Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  Like all great forces—fire, electricity, wind—this one can be edgy. The bloodiest night in Canadian history—the 1814 Battle of Lundy’s Lane—took place within earshot of the surging waters. Freak accidents happen here with depressing regularity, and more people than we hear about take the plunge. Not every one of them is killed. When the survivors can talk, the first question they have to answer is usually, “Why did you come here to kill yourself?”

  A good part of the time, the answer is, “I didn’t.” They remember coming to see the great falls, looking in, admiring, wondering, adoring, and . . .

  Contemporary psychics say that anyone who listens long enough can hear ancient spirits in the natural hiss-roar. They must hear something. Ted Williams’s father, Eleazar, used to tell him about places on the Niagara that can just take you. “You look into them, they haul you in, next thing you know you are gone.” Anyone who has ever stood close to a speeding train and felt the pull of the wheels may understand. And this is vastly grander.

  SNAKE HILL

  (Mohawk Country)

  Spook, snake, or devil: These are scarlet-letter place-names in the Northeast. Whenever you come across one of these in reference to a site, it bears examination.

  Most of the early white settlers who developed these place-names were nurtured on the dualism—the good god, bad god—of Christianity. Anything that didn’t compute as saintly defaulted into the satanic. Calling something Spook Hollow, Devil’s Punchbowl, or Snake Hill might be a sign that it held an immeasurable power to an earlier society, a power that even the early settlers could feel.

  Snake Hill is one of the most conspicuous natural monuments in the state. You can’t miss it as you drive or boat around Saratoga Lake. On a promontory that juts out from the eastern shore, it is a curious piece of geology, and it is coupled with others.

  Locals will tell you that in most places, Saratoga Lake is no more than a dozen feet deep. Boaters can usually see the bottom on bright, still days. But just offshore from Snake Hill are declivities said to go 250 feet down. The fish breed and grow down there, they say—a fine place to wet a line. Something dropped into that abyss would be there a mighty long time.

  Some conjecture that Snake Hill was named for a resident who liked his privacy. To keep it, he generated a legend of rattlers bigger, badder, and more profuse on Snake Hill than anywhere else in the region. Other stories feature a white man who raised and trained the snakes and showed them off to the public. (One day he got bit, and that was the end of that.) Still another rumor concerns an Algonquin who collected an abnormal bounty turning in just the rattles, taken as evidence of death. It turns out that he wasn’t harvesting the varmints, just trimming the rattles and waiting for them to grow back.

  At the northeastern edge of Iroquois territory, Saratoga County was hunted and fished by Mohawk and Algonquin groups. By all accounts, Snake Hill was a legend site to them, too, and many familiar motifs are attached to it. The Mohawks have a tale about a brave old chief tortured to death here by the Algonquin. The Algonquin get even with a “lover’s leap” tale about a brave of their own delivered from the Mohawk stake by an infatuated chieftain’s daughter. The cornered pair are said to have plunged from a high point on Snake Hill.

  Behind the scenes, people talk about an ancient earthwork on Snake Hill, private property now. It was likely a mound, and one neither archaeologists nor residents want us to know about. If it’s a burial, it’s both monument and graveyard. It’s also a mystery. The mound-building tendency (if influence isn’t the word) wasn’t thought to get this far east and north of the Ohio Valley.

  From the right vantage, Snake Hill looms against the starry sky. The lights of houses glisten like the eyes of unknown animals in a bush. Strange luminous spheres are reported moving about Snake Hill at night. A classic, unnatural, sky-high moving light—a UFO—has been spotted buzzing Snake Hill, and there are even witnesses who report a touchdown. We see once again the connection between ancient human power sites and the UFO cycle. This is clearly a power hill.

  THE ANGEL’S MOUNTAIN

  (Seneca Country)

  We’ve all heard the story about the American farm boy who went on to found a major new religion. Born in Vermont in a region of strange stonework, Joseph Smith (1805–1844) moved with his family to Palmyra in upstate New York. In his teens, he poked around Cumorah Hill, may have dug into an ancient monument, and turned up tools, trinkets, and a pair of crystals he used to read a set of mysterious golden tablets no one has been able to find since. New York’s Burned-over District had one more founding tenant.

  Joseph Smith would spin a strange tale of a hidden cave, dialogues with an angel, and the golden plates that make a virtual new Bible. This Book of Mormon tells of lost tribes from Israel, ancient American civilizations, climactic battles, and biblical allegories. In only a few years, Prophet Smith (like Jesus Christ) died an early death at the hands of a mob, and his inspired supporters formed a new religion. His devout followers suffered persecution, built their New Jerusalem in the western wilderness, and founded one of the world’s most successful young religions. This tale of fantastic achievement is rooted in a serious mystery. What did Smith find, and why was it on Hill Cumorah?

  “This is a special place,” said Salvator Michael Trento, the Oxford-trained author who’s studied North America’s sacred places. Trento found “a major aberration” of Hill Cumorah’s “total magnetic field” and electro-magnetic curiosities like those reported at the world’s other major sacred monuments. Supernatural folklore tends to follow such sites, as with Smith’s Palmyra hill: UFO sightings, apparitions, and even witchcraft-inspired murders.

  His followers think Smith talked to angels and spoke for God. Our Seneca contacts agree that he found something on Cumorah Hill, and that it may be no easy place. They say their ancestors knew something powerful was hidden in that hill, and that it was medicine no one wanted to mess with. It was like the bottle holding the genie: Open it right and at the right time, and it works with gratitude; open it wrong or too late, and you had best not have opened it at all. Surely this counts as one of North America’s hot spots. The Seneca, we hear, still mistrust that hill.

  TAUGHANNOCK FALLS

  (Cayuga Country)

  Cayuga Lake drops south of Seneca Falls, home of the women’s rights movement. At the bottom of it is Ithaca, an eclectic city and home of Cornell University. Between Ithaca and Trumansburg on the southwestern shore is one of the state’s most unusual features.

  As much as today’s tourists revere sublime views, the old Iroquois loved them more. They walked vast distances to commune at these special scenes. Taughannock Falls was known to be one of them. Taughannock is far from New York’s biggest waterfall, but its 215-foot drop makes it the highest. It’s the focus of a number of tales.

  Taughannock Falls, a sacred spot for the Iroquois

  Some believe that Taughannock may mean “great falls in the woods.” In some tales, it’s the name of an Algonquin hero who made forays into Cayuga country. In others, it’s the name of a Delaware invader killed and tossed over the falls. Still another version of the legend stars Taughannock as a righteous local defender against Iroquois oppression whose daughter married a defeated Cayuga chief at the falls.

  There is also a Cayuga “lover’s leap” tale set here, fundamentally identical to a Mohawk legend of Snake Hill, an Onondaga story about Skaneateles Lake, and a Seneca romance about Canandaigua Lake. There could quite well be story-variants that we haven’t heard of. In recent Internet folklore are unsigned reports of mystery lights and a female demon somewhere in the park. Take those as you will.

  Taughannock Falls has a curious doorlike space, about eight by ten feet, in the cliff wall to the right of the water. Of course, it’s created by a falloff of a layer of rock, but it jumps out, even on the Internet photos. It looks like the entrance to a secret space inside the rock-ribbed mountain.

  The Six Nations folk presumed some magical force was at work in
truly curious natural features. Either the spot attracted the supernaturals, or it was made by them. Queer clefts in rock faces were wizards’ hideaways. Doorlike spaces in cliff walls were the gates of the Little People. This spot at the top of Taughannock Falls could have been either, and we would know which if we could solve the spell and get the smooth barrier to open for us.

  LOST NATION

  (Seneca Country)

  There’s some kind of mystery going on here, but we’re not sure what.

  For much of its existence, the Confederacy was at war. As the Longhouse nations expanded their territory, they met obstacles in single tribes. These groups were absorbed or cleared out.

  The Europeans changed everything, including the scale and objectives of war. In the 1600s, the Confederacy fought sustained wars on many fronts with large Native American groups, chiefly fellow Iroquoians like the Huron and Algonquin speakers like the Adirondack and Abenaki. Mini world wars, these conflicts sprawled all over the Northeast, the Great Lakes, and the Atlantic states.

  Many New York nations disappeared in the pass and fell, as Hamlet would say, of mighty opposites. None did so with greater mystery than an Allegany County group remembered as the Lost Nation. What else do we call them? They vanished from history in a heartbeat. All that remains of them is the name set to their former territory, a 1,500-acre tract in the town of Centerville.

  Scraps of rumor lead us to deduce that these folk were admired as craftsmen and settlers. Nothing tells us why they left in such a hustle. The Canandaigua Treaty of 1794 lists the tribes and territories in western New York; none could be the Lost Nation.

  The name Tutelo has surfaced in some sources. The Tutelo were a Siouan people from the American Southeast who did some wandering. Some were in western New York in the mid-1700s and may have been absorbed by the Cayuga. But who lived in Lost Nation? And why are there no signs of what happened to them? Did the UFOs beam them up?

  Lost Nation today is still undeveloped and used for hunting and other outdoor sports. Its enigmatic ruins—stone foundations and fireplaces—inspire the imagination but have recent origins: the CCC’s (Civilian Conservation Corps) Depression-era work camps.

  Still, something about Lost Nation nurtures folklore. Almost every figment of the paranormal surfaces today in the region: mystery lights, ghosts, witchcraft rumors, and mystery critters, including an excellent Bigfoot flap. Every few years it’s something.

  THE DALE

  (Seneca Country)

  The Cassadaga Lakes are three tame water bodies eight miles south of the Chautauqua County college town of Fredonia. They make a rough C-shape nestling today’s Lily Dale, concentrated just south of Upper Lake.

  Lily Dale is the capital of Spiritualism, a young American religion based on the idea that the spirits of our dead are still around us and can be reached for communication. While the Dale today is a freethinking community that hosts a summer program of talks and events on many metaphysical topics, what we see is only the flower on the vine. A series of eclectic movements ran behind today’s Lily Dale. The constant is the site.

  The whites settling here in 1809 found a number of ancient earthworks. Scholars reported odd skeletons and an ancient road, possibly even a European-style cursus, one of those short, still mysterious, roads to nowhere. These old monuments drove the belief that Lily Dale had been a cross-culturally sacred, conflict-free zone for ancient Native American societies and even a necropolis, a city of the dead.

  In the Lily Dale archives is an ancient works map, which Brad Olsen used for his own write-up in Sacred Places of North America. The southern Lower Lake was the focus of the ancient energy, featuring fire pits, causeways, palisades, and earthworks on the north, south, and east sides. We only wish we had the words of the ancient societies. We can only judge by the monuments they left us and the reactions we have to them.

  There’s still an earthwork somewhere at Lily Dale, inconspicuous, much settled, and in a tree-shaded yard. There seems little doubt that the spirit of place, the genius loci, is still active. Paranormal folklore abounds from the nineteenth century, including mystery lights and a couple of wonderful reports of a UFO and a Bigfoot. The psychics and mystics at Lily Dale are prone to seeing vortexes and power points there today, as well as spirits.

  Surely by design, Lily Dale encourages meditation. It has many nurturing nooks on its grounds. The most powerful may be Inspiration Stump, the atmospheric, reconstructed tree in an amphitheater amidst old-growth forest. Michael Bastine recalls the rumors among the Iroquois that this was a Little People place.

  Canadian psychic Gwendolyn Pratt recalled a midnight walk to Inspiration Stump just after a rain. In glistening steam and moon-spattered foliage, the bole in the grove was covered with white butterflies. All they took of the moonlight they gave back. What drew them all here, only here? Not another was in sight, anywhere. It took the breath away. Were they natural? In many cultures of the world, including some Native American ones, it’s thought that souls often return as butterflies.

  LAKE ELDRIDGE

  (Seneca Country)

  Four hundred years ago, the junction of the Chemung and Susquehanna rivers was hunting territory for Native American nations from as far away as the Atlantic coast. This was not unusual. The Northeast Woodlands were being overhunted, and communities had to send far afield for game. Sometime before the Europeans arrived, the warlike Andastes took hold of the region and gave it up only to the mighty grip of the Seneca. Odds are good that this was Seneca territory when the whites arrived, eventually setting up the city of Elmira.

  Somewhere in today’s city limits was the Iroquoian village called Shinedowa. Mount Zoar to the southwest dominates the horizon. Just south of it and along the Chemung River was a grove of evergreens that held the burial mounds of these Iroquoians and who knows who before them. The Seneca had legends about what’s called today Eldridge Lake.

  A dangerous swamp once surrounded it, and it had many mysterious residents. The Bird of Doom was a giant green creature whose eerie calls drove men back from the trails. Men knew they were fated to be wounded or killed when their paths were crossed by a certain huge black wolf, doubtless a shape-shifter or some wizard’s emissary.

  A chief ’s son met a strange, seemingly supernatural woman here and was haunted and fey afterward. The Celts would say that this was his fairy lover. He lost all his taste for life among mortals and was found dead in this swamp. He may be buried under a mound that could still be here—somewhere.

  Eldridge Park today is an urban oasis just north of the core of Elmira. Its small lake is so deceptively deep that the Native Americans believed it was bottomless and that it might be connected by underground channels to Seneca Lake, and thence to Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and the Atlantic. Maybe that explains its most dramatic legend, the one about its monstrous serpent at perpetual war with the local villages that the Thunder Being resolved to save. A chief ’s son and his bride-to-be bravely tempted the critter into the open, walking dangerously close to Eldridge Lake. When it reared to strike them in full sight of the lightning hurler, the trap was sprung. A single bolt ended the monster’s reign.

  HIGH ROCK SPRING

  (Mohawk Country)

  For thousands of years, on all the continents, springs have represented healing and inspiration. They are also associated with visions. Many Christian miracle sites, including those of Marian apparitions, are natural fountains. It was no different in Iroquois country.

  The British Empire’s Indian agent in North America was Irish-born Sir William Johnson (1715–1774). Revered by the Mohawks, he had a thing for Mohawk women and left a long line of multiracial descendants. He led the Mohawk men against a French and Algonquin force at the 1755 Battle of Lake George. He took both the honors of victory and a musket ball in the thigh that acted up ever after. It was so bad by the summer of 1767 that the Mohawk took Sir William in a litter to their most private and holy site: High Rock Spring in today’s Saratoga. He got there on
e morning in August.

  In the Mohawk style, he offered ground tobacco to the earth and winds, to the ancestors, and to the four quarters. He used more to fill and light the calumet, the peace pipe that may have been a gift from Ottawa chief Pontiac. Then he walked shakily to the sacred fountain. For four days he drank from it and lay in its waters.

  Letters arrived calling him home, and he stood with a pleasant shock. Not only was he no longer at death’s door, he could walk well enough to make much of his journey on foot. High Rock Spring’s notoriety may date to this visit. Other new springs were found in today’s Saratoga village, and all over this part of Saratoga County. The towns of Saratoga Springs and nearby Ballston Spa thrived as resorts based on the healing industry.

  Today, High Rock Spring nestles in its pavilion below the prominent fault that runs right down Saratoga Springs’ most important street. Its chief supernatural distinction today may be the wake of hauntings that spreads all around it. Noteworthy but not unexpected is its nearness to the famous haunt the Old Bryan Inn and the reputed territory of the late Angeline Tubbs (1760?–1865), the Witch of Saratoga. (She resurfaces, too, as a worthy ghost.) “You always have sightings at springs,” says Abenaki author Joe Bruchac. “We’ve got so many stories.”