The Flying Head had shape-shifting magic. It could make itself the size of an ordinary human skull if it needed to, in which case its mane would have made it look much like a medicine mask. There are stories of it flying in its small form into human homes and interviewing the inhabitants it had not yet decided to kill and eat.
The Flying Head may have been a brute, but there was more to it. In some tales, the Heads are grudgingly benevolent. Later tales pictured them as material beings who, when they weren’t eating people, might intercede for them against other monsters. Usually this means standing up for human beings against Stone Giants or witches in a wizard’s duel, a common northeastern motif.
In other tales, the Heads can work as healers, serving as a source of inspiration for the common faces of Iroquois medicine masks. They come to hunters in the woods or as visions in dreams, often long enough to direct the making of masks and even serve as models.
We haven’t heard contemporary reports of these Flying Heads anywhere in Iroquois country. Even in the settler days, according to Mary Jemison, the Iroquois talked about them as if they were things of the past. There were regions, though, groves or hills, known once to have been special to them. I’ve heard of one in Seneca country near Letchworth State Park.
THE VAMPIRE CORPSE
The Iroquois had a lot of stories about evil, semidead, humanlike beings sometimes called vampires or cannibal corpses. Not all of the Six Nations’ variety are bloodsuckers like the Romanian vampire or the Scottish glaistig. Still, they were so similar to the human predator of European folklore that we have to call them vampires. Variants abound.
The culprit can be a dead human, a simple corpse that something overtakes. It may be the body of a witch or sorcerer so full of its own otkon that the force lasts on after physical death. Sometimes the demon is an airy specter or ghost, physical enough at the business end for a bit of chewing. The Iroquois vampire can be a virtual skeleton, sometimes even what seems to be a separate species that only looks human. It could even be a servant of the otherworld like the monsters that wait along the perilous course of the human soul in Egyptian mythology.
It’s hard to tell if these are different tales—regional variants—or if the subject of them has different forms. Ah well, the European vampire is a shape-shifter, too, at least within a range of animal forms: bats, wolves, rats, moths. Maybe the stories are about the same critter. But forget the suave Victorian counts or runway models of the twenty-first-century vampire industry. The Iroquois bogie is a reanimated corpse that wouldn’t score at a zombie festival.
The Vampire Man
There were rumors about the old man. He lived by himself far from the village. In his last sickness, people came to make his days easier. Just before his death he said, “Put me in a bark coffin and set me in the backroom of this house. Leave everything as it is, and travelers can shelter here.” He added in a tone that should have registered, “But no woman or child should ever sleep here. It will be just too dangerous.”
Sometime later, a poor traveling couple and their baby girl came upon this deserted house. They saw the body in the birch-bark coffin, but made little of it. This was a normal custom for many Native Americans.
The husband lay down in the backroom to rest. His wife prepared the evening meal, her daughter slung at her side. She heard the sounds of breaking bones, chewing, and slurping. She knew instantly that her husband had been killed, undoubtedly by some supernatural presence related to the corpse. Hope lay in deception.
“Your daughter and I are going to the stream to get water for the broth,” she cried out as merrily as she could. “We’re coming right back.” She took the pail, left the house casually, and started running along the well-worn footpaths. She was a long way toward the nearest village when a furious howl came from the direction of the cabin.
She ran even faster through the dim woods. Her pursuer was coming. The next bestial vocable she heard was closer than the first; the vampire man was gaining. She threw off a scarf. In a little while, she heard it ripped to tatters. She threw off other pieces of clothing, and each time the same thing happened.
She saw the walls of a stockaded town and called out the traditional distress cry, hoping someone might hear it. Some women finishing their last chores took it up, not knowing what emergency was at hand. But the sounds were near. The young mother could hear panting.
She collapsed outside the village, fearing it was too late. But a party of young men burst from the gates. They hovered over her, glaring into the night, and they were armed. Even a vampire knew he was beat. A half-human voice howled from the thicket.
The next day the young mother told her tale, and a war band set out for the cabin. The body of the husband lay just as he had slept, but with a big hole in his side. Next to him in its coffin was the body of the hermit, fresh blood on its face. It was the most contented corpse they had ever seen.
The warriors pounded the vampire into pulp and piled logs about the house. Soon after they set the fire they could hear yipping and howling within. A big jackrabbit slipped out, dodged weapons, and dashed between the legs of warriors. This may or may not have been the vampire spirit, but if it was, he had learned his lesson from the Iroquois. They never heard of him again.
SUPER SERPENTS
The snake is a universal image: its emotionless gaze, its stony torpor, its earth-cool blood, its inexorable slithering, its coiling, enveloping kill. As a symbol, it has powerfully impressed the conscious and unconscious mind since people started to create their lore, art, and mythology. The snake permeates dreams, all over the world.
Snakes that appear in conflict with the powers associated with sun, air, and sky—birds, lightning gods—may be different from the giant ones that appear solo. This bird-versus-snake imagery is heavy all over the Americas, including among the Iroquois.
In art, mythology, and literature, almost any big slithery evokes a dragon. Legs, wings, and fire or not, the twain are often taken as one.
The Asian snake/dragon is usually a symbol of the earth force and intertwined with the power of fate. It is not meant to be confronted, any more than other indomitable natural forces like gravity or the wind. It’s best worked with. Despite the occasional variant tale, the Native American snake is more like the Asian one.
Although the pre-Christian Europeans’ view of the snake may have been more in keeping with the Asian and Native American version, the European snake/dragon we see most often in art and literature is something the hero, the representative of consciousness, needs to master, carve, or skewer. Monstrous and inimical to human society, the European dragon is often interpreted as a symbol of something terrifying within the human mind, possibly the bestial unconscious—or older societies, an earlier way of life, and even the Devil.
Bearing in mind that their folklore shows some influence from European Christians, the great snakes that populate New York legend have a bit of both continents in them. Suffice it to say that the lore of the Iroquoians seems to participate fully in this pan–Native American and global mythological cycle.
In the Iroquois site tradition of New York, there are great lake snakes, little lake snakes, shape-shifting mythological snake beings, and landscape energy snakes. In general, the bigger the snake, the better it is for human society. Let’s talk about a few of them.
The Welsh word for man is related to the Latin vir and sounds like “were.” A werewolf is a man-wolf. One class of Iroquoian snake beings are were-snakes, shape-shifting serpent fairies, an alternate race like the selkies (were-seals) of Scottish lore. They may be related in some form to something the Seneca called the Blue Lizard, a man-sized servant of the greater snakes.
Some of the time these were-snakes are in league with a gigantic lake monster. They lure people near it for a meal. In other scenarios, they are altered forms of the big critter. Many Iroquois supernaturals are size-shifters.
Sometimes they come to us as lovers. They look pretty slick in their human forms. Seductive,
on-the-edge beings, what about them entrances us so? They’re a lot like the Lamia of European folklore and Keats’ famous poem. They’re like the Lorelei Jung talked about, figures of dangerous sexuality. They are sublime—psychologically threatening. They look too cool for us. Then they show an interest. One hangout session with one of them and you are lost—fey—spiritually taken by the fairies, as the Celts would say.
If a man meets a female were-snake, he wanders the marshes at the borders of the human world that no longer interests him. Then he’s mysteriously found dead.
For a woman, it may be more complex. She goes off as a bride with the fast-talking, elegant stranger. Before long, she discovers his beastly, size-shifting nature, but what’s she to do? He’s as potentially hostile as he is amorous. But a Thunder Being just waiting for this moment comes to her and gives her the guidance to flee her demon-husband. As he pursues in his true form, the massive, hypnotic snake comes into the open and is killed by a bolt of lightning.
With the big-lake snakes, we start in the realm of folklore and step into that of the paranormal.
The Great Horned Snake of Lake Ontario is a figure of Iroquoian legend. Sometimes his horns are the shape and spread of the antlers of a massive buck deer. Sometimes they’re like those of the buffalo, though many times larger. This being is not by nature evil. He helps outcast human beings in many a tale. Still, he’s at war with the Thunder Being and his allies. For some reason these two have it out for each other, and whenever old horny flashes his hide under open sky, he risks taking a bolt. Many geological features around the state are reputed to be the work of the climactic clash. Ironically, a big slithery has been reported many a time in Lake Ontario. Soldiers stationed at Fort Niagara have called it in.
There is a two-hundred-year-old string of reports about a less religious mythological creature in Lake Erie. Back Bay (or South Bay) Bessie is a variably sized critter blamed in at least one boat capsizing and attack in 1992. (We have not interviewed witnesses of that event and have to tell you that this is an Internet rumor.)
Then there is the famous Lake Champlain monster. While it’s rumored to have been mentioned first in the 1609 journal of French explorer Samuel de Champlain, that water-critter sighting most likely took place in the ocean waters of the St. Lawrence estuary. Still, the Mohawk and some Algonquin-speaking nations thought there was some big animal in the long lake, nicknamed Champ after the French explorer. The legend continues to grow.
Several of the Finger Lakes and some of the smaller lakes and rivers have both Native American serpent legends and recent paranormal reports.
The 1850s flap over the serpent of little Silver Lake in Wyoming County was as much a hoax as the man-made Cardiff or Taughannock giant. The perpetrator claimed to have gotten the idea from a Seneca site legend. Even tiny Findlay Lake in Chautauqua County has its serpent tales.
Lakes Seneca and Canandaigua have both Iroquoian serpent legends and fairly current white reports, some of them well documented. We know the Seneca great serpent legend associated with the south end of Canandaigua Lake. In August 1891, many white Canandaiguans reported seeing a gigantic snake that could have been its twin, negotiating the lake’s beautiful waters. Lakeside innkeepers claimed that sightings were routine.
Likewise a feature of legend, the Seneca Lake monster was spotted in 1899 by a boatload of Geneva citizens. This one came so close that a geologist on board believed he could identify the species—a Clidastes, a finned croc nightmare. It was of modest size, though: twenty or thirty feet long.
A bigger something was seen on Seneca Lake in the summer of 1995. A responsible, educated woman on a Geneva hotel porch reported seeing a monumental form leap out of the water, lunge like a column, and lapse like a tree back. The distance from her she estimated at six hundred feet. She was so shocked that other aspects of the experience are foggy. Another curiosity, which could be related, is the Seneca Lake drums—massive, seemingly geological percussions occasionally heard coming from the lake.
Lesser-known “underwater drums” are also reported in Cayuga Lake, which has its own serpent legends and reports. Old Greeny, the whites call the eel-like thirty-footer. According to the Ithaca Journal of January 5, 1897, they’ve been seeing him since at least 1828, and the most recent sighting we’ve heard of was 1974. Cayuga is the longest and widest Finger Lake and maybe the best candidate for such a critter. Since both these lake bottoms dip below sea level, the possibility of underground channels between them, the Great Lakes, and, hence, the oceans comes into speculation.
Also in Cayuga country, Owasco Lake was the subject of big snake reports in 1889 and 1897. A lakeside farmer reported a fast-swimming critter. Two men in a boat saw a fifty-foot reptile with a huge girth.
The 1828 pamphlet of David Cusick, Tuscarora historian, memorializes a gigantic serpent legend based around Onondaga Lake near Syracuse. Cusick had spent midstate time with the Oneida, among whom it was said that this stenchful, venomous critter attacked and killed two hundred people.
There are also the serpents of outrage, of offense to the Native people and the face of the New York landscape. In this sense, they seem projections of the collective unconscious, if not the earth itself.
During the late-1960s turmoil over the Kinzua Dam, Salamanca residents reported all the bogies of the Iroquois zoo in the natural landscape, including the Great Snake of the Allegheny. It had apparently climbed the banks of the river and done some foraging in the hills above the construction site. Most witnesses were offended local Seneca, but not all. Such an image was also reported at and about the 1930 damming of the Sacandaga Creek, creating the Sacandaga Reservoir in Saratoga County. Though this was far less of an offense to Native American sovereignty, it produced plenty of local paranormal folklore.
The Kinzua snake may not have left us. In 2001, a local college physics professor and two friends reported seeing a gigantic snake in the reservoir water below them. It may not have been a match for Godzilla, but it was at the least the biggest natural python in the world and completely out of place and clime. From hundreds of feet away, it was visible, forging its mighty course through the waves.
Asked for a material explanation for these critters in lakes that widely freeze over—like the Erie and the Champlain—and that could hardly support a single big predator, much less a breeding population, we are at a loss. We can only point out the significance of the big snake in both mythology and Jungian psychology. We will also say that these big critters are reported in other deep, cold, mind-defying places about the world, like Loch Ness. There is probably something going on that we haven’t figured out yet, and whatever it is, it is not as simple as a “true or false.”
THE THUNDERERS
In so many world mythologies, there is a clash between fire and sky forces, symbolized by explosive flame and lightning, and earth and water forces, personified by enormous snakes, reptiles, and lizards. We see this with the Iroquois.
One of the great Iroquois gods was called, in Seneca, Heno. Parker tells us that it means “he great voice,” a pretty apt name for this power of the sky. So esteemed was this Thunder Being that it’s not clear that he and the Creator are totally separate entities.
In a striking parallel to the Indic thunder god Indra, the Iroquois Heno keeps an entourage of thunder boys. At least some of them are probably noble orphans, lost children ruined by disaster or fate, saved from death and raised by another Thunderer. Sometimes the orphan of a chief favored by the Thunderers will be so honored. Others are love children of wayward Thunderers.
One of these Thunderers is pretty hard to resist when he comes in the form of a splendid young chief. He tells his mortal bride not to let their boy play with other kids. Just a slap from him would kill a natural human; he’s that full of juice. Soon he goes back to the heavens and joins the apprentice Thunderers. Their jobs are to patrol the world on the lookout for evil magical beings.
They are also the Thunder Beings’ spies, one each inside a thunder c
loud, on the lookout for the otkon forces of the earth. But they’re a frisky bunch. It’s hard to see how anyone sleeps in their part of the Iroquois heaven.
Now and then one of these formerly mortal Thunderers comes back to the world with extra abilities. They’re really good at straightening out a lawless village or a pack of witches terrorizing a community. Sometimes they pitch in with the Little People and launch a bolt or two at the giant underground buffalo when they are on the loose.
A former mortal raised and trained as a Thunderer is of special use to the high one. The head Thunderer himself and his mightiest minions can be scented a long way off by their enemies on the earth. Riding a cloud, packing a magical bow and a quiver of bolts, a mortal-born Thunderer is just human enough to fool them.
So strong was the faith that mortal children might be raised to the ranks of Thunderers that some Iroquois had no fear of lightning storms. “We have a relative there who makes the thunder,” an Oneida woman told Hope Emily Allen in the early twentieth century.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 26