By the time I came out under open sky, I realized that I had been thinking about ancestors, and my own elders, all passed to the other side. On days like that—Easter—they seem close. Their memories passed before me.
The men in my family had dropped quickly, and to no pattern. The women had lingered past their capacities to enjoy anything in the world but the love for them that came back from it. I loved my sports, my movement under the open sky like this, my books, my friends. I pitied the two women I had seen to their ends, that they had nothing like this anymore in their lives. As they aged and weakened, I found myself paying special attention to them on holy days like that one, affirming images of renewal and hope for them any way I could. Every long winter either of them survived seemed to promise that one more summer would beckon and charge their fading lives into another full-year cycle. The last of them was gone, though. My mother had crossed over two months before.
I looked up and across the open fields and reflected on family, on the family each of us chooses to create, creates without thoughtful choosing, or never creates. It seemed a loss to me that I have had no children, and that I have no plans to. Even nieces and nephews are no likelihood. I have no siblings.
Most of us are born into the embrace of families. Through children and partners many of us re-create it around us as the elders fall. That’s what we think our duty is. Some with those responsibilities envy those who seem free. There’s another side.
For those none will ever look to as ancestor, that community is gone when the elders leave the world. I realized that the true honoring of ancestors may well be children, gifts of continuity and love coming back to them from the world. I wondered if I had wasted the preceding twelve years in an indirect cycle of stress and grief, and if by then the true remedy was too far away. Leaning on my poles, I looked to the sky, then looked down for a good long while. I saw that my books may be the gifts I give to the elders and started to ski again.
These Little People are quirky. Like children, their gifts and shortcomings are not those of adults. Their size and whimsy make them childlike; their powers and understanding are supernatural. This contrast may be a testimony to the archetype of the child.
The child mind has immeasurable inspiration and creativity. Its limits are those only of its species, but it lacks experience. It needs help to do simple things, but its talents—its imagination, its play, its gifts of seeing past boundaries—can only be recaught by the greatest artists. This could be the model for these forever children.
As if powered by the boundlessness of every child mind, these Little People are forces of nature—of growth and fertility—to every culture that holds them in tradition. They drive the seasons’ turn. They are also with the ancestors, as if either the spirits of the human dead can, after some transformation, join the Little People, or the Little People as they are know other otherworld realms.
Messengers from both the worlds, of nature and of spirit, these Little People may be closer to you than you think. See them, hear them, when they come to you.
11
The Land of the Elders
At night when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. “Dead” did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.
CHIEF SEATTLE, IN HIS 1854 ORATION
THE OLD SPIRITS
The paranormal is a broad field (UFOs, cryptozoology, earth energies, ancient mysteries). The division of it presumed to originate with the human mind or spirit is called psychic phenomena: ESP, poltergeists, mind over matter, and, yes, apparitions. Ghosts. This chapter is about haunted places and psychic experiences related to the New York Iroquois.
Today’s Iroquois don’t tell a lot of ghost stories, at least not in any writer’s hearing. They talk about seeing the occasional curt supernatural image and give it the name of a once-living person if they can. They talk about their own psychic experiences. They talk about buildings and sites that host spectrums of paranormal effects, including these apparitions we call ghosts. They talk about dreams, visions, and psychic experiences, many of which seem related to the spirits of humans who have passed over. In this, they are the equal of any people known to history. Ghost stories of the popular type, though, are told about the Iroquois by others.
The great folklorist Louis C. Jones (1908–1990) was well aware that not all of New York’s Native American ghost stories originated with the Native Americans. “These are neither the tales the Indians tell of themselves nor tales that have taproots in the white man’s past.” It makes sense that it would be this way, from several perspectives.
While we know of no treatise developing the Iroquois concept of the soul, the Iroquois seem to believe that the human organism had several levels of spirit-self. They aren’t the first world society to have thought that. The classical world, for instance, thought there might have been layers to the immaterial part of the human being. The fine contemporary paranormal scholar Colin Wilson gets quite close to this with his “ladder of selves” theory.
As Arthur C. Parker concluded from the classic stories and his interviews, the Iroquois didn’t consider all ghosts to be sentient, self-actuated beings. For the Iroquois, the ghost is, like the Roman manes, the body-spirit. The full psychic personality is long gone into the spirit world when the material body dies.
In our mix are some stories the Native Americans do tell. Our tales fall into four categories:
Traditional Iroquois ghost tales
Profiles of cross-cultural haunted sites that feature folklore of Native ghosts
White folktales and reports about Native American ghosts
Contemporary Native psychic experiences, including dreams, messages, and sightings
Native American ghosts are reported all over the United States. They are especially common in New York, where, if you checked hard enough, you could come up with some Native American–related ghost tale in almost every village or patch of city.
Our settlers reported Iroquoian ghosts. Just check the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century files. You won’t fail to come up with some anecdote, however cryptic, about a haunt of relevance to New York’s first nations. We’ve done our best to reconstruct a few such ghost stories. Not all of them may be current.
Apparitions of chiefs, shamans, and buckskinned maidens are scarce in some quarters, like Times Square. Little wonder. The period of reporting of an identifiable ghost is typically less than two hundred years, and Native American societies have been displaced from the territory of our cities at least that long.
A lot of ink has been spilled over America’s Native ghosts. Their apparitions are often analyzed as manifestations of societal guilt. “Europeans take possession of Native American lands,” noted Renee Bergland in The National Uncanny (2000). “But at the same time, Native Americans take supernatural possession of their dispossessors.” As Jones pointed out, when the rest of us stopped slaughtering the Native Americans, we started to supernaturalize them. It may also be, though, that the ghosts are there; that the Native Americans, quick or dead, represent the spiritual conscience of the nation; and that, until we come to grips with something we haven’t collectively faced, they will be here to remind us, like Banquo’s ghost, of our debt, especially in New York state.
FIVE IROQUOIS MOTIFS
Doubtless there is a European influence in some of the most familiar Iroquoian ghost tales. There is also something original to them, not least of which is their attachment to precise upstate sites. In his 2005 book on Oneida folklore, Anthony Wayne Wonderley notes “how consistently [Iroquois supernatural stories] relate to space and local geography.”
As we see everywhere else in the world, stories told by and about the Iroquois tend to fall into generic forms called motifs. In the matter of ghost lore, we find a couple
of these story forms everywhere in Iroquois country, almost always affixed to local landmarks. Below are five of the major upstate Native American ghost motifs. They could have been sited in almost any county in the upstate. If we see an Onondaga tale in one of these motifs and find that a Seneca version has not been preserved, not to worry. We can presume it was there.
The Offended Lovers
(Seneca Country, Rochester)
A young Seneca couple journeyed along Lake Ontario to join their families on the Niagara River. They made camp near Long Pond in today’s Greece. A handful of fellow travelers soon joined their fire.
Their guests were a party of renegades who at first shared only fire and conversation. Soon they stopped even addressing the husband and drew closer to the fair young wife. One started going through the belongings of the couple, looking for anything of value. Others started pawing the woman and told the husband to scram. They must not have known he was Seneca.
The only weapon near the young man was his knife, which he drew and instantly commenced to use. His wife fled the firelight. A scoundrel turned after her and was struck dead. The young Seneca fought like a panther, but his assailants had numbers, clubs, and tomahawks. He took many wounds. When sure his wife was clear, he dove into Long Pond, singing his death song, and went under.
All was still, all but, from an invisible grove, a woman’s voice, chanting the bitter words of a curse. The renegades never reached their destination. Maybe they were finished by a party of avenging Seneca. Maybe it was something worse.
Apparitions are common by bodies of water and moonlight. The one at Long Pond could be anything. But a legend has developed that it’s the Seneca husband reappearing as a sheeny spirit in the water. Whatever it is, Rochester historian Shirley Cox Husted recalled seeing it.
THE HAUNTED BATTLEFIELD
(Mohawk/Algonquin Country, Ballston Spa)
Until the advent of the car and modern highways, water has always been the preferred method of travel in the hilly, woody Northeast. When lakes and creeks didn’t connect, there was a canoe-hauling march between the points called a portage, usually marked by a well-worn trail.
Kill is a Dutch word for creek, found often in Hudson-region place-names. Mourning Kill is a stream at the northeastern edge of Mohawk territory. Today it runs through the town of Ballston in Saratoga County and winds into the Kaydeross River. Between the creek called Mourning Kill and the outlet of Ballston Lake was a portage on one of the trails between the Mohawk and St. Lawrence Rivers. A thoroughfare for thousands of years, Mourning Kill was a natural meadow, a likely place for Native American groups to cross paths—even those who didn’t get along.
The Trickster Raptor
One morning during strawberry time, centuries before Columbus, five hundred Mohawk men entered the Mourning Kill portage en route to the St. Lawrence River. As they did, the first handful of an Adirondack band approached from the other direction. An eagle landed on a high branch and looked down as if for a show. A fight broke out in the flower-rich meadow.
Packs of men in small parties pounced on one another. Clubs, spears, and tomahawks clashed. Archers’ work was no less deadly. Both sides were shocked by the carnage in the trees, but neither gave ground. The eagle hopped and gloated on its perch. It rose and circled whenever parties lagged and cheered them when they rushed again. Both sides took it as a sign urging them to courage. The day would be remembered! New songs would be made and, for centuries, danced for their eagle!
But as the day stretched with no resolution at Mourning Kill, the men started to look at the raptor with revulsion. One by one the idea came over them that they had been killing and dying for nothing. As the last beam of sunlight tipped the high pines, five hundred bows lifted, and that many arrows launched as if by a single impulse. Blood, feathers, and bones, the bird fell to the earth. It had hardly touched ground before a bright dove rose out of its tattered form and flew up and away. The men parted and went their ways with only glances at those they had been trying all day to kill. No man of this battle at Mourning Kill ever raised a hand against folk of the other nation again.
For generations, the landscape remembered. The wild roses that sprouted in strawberry time came no color but red in memory of the loss and sacrifice. For years, the ghosts of the warriors showed themselves at their old battleground at the end of the occasional day. The sounds of their cries may have troubled the nights for centuries. The effect may linger today in reports of mysterious lights, likely witch lights, at dusk in Mourning Kill.
A story like this teaches us to understand the Native American reverence for human remains. They believe the spirit has some connection still to the body, possibly one too profound for human philosophy. In this case, though, the returning dead person is less ghost or spirit and more of what’s called a revenant: They’re back—in the flesh.
In the old days, the Iroquois often wrapped their dead in skins and left them above the ground in trees or on open scaffolds. This way the natural processes could do their work in the clear air and give back to nature what it had put together.
The Specter Wife
(Seneca Country, Western New York)
A young hunter had a pretty wife to whom he was much attached. She sickened and died within days, leaving him and his young daughter. Even after the accustomed ten-day mourning period of the Death Feast, the husband was beside himself. He wandered about the village aimlessly, sitting by himself, crying and muttering, their sad little girl in tow. He recovered enough to join the rest of the men for the hunting season. He left his daughter in their home, telling her that her mother’s spirit would look out for her.
In a few days, he came back and was surprised to find the fire already made and his daughter looking happy. He wondered about this, but the girl was too young to talk. The next day when he came home, the fire was made as before. Furthermore, his daughter’s hair was combed and her face was clean as if a mother were caring for her. The next day he came home a bit early and found the fire made, the girl groomed, and the meal started. The man wondered if the Great Spirit had taken pity on him.
He came home still earlier the next day and caught a glimpse of his wife’s dress darting around the lodge as if she had just left their home. He pursued it, but saw nothing.
The next day he rejoiced to himself, hardly able to think about his hunting, sure that the Great Spirit was returning his wife to him. Sure enough, when he came home that day he found the meal almost ready to serve and his wife at her appointed tasks. He could hardly believe it. He rushed to embrace her, but she stopped him with a gesture.
“It’s true that I’ve returned. I’ve been coming back to our daughter all along. I loved you both so much that I couldn’t rest in the other world. I’ll stay with you and care for you both, but I’m still one with the spirits. You must never try to touch me in any way.”
The young man was overjoyed to have her in any capacity, and the family spent many a month together. At the end of the hunting season, though, the small family was sharing a meal when the mother cut loose with a scream. “My burial place has caught fire!” she said, horror in her eyes. “I have to go. I love you both, and I will see you on the other side!” And she vanished.
The hunter ran madly through the woods to his wife’s scaffold and saw indeed that it had caught fire. Her body was almost entirely consumed. It might have been the work of lightning. That was the beginning of the time that the Iroquois started to bury their dead. It’s from events like these that societies like the Chanters for the Dead originated, intended to ease the earthbound spirits.
The Old Chief’s Grave
(Onondaga Country, Skaneateles Lake)
It was the fall of 1696. Frontenac’s massive army had landed near Onondaga Lake and was on its way to the Onondaga Castle. The huge force had guns and cannon. Open battle was pointless. Even a traditional Iroquois ambush was a poor idea. These invaders had Native allies serving as their own keen scouts.
The Onondaga le
aders called their century-old chief to the council fire. His name Thurensera was said to mean “dawn of the light.” No one watching him on a litter would guess how agile he’d been in his youth.
“Not until you join with the other Longhouse nations can you fight this force,” he said. “But the invaders must learn a lesson. I will stay to show them how an Onondaga can die.” The whole camp took a breath. Thurensera would be tortured and killed.
The old chief told them how he wanted to be buried: with his pipe, his canoe, his tomahawk, and his bow, on a hill overlooking Skaneateles Lake. When they returned, they would find his bones, doubtless by the torture stake. He made his good-byes, declaring them the last words he would speak. Then he took a Zen-style pose, faced the direction from which the invaders were expected, and waited for an army alone. His people fired their homes, loaded their belongings, and filed by him with their last words.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 36