by Aaron Mahnke
The tipping point seems to have been on August 14. It holds the record for the largest number of sightings in a single day—not just in Gloucester, but in all of history. Seventeen, in fact. Seventeen sightings. Seventeen individual descriptions from independent reports. And when that many people have that many frightful experiences…well, it has a tendency to push a society over the edge.
On August 14, 1817, Matthew Gaffney decided to take matters into his own hands. He was the carpenter for a local fishing vessel, but that day he didn’t go out with his crewmates. Instead, he stayed behind and took his own boat into the waters just south of Gloucester Harbor. He was joined by his brother and one of their friends.
It wasn’t long before the three men found what they were looking for. Off in the distance they could see the dark, undulating shape of the sea monster, slipping in and out of the water. So they guided their boat closer for a better look—and, of course, a better shot.
As they approached, they could see the creature in more detail. Same horse-like head. Same dark eyes. It was apparently a dark green color mottled with brown, but white on the underbelly. Here it was, the beast that had been frightening the village. The monster that shouldn’t exist. Here was the thing they had come to hunt. So Gaffney reached for his rifle and took aim.
He fired, and all three of them swore he hit the target—right in the head, in fact. But nothing happened. They saw no blood. The serpent didn’t even flinch. Instead, it dove under the dark waves. And that’s when they noticed that it was headed straight toward their boat.
Maybe that Native American had been right all along: if someone was to shoot it but not kill it, the creature would become an angry, deadly threat. Gaffney and the others braced themselves for an attack. But the attack never happened.
The serpent resurfaced on the other side of their boat and began to coil and uncoil in the water, moving erratically and stirring the ocean into a cauldron of foam. But it never approached them. In the end, Gaffney sailed home empty-handed.
What he didn’t know was just how easy it could be to get close to the creature. In fact, two months later, two young boys would accomplish what Gaffney never could: they stood over the serpent’s dead body.
Well, sort of. You see, in the late 1700s, there was a Swedish botanist named Carl Linnaeus. He’s the person responsible for developing the scientific system for classifying living organisms, the same system we still use today. In the 1790s, Linnaean Societies were formed all across Europe and America with the goal of discovering and classifying new plants and animals.
So when two boys stumbled upon the dead body of a sea serpent on the rocky beach near Gloucester Harbor in October 1817, their parents called on the Linnaean Society of New England to help study it. What they found was a three-foot-long snake-like creature.
It was much smaller than the sightings had reported, but the reason was obvious to the Linnaean Society members standing over it: it was a baby. The full-grown serpent had entered Gloucester Harbor to lay its eggs, and this was one of the young that didn’t survive. So the society members declared it a new, undiscovered species of snake and called it Scoliophis atlanticus—the Atlantic humped snake…for a while. A few days later, another naturalist, Alexandre Lesueur, studied the corpse and said it was nothing more than a common blacksnake. With no specimen left to study today, it’s difficult to say who was correct.
And then things sort of slowed down in Gloucester. There were only twelve sightings in 1839, and that decreased to nine in 1875. It’s not that the town itself was shrinking—to the contrary, Gloucester has grown a lot since then. But the sightings just sort of faded away.
In the first five decades of the twentieth century, the frequency of serpent sightings dropped to roughly one per year—a far cry from the golden days of the early 1800s. Whether or not that has been a disappointment to the people of Gloucester is unclear, but there’s no more fear, no more worry, and no more cautious glances cast at the dark waters of the harbor.
If the Gloucester sea serpent was in fact a real, undiscovered sea creature, we will most likely never know. Whatever it was, it seems to have slithered out of reach, existing now only in the dark pages of history.
And, perhaps, the depths of the Gloucester Harbor.
DEEP FEARS
The ocean is deep and dark and full of mystery. That’s the sort of space that invites fear and stories and superstition. For centuries, sailors have been considered some of the most superstitious people in the world. Their culture is full of bad omens, good omens, mythical creatures, and unique rituals.
It’s most likely a side effect of their risky profession. On the open seas, your life hangs in the balance every moment of every day. An unexpected storm, a hidden reef, a concealing fog—anything can sneak up on a vessel and pull it down into the depths of those cold, black waters.
So it’s no wonder that sailors have feared something darker, something more deadly than just the waves. Whether it’s been the tentacles of the kraken, the call of the siren, or the coils of the sea serpent, the ocean’s mythology is home to a dangerous aquatic menagerie.
Thankfully, science has pulled the veil back on a number of these tales. Sometimes, as in the case of mermaids, there really is nothing to fear. Other times, the tentacles are just as long as we might have imagined—but far less deadly. But there’s so much about the ocean we still don’t know. In many ways, it’s the final undiscovered country.
Beneath the waters off the coast of Gloucester, there’s a shelf in the ocean floor. It’s like a plateau that skirts the mainland, where the water is shallower, maybe two hundred or so feet deep. Farther out to sea, the water depth is more than three thousand feet, which makes the waters of the shelf sort of a world of their own.
That shelf extends all the way up the east coast of North America. And it was on that shelf, in the waters of Fortune Bay on the southern side of Newfoundland, that something odd happened in May 1997.
Two fishermen from Little Bay East were in their boat when they saw something large in the water. At first they assumed it was a collection of garbage bags, floating free after having fallen off another ship, so they guided their own boat over to retrieve them.
When they got there, they quickly realized that the shapes weren’t garbage bags. They were the humps of a long-necked creature. The skin color was lighter than the Gloucester serpent, sort of a medium gray, but the rest of the description sounds eerily familiar: forty or so feet long, large dark eyes, and a head that both men described as horse-like.
As they approached, the creature lifted its head above the water and looked at them. For a moment, no one moved, no one made a sound—neither the men nor the creature. And then, without warning, it quietly slipped back into the water, disappearing beneath the waves.
Our fear of the sea always seems to float just beneath the surface. And if the stories are true, it’s not alone.
WEBSTER COUNTY, WEST Virginia, is down in the southeastern corner of the state, right near the Virginia state line. It’s beautiful country, right by Shenandoah National Park and the northern tip of a patch of national forest that spans three states. I’ve driven through it, and I can tell you categorically that it’s breathtaking.
But a century or more ago, I can also imagine it was harsh. Especially in the winter. It always is on the frontier, isn’t it? One of those frontier towns was, and still is, Bergoo. It sits on the Elk River, one of countless little rivers that cut through the valleys between the countless little mountains that fill up the county.
Today there are just ninety-four people in town, and maybe half a dozen roads, but it’s still there, holding on tight. Because it’s a tough town, and it’s been through a lot. Take the story of Daniel Junkins.
I don’t know when he and his family moved onto the mountain by the river, but there was a whole little community there by the 1890s. Maybe he started his family there. He might have even died there decades later. That mountain was their world, their home, and j
ust about all they ever knew.
The winter of 1894–95 was harsh. Again, this was more than a century ago. There were no snowblowers or plows. When it snowed, life sort of came to a standstill. And when it snowed hard for days in late January 1895, Daniel Junkins started to worry about his elderly neighbor, Mrs. Warnick.
On the first of February, Daniel sent his ten-year-old daughter, Landy, out into the snow to check in on Mrs. Warnick. It was a two-mile walk. Now, I’m not going to pick apart his parenting decisions or ponder why he didn’t go himself. Two miles is a long walk for a ten-year-old, and in the snow it’s even worse. But I think kids were made of tougher stuff back then. At any rate, he sent her.
But Landy never arrived. Of course, her family and neighbors went out looking for her, hoping to find her and bring her home. But all they managed to find was a solitary line of footprints in a smooth field of white. So they followed them.
The tracks went on for some distance, and then, in the middle of an open field, they simply stopped. There was no girl waiting at the end of the tracks, no body or any other clue about where she might have gone. They just…stopped.
The search continued, and they worked fast. Winter nights in West Virginia, especially in February, were bitter and deadly. They watched the sun set like a ticking clock and knew when they hadn’t found her that their hope had vanished with the light.
They searched again the next day, and then another. But Landy Junkins was never seen again. Her tracks told a bizarre story: she was there one moment, walking and moving in the right direction. And then…gone. Vanished without a trace.
ONE OF THE FLOCK
A day or two later, Hanse Hardrick wrapped up his day by guiding his sheep into a small shed he had built to protect them from the cold winter winds. He made sure they had everything they needed, and then latched the door. That door, which faced the house, was the only way in or out.
The next morning, Hardrick went to check on the sheep. He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and then stopped. One of his animals was missing. The remaining sheep had all huddled into one of the corners, as if they were afraid of a predator.
Glancing around, Hardrick noticed that small pieces of wood and bark were scattered all around on the floor. Looking up, he discovered why. There was a large hole in the ceiling. Large enough, in fact, for a sheep to fit through.
The people of Webster County, West Virginia, did the math. They remembered poor little Landy and her mysterious disappearance. They pondered the lost sheep and the hole in the ceiling. Pretty soon they were convinced that something was hunting them from the sky. Little Landy and Mr. Hardrick’s sheep were both proof of that.
So their village went on the defensive. Children were kept indoors to protect them. Farmers watched over their livestock with added vigilance. The whole community was in lockdown, with one eye on what was most valuable to them and the other on the sky.
Then, a few days after the sheep was stolen through the roof of the barn, the county sheriff and his grown son were making their way out of the forest after an unsuccessful hunt when they stepped into a clearing. Out there in the open, they saw two deer—a doe and her fawn—trying to fight off something enormous. The men couldn’t see it clearly, but from where they stood, it looked like a giant bird, or at least something with huge wings.
Before they could rush toward the animals and try to help, the creature grabbed hold of the fawn and rose into the air with it. They watched as it flew higher and higher, heading straight toward the mountains east of town.
Most historians who have heard these tales have walked away with cold, logical answers. It was an eagle, and nothing more. But what eagle can pick up a ten-year-old child? Or a sheep? Or a fawn?
I get it. It’s easy to say it was an eagle. They’re predatory birds, and they’re big. But these events suggest something else. And the fact that they happened less than a hundred miles from the Ohio River Valley, where there have been sightings of a winged creature that some people called Mothman and others compared to a giant owl…well, it makes you wonder.
Oh, and the mountain the Junkins family and their friends lived on? It had a name. For as long as anyone could remember, it had always been called Owls Head.
THERE’S A SCHOOL in Jefferson, Wisconsin, with a name that sounds like it was pulled right out of the pages of a comic book or dark urban fantasy novel: the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children. It has a nice ring to it, right?
But St. Coletta wasn’t home to a group of crime-fighting superheroes, or even a gathering of exceptional but peculiar students. It wasn’t even a school, really. Its original name might hint at the true nature of the place: the St. Coletta Institute for Backward Youth.
It was, for all intents and purposes, a home for mentally disabled individuals. It opened its doors in 1904, and altered its name in 1931 to include the more poetic “Exceptional Children.” Along the way, it played host to people from all walks of life. The most famous resident would probably be Rose Kennedy, sister of former president John F. Kennedy. She spent most of her life at St. Coletta after an unsuccessful lobotomy at the hands of Dr. Walter Freeman left her permanently disabled.
While there, she had a private house on the school grounds. St. Coletta had a lot of land—nearly 175 acres, in fact—and that allowed the school to spread out and meet the growing need for housing. But there were other things on the campus as well, things that the school did not build: Native American burial mounds.
Among the night guards in the mid-1930s was a man named Mark Schackelman. Part of his job was to walk the campus, flashlight in hand, looking for signs of trouble. It was a quiet, peaceful job, most likely, although those Wisconsin winters must have been brutal.
One night in 1936, Mark was walking his usual patrol route through the property, which took him past a number of burial mounds. The beam of his flashlight bounced across the dark grass as he walked. Suddenly he stopped. Someone was kneeling on the ground at the base of one of the mounds.
And the person was digging.
He assumed it was a local, maybe out looking for trouble, or maybe seeing if the mound held anything of value. But when he focused the light directly on the person, he realized it wasn’t a person at all. It was a thing.
Schackelman said it was roughly human-sized, but it was covered from head to toe in dark fur. And the way it was kneeling didn’t seem human, either. But he didn’t have a lot of time to study it, because when it noticed the light, it stood up and bolted into the night.
Mark didn’t stick around to inspect the area. He raced back to the main campus building and clocked out for the night. But the next day, with the sun shining brightly overhead, he returned and gave the burial mound a second look. There were signs that the earth had been dug up. Huge gouges had been made in the lawn and soil. And in the dug-out areas, Mark could see something that resembled claw marks.
Now, Mark was a lot braver than I would have been in his shoes. He clocked back in that day, and when it came time to patrol the campus in the dark by himself, he did it. Crazy, isn’t it?
I don’t know if he expected it or hoped not to encounter it again, but when he reached the same spot he had the previous night, he found the creature back on its knees, digging in the ground. But rather than run away, it stood up and stared him down.
Mark got a better look this time. It was about as tall as he was, but the creature’s chest was large and muscular. The arms had hands that looked like they had been crossed with the claws of an animal. Tall ears, fur all over, and oddly shaped legs. But the most surprising thing that happened that night was that this…thing…actually spoke to him.
It said only one word, and to be honest, I’m not sure Mark understood that it was a word for a very long time. But according to his notes and sworn testimony, it did indeed say something to him: “Gadara.”
Mark spent the rest of his life keeping the events of that night a secret. Only his wife ever knew, and that doesn’t sound like the behavior
of someone who is making up stories to get attention or fame.
In 1958, when he thought he was dying from a terminal illness, Mark finally broke his silence and told his son about it. His son, it just so happens, was a reporter for a local newspaper, and he hoped that by sharing the story locally, others who had had similar experiences might come forward and share theirs.
As far as I can tell, no one did. Mark’s experience seems to have occurred in isolation. But sharing the tale did have one added benefit: it gave a lot more people the chance to figure out just what that one little word might have meant, and why the creature Mark encountered might have felt the need to utter it: “Gadara.”
Interestingly, people for centuries have viewed werewolves as demonic creatures, human beings possessed by evil spirits and then driven into a beast-like state. They were burned alongside accused witches all throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Demons, after all, deserved to be destroyed, they believed.
There’s a famous story of demon possession in the Christian Bible. The book of Mark tells of a man who told Jesus he was possessed by a demon called Legion. “Legion,” he said, “because we are many.”
The city where that happened isn’t there anymore. It was the capital of a Roman province for a long time, and then it was destroyed in an earthquake in 747. I bring it up because that city’s name has huge significance in the history of folklore surrounding demonic possession.
Its name?
Gadara.
IF WE’VE LEARNED anything from centuries of exploration, it is that this world we live in is full of life. From the depths of the ocean to the rocky cliffs of our tallest mountains, living creatures have a way of adapting and thriving. In a lot of ways, we can’t help but think of this planet as anything other than crowded.
