Our settlers reported Iroquoian ghosts. Just check the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century files. You won’t fail to come up with some anecdote, however cryptic, about a haunt of relevance to New York’s first nations. We’ve done our best to reconstruct a few such ghost stories. Not all of them may be current.
Apparitions of chiefs, shamans, and buckskinned maidens are scarce in some quarters, like Times Square. Little wonder. The period of reporting of an identifiable ghost is typically less than two hundred years, and Native American societies have been displaced from the territory of our cities at least that long.
A lot of ink has been spilled over America’s Native ghosts. Their apparitions are often analyzed as manifestations of societal guilt. “Europeans take possession of Native American lands,” noted Renee Bergland in The National Uncanny (2000). “But at the same time, Native Americans take supernatural possession of their dispossessors.” As Jones pointed out, when the rest of us stopped slaughtering the Native Americans, we started to supernaturalize them. It may also be, though, that the ghosts are there; that the Native Americans, quick or dead, represent the spiritual conscience of the nation; and that, until we come to grips with something we haven’t collectively faced, they will be here to remind us, like Banquo’s ghost, of our debt, especially in New York state.
FIVE IROQUOIS MOTIFS
Doubtless there is a European influence in some of the most familiar Iroquoian ghost tales. There is also something original to them, not least of which is their attachment to precise upstate sites. In his 2005 book on Oneida folklore, Anthony Wayne Wonderley notes “how consistently [Iroquois supernatural stories] relate to space and local geography.”
As we see everywhere else in the world, stories told by and about the Iroquois tend to fall into generic forms called motifs. In the matter of ghost lore, we find a couple of these story forms everywhere in Iroquois country, almost always affixed to local landmarks. Below are five of the major upstate Native American ghost motifs. They could have been sited in almost any county in the upstate. If we see an Onondaga tale in one of these motifs and find that a Seneca version has not been preserved, not to worry. We can presume it was there.
The Offended Lovers
(Seneca Country, Rochester)
A young Seneca couple journeyed along Lake Ontario to join their families on the Niagara River. They made camp near Long Pond in today’s Greece. A handful of fellow travelers soon joined their fire.
Their guests were a party of renegades who at first shared only fire and conversation. Soon they stopped even addressing the husband and drew closer to the fair young wife. One started going through the belongings of the couple, looking for anything of value. Others started pawing the woman and told the husband to scram. They must not have known he was Seneca.
The only weapon near the young man was his knife, which he drew and instantly commenced to use. His wife fled the firelight. A scoundrel turned after her and was struck dead. The young Seneca fought like a panther, but his assailants had numbers, clubs, and tomahawks. He took many wounds. When sure his wife was clear, he dove into Long Pond, singing his death song, and went under.
All was still, all but, from an invisible grove, a woman’s voice, chanting the bitter words of a curse. The renegades never reached their destination. Maybe they were finished by a party of avenging Seneca. Maybe it was something worse.
Apparitions are common by bodies of water and moonlight. The one at Long Pond could be anything. But a legend has developed that it’s the Seneca husbandreappearing as a sheeny spirit in the water. Whatever it is, Rochester historian Shirley Cox Husted recalled seeing it.
THE HAUNTED BATTLEFIELD
(Mohawk/Algonquin Country, Ballston Spa)
Until the advent of the car and modern highways, water has always been the preferred method of travel in the hilly, woody Northeast. When lakes and creeks didn’t connect, there was a canoe-hauling march between the points called a portage, usually marked by a well-worn trail.
Kill is a Dutch word for creek, found often in Hudson-region place-names. Mourning Kill is a stream at the northeastern edge of Mohawk territory. Today it runs through the town of Ballston in Saratoga County and winds into the Kaydeross River. Between the creek called Mourning Kill and the outlet of Ballston Lake was a portage on one of the trails between the Mohawk and St. Lawrence Rivers. A thoroughfare for thousands of years, Mourning Kill was a natural meadow, a likely place for Native American groups to cross paths—even those who didn’t get along.
The Trickster Raptor
One morning during strawberry time, centuries before Columbus, five hundred Mohawk men entered the Mourning Kill portage en route to the St. Lawrence River. As they did, the first handful of an Adirondack band approached from the other direction. An eagle landed on a high branch and looked down as if for a show. A fight broke out in the flower-rich meadow.
Packs of men in small parties pounced on one another. Clubs, spears, and tomahawks clashed. Archers’ work was no less deadly. Both sides were shocked by the carnage in the trees, but neither gave ground. The eagle hopped and gloated on its perch. It rose and circled whenever parties lagged and cheered them when they rushed again. Both sides took it as a sign urging them to courage. The day would be remembered! New songs would be made and, for centuries, danced for their eagle!
But as the day stretched with no resolution at Mourning Kill, the men started to look at the raptor with revulsion. One by one the idea came over them that they had been killing and dying for nothing. As the last beam of sunlight tipped the high
