"THE NIGHT WALKERS
On a cold
autumn night in September, 1923, night security officer Atwood Delacey was
making his rounds at the Whitney Shipping House near the waterfront when he
noticed a strange pair of beings wandering along the edge of the rooftop.
According to Delacey, the creatures resembled “walking wishbones or bobby
pins”. They were nothing but round heads on a pair of long, stilt-like legs.
They were covered in plates or scales, including jointed bands of armor running
down their legs and a ring of rectangular “windows” around the middle of the
main body. One of the creatures was half the size of the other and seemed to
constantly scurry after its larger companion like a puppy following its mother.
Delacey
watched the beings pace back and forth for about ten minutes before he went
into the building to investigate. When he got to the roof, though, the
creatures were gone.
This would
be the first and only sighting of the so-called “Night Walkers” in Grenhaven.
But a similar creature was seen on several occasions far to the Northwest in
Boston Corner, New York (originally part of Massachusetts).
From 1825
to 1898, people would occasionally report sightings of a stilt-legged
“Pumpkinhead” monster wandering the hemlock forests that clung to the sides of
the nearby Taconic Mountains. This mysterious visitor only added to the appeal
of Boston Corner, which was already infamous as a wild, lawless town of prize
fighters, drunks, criminals and black marketers.
In the
summer of 1854, one of the sightings led to an outright hunt for the creature.
According to the Boston Corner Gazette, a local man ran yelling into the crowd
at a prize fight claiming to have seen the Pumpkinhead skulking around an
alley. The crowd fled in a panic, which naturally angered the two pugilists in
the ring, Gottlab Straw and Douglas “Ducky” Poole (nicknamed after his peculiar
limp caused by an old injury). Eager to take revenge on the creature that had
ruined their show, Straw and Poole collected a small militia to “drive the
damned thing back to Hell once and for all”. In the end, though, no trace of
the Pumpkinhead could be found. This event is the inspiration for the
Massachusetts folk song “Ducky on the Hunt”*
No one
knows precisely what the Grenhaven Night Walkers or the Boston Corner
Pumpkinhead were. Some have suggested they were beings from another world that
had slipped through a window into our plane of existence. Others have claimed
that the creatures are some sort of unknown Earthly animal. Still others have
suggested that they are nature spirits or elementals that have always inhabited
the Northern woods. Supposedly there are Native legends about them going back
centuries. Those who believe this theory have pointed to strange wooden statues
of the beings found in the woods around Boston Corner shortly after the
sightings began. These, they claim, were created by prehistoric Indians to pay
homage to the spirits.
These
claims have been called into doubt, though, by Mohican spiritual leader Joseph
Tallpine, who says that there is no record of any being even remotely
resembling the Pumpkinhead in his people’s legends. Furthermore, examination of
the “prehistoric” wooden statues showed that they were freshly cut and carved
around the same time that the sightings began, suggesting that they were probably
created by locals to drum up more publicity.
*see Ephram
Switon’s “Gandydancing: Folksongs of Working America”
Also, here's a list of other books by Lee, from the back of the pamphlet:
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