments.

  FRANCIS HITCHING, EARTH MAGIC

  Landscape Magic

  In 1955, South African travel writer Laurens Van der Post (1906–1996) tore off into Botswana in search of the mysterious, ancient Bushmen, who these days are often called the San. As his expedition neared the fabled region of the Tsodilo Hills, their African guide warned the whites not to do any sport hunting. Word didn’t get to a small advance party, who shot an antelope and a wart hog who had doubtless loved their lives. Such an uncanny plague of calamities commenced that even the skeptics among the whites suspected that their troubles might be supernatural.

  Their African guide Samutchoso drew off by himself and sat in the sun. He gave the appearance of holding a solemn ritual, then a dialogue with invisible presences. He returned with the counsel that “the spirits” were angry with the whites for approaching the holy region with blood on their hands. The whites were starting to believe in African landscape magic, and the misery didn’t let up until they all performed a ceremony of contrition—signing a letter of apology, sealing it in a bottle, and burying it under an impressive ancient rock painting. Still, the spirits had a message for group leader Van der Post: Soon he would hear bad news. So it was; at the first village he came to, a telegraph was waiting to inform him that his father had passed away.

  We could cite a twentieth-century story like that on every one of the continents. The sites of traditional ancient power places like these were once everywhere about us in upstate New York. Some were sacred, and any of them could operate negatively if offended. How many of us are camped above them, meeting inspiration and spirituality every day and not knowing why? How many of our haunted houses and cursed zones could be atop them? This is a chapter about some of the ones known in Iroquois country.

  Folklorists have known for a long time that supernatural folklore tends to cluster about certain sites or regions. A dramatic example of that would be Stonehenge, attributed in medieval legend to witches, giants, wizards, dragons, fairies, and possibly even the devil. Paranormal scholars—the good ones—notice the effect today. As strange as it may sound, reports from the modern mythology—including mystery monsters, UFO sightings, and unusual earthly energies—tend to pile up in small zones.

  Once you identify one of these power places, you can just about presume there will be a story or two about a ghost. Another constant comes in the fact that the most prominent American paranormal places usually have some connection to the people who were here before us. Most of the power places in New York were spiritually significant in one way or another to the precontact Native Americans.

  British scholar Paul Devereux has made a study of Native American shamanic landscapes. “It is often difficult to separate spirit haunts,” he writes, “from more generalized American Indian concepts of sacred places.” As we said at the start of this book: Where do you draw the line between the sacred and the spooky?

  The classical—Greek and Roman—world believed in two kinds of sacred places. The most obvious were man-made, what Sig Lonegren calls “sacred enclosures”: churches, temples, altars, and monuments people had designated as holy through architecture and devotion. Some were as simple looking as a pile of dirt. Some were as elaborate as the Parthenon or as monumental as the Great Pyramid.

  Like all the territory at the underbelly of the Great Lakes, New York state was once dotted with earth-and-stone monuments much like the ones of Europe. Most of them were simple burial mounds, but others were geometric shapes like circles, ovals, and octagons. Some were even human and animal effigies. Virtually all were built by people who preceded the Iroquois. Not many were left by the start of the twentieth century, but some of their former locations are known. These sites tend to pick up folklore, even when no trace of the monument remains.

  Another kind of sacred place is natural. One knew the gods had made these places to be special by the way they looked or felt. Fountains, falls, faults, caves, hills, and mountains predominate. Others are simple groves and inconspicuous springs. Something in the energy or ambience of a site projected to people that this was a great spot to get closer to the spirits. Iroquois country is rich, too, in these.

  In his 1992 study of Native American sacred places, Andrew Gulliford detailed some styles in the pattern, which include:

  Sites associated with traditions and origin stories

  Trails and pilgrimage routes

  Traditional gathering areas

  Offering areas (altars and shrines)

  Vision-quest and individual-use sites

  Group ceremonial sites (including sweat lodges and singing spots)

  Ancestral habitation sites

  Battle, burial, and massacre sites

  Sites of pictographs and petroglyphs

  Observation and calendar sites

  Gulliford makes his observations in the broad American West. Only sites meeting the last two categories—pictographs and calendar sites—are hard to find in Iroquois country.

  Human act
ivity can sacramentalize a place. Think of battlefields, forts, religious monuments, and burying grounds. Human activity can also outrage it. We’ll take a look at sites in Iroquois territory that have attracted supernatural folklore and tradition. These places are all spooky. And visionary.

  WITCHES’ WALK

  (Seneca Country)

  The whole region of Allegany State Park is one of intrigue. Stone ruins, strange artifacts, and curious writing on rocks have gotten more than one writer speculating about undocumented aliens of the ancient kind: Celts, Vikings, or even Egyptians, traveling, trading, and maybe even colonizing in this region of abundant water transportation routes. Today, this is a mother lode of paranormal folklore: UFOs, Bigfoot, mystery monsters, and ghosts. No part of it is richer in tradition than a rural stretch by the Allegheny River by Salamanca.

  The Seneca had legends about the region between hill and river. The first of them to venture here found countless skeletons, all bearing the marks of violence. Thousands of young warriors had lost their lives in an event storyteller Duce Bowen suspected was a civil war between communities. The energy of brother killing brother made it more than an ordinary clash. Angry, confused, cut-off souls are thought still at work, giving their energy to the land over their bones.

  Witches’ Walk may get its name from a single old trail winding through it, the proverbial route of the only folk who dared walk here at night. Only then was it so easy to spot them, huffing along on a frosty eve, red glows like inner fires coming out their mouths and nostrils, fanned fuller with every exhalation. Anyone who happened to be near at such a time—a hunter frozen in a stalking crouch, a lover awaiting a tryst—held pose, even breath, hoping stillness and cover would hide them. Bear, wolf, and panther turned aside and went their ways—unless, they, too, breathed the internal fire and gave greeting.

  Supernatural folklore was vivid here throughout the nineteenth century, and the twentieth got a taste of its power, according to Duce Bowen. The train used to go through along the route of the current expressway by river and hills. One night a conductor saw something odd on the tracks ahead and got off to check. He never got back on.

  Witches’ Walk today is a bushy, low area of Allegany State Park. The state has since routed an expressway through it, the picturesque I-86. The best way to get to Witches’ Walk is to ask directions at the Seneca Nation museum. If you belong there, they’ll tell you. And don’t go off the road at night.

  HILL OF THE CROWS

  (Cayuga Country)

  Owasco Lake was the center of gravity of the Cayuga. Auburn, New York, just north of it, was their major community. Two of Auburn’s distinctions overlap. One is the illustrious Fort Hill Cemetery based around the burial ground and earthwork of a pre-Iroquoian culture. Upstate pioneers and national heroes, including Harriet Tubman, are buried here. The other distinction is unwelcome, the infestation of migrating crows that besets this historic burying ground twice a year.

  It’s no surprise that Auburn would have been an ancient civic center. Many upstate cities were Iroquois capitals. Even in the prehistoric Northeast, the natural features that made for community growth pertained to commerce and travel.

  It’s no shock, either, that Auburn’s Fort Hill would have been burial ground to prehistoric Hopewellians, contact-era Cayuga, and contemporary whites. We see this pattern in New York more than most would expect. Sites sacred to one culture tend to be adopted by each supplanting one. We see nothing like these crows.

  For as long as we have records this biennial bio-bomb has perched at the cemetery every autumn and ravaged the city before setting off to its winter rest. All the months that the snows sweep or settle the upstate, countless coal-black scavengers breed and season on Mexico’s Yucatan. They return from Maya country and blacken our skies every spring.

  Earthworks are clustered at the top of the high ground above the Owasco Creek. Early settler James McCauley studied the remains of the Cayuga palisade Fort Osco in 1820 and judged by the trees growing through it that it predated Columbus. Fort Allegan, right around it, was a Hopewellian fort at least 1,500 years old. Similar in style to the megalithic constructions in Europe, this ring fort held eight open spaces that might have been entrances.

  Maybe as a sign of its mystical heart, the city of Auburn was passionately involved in some of America’s nineteenth-century movements: Spiritualism, women’s rights, and abolition. Today’s Fort Hill is a grand cemetery in which psychics, suffragettes, and abolitionists rest. Dedicated in 1852, it’s spilled well beyond its original bounds. But at the core of it is the famous earthwork. Much like a British henge, it’s a piled dirt monument that makes a ring and a ditch. It’s almost invisible today due to the development around it and its settling under all those winters.

  But it’s easy to find. It’s the Fort Allegan section, rooted by the fifty-six-foot, local stone monument to Cayuga chief John Logan, a fighter against white expansion into Ohio and Pennsylvania. At the end of Lord Dunmore’s War (1774), Logan gave a short, noble, remarkable speech whose text made its way to Washington and impressed Thomas Jefferson as much as Caractacus’s address to the Roman senate.

  Psychic folklore is often a sign of power places like these. When you see the flowers—apparitions—you wonder what sort of bed lies underneath. The whole cemetery seems, of course, to be haunted, just not by clear Native American ghosts. The apparition reports we get about Fort Hill are those of many New York graveyards, archetypal images like the seemingly omnipresent little girl ghost and the woman in white. Mystery lights and a pale horse or two are legion in upstate New York, and they have no known explanations in the folk tradition of this cemetery.

  Logan’s Monument in the Fort Allegan section of Fort Hill Cemetery, Auburn, New York

  A region’s ghosts are seldom frozen onto either the natural landscape or the one of folk memory. Psychic folklore is so plastic a thing that the reports you get of a site or region can vary radically depending on the day or decade you interview. In a morning of driving the streets around Fort Hill, I came up with rumors of “Indian chiefs” buried inside its trees, of the sound of the hooves of invisible horses, of someone’s grandparents reporting the images of old settlers. I notice that none of the reports were personal, but were instead recollections of what old-timers had said. The site may no longer be active. I keep coming back to those crows.

  Vögel der Seele, Rilke called his angels, “birds of the soul.” Birds are symbols to most world societies, often as emissaries of the spirit. Intermediaries between the realms of earth and sky, they rise, vanish, and rest again. Some have been messengers and prophets, and others totems of warrior cults.

  The battlefield birds, though, crows and ravens, are usually more than that. Associated with war and destiny, they know where death is soon to come and bodies to be had. In their visits with the eternal, they learn the fates of heroes and the ends of empires. Why do the real ones keep coming to Fort Hill?

  The old name of the outlet of Owasco Lake was Deagogaya, “the Place Where Men Are Killed.” Was this a memory of some tragic event that took place at Fort Hill, even a battle that preceded the Iroquois? What have the crows learned to remember?

  GREEN LAKE

  (Onondaga Country)

  Nine miles east of downtown Syracuse is a state park holding comma-shaped Green Lake. In the heart of Onondaga territory, it lies just a short walk north of the Great Migration trail that lies under today’s Route 5. The lake may have been made by a titanic waterfall spilling off a retreating glacier, hence its preternatural two-hundred-foot depth. One of its first white names was Lake Sodom, possibly linking the tale of Lot’s calcifying wife with the heavy sulfides in the water. Green Lake is meriomictic, meaning that the top layers and the bottom—like human society—don’t readily mix.

  The lake is aptly named. Its color is depths beyond green, an effect caused by low plant life and lack of suspended matter in the water. That explanation doesn’t take away the wonder.

  The Power
of Green Lake

  Green Lake is a gem, an emerald, a crystal. This is a power lake whose dominant legends concern a gigantic serpent, a snake being that partners with a human-size shape-shifter or else takes a human form itself. In this guise, it beguiled a young mother into trading her infant for the serpent’s own beglamoured bairn. A few moments later, she felt something clawing at her; the changeling infant on her back had become a hatchling crocodile. She heard her own babe crying in the swamp.

  She pondered suicide by jumping off a high point into Green Lake, but a voice within told her to live. She presumed it was the Great Spirit. She went to her husband.