by Aaron Mahnke
When Jack’s father died in 1891, Jack took over as the leader of the Sandy Lake people. That sounds fancy, but in reality there were only about 120 people living in his community. He had influence on the wider geographical area, too, but his real power came from his role as tribal shaman.
A shaman’s powers were a vital part of his leadership. When Jack became the spiritual leader of his people, he became the keeper of their ancient traditions and their guardian against the approaching darkness that was Western civilization. There are even legends that tell of Jack Fiddler curing illness.
But most important, Jack became their first and only defense against wendigos, often called on to hunt down and kill them. I know, this sounds like the stuff of comic books or Hollywood movies, but Jack Fiddler lives up to the hype. In fact, over his lifetime he claimed to have defeated fourteen of the monsters.
But Jack didn’t go looking for a tall, monstrous creature with antlers and a bony body. No, he understood the wendigo to be more subtle. Some wendigos, Jack said, had been sent to attack his people by other shamans. Others had been members of his own tribe who seemed to have been overtaken by an unstoppable urge to eat human flesh. When it was his own people, Jack said that he and his brother Joseph were the ones called on to do the hard thing and kill the individuals.
But merely killing them wasn’t enough to stop the possession. You see, it was believed that the wendigo spirit could actually hop from one body to the next, so those who died as a result of their possession were often burned to stop the infection from spreading.
For the Sandy Lake people, and many of the other Native American tribes that cover much of the northern half of North America, the wendigo stories were more than hearsay. It was an idea that was rooted in ancient tradition. Ceremonies were built around the legend. People were warned and educated constantly about the dangers this creature posed to the community.
And then, suddenly, all of that tradition and history ran headlong into the modern world, and the results were disastrous.
Sometime in 1905, Joseph Fiddler’s daughter-in-law was brought to Jack’s village. She was very sick, according to multiple firsthand accounts. She was in severe pain that drove her to cry out and moan constantly. Some of the women tending to her would even have to hold her down to keep her under control.
Jack and his brother Joseph were brought in. They were old men by then, both in their eighties and very frail, but they knew what was causing her illness. And they knew how to stop it. They had done this many times before. So they did what they did best: they took a thin rope, looped it around her neck, and then—slowly—tightened it.
It wasn’t done in cold blood; it was a calculated decision that these men came to only after deep discussion. But it was driven by fear. If the wendigo spirit inside her had been allowed to take control, there was no telling how destructive it might have become. To them, this was preventive. It was mercy. A form of euthanasia that protected the entire community. The Fiddlers were mere instruments in the hands of a culture driven by superstition.
Witnesses testified to their quiet, dignified nature, but it didn’t help. The men were brought before a six-person jury later that year. The Toronto newspapers printed sensational headlines about the trial, inveighing against devil worship and murder, and in response people around the country clamored for a conviction.
And the Fiddler brothers were guilty, without question. These men had killed a member of their family. It might not have been a crime of passion, but they were still murderers. So when the verdict came down, it was far from a surprise: guilty.
The Cree people of Sandy Lake lost their leader. They lost two of the most respected elders of their tiny community. And, most frightening to them, they lost their last remaining wendigo hunters. Real or not, these men had been a wall that kept the darkness and fear at bay.
And now that wall was gone.
WHAT WE REALLY FEAR
Superstition has often served to answer our questions and calm our fears. From the changelings of Ireland to the vampires of New England, the stories we tell have helped us explain the mysteries we don’t understand. That’s not all superstition does, I know, but it makes up a lot of the examples we find. We fear the unknown, and we’ll come up with something to explain it away.
Cannibalism is something that humans have feared for a very, very long time. Not because we’re convinced that it could change us into supernatural monsters. No, at the root of it all, cannibalism is just a line that we don’t think we should cross. And rightly so.
History is littered with examples of people who have crossed the line. It wasn’t because their life was at risk, or because they had no choice, but because of something darker: deep belief in the folklore of their upbringing, mental instability, premeditated violence. Whatever the reason, every example reveals humans to be the true monsters, capable of anything. Even the things we fear the most.
Maybe Jack Fiddler understood this. Perhaps he knew that he represented the final entry in a vital, ancient lineage. He saw a world ill-equipped to defend itself against the evils he had fought all his life. I have to imagine that the idea of it exhausted him.
On September 30, 1907, while on a walk outside with a police constable, Jack escaped into the woods, where he strangled himself with the sash he wore. His brother would later die in prison from tuberculosis.
More than a century later, on July 30, 2008, a man named Tim McLean was riding a Greyhound bus along the Trans-Canada Highway in Manitoba, when one of the other passengers attacked and killed him. The man, Vince Weiguang, did more than kill McLean, though. He stabbed him, beheaded him, and then proceeded to cannibalize the body.
Was the killer just insane? Or did he perhaps meet an evil spirit there on his trip through wendigo country? That’s a question that would be impossible to answer for certain, but the courts ruled in favor of insanity. In the end, he was committed to a high-security mental institution in Manitoba, but he stayed there for less than a decade. In May 2015, he was released back into society.
AT THE HEIGHT of the Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, the American navy was using audio technology to detect Soviet submarines. These high-powered underwater microphones could detect unusual sounds from hundreds, even thousands, of miles away, helping the military peer far into the depths of the ocean.
After the Cold War ended, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration built on to that old microphone system with the hope of gaining a new understanding of the massive unexplored world beneath the ocean waves. They studied ambient sounds, geophysical noise, and bioacoustics—the sounds that ocean creatures make.
But in 1997, they encountered a sound that defied explanation: a very low-frequency, very powerful sound. So powerful that it was picked up by their microphone system from more than three thousand miles away. Oh, and H. P. Lovecraft fans might get a kick out of the location they pinpointed: it’s roughly nine hundred miles from the location of the mythical island city of R’lyeh, where Cthulhu is imprisoned, waiting and dreaming.
It didn’t help that, at the time, NOAA deemed this sound to be neither man-made nor geological. It seemed to be organic, with a signal that varied too much to be mechanical. Today, scientists lean toward another theory: that it’s the sound of icebergs scraping the ocean floor. Maybe. Many people still wonder what “Bloop,” as they called it, really was.
We wonder because there’s something dark and mysterious about the ocean. Even after centuries of exploration, we’ve mapped only about 5 percent of the ocean floor. It’s crazy, but we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about roughly 70 percent of our own planet. There’s so much darkness, so much that’s unknown, that it leaves us feeling a bit uneasy.
We fear the unknown because it’s full of questions. Questions are risky. They’re dangerous. They prevent us from settling in and feeling comfortable. And the ocean is full of questions.
But according to some, there’s a very good re
ason to be afraid.
ANCIENT DEPTHS
One of the endearing features of many early European maps is the inclusion of tiny little sketches sprinkled throughout the ocean—sketches of beastly green heads protruding from the waves, or long, lashing tails reaching out for a nearby vessel. You won’t find them on navigational maps from the time, but they were a common feature of the decorative maps created for aristocratic homes. Those maps were, above all, entertainment.
But there were enough stories told by reputable people to give these decorative maps a bit of credibility. One example would be the map drawn around 1530 by Olaus Magnus. He was the Catholic archbishop of Sweden, along with being a well-respected historian in his day. So when his map of Norway showed the waters off the coast to be packed with sea monsters, people believed him.
In fact, when Conrad Gessner published the fourth volume of his Historia Animalium in 1558—sort of a collection of all known sea creatures—he included a number of sketches from Magnus’s map. To him, and to a lot of other people, they were real.
It’s not entirely their fault, though. Humans have been telling stories of the mysterious creatures of the ocean for a very long time. Almost twenty-four centuries ago, Aristotle wrote about a creature he called the teuthos, a gigantic, monstrous squid. Centuries later, right in Magnus’s backyard, the Norwegians who lived near and traveled through the waters around Norway and Greenland spoke of the kraken. It’s a name based on the Norwegian word krake, which refers to an unhealthy animal or a creature that’s unnaturally twisted. It’s a meaning that fits perfectly with the notion of mysterious sea monsters. And so for a long while, if it was mysterious and dangerous and beneath the waves, it was a kraken.
A lot of these old stories can be explained away with an understanding of just how little people really knew about the ocean in the fourteenth century. When a sailor landed on an island and found the decomposing corpse of a giant oarfish on the sand, he didn’t say, “Hey, it’s an oarfish.” No, he framed the unusual sight through the lens of folklore. It was big and serpent-like, so, naturally, it was a sea serpent. Or a hydra. Or a kraken. You get the idea.
Of course, modern science has given us a better understanding of the ocean. We know more than Olaus Magnus ever did. We know that the giant squid is a very real, very large creature, although it’s taken us a very long time to prove that. In fact, it wasn’t photographed live in the water until 2004, and it took another two years before it was ever filmed.
The kraken isn’t the only ancient sea creature to be debunked by science. On January 9, 1493, Columbus reported sighting something remarkable in the waters off the coast of Hispaniola: three mermaids. “They are not,” he wrote, “as beautiful as they are painted, since in some ways they have a face like a man.”
Folklore had always portrayed mermaids as part woman, part fish. For thousands of years, humans have been obsessed with the idea of human-fish hybrid creatures. The Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the ancient Greeks all told stories about them, as did cultures from Africa, China, India, and Europe. History, if you’ll pardon the pun, is swimming with mermaids. Sailors, who were notoriously superstitious, tried to avoid them. They were viewed by some as bad omens, signs that tragedy was about to strike.
But the mermaids that Christopher Columbus sighted in 1493 were likely nothing more than a group of manatees, a large aquatic mammal that’s fairly common near the coastlines around the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. They have fish-like tails, arm-like flippers, and—being mammals—pectoral mammary glands. From a distance, and viewed through a few feet of water, they tick all the boxes.
But not everything can be explained away so easily. Sometimes the stories are simply too numerous, too detailed, and too documented to be brushed aside. Some stories hold on tight long after others have caved in under scientific scrutiny. And no tale from the sea, at least in America, has held on longer than the one that began in New England nearly four hundred years ago.
If it’s true, it’s more than intriguing; it’s downright chilling.
A COLD WIND
In the early days of British settlement of the New World, colonies were often approached as investment opportunities. Financial supporters in England would front the money to hire colonists, buy supplies, and launch the mission. You might think of it on the same level as a privately funded human mission to Mars. Except, for the early colonists, there was profit to be made.
In 1623, a private company was formed in Dorchester, England, with the goal of establishing a profitable colony in North America. Later that year, the expedition landed on the area north of Boston known as Cape Ann, and the colonists got to work. But life in this new land was tough, and within two years their funding was pulled.
Five years later, in 1628, new money and new settlers arrived. Things were looking up. Within two years, progress there was successful enough to warrant sending more colonists. In the decade between 1630 and 1640, more than ten thousand brave souls weathered the Atlantic crossing to start a new life on the northern coast of modern-day Massachusetts.
And more people means more observers. More eyes on this strange new land, full of indigenous people, strange animals, and unknown threats. Fear is a spark that’s fanned by large crowds, and in the right setting it can engulf a culture. And that’s just what happened in Gloucester.
The first spark was recorded by John Josselyn, a traveler from England. Josselyn was a keen observer of the natural world and would later go on to publish his adventures in two separate books in the late 1600s. A few days after his ship entered port in the summer of 1648, one of the colonists told him a most extraordinary tale. A sea serpent, the man told him, had been seen on the rocks at the northern tip of Cape Ann. This gentleman described the serpent as an enormous snake, and claimed that it would slither up out of the waters of the Atlantic to coil up there on the rocks.
Other colonists had witnessed it as well. Once, he said, a boat was sailing near that area with four men aboard, two English settlers and two Native Americans. When the Englishmen saw the serpent moving through the water, one of them raised his musket to fire at it. But one of the Native Americans placed his hand on the barrel and gently told him to stop. It was too risky, he said. If the shot didn’t instantly kill it, they would all be in danger.
In 1641, another man, Obadiah Turner, sighted the serpent in the vicinity of Gloucester. He described it as more than ninety feet long, with black eyes set into a horse-shaped head, and said that his report could be backed up by a number of other settlers. And he wasn’t the last, either. For decades, rumors blew across the cold, harsh coastline like a stiff ocean wind.
That’s how a lot of folklore works. There are a handful of experiences, and they give birth to a wider story. Story, as we all know, spreads like water. It flows and seeps and has a way of reaching through barriers. Given enough time, story—like water—will leave its mark and transform a place. And Gloucester was certainly being transformed.
One and a half centuries later, on August 6, 1817, two women were walking near the inner harbor of Gloucester when they saw something moving through the water, as if following the tide inland from the sea. They stopped to watch it for a moment before realizing exactly what it was they were looking at. It was a serpent. A monstrously large serpent, too large to be anything they might typically see in the waters there. Naturally, they were frightened, and they shared their story with others.
Four days later, on August 10, others had a similar experience. Susan Stover was walking with her father when both of them saw a creature in the water. They described the body as long and serpent-like and said that its head was long, like that of a dog or a horse.
That very same day, Lydia Wonson had her own sighting, except when she saw the serpent, it was coiled up at the water’s edge. When it uncoiled itself, Wonson claims it was nearly seventy feet long.
More sightings followed. Local man Amos Story claimed to have watched the serpent for at least half an hour. He saw o
nly portions of it as it moved through the waves, but his reaction was awe and fear. Henry Row, along with his sons, had multiple sightings that week. On August 12, Solomon Allen claimed that the monster actually circled his boat a few times. He described it in roughly the same terms—eighty feet long, head like a horse, black eyes. But he watched it for hours and never felt threatened. In fact, Allen described the creature as almost playful, something he never expected from such an otherworldly monster.
The summer of 1817 was filled with sightings of the Gloucester sea serpent. Every time the tide came in, it seemed, there was something new following it—more whispers, more fear, more first- and secondhand reports. For many tales, that would be enough. Whatever it was, it was already guaranteed a place in local lore.
But not this creature. The sea serpent of Gloucester, you see, was far from finished.
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
In the coming days, the culture in Gloucester would shift. For almost two hundred years, the people of the region had whispered about the creature. They warned their children to beware of the coast, to keep a watchful eye on the dark Atlantic waters just beyond their door.
But as the sightings piled up at an alarming rate, people were beginning to wonder if something else should be done besides just talk and worry. Maybe they needed to take action. Perhaps, some suggested, they should hunt it down.
It’s a very human reaction. When we fail to understand something, we tend to attack it. If it’s an unknown, it could be a threat—at least, that’s our gut reaction to those moments. I’m not saying it’s a good reaction, just the natural one. So the people of Gloucester can’t be blamed for deciding to act. They were, after all, afraid for their safety.
