Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  The traditional ghost of 13 Curves is an archetype, what I call the woman in white. Most New York state villages have a handful of them. There is even a folkloric motif, a 1940s car crash on a wedding night, behind the one reported at 13 Curves. The place has become a Halloween hotspot. Thrill seekers report ghost faces in the car mirrors. Others drive right through a faint form on the road and sense a chill permeating the car.

  13 Curves might seem no more than a simple haunting were it not so suspiciously located on something called Onondaga Hill. As it is, we interpret 13 Curves as one of those wonderful cross-cultural morphs we get in New York state, a power place acting up and frying the circuits of the observers. To those who fail to see the Native American connection to this folkloric figure, it should be remembered that, whatever the melanin-content of the skin of the living, ghosts are often on the pale side.

  WEST ROAD

  (Oneida, Oneida County)

  Like a lot of haunted roads, this stretch a mile or so west of Oneida Castle changes its name a bunch of times. It’s Smith Road at the bottom, Creek Road north of that, then Highway 10, Highway 54, and Pine Ridge Road. It’s also called Creek Road and County Highway 29 in other places.

  Our contemporary Anthony Wonderley sifted many Oneida tidbits from the papers of Hope Emily Allen. In one of them from the early 1900s, Electa Johns recalled the haunting of her parents’ derelict house on West Road: “A stone rolls through it and then a ball of fire follows.” According to Johns, many West Road houses kept their hauntings even after the Oneida left. West Road may be just as famous for witchcraft as for ghost lights and psychokinetic stones.

  ROUTE 5

  Route 5 is the daddy of New York power roads. A three-hundredmile track from Albany to the Niagara, it is a rib, a spine of psychic energy that runs along the Onondaga Formation. This trail, the spine of Iroquoia, is ancient. There’s a good possibility that the foot-wide track the first whites encountered was made by beasts migrating east to west with the seasons. They could have been mammoths and short-faced bears. Paleo-Indians who hunted them used the track along the underbelly of the Ontario once the glaciers receded. The Jesuits called it the Iron Path since it was packed so hard and so much military hardware clanked along it. Only the Hudson Valley could even be suggested as the broker of that much New York state energy.

  Today, this old track is paved over and massively traveled. In places, it is a virtual highway. In others, it is the main street of quaint villages, holding historic sites and buildings. Visit any one of them on the route and walk each side with a clipboard. Do a few interviews at any building older than fifty years. The ghosts you hear of may not all appear as Native Americans, but you will hear of ghosts. The effect doubles in stretches where 20A and 5 overlap. Sections outside Canandaigua get reports of altered animal forms. Other stretches are considered cursed and accident-prone.

  While this was a migration trail, a hunting trail, and a warpath, it was also a vision trail. If it surprises the reader that something could be strongly all four, remember that the Native American mind was not nurtured on the Socratic dialogues, which arrive at many of their truths by winnowing down and excluding nontruths. The Native American mind had no trouble with one thing being strongly of one quality and also strongly of another.

  THE SPIRIT WORLD

  Without question, the Iroquois grieve when a loved one dies. If we had to give a character to it, we would say that their grief tends to be a melancholy and a sense of tribute, not the utter despair displayed by some whites. It could be because their faith in a life to come is so strong, seemingly like that of the old Celtic warriors, who borrowed from each other in life with the promise of repayment in the afterworld. This belief may not be a thing of the past among the Iroquois, and it could be with them from their earliest years.

  Though not as famous as Davey Crockett or Daniel Boone, New York “Indian Fighter” Tom Quick (1733?–1795) was a similar figure. There was a real man, and there is a pile of folklore about him. Not all of that said about Quick is heroic. Though Quick is associated with Milford, Pennsylvania, the site of his birth, most of his adventures were in Iroquois country.

  Quick’s Revenge

  Quick grew up around Native Americans and was a great woodsman, in that sense the proverbial “white Indian” like the Deerslayer of Cooper’s fiction. His greatest gift, though, was an uncanny ability to sense danger.

  In the turmoil of the colonial wars, Quick’s family suffered under Native attacks. Quick might have blamed fate, mankind, or war. He might have blamed the French and then the British Empire who launched these allied attacks. He might have blamed first Algonquin speakers or Iroquoians. He might have blamed individuals. Instead, he blamed all Native Americans.

  Quick’s revenge was so drastic and bitter that it set off a cycle of retribution that lasted long after peace was declared. Quick never knew which Native American he encountered might be remembering a death he had dealt a brother or comrade.

  One winter night in a tavern, Quick found that he had a sudden new friend. Drinking, joking, laughing at everything Quick said, a young Native American man proposed hunting together on the morrow. Quick doubted that all was as it looked. In the middle of the night, he emptied his new friend’s rifle of most of its gunpowder and reloaded it with ash from the fireplace. He did likewise with the powder horn.

  The next morning, the brave inspected the loading of his flintlock with a bit more care than that of a man out for some sport hunting. “Why don’t you walk ahead of me awhile and break the trail?” he said when they set out. Quick obliged.

  The pair were no sooner out of sight and hearing of the lodge than the white heard the pointless click of a rifle behind him. He looked around. “What did you see?”

  Making an expansive gesture, the brave replied, “A fine buck on the other side of the creek.” Misfirings were common in the black-powder era. Apparently making no more of it, the Iroquois reloaded carefully from his own horn.

  Awhile later, the scene was repeated. “What did you see this time?” said Quick.

  “An eagle soaring above us,” said the brave.

  Quick kept his own gun at the waist, casually trained on his companion. “Why don’t you walk ahead of me this time.”

  They came to a grove even more sheltered than the rest, and Quick cocked the hammer. “So, my deceitful friend,” he said. “Tell me what you see now.”

  “The spirit world,” said the brave, stepping in front of the barrel and standing tall.

  One afternoon in the 1980s, white teacher John Newton was walking on the Onondaga Reservation with some of his young students. A pickup truck went caterwauling by them on a bumpy dirt road. As it passed, he was startled to see a couple of young men bouncing precariously in the back, legs hanging over the tailgate. “Boy, they ought to be careful,” said Newton. By their lack of reaction, his students let on that it wasn’t such a big deal.

  Newton couldn’t understand this. He may even have raised his voice. “Well—somebody could get killed! Doesn’t that matter to you?”

  One of the boys shrugged and summed up the attitude of the others. “He’ll just go into the spirit world a little early.”

  I FEEL MY FRIENDS HERE

  The notion of acculturating the Native Americans goes back to George Washington’s administration. It was presumed that progress was the natural goal of societies, and that the proper gift to Native Americans was what the whites would have wanted for themselves: religion, education, jobs, and life skills—in short, more white medicine. Indian schools were established across the United States.

  Most of them in the East were orphanages for the care and education of children orphaned because of the collapse in their societies brought about by white incursions. Some in the West were shock military schools intended to modify ancient attitudes by reworking a single generation.

  Supported by Baltimore banker Philip E. Thomas (1776–1861), Quaker missionaries Asher Wright and his wife, Laura Maria (180
9–1886), built a combined school and orphanage on the Cattaraugus Reservation in 1856. Tycoon William Pryor Letchworth (1823–1910) gave a financial hand in 1875, and by 1898, the Thomas Asylum for Orphan and Destitute Indians came under the supervision of the state’s Department of Social Welfare. That’s when most of the buildings we see today were constructed.

  Like many a college campus of the day, they were Georgian Revival redbrick structures, with appealing cornices, dentils, and cartouches, most featuring Native American images with classical styling. Today, a handful of the buildings stand, and probably, in some form, the tunnels and passages that connected them all. By 1905, it was known as the Thomas Indian School.

  By 1956, the centralization of New York schools was under way, and the Thomas, as it was called, closed. The site and some structures did a five-year spell as part of the Gowanda State Hospital, an insane asylum. Decline, dilapidation, and many demolitions followed.

  The experience of these Indian schools was traumatic enough—away from nature, language, villages, families, play. The discipline of the era would qualify today as abuse. These “forgotten” children returned to their villages as adults, often neither fully white nor Native—“neither wolf nor dog” as the Seneca say—and unable to deal with the world.

  Over the years, we’ve interviewed old-timers who remembered family members traumatized by their years with the schools. Our Tuscarora friend Jay Claus had an uncle who had never been right, due, Claus was sure, to his experiences at the Thomas.

  No wonder the Thomas is haunted. We know a graveyard was here, probably under the whole campus. Skeletons were discovered in 1900 during excavations for new construction. That should have told them something.

  Only a couple of the original Thomas buildings still stand, and the most prominent is the former infirmary, right out there on Route 438 across from the library. Today the site is used for office space by the Seneca Nation, but no one likes to be in it at night. We know many a Seneca who lists it as a top haunt in the region.

  Seneca librarian Pam Bowen tells the story of a Cattaraugus woman doing some late-night painting on the top floor. Just after her male colleague ducked out for an errand, she heard the old-time elevator kick in ominously and start clattering up. She didn’t wait to see what would come out the door. She bolted down the stairwell and waited outside for her partner.

  One old lad we interviewed used to drop in on the place whenever he was in the area and walk around mournfully near the resting places of his chums. Many had died during their time at the Thomas, and some were buried, according to him, in “lost” graves. The place was, to him, horrible, but the way old warriors revisit battlefields, he went back now and then to honor the fallen. “I feel my friends here,” he said.

  The Ghost Talker

  In the 1970s, Mad Bear and friends were out viewing rock carvings when their young guide found a magnificent, ancient flint point. He offered it to Mad Bear. “You found it,” said Mad Bear. “There must be a reason.” The boy put it in his pocket.

  “Whoa!” said Mad Bear. “You can’t take it like that. Either put it back where you found it or make some kind of offering. If you can’t offer something, make a pledge.”

  The lad held the arrowhead up to the sun for a minute and put it in his pocket. “I made a pledge,” he said, grinning. “I promised the Great Spirit I’d quit drinking.”

  Mad Bear cut him off. “A pledge is sacred,” he said. “You’ve got to mean it.”

  A few days later, Mad Bear called his friends together to tell them that the young man who had taken them to the rocks was dead, killed by the stroke of a knife. Few thought it would take Mad Bear long to find the killer. He went to the boy’s family.

  At dawn he called his circle together, which included the white author Doug Boyd. “The ceremony went pretty good,” he said. “I got hold of him, and he recognized me.” Mad Bear led the young man’s spirit around the house where he had lived, showing him his room, his things, his friends, his family. “This is where you used to sleep, but no more; this is who you used to live with, but no more.”

  “You got to get everything closed out,” he said. “That’s the purpose in a ceremony like that.” Confused spirits can be “trapped something terrible. Time was, everyone in the world had ceremonies for that. Now it’s mostly lost—especially where there’s no traditional medicine people left.” He got up. “I’m tired. I done a lot of work tonight.”

  “How did he get stabbed?” shouted Boyd. Mad Bear sighed as if the grief was new and he’d seen it through the young man’s eyes. The boy with the flint in his pocket and the pledge on his lips had walked a long trail to a store. When he came out with a six-pack, a dog that had always been friendly went after him. A fracas ensued, and the dog’s owner drew his knife to stop it. Mad Bear’s young friend kicked out at the dog, maybe even at the knife. That was how he’d been hit. The wound had seemed just a scratch in his hip, but it bled as he walked. He weakened, rested by an old cabin, and fell asleep. The steel point had come in over the flint one in his pocket. It must have sparked off it.

  BLOODY MARY

  One of the Niagara’s best-known Native American ghosts haunts the Saylor Community Building on the Cattaraugus. Her fame is so widespread that even Tuscarora and Tonawanda folk will tell you about Bloody Mary. Still, her story is counterintuitive.

  The fact that they give this ghost a name presents the first problem. The Iroquois seldom personify their ghosts. They know the apparition of a late person when they see one, and they’ll give it a name when they know it. But the site ghosts they report, named or not, behave not like the ghosts of entertainment, but like those of parapsychology: quick, quirky images, not always fully formed, seldom dramatic or self-aware. So often no one knows who the apparition may represent.

  Problem two is the name itself. Bloody Mary is a white contemporary bogie—the ghost of a woman who either killed her children or whose child was stolen. (Stand in front of a mirror and call her name three times and she just might appear as a reflection.) This urban legend may be only a quarter-century old. It’s also a cocktail named for an English queen, the daughter of the notorious Henry VIII. Mary I (1516–1558) could have gotten her nickname from a couple of false pregnancies or abortions. More likely, it came from her penchant for killing Protestants.

  The Saylor’s Bloody Mary is a character—and a player who may have a connection to the fabled bogie the Legs. An edgy babe, dark-haired, seductive, dressed in black and red, she turns up at the occasional dance. The Saylor is dark, and the music rocks. She catches the eye of a married man who likes to run around on his wife. She’s a quick laugher, and he’s impressed by his own form. His friends are watching. Who knows what she looks like to them? Like a vampire or the European fairies, she has glamour, the power of casting visual enchantment on herself or other beings and objects. She goes to “freshen up” and agrees to meet outside. That’s the last he sees of her—in this form.

  The man walks home, dejected, and soon uneasy. Trees stir around him; footsteps follow. If it’s his would-be conquest, she doesn’t answer his weakening calls, and those strides are not those of a woman in heels. Soon a massive pair of female legs and pelvis races round him in the dark. He detects the smell of menstrual blood, a dozen times greater than normal. There’s a collision. He gets home, out of breath and terrified, but the effluvium is with him. His appetite for conquest is dimmed. Even if his wife lets him live.

  THE CHIEF OF THE BLUE HERON

  Leon Shenandoah (1915–1996) was the Tadodaho of the Six Nations. This is a title, and a different word in all the Iroquois languages, but there’s no mistake about the man who bears it. The leader of the Longhouse folk, the Tadodaho, is the Fire Keeper of the Onondaga and the only member of the Six Nations to wear the single feather of the great blue heron. This inspiring bird and its feather in the ancient headdress have come to symbolize this chief of chiefs. The man who bore it to the end of the twentieth century had power in his hands an
d play in his heart.

  Mike Bastine and Ted Williams used to visit Leon often at Onondaga. One thing that impressed Michael the most about him was his forgiveness. Leon’s daughter was killed in circumstances that looked like murder to many. It was the direst event of his life. Still, he swore off vengeance and never gave way to bitterness, even when people around him vented against murderers. The worst Leon ever said was, “Sending them to the Land of the Elders is too easy. Let them stay here awhile longer.” His verdict was always final.

  The Graceful Bird

  On the night of July 22, 1996, Mike and Pam Bastine were driving home from a camping trip in the Catskills. It was about ten, and they were on Route 20A near Varysburg, about twenty miles east of their Wales Center home. One of those long Erie County hills bottomed out at an intersection by a streetlight. A pale shape was ahead of them, at the very edge of their side of the road. Michael had to swerve to miss it. Still as a coatrack in a sheet, it could have been a ghost, and one that didn’t fear the brush of cars doing sixty. Michael had a funny feeling about it. He turned to Pam. “Did you see that?”