THE KICKING CHIEF OF COOPERSTOWN
(Mohawk/Oneida Country)
Cooperstown ought to have ghosts. Founded in the late 1700s, it’s one of the older villages in this part of the state. Today’s village doubtless covers many unknown Native American burials, and at least one ancient earthwork still stands along the Susquehanna River. They say that on the right full moon, long Otsego Lake above it still reverberates with the sounds of centuries of Native American canoes paddling across the water.
On the west side of River Street near the estate called Greencrest and at the edge of Cooper Park is a stone wall that’s gone through a lot of changes. For most of the twentieth century, it was smooth. By the 1960s, the stones bulged toward the street, as if the wall were buckling—or something inside was trying to get out. Some Cooperstonians got curious, broke through the wall, and found a skeleton, with pipes, weapons, and artifacts. Most presumed it the burial of a Mohawk chief, though he was just as likely to have been an Oneida. Otsego Lake is the boundary between their former territories, and Cooperstown roots it like the dot of an exclamation point. This burial is on the Oneida side of the town.
The townsfolk could have saved themselves the trouble if they had read Ralph Birdsall’s (1871–1918) 1917 history. The skeleton was found in the late 1700s by Judge William Cooper (1754–1809), father of the Leatherstocking Tales author. The novelist’s grandson, also named James Fenimore Cooper, told this tale to folklorist Harold W. Thompson (1891–1964). How the body got into a wall in the first place is left to conjecture.
It seems likely that the wall’s first builders may have found the old chief exactly where he was and decided to keep him near his original spot by putting him in the wall. Many thinner walls fell around the bones, and a stronger one was made. It lasted into the Woodstock era and merely buckled.
In local tradition, the buried chief ’s posthumous kicking expressed his fury at the white takeover of his lands. Other supernatural theories involve a weeping skeleton whose saline tears undermined the wall and a thrashing one trying to get a bit of leg room. This guy was folded close: in a virtual squat, knees to chin, arms round his shins.
Not the least of the controversy is the whereabouts of the chief ’s remains today. Did they put him back, with a little repositioning, and reform the wall? Did they sell the artifacts? Did they give the bones to a local museum? Heaven help whoever holds them, if his or her heart isn’t pure. At least the wall is still behaving.
THE FIVE GHOSTS OF RED JACKET
(Seneca Country)
The Six Nations were not metallurgists, painters, city builders, or engineers. Their distinctive arts were those natural to their place and lifestyle, those of mind and word: storytelling, song making, and speech giving. They were particularly famous for their orators, and the man we call Red Jacket was one of the greatest. When he was born near Keuka Lake in 1750, Iroquois lifestyle and landscape were much as they had been for a thousand years. When he died at Buffalo in 1830, he was afraid for Native American survival.
The name Red Jacket likely comes from the British officer’s coat he often wore. His birth name Otetiani is often said to mean “always on guard.” By the time he stood with the Six Nations counselors he was Sagoyewata. That could mean “he keeps them awake,” but it’s also been taken as “he can’t shut up.” No translation implies that he withheld his opinion.
Red Jacket’s monument at Forest Lawn, Buffalo
Many whites considered Red Jacket a genius, an orator ranking with Cicero and Demosthenes. He campaigned against selling land to whites and taking alcohol from them. He caught the liquid plague himself, and most of the comical episodes in his file come from it. George Washington’s silver medal on his chest did sobriety no favors, making Red Jacket one of the few Native Americans allowed in a white pub. He was at the least a great wit, who, even through the language barrier, came up with some of the best lines of the day.
All kinds of invective get thrown around in political squabbles, and Red Jacket had his share of them. One image of him that’s stuck in history is coward. No one who called out Joseph Brant and Cornplanter could have been a chicken. Eyewitnesses described Red Jacket leading a devastating guerilla operation at the 1813 Battle of Chippewa. Some Iroquois maintain that Red Jacket founded a deadly Seneca assassins’ cult, the Red Tips, named for the red-tailed hawk, little brother of the eagle. (The Mohawk correspondents are the Black Hand. They choke you in the night and leave only sooty marks on your throat.) Red Jacket a coward? That’s silly on the face of it. He was Seneca.
In his last years, Red Jacket was filled with gratitude to the Great Spirit for his days on earth. Hoping to honor him with the ceremony of one last hunt, he plunged into the Genesee Valley, probably in Livingston County. He was expecting the old-growth forest he remembered, streaked with footpaths and dotted with villages. Before long, he came to a fence and saw cleared land and whites plowing. He went off in a different direction and came to another fence and another farmer’s field. He sat down on the trail and sobbed.
After a round of farewells to friends and relatives, Red Jacket died at Buffalo Creek in 1830, “exulting that the Great Spirit had made him an Indian” and dreading a white burial. His Christian wife, however, ruled his rites. He was originally buried near many Seneca luminaries in the Old Indian Graveyard at Buffum Street in Buffalo, but his remains did a spell in a cherry wood chest on the Cattaraugus Reservation until they were reinterred—allegedly—in 1884 at Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery, resting now by a fine martial monument, tomahawk in hand.
Some Seneca believe that Red Jacket got his wish and that the bones under the monument are not his. In one week of May 2010, I met two whites claiming to know where his true grave was. (One proposed site was in West Seneca and the other Elma.) With so many questions about Red Jacket’s bones, it’s no wonder his ghost might be acting up. After-life protests are thought customary at troubled graves. (The wretch Caligula was said to have haunted his Roman villa until someone treated his remains fairly.)
Folklore hangs the name Red Jacket on ghosts in his section of Forest Lawn, by the sites of Canandaigua and Batavia courthouses at which he spoke, and at still-standing Williamsville and Lewiston inns at which he might have been overserved. The best report of a sighting comes from a folder of notes willed to the Buffalo Museum by volunteer archaeologist and Erie lakeshore antiquarian Everett Burmaster (1890–1965).
As a boy around 1900, Burmaster and a pal cut through the Cattaraugus Reservation on a foggy night. As they passed a ruined house, they heard strange rustling sounds and saw a mass of mist take the form of a man in a heavy coat and beaver hat. The apparition drifted right through a fence and became indistinct, then invisible. It turned out that this had been the home of Red Jacket’s stepdaughter. The box holding his bones had once rested there, and the locals had seen him many a time. They see him still—in a young, vigorous form.
My Seneca contacts also think Native burial ground was emptied as fill beneath Buffalo’s streets and roads, hence Red Jacket’s spectral reappearance may be an afterthought. Maybe a bit of him is everywhere with us, then, under our feet, in the air, in the trees. The image of Native Americans as spiritual counselors of white Americans may, after all, be what this book is about, but still, it’s a mite trite the way countless Victorian-era mediums hauled Red Jacket up as a spirit guide. Blessings on you, old He Keeps Them Awake, wherever you rest or return.
THE TONAWANDA PRESBYTERIAN
(Seneca Country)
Buffalo scholar and preservationist Austin Fox (1913–1996) (Church Tales of the Niagara Frontier) figured that 1868 was a good year for the construction of the Tonawanda Presbyterian Church. It’s been remodeled and looks younger than that would make it, but the Seneca operate with the assumption that its core is decades older. Some say that Reverend Asher Wright (1803–1875) transcribed at least part of Seneca Prophet Handsome Lake’s Code in a building on this site, possibly an older version of this one. (The prophet h
imself died in 1815.) Whatever its age, the building has an illustrious legacy, including a psychic one.
Some Seneca consider this the most actively haunted building in western New York. People who visit the church routinely see and feel things out of the normal. Even in the middle of the day, something raises their hair; something touches them on the arm; something brushes their shoulders. At night when the building is empty, something plays the piano. In 2005, our Mohawk friend Andy Printup recalled rumors that the lights of the church turn themselves on at night. “This is no high-tech church with automatic lights,” he said. His brother used to go by there frequently and reported the effect himself.
This church became so proverbial as a haunt that the reservation had to recruit security to watch it for periods in the 1980s. White thrill seekers came here routinely in hopes of witnessing something spooky.
Our favorite report is one from a Christmas season, remembered for us by Seneca Jean Taradena in the late 1990s. A dozen members of a choir were getting ready to practice. The doors opened and footsteps came down the aisles behind them. Thinking it no more than fellow choristers on the way, they kept their eyes ahead of them on the minister. “Let’s wait for them,” he said, looking down at his music. The footsteps stopped, as if a party were waiting, and the singers turned to look. No one visible was there. “Well,” said the minister, packing up with a feeble smile. “I guess we won’t practice today.” They got up and filed out. Through the back door.
HAUNTED ROADS
Buildings and battlefields aren’t the only things that get haunted in New York state. There are streets and sections of road in every community that pick up formidable bodies of supernatural folklore. Many of them had deep roots in Native American tradition and have to be considered power sites, of a different sort than a haunted human enclosure.
New York’s most prominent old footpaths are well known, and most have been turned into numbered highways by now. Many of our haunted roads were once stretches of them.
Some of our psychic highways may also be what are called (in England) corpse paths, the routes the human dead in their coffins traveled to their last rest. All across medieval Europe, these often short paths from church to graveyard were considered wonderful places for spirit spotting on the right nights of the year, generally power nights relevant to the specific society. (The night varied. In Germany, this would have been April 30, Walpurgisnacht. In Scandinavia and much of England, it might have been June 24, the traditional Midsummer’s Eve or St. John’s Day. In Celtic countries the night would have been the variously spelled Samhain, our Halloween.)
While in old Europe, the corpse path was usually a walkway with little other use; today our village streets often fall into the configuration. Some city streets link several churches and graveyards in a single mile. We drive over them every day. We live on them. Funeral processions take them, too.
Short stretches of some of these New York power tracks are also leys. This is a much-used term in today’s spiritualist New Age. Depending on whom you talk to, leys are:
Lines of spiritual force along the landscape
Sacred pathways
Alignments of sites (both naturally sacred or man-made and religious)
The only definition that can be proven to an open-minded skeptic is the last. Preindustrial people did set up their sacred sites in alignment with each other. (An Inca term for these connectors—ceques—means something like “a row of things.”) The typical ratio is still, we believe, six sites on a line ten miles long.
Leys collect supernatural folklore, especially where they cross. While leys were rediscovered and popularized in England, an island dense with both antiquarians and cross-cultural sacred sites, they can be found worldwide. Native American societies in the Andes, the Chacoan (Four Corners) region, Mexico, and the Mississippian/Ohio Valley were known to have established these dead-straight sightlines across impressive distances. Some were dramatic and visible pathways like the Hopewell Highway in Ohio and the Four Corners’ region’s Chaco Meridian.
Surely leys existed in ancient New York state. We know of no authoritative study of our potential leys, and I don’t see how a comprehensive one could be done, since so many of the ancient monuments are gone and their exact locations are unknown.
Few of these haunted roads are true leys; they aren’t all straight, for one thing. Still, many short stretches may be leys—or corpse paths. The haunted sections themselves may be stretches of ancient trails. We mention here a few of the power trails we know that have Native American roots—as if anything in New York state doesn’t.
DELAWARE AVENUE
(Buffalo, Erie County)
The turn of the twentieth century was likely Buffalo’s peak. One of its grandest streets was called Millionaires’ Row. For a short stretch, Delaware Avenue was one of the truest leys we know of in New York state. It connected an apparent earthwork at the core of Joseph Ellicott’s old city plan with the powerful natural fountain at Gates Circle before plunging into today’s Forest Lawn Cemetery and several ancient burial mounds. All three of these sites were legitimate power points to the Native Americans of the area, defining Delaware Avenue as a ley. It also has plenty of churches and current or former graveyards.
American Freemasons and landscape planners tend to be sensitive to Native American site traditions. The work at Delaware’s south end—by Ellicott—and that of Frederick Law Olmsted a few miles north certainly commemorate this configuration.
Delaware, a Native American ley, is one of Buffalo’s most haunted avenues. We venture to say that if you did five-minute interviews up and down the street between Niagara Square and Delaware Park, you would collect psychic reports from half the buildings. So far the only named Native spook we hear of is Red Jacket at Forest Lawn Cemetery. The idea of a ley in a modern city might seem strange, but, as Hamlet says, as a stranger give it welcome.
BLACK NOSE SPRINGS ROAD
(The Tuscarora Reservation, Niagara County)
Urban legend has an explanation for the juju on short, cutoff Black Nose Springs Road: the massacre of a family whose bodies were thrown into a nearby pond. As if reminders of their murderers’ guilt, their light, pale, wretched faces kept appearing just under the surface, even decades after the event. If so, their influence radiates. Living witnesses driving on the road at night report scary faces in their mirrors and sounds on the outside of the car as if something alongside it is either keeping pace and tapping a message or hitching an unseemly ride.
These massacres keep coming up in the folklore of hauntings, seldom with any background. If there’s truth to the theme in this case, the event likely happened as some offshoot of the War of 1812. Both sides in that war had Native American allies, and this reservation along the underbelly of Lake Ontario was ravaged by attacks out of Fort Niagara made by British-allied Mohawk and Great Lakes nations. The ghostly backdrop could also have been a lash back by the U.S.-allied Tuscarora upon white Loyalist agents.
THE FORBIDDEN TRAIL
(Allegany, Cattaraugus, and Chautauqua Counties)
East–west Iroquois trails were paths of peace and commerce. They ran between the New York Iroquois nations. North–south trails were ones of war; invaders usually came from Pennsylvania or Lake Ontario. That way they could hit one Iroquois nation without having to fight through the territory of others.
The ominously named Forbidden Trail is a tweener, a gnarly diagonal flowing from the core of the state to the Allegany region. Sometimes called the Andaste Trail after some Iroquoian enemies, this was a military shortcut, a warpath that Iroquois warriors used to respond to emergencies to the southwest.
The Forbidden Trail connects old paths at Tioga Point with ones at Olean. It flanks creeks and rivers—the Genesee, the Allegheny—and coils through a lot of Southern Tier villages, generally as their main street. Towns likely to be on it include Alfred, Almond, Angelica, Canisteo, Corning, Elkland, Hornell, and Painted Post. Other than that, its exact course is a matt
er of debate. This figures. It was meant to be a secret: You stray, you pay.
We can hardly summarize the psychic and paranormal folklore that comes from the region of this trail. Visions were reported along it in historic times, including prophetic images on the moon. Otherwise, let your imagination run free: Bigfoot, UFOs, ancient mystery ruins, as well as haunted buildings along it in every village it bisects. It’s hard to imagine what this trail would have been like at night in the old days.
13 CURVES
(West Syracuse, New York, Onondaga County)
Winding and narrow, 13 Curves is a stretch of Cedarvale Road southwest of Syracuse. It’s creepy for natural reasons. It has no shoulder, and trees crowd the asphalt as though reaching for motorists. The effect is squared at night. Every accident adds to its reputation. At the middle, there’s even a dead man’s curve.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 38