Massachusetts is a US state located in the northeastern United States in the New England Region and is the most populous state within that Region. It is bordered with the US states of Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island, it also has a coast along the Atlantic Ocean, including a number of islands. The state capital and largest city is Boston.
Massachusetts geography includes the coastal plain of the Atlantic Ocean, a lowland which is located in the Eastern section of the state where most of the state’s population lives, the Cape Cod peninsula here is a strong tourist attraction. Central Massachusetts is hilly upland, wooded and rural and beyond that is the Connecticut River Valley, a lowland in which the Connecticut River runs through, which is the longest River in the New England Region. Finally, in the further West, is Western Massachusetts, where the Berkshires can be found, which is a mountainous area.
Massachusetts economy was originally made up from Agriculture, fishing and trade but then moved on to becoming a center for manufacturing after the Industrial Revolution and then moving on into the modern era the economy shifted to services, the state is now known as being a global leader in sectors such as biotechnology, engineering, higher education, finance, and maritime trade. Other important sectors for the economy include manufacturing, information technology, health care, tourism and defense.
Now let’s dig into the strange and the unexplained of the US state of Massachusetts.
One of the first I know of and which I had read about a very long time ago now, back when I first made my venture into the world of the paranormal as a child, is the Dover Demon.
The Dover Demon is a creature of unknown origin that a group of teenagers in Dover, Massachusetts claimed to have witnessed from April 21st-22nd 1977. The first sighting was made by a 17-year-old boy called William “Bill” Bartlett who was driving down Farm Street on April 21st along with two friends who also saw it. William claimed to spot an odd creature sitting on a broken stone wall, he said the creature had large eyes that glowed and also the creature had tendril-like fingers. Whether the creature’s eyes actually glowed or if it were merely a reflection of the headlights of the car from within the creature’s eyes is another possible question.
A 15-year-old called John Baxter seemed to corroborate William’s sighting by saying he saw a similar creature on Miller Hill Road on that same evening. Abby Brabham, another 15-year-old, also claimed to see the creature, this time in Springdale Avenue the following night. The Boston Globe, a newspaper that reported on the incident, said that the sightings laid along a straight line spanning over 2-miles.
Both William and John drew a sketch of the apparent creature, William’s sketch appeared to show the creature as being small, writing on the sketch that it was about the size of a monkey, the creature also appears to be hairless and with smooth skin, with short slender legs and/or arms with as was mentioned the tendril-like fingers, a short slender neck and a peanut-shaped head with large eyes, disturbingly with no visible mouth, nose or ears. The drawings of the Dover Demon to me looks rather alien-like, looking like a smaller version of a stereotypical grey-alien sort of being.
Baxter drew his as a silhouette, with it grasping a tree and standing on some rocks, and unlike William’s Sketch, Baxter’s sketch had the creature standing up on two limbs rather than down on all fours. The shape of the creature was though practically identical to the William sketch. Baxter also labelled the creature as having faintly glowing eyes, and so since Baxter was walking home at the time, not driving, then car headlights could possibly be ruled out from causing the effect, unless there was perhaps another source of light at the time.
Skeptics have come up with such explanations of it merely being a misidentification of a foal or moose calf or perhaps even a cat or dog, or maybe an escaped Gibbon or monkey that someone had been owning illegally. Police stated that it was most likely a school vacation hoax, although a former police chief of Dover, Carl Sheridan, somewhat stuck up for the kids, saying he knew them as good kids and that the whole thing was unusual.
Since the original sightings there have been no further reported sightings of the creature and so we are left to wonder what this strange anomaly could have been.
Next up is something known as the Beast of Truro, which is what an unknown creature was dubbed that had apparently been mauling various animals to death across Truro, in the Cape Cod Peninsula. The maulings took place between 1981 and 1982, with people suspecting the culprit to be anything from a dog to a pack of dogs, or some kind of wildcat, such as an ocelot, lynx or even possibly a mountain lion, although mountain lions have not been seen in the state since the mid-1800s. Massachusetts only current native wildcat is the Bobcat.
As the New York Times report on the incident says, the first sign of something stalking the animals of Truro came when about a dozen dead cats were discovered in the town, other attacks soon followed, including a badly-injured 175lbs hog that had to be put down, and a few days after that a couple of pigs were attacked and clawed in their own pens. William and Marsha Medeiros have claimed the closest sighting of the apparent mystery predator, the sighting took place when they were out for a walk in Truro on a bike trail near Head of the Meadow Beach.
The animal was spotted about 50ft from them, they were unable to make out what it could be, describing it has having a long ropelike tail looking like the letter J, and that in height the creature probably came up to about their knees, and they estimated it to be 60-80lbs. William picked up a stick just in-case they needed to defend themselves from the creature, but it soon casually, but slowly, strolled away.
Others have claimed to hear odd catlike cries during the nights and one visitor from New York phoned authorities claiming to have seen a Mountain Lion. Police had attempted to use tracks around a pigpen that was attacked to try and identify the creature, but the tracks were not clear enough. The authorities believe that the culprit/s were most likely a dog or pack of dogs but that they could not be certain, and that although a mountain lion was unlikely, it also wasn’t impossible.
Whatever it was since that time attacks eventually calmed down and any such creature has not been witnessed again.
Next up we move on to another of many sea serpents, this one known as the Gloucester Sea Serpent, having been seen in the ocean along its coast. It is perhaps one of the oldest mysteries of Massachusetts with the first recorded sighting coming all the way from 1638, a long while before Massachusetts had even became a state, where it was simply a bunch of English colonies and native peoples.
The 1638 sighting was recorded by John Josselyn, who was a British traveler and author, he recorded that a sea serpent or snake lay coiled up like a cable upon a rock in Cape Ann, they were on board a boat at the time with English on board as well as two Native Indian guides. Josselyn wrote that they would have shot the serpent but that the Indian guides dissuaded them from such an action, explaining that if they failed to kill it and it got away, then their lives would all be in danger.
Further sightings took place over the 1800s, declining over the years, although some sightings have also been recorded into the 1900s as well, including as recent as 1997. Specifically, from 1817 until 1819, it was said that sighting the Gloucester sea serpent was very easy and that anyone was basically guaranteed to see it at the time if they were to head to Gloucester and look out over the ocean, in this way it was claimed that crowds of people together all saw the creature frolicking about the ocean waters and that people would travel from far and wide to see it. This makes it quite different from usual cryptid sightings which tend to be only seen by a singular person or a small group and then often disappearing for a period of time before the next sighting, basically only a very minimal of people see it, but in this case, many were said to have seen it over consecutive days for several years.
Descriptions of the creature often had it as very long and thin, anywhere from 80-100ft in length with humps along its body and a horse-like head.
One particular part of the whole ordeal includes the investigation conducted by the Linnaean Society of New England which started investigating the creature. The culmination was residents of Gloucester finding a small odd-looking black snake with humps along its back on a beach, which they believed was the offspring of the much larger serpent. The Society would investigate this finding and deem it to be a new species which they called “Scoliophis Atlanticus” or “Atlantic Humped Snake” and even published this into a pamphlet, saying that the serpent would lays eggs at the shore to hatch young. However, this would prove to be a humiliating mistake when Naturalist Charles Alexandre Lesueur examined the specimen and concluded it was simply a deformed common snake.
Skeptics say that the creature could possibly have been an Oarfish, a creature that can get to monstrously long lengths but of which are very rarely seen, as usually they remain deep under water rather than come to the surface. Although I say skeptics, back then the Oarfish would not have been a catalouged creature and as such it would indeed be a real cryptid at the time, it it were that creature.
Well, that will do for Massachusetts. There isn’t too much more I can find apart from some Thunderbird sightings, although I have already talked about such mythical creatures in previous posts, including in other states in this series as well as in my paranormal alphabet series here.
Next up we shall be heading to the US state of Virginia to see its weird and unexplained stuff.
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