Maybe a witch or wizard is disguised among your trusted animals. Maybe your pets had hidden talents all along. But if you live in the Northeast and like those long nightly hikes, even around your own village, be courteous to whatever approaches you.
“You don’t want to walk by and see two horses talking to each other,” said Seneca storyteller Duce Bowen. “You don’t want to have an animal ask you why you’re out and invite itself home with you.” Decline courteously, we suggest. Better yet, stay in on those nights that don’t feel just right.
WITCH AND SHAPE-SHIFTER
As with Celtic wizards, one of the distinctive powers of the master witch was shape-shifting: the ability to become another being, usually an animal, and continue to think as a human. Most of the wacked-out animal forms we encounter in Iroquois story and report were thought to be dangerous. When they weren’t apparitions projected by the witches or the back-off signs of a negative site, they were thought the alternate forms of great witches, most of whom had a favored critter into which to shift.
“Spirit of Victory” by Tom Mullany (1989) in Joseph Davis State Park, Lewiston, New York
Still, tradition doesn’t give us a reason to presume that witch and shape-shifter are one. For one thing, there are shape-shifters who aren’t witches. For another, there are witches who don’t shape-shift. The occasional worker of a love charm or a hex may be technically a witch, but no metamorphosis is involved.
Some good power people can be shifters, too. The shamans, forerunners of the great medicine people, were thought to take animal form. The most exceptional contemporary medicine people are thought to do it, too, but the transformation could be psychic. (The material body lies at rest; the astral form’s at work.)
But you can spot a shifter. One of the oldest pan-Amerindian strictures concerning these people-animal forms is that they can never fully hide what they are. A shape-shifted animal will always show some feature of what it used to be. Even the ancient rock art of the American Southwest depicts animal forms with human feet. You just need to look closely enough.
The morphed human will have an animal tooth, ear, or tail. The full animal will walk funny, even on two legs like a human. Fully morphed animals may turn to each other and talk in human poses. Pay attention. This may be your one edge on them.
But these altered animals don’t stop and explain themselves. All you can know for sure about them is that the matter is wondrous strange. And people still say they see them, all over upstate New York.
The Witch Dog
(Late Nineteenth Century)
A woman suffering with a wasting disease told her family that every night something peered in her window. Some thought it was just the delirium of her ailment, but often when the ground was soft her husband found big dog tracks outside. Once after a snowfall, he followed them to the dirt road where they got lost in other tracks.
The morning after that, an old woman was among the friends who called. She lived in a little house near the creek and asked about the wife so suspiciously that the husband wondered how she knew so much. When she left, his wife was worse.
That night his wife screamed in her sleep: “She is looking at me!” The husband jumped up, saw nothing, and thought it was another vision. Outside, though, he saw widely spaced dog tracks under the window, as if the animal that made them had run away. A neighbor saw a dark, fast-moving form leap a fence and run into the trees toward the creek.
In the morning, the husband followed the tracks of a big dog to the creek. On the other side were human footprints, leading to the house of the old woman. That afternoon, the old woman came again, and the husband accused her of witchcraft. She acted shocked, but her performance fell flat. No member of any Iroquois nation would be that surprised by the idea of witchcraft. “Stop witching my wife,” the husband finished. “I’ll fix you if you don’t.”
That night, the husband camped in the woodshed. Sometime after midnight he heard an ominous huffing and dog feet coming from the trees. He looked through a crack in the shed and saw a huge hound looking in on his sleeping wife, its paws on the windowsill. Its snout glowed in the glare that pulsed from its jowls with every breath; its spittle lit like molten metal. It had picked a bad night to come witching. The husband had his rifle.
It was sleighing time, and the moon was out. Lots of people saw the witchdog hurdle the fence as the husband fired. They heard a yelp and the sound of a tumble on the other side. They saw something taller and two legged run to the nearest cabin and jump through the window. In the morning, they saw blood spatters in the snow.
Three days later, the old woman was found dead in her bed from a bullet wound. Everybody was sure she had been a witch. Her intended target recovered.
The Twilight Walker of Marble Hill
(Late Nineteenth Century)
Between Syracuse and Utica is the town of Oneida where utopian socialist John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886) set up the first of his alternative perfectionist communities in 1848. Ever after called the Oneida Community, it thrived for three decades and was the flagship of a handful of others in North America. Noyes was far from the only white to find inspiration on Iroquois ground. The small bit of Indian land he picked had an otherworldly rap sheet before he got there.
A short walk east of Noyes’s massive mansion is a high ridge called Marble Hill. It’s just south of the eastern edge of the village called Oneida Castle, named for the fort once here. In the late 1800s, the area of Marble Hill was awash with reports of a strange twilight walker. Tall and slender, he carried a satchel and wore a stovepipe hat. That chapeau makes him sound suspiciously like a bogie the Allegany Seneca personify as High Hat.
Anyone walking about at night might see him, though they might not hear him. He walked noiselessly. Few got close to him, probably for the good. Those who did saw the two big animal ears partly covered by the hat. Some noticed one normal foot, in a walking shoe or boot. The other was the hoof of an animal. If Iroquois tradition surely held an indigenous devil, this might be one sign of him.
An Oneida farmer on Marble Hill had a bit more of this character than he wanted. His cows were developing an unwelcome habit of wandering off at the end of every day. One dusk, their owner was looking for them when he met a tall longhair who could only have been another form of this stranger. The minute the pair met, the twilight walker commenced launching such verbal abuse that the two fell into a terrible fistfight. They clinched, and the sturdy farmer got the edge, twisting one hand solidly into the stranger’s mane and, like a hockey fight, using the leverage to belabor him with the other. Suddenly, as if bespelled, he fell asleep.
He woke by daylight, his joints stiff and his clothes wet with the dew. He noticed, though, that his hand was firmly tangled in a patch of the coarse marsh grass the Oneida call the devil’s hair.
CHANGELINGS
Some reservation folk talk these days about changelings. They seem to be using this old European word to mean shape-shifters, shamans or witches who take on animal forms, but with an odd twist. These changelings seem never to be a single whole critter. They are either animals that are complete morphs of others or people with critter features: fox tails, bear ears, horse hooves. We keep open the possibility that they could be shape-shifters, spotted in the process of shifting into shape or careless about shifting back.
We’d like to know how long this word changeling has been in use among the Iroquois. We can’t tell if it’s an English word being used for an old Iroquois folkloric critter or if the term has infiltrated reservation folklore through contact with whites and been misapplied. We suspect the latter.
The changeling of Celtic folklore isn’t a being who changes forms. The word means something exchanged, usually a fairy baby left in place of a stolen human one. Loud, sickly, ugly, ravenous, and developmentally challenged, this changeling is a world of hurt for its adopted parents. There are usually two ways to be rid of it and get the mortal child back: either to make the changeling think you’re crazier tha
n it is by doing something silly—like making tea out of brewed eggshells—or scaring it by threatening to abuse it. (“I’ll boil the water for the baby’s bath,” the mother calls cheerfully to the father. “You get the steel wool and bleach to rub him.”) It bolts out the window like it could fly, and the mortal child is heard cooing in its crib.
In one description, these Iroquois changelings, from the front, look like people, normally dressed for the rez. But the back half is animallike, with tail or fur. The surreality of this description makes us wonder if the whole thing is an illusion.
The Iroquois aren’t the only ones who see these altered critters. I met a white trucker who once cut through the Tonawanda Reservation every morning on his way to work. One misty dawn, he rounded a bend and caught a look at something strange: a human figure in a long coat and hat, with a big, bushy animal tail billowing out behind. It froze just long enough for him to see it, then darted back into the woods. He never took that shortcut again.
In another description, a changeling is an altered animal but with frightening powers. In the early 1990s, one of these popped out on winding Sandhill Road and chased a man on a chopper, one of the biggest men on the Tonawanda Reservation. People referred to him as “that big mean biker dude.” It was his turn to be intimidated.
He could see it in his rearview mirrors, a forty-pound animal with fox ears and a tail. It chased him upright, though, like an enraged fireplug. He ran stop signs and sped around bends. It gained on him at fifty. He didn’t see the last of it till he was off the reservation. Maybe it was a changeling, out to get him, losing its power on white man’s land. Maybe the medicine people sent it to him as a message: cool it.
There are parallels all over North America. Around the upper Great Lakes are legends about bearwalkers. Obviously witches in their theriomorph forms, they pace as shaggy humanoids that huff and puff smoke and sparks. Author Tony Hillerman (1925–2008) recounts the southwestern mythology of the skinwalkers, who can move pretty fast. Late one night a white trucker saw one of these pull alongside him on a highway. A lean, grinning Native American man under a coyote-head hood kept up with him on foot and motioned him to pull over. He didn’t outrun the figure till he reached a terrifying speed down a hill.
SHAPE-SHIFTERS
For the old Iroquois, shape-shifting witches usually took the forms of forest critters like wolves, bears, and owls. These days, it’s often livestock or pets: dogs, horses, cats, and pigs. In these forms, they stalk and curse their human enemies. They also get hit, whipped, or shot. Somewhere a human usually turns up with a matching wound.
Duce Bowen talked of shape-shifters like they were real. “Have you, or anyone you know, ever seen one of these things in the process?” I asked him once.
“No shape-shifter will ever let you see them,” he said firmly. He seemed to feel that as recently as his own childhood there were people known to use this power. It’s probably a fading art. As of 2004, he knew no one he suspected, at least none he would talk about. Maybe we only hear about these folks near the end of a life, after many occult feats.
But the old-timers can recognize them in their final shape. Any time you see an animal behaving unnaturally like a person—walking on its hind legs or talking—it’s a sign of supernaturalism and usually trouble. Even an animal that looks normal but displays a humanlike sense of purpose—perching outside a home and staring fixedly day after day—is probably either a wizard in disguise or something sent by one. Even a natural animal out of place might be such a critter. Horses grazing in a neighborhood that lacks them. Sheep wandering without an owner.
In the 1930s white writer Carl Carmer (1893–1976) got a couple of Tonawanda Senecas talking about shape-shifting. They gave him an earful.
“There are a good many witch stories about humans changing themselves into animals,” Jesse Cornplanter admitted. “I could tell you the names of two or three who actually do it if reports around here can be believed.”
Cephas Hill, a college-educated plant foreman, recalled that once, in his boyhood, strange pigs were heard rooting in the shed of Willy Abrams, a Seneca man who had just died. An old woman told young Hill that he’d better watch out for them, that they might be witches. She said this as if they might have had something to do with the death and had come back gloating on the funeral day. Young Hill gave them both barrels of his shotgun, and they ran off squealing. Later some younger children who had been with him at the time told Hill that they’d seen a man by an abandoned cabin in the woods picking buckshot out of his backside. “Witch!” they yelled, and off he ran.
Cornplanter remembered an old man who went to the Lockport Fair on a hay wagon with some Tonawanda folk. He wasn’t ready to leave with the rest, so they left him. Later a pig came trotting along behind the wagon. As it passed, the driver gave it a crack of the whip. The pig stopped and looked at him with an eye so evil that it gave him the creeps. When they passed the old man’s cabin an hour later, his lamp was lit, and on the porch he sat. He never said how he beat them all back.
“I knew an Indian fellow who took a girl to a dance who was not his regular girl,” said Hill. On the way home, he and the girl were following a path along the top of a ridge when a galloping horse came up behind them. It nearly ran them over. As it went by, the lad shot it in the shoulder. It whinnied and ran into the woods. Soon after, his regular girl’s mother died. When they laid her out for burial, they found a bullet wound in her shoulder. No one knew how it got there.
The notes of Irving historian Everett Burmaster tell us of one early twentieth-century witch who lived on the Cattaraugus Reservation. She could transform herself and spent much of her time in a pond as the consort of a huge black snake. This reminds us of the Olympian Zeus who amused himself by getting it on with his conquests—usually mortal stunners—in the forms of different animals, sometimes even transforming them as well so as to deceive his jealous wife Hera. The Greeks didn’t tell us which animal does it better, but in Seneca country the snakes must have had the mojo. As if a testament to the witch’s eternal flame, when she finally died and was buried, a witch light or ga’hai was seen over this pond. I think I know where that pond is, or at least used to be. It’s not far from Irving, New York, and on a point always reputed to be haunted. It was her house in which Burmaster found his witch bag.
ALTERED ANIMALS
On October 12, 1870, the Livingston Republican ran an article about a strange beast seen by several different people. It was large, bipedal, and, from the description, a bit like a crazed kangaroo. The residents of Livingston County would have recognized such a beast, though, and this one’s temper was hardly that of a vegetarian. It attacked a number of dogs, rearing on its back legs and striking out with its forepaws. A few weeks later, another article claimed that the beast “literally tore the feet and ears” off the hound of a doctor in the Livingston County town of Moscow (now the village of Leicester). On the last day of 1870, the Nunda News reported what had to be the same strange animal, spotted again outside Moscow. The accounts make no mention of critical details: its skull size and shape, its tail or lack thereof. They describe its motion as virtual hopping and its paw prints like those of a dog.
In 2003, there was a flap in Niagara County. Near the Tuscarora Reservation is a campground around which people reported seeing bizarre animals, including deer walking on their hind legs. The white folkloric imagination latched on to the idea of radioactive waste dumps and mutating wildlife. There has been some deplorable contamination at many points along the Niagara and radiation has been the deus ex machina—sudden artificial plot device—for movie monsters like Godzilla. But the critters have parallels.
They see things like this on Ga’hai Hill near Salamanca, where images of deer—sometimes gutted—have been reported, rearing up like people and walking on their spindly rear legs. Are these the altered animal forms of the Iroquois variety?
One of our favorite Native American bogies is a sinister, silent little devil from the lor
e of the American Southwest. Hillerman skillfully retells the stories of these critters, assassins from the spirit world who take over the bodies of animals and can appear in any natural form. The favored ones seem to be small, like owls, rabbits, and foxes. Killing the animal will only kill the host, and the bogie will show up in an equivalent version soon enough. Though they terrorize through their inexorable stalking, they usually kill through simple bad fate: accidents, sickness, and the like. They may walk on their hind legs like humans, and it’s no good sign if you see that. The only sure way to tell them is by the eyes, flat and unreflective like those of dead fish. It’s presumed they are animated by the chindi, malevolent spirits of dead humans.
There was the story of a rich Navajo family that had asked a heavy favor from an old shaman and crassly refused payment. He set this sort of altered-animal demon on them. At first, only the old and sick died. Then accidents and ailments struck the middle-aged. The young ones met with the shaman. He agreed to think things over but died before he had a chance to undo his work. Most of the family was gone by the time the story was recorded.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 28