Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  The great healer reached into his medicine cabinet and came out with some dried squirrel corn, a northeastern herb with white heart-shaped leaves, which he pounded and made into a tea. “We’ll have a little ceremony just between us,” he said to his son. “This tea is really good for secret keeping. If either of us talks about this, those potato eyes will start growing on us.” When the mixture cooled, Eleazar and his son touched cups, met glances, and drank. Young Ted was terrified by the thought of those warts. This was one secret he was going to keep!

  A couple of days later, Ted looked out the window and saw his medicine man father hop onto a horse. He had the expression of somebody off to do business. “Where you going?” Ted called out.

  “Shrink’s place,” said the father. “Don’t forget about those potato eyes.”

  Because nothing more was ever said about this, we presume that Old Shrink stopped demanding payment from certain people and warts stopped growing on others. We will never know whether Ted’s father was serious about the wart-growing potion. The tale appears in Ted’s book Big Medicine from Six Nations, which wasn’t published until 2005, just after Ted left this world.

  3

  The Witches’ Torch

  The lights have been with us since the beginning of time, and they will be with us until the end of time.

  DUWAYNE LESLIE BOWEN, ONE MORE STORY

  WITCH LIGHTS

  The strange, nocturnal lights known in Seneca as ga’hai—witch lights—are fixtures of Iroquois storytelling. Sometimes the lights appear as pale, slow-moving, head-sized spheres that, but for their variable hues, could be the lanterns of distant hikers. Sometimes these luminous balls swarm, drifting across the landscape like pastel balloons. Sometimes they seem atmospheric and even site-bound, rising like tallow marsh gas from invisible vents. Other witchy lights are dynamic, fiery, and even self-directed, hurtling through the treetops like low-level comets and coming to rest in dire places like graveyards, battlefields, or swamps.

  In some tales, these flying lights are flares leading a witch or wizard to victims or targets. They might be static markers indicating the hiding places of charms or other treasures. If one springs to light by the course of your evening stroll, watch your step: Its controller is near.

  The lights themselves are virtual characters in other tales, going through their impish, seemingly intelligent maneuvers to the amazement of human onlookers. Ones like these are more likely to vary in size, to flock in numbers, to fill a grove or graveyard, and dart or hover like hummingbirds. The presumption is that some supernatural being that inhabits or causes them might be out for a little fun with us. We’re surprised that these lights are not routinely associated with the Little People in Iroquois country. They were in Europe.

  In the most developed stories, witch lights are regarded as alternate forms that witches take in order to travel. If you are near a witch light as it passes, you might see the faint image of a human face inside the sphere. It’s probably the countenance of a power person, living or dead, presumably the witch or wizard directing it. It’s best if it does not notice you noticing it.

  Though unassailable in this form, called the witch’s torch, witches come back to their natural bodies sooner or later. If you follow one of these lights to its destination, you may see it snap out of existence. In its place will be the human you now know to be a witch.

  Whites in the Northeast have been reporting these lights for centuries, offering no explanations for them in local folklore. The ga’hai are still seen with frequency about upstate New York, and by all types of people, especially in traditionally haunted sites and areas. In contemporary accounts, they seem to be simple paranormal phenomena, almost like spontaneous and unintelligent offshoots of the territory around them. Maybe this is what they really are. Though some fit the profile of the folkloric witch lights, others are surely will-o’-the-wisps or swamp gas. Their high-density sites are often on reservations, prehistoric ruins, battlefields, or other “places of ancient sanctity” (as John Michell called them) to Native American societies.

  ANOMALOUS LIGHT PHENOMENA

  What is often called ALP (anomalous light phenomena) is commonly reported around the world. Regarded most often as signs of fairies or ghosts in European and Asian traditions, these earthbound mystery lights are among the most commonly reported sights at haunted locations. Like ghosts, they seem site specific, associated with particular areas that often have historic, religious, or geological peculiarity.

  Two of the most prominent contemporary paranormal scholars started their careers in search of the answer to the UFO phenomenon, whose early peak was in the 1960s. British authors John Michell (1933–2009) and Paul Devereux found levels of complexity to the matter. Michell noticed general paranormal connections to UFOs, including the witness experience. People either witnessed the lights when they were suspiciously close to ancient sacred spaces or when the lights themselves were above these features.

  Devereux backtracked on earlier reporting and reinterviewed witnesses cited in media reports. He noticed that a lot of things first reported as UFOs may not have been the classic sky lights presumed to be extraterrestrial vehicles, and that the eyewitnesses may have been reporting something different altogether. He concluded that a different type of phenomena was getting lumped in with UFOs, the confusion likely caused by news stories written by hasty and disbelieving newspaper and TV reporters. Many so-called UFO witnesses were describing more terrestrial types of lights—a European version of the Iroquois witch lights. Devereux decided that most of these “Earth Lights,” as he calls them, come from the natural energies of the earth. He separated them into categories:

  Ball lighting. This is a many-colored nexus of light that manifests, cavorts, and then escapes. Once thought to be paranormal, ball lightning has been recently accepted as a real physical phenomenon. It often shows itself inside enclosed spaces like buildings or airplanes.

  Will-o’-the-wisp. These mysterious lights seen at night or twilight over bogs, swamps, and marshes were personified in the British Isles as Will of the (lighted) Wisp, or sometimes Jack of the Lantern. Will (or Jack) was fated to wander the world’s lonely places with his woeful searchlight till the Judgment Day. The decay of organic matter and the subsequent oxidation of phosphine and methane in the air is one explanation for these lights.

  Earthquake lights. Nicknamed EQLs, these strange lights manifest near the surface of the earth just before seismic disturbances. When tectonic plates grind beneath the surface, they create natural electrical charges, called piezoelectricity, which have been photographed and videotaped. It’s like the spark set off when steel hits flint. Though EQLs weren’t recognized by seismologists until the mid-1960s, Charles Fort (father of American phenomenalism, 1874–1932) listed appearances of them in his books as early as 1919.

  The witch lights reported in Iroquois country include all three of these forms. Some act like natural ball lightning, starting in one place and moving irregularly to another. Others haunt marshy ground, and still others just might be the EQLs of Devereux’s third classification, trooping about the Onondaga Formation and many of the geological faults that underlie upstate New York. There are also witch lights in folklore that don’t fit into any of these categories. These the Iroquois might know better.

  Like Walt Disney turning a house mouse into Mickey, folklore personifies natural phenomena, giving them character and personality, and spinning them into stories. Even if you believe that this is what has happened with the witch lights, regional traditions of sightings could also indicate some kind of metaphysical energy about sites or regions. When witch light appearances permeate a place, this is regarded as a sign of many spirits, as if there were once a battle or an old tradition of occultism.

  THE HILLS OF ROCHESTER

  Western New York has been Seneca country for at least a thousand years. Before the Seneca’s arrival, other Native Americans lived here, including communities of Algonquin on a couple of Rochester’
s damp hills. The Algonquin’s heyday was probably during the European Middle Ages, around the 1200s and 1300s. It’s fairly certain that they were driven out or absorbed by the Seneca. We may never know exactly where any of the clash points were. But sites linked to battles and bygone populations attract supernatural folklore everywhere. It was no different along the Genesee River. For the Seneca, the five Rochester hills made a zone of spirits.

  One of them, Oak Hill, has been leveled off and made into a country club. Highland Hill and Cobb’s Hill are recreation spaces today. The other two, Pinnacle Hill and Mount Hope, are the most interesting from paranormal perspectives. What do we do with pieces of land no one wants to live on? Sometimes we give them to the dead. This was the case with both hills.

  First named Mount Monroe, Pinnacle Hill is the highest point in Rochester and just might be the object visible from Buffalo on the northeastern horizon at the end of Genesee Street in Joseph Ellicott’s (1760–1826) 1804 city plan, which is very likely Masonic. A lawyer, surveyor, and city planner, Ellicott’s name has surfaced in connection with mysticism many a time. (A prominent artist, lecturer, and self-described “urban shaman” in Buffalo, Franklin LaVoie has this and many other innovative theories about local landscape.) Pinnacle Hill hosts a church, park, St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cemetery, and legacies of witch lights.

  Mount Hope by the Genesee River may have been even more powerful. The Seneca didn’t cross the hill or the marshy area below it after dark. Even the white settlers drove carts and wagons far out of their way to avoid it. The much-storied Mount Hope cemetery has a huge late population, hosts of ghosts, and several proverbially haunted regions.

  Strange lights have been reported at night about Mount Hope, floating, drifting, and hovering. Several buildings at the nearby University of Rochester are thought haunted, though the ghosts may be related to more recent events. Even the campus newspaper has reported various supernatural sightings over the years, not the least of which are the lights.

  THE LIGHTS OF OSWEGO BITTER

  In the early 1800s, Revolutionary War veteran John Marshall (1755–1835) gave land for a cemetery near his house in Oswego Bitter, a hamlet ten miles east of Syracuse. From the start, the settlers reported strange lights at night in the gravestones on Bennett’s Corners Road.

  The lights moved with apparent purpose—along walking lanes, around obstacles, and over streams. Some witnesses thought they might be people with lanterns. They always came from or vanished into the graveyard, though, and those who saw them up close had different stories.

  A farmer’s horse knew its route between barn and tavern so well that its owner could have as many as he wanted “for the road” and trust it to lead them both home. Their course went past the burial ground at Oswego Bitter. On one such night the over-served rustic woke up at the graveyard gate, the cart parked, and the horse mesmerized by a dancing ball of light. Only when the light drew into the cemetery and blinked out could the horse be persuaded to move.

  Another time two farmers spotted one of these lights and stopped their wagon to watch. The glowing sphere came right at them, drifted over the harness, passed between them over the center of the seat, then disappeared in the graveyard.

  By 1952, newspapers were still referring to will-o’-the-wisps in the hilly country near Bennett’s Corners Road. The term may have comforted reporters, who likely surmised they were nothing but swamp gas, but the sightings created a buzz among the locals. No wonder. The lights in Oswego Bitter seem nothing other than the ga’hai.

  By 1987, Robert Fletcher, a resident of Oswego Bitter, had been seeing these luminous balls for thirty years. Fletcher lived near Bennett’s Corners Road and had used parts of John Marshall’s original house to build his own. Most often, Fletcher said, the lights came down the hill, entered the graveyard, and disappeared. He presumed the phenomenon was natural, though he ventured no opinions on the cause. Others on the road thought the business was rooted in the ancient spirits. The area is at the margin of Cayuga and Onondaga territories, and it would have been fun to talk to the old-timers two centuries ago and find out what they made of the lights.

  Since the late 1980s many who have spotted the lights heard an animal call that no local hunter could identify. The sound reminded some of the recorded cries of an alleged Bigfoot in a western state. The Big Hairy has been reported in most parts of the Empire State, and in many zones associated with mystery-light phenomena. Maybe this graveyard near Oswego Bitter is one of those places.

  INDIAN HILL

  New York state has several sites called Indian Hill. One at the edge of the village of Gowanda not far from the Cattaraugus Creek is getting pretty famous. The road cutting over it to the Cattaraugus Reservation has accidents with a suspicious frequency. Maybe that explains its deep legacy of supernatural folklore. Anyone bold—or silly—enough to be here on certain nights might hear eerie sounds coming from the hollows holding old graves and homesteads. Phantom forms are reported in the woods at twilight and around distant fires, seldom distinct enough to be studied. One presumes they may be simple human ghosts, possibly those of earlier inhabitants.

  But mystery lights are the specialty at Indian Hill, widely reported by drivers using the road. Depending on when and where they appear, they could have many natural causes. Those who have encountered them at close range are not so sure.

  One of the most elaborate reports from Indian Hill is of a distant sphere of dim light drifting through the trees that, as it nears, becomes the complete image of a wolf in a sort of glow. Thought to be some type of wizard in animal guise, witch lights like this one are regarded as very dangerous.

  Maybe a great medicine person lived nearby and did a bit of nighttime wandering in a form like it. It’s possible that this apparition was seen at times of turmoil for the neighborhood, hence it could be interpreted as a protest from the collective psyche. We think it was just one more aspect of the witch lights.

  Native Americans on all of western New York’s reservations think of Indian Hill as a whole zone that’s active and enchanted. A word to the wise, though: this would be a bad place for thrill seekers of any type. It is part of the Cattaraugus Reservation and hence sovereign Seneca territory. Ask permission before you start poking around.

  TRAIN TRACKS AND WITCH LIGHTS

  By the winter of 1887–1888 people living near the Peanut Railroad between Corfu and Indian Falls were starting to worry about strange nocturnal lights. In February 1888, the Batavia Daily News even ran a curious report titled “Supernatural Lights.” Newspaper reporter G. Ranger claimed to have seen one himself while driving north from Attica. It first appeared north of Alexander on the Central Railroad and kept up with his horse and cart almost to Batavia. From a distance, it looked “like the headlight to a locomotive,” though not as bright. Ranger got home without further incident. As he neared his house, the light drifted off and disappeared into the woods.

  Years before, a local named Philander Shippy was out for an evening drive in the same general region and was ambushed by a flurry of these lights. The air was full of them as he left Batavia. They danced around his cart “like flies in the summer,” lighting on the horse, the harness, and even his hat. He snapped at them with his whip, but they easily dodged every stroke. He set his horse running to get away from them. They followed him the length of the turnpike, but they disappeared when he hit the high ground.

  Ranger noted that these lights were nothing new to the area but that they were getting rarer in recent decades. He felt confident in saying that they “belong to the Jack-o-lantern or the will-o’-the-wisp family, are without heat, and perfectly natural and harmless.” He was untroubled by the seemingly intelligent behavior of the one he claimed to have seen, or its difference from the ones that beleaguered Shippy. The idea that these could be fireflies or swamp gas seems ludicrous. It seems as if the whites were encountering witch lights, which are known to play pranks.

  The fact that these witch lights are associated w
ith railroad tracks or beds makes us wonder if there might not be some geological or geomagnetic component to their appearances. But why would anything psychic favor these broad straight channels through the landscape? It almost makes us wonder if it’s hard for a post-colonial shaman to see when disguised as a light. Maybe these artificial paths make for easy navigating.

  THE HILL OF DEAD WITCHES

  One of New York’s folkloric hotspots is a piece of territory on the side of a hill in Allegany State Park. To the Seneca this is Ga’hai Hill, a region of magic and mystery where anything otherworldly is likely. It’s an “X-zone,” in other words, an area whose magic affects many who come here. From a distance, witch lights can be seen at night on this hill. The northern Alleghenies are part of a region that has long been a major zone for UFO reports. Ga’hai Hill is one upstate site like the English ones noted by Paul Devereux, in which earthly lights and celestial ones—the classic UFO—may be linked. There may be more to it than that.