This wonder needed an answer, and someone thought of consulting the Native Americans—a remedy we’d recommend today for many American problems. The Seneca dwelling at nearby Squakie Hill held a council and came to the conclusion that this was the spirit of one of their elders who had recently died. Apparently it had lost its way on the journey to the Iroquois heaven and was caught in this sort of nether land. To help the disoriented soul, a hundred warriors were chosen, armed with rifles, and placed as directly under the noise as possible. At a signal, all of themfired their guns at once into the air. The echoes faded, and the wonder was no more. It was not reported again after the Senecas’ ceremony, so maybe their explanation of it was the best. It would be far from the first time.
THE ONTARIO COUNTY COURTHOUSE
(Seneca Country)
At the north end of Canandaigua Lake was a village of Great Hill folk and other Native American communities before them. Its name in Seneca means “the chosen spot,” and Canandaigua is still one of the most gorgeous towns in New York state. It’s long been a place of power.
Somewhere in today’s village the first whites found a big old fort—a term for both a palisaded town and an oval or circular earthwork shape. Canandaigua was one of the frontier’s early capitals, nucleus of a huge tract that stretched westward and became many of today’s counties. Canandaigua was the seat of Ontario County’s government and a frontier center of population and trade. Its star was high until the Erie Canal turned cities like Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse into metropolises.
Canandaigua’s original 1794 courthouse administered frontier justice from the square at 27 North Main. New York’s first jury trial west of Albany was here. (It was over the theft of a cowbell.) By a big rock still here was signed the Pickering Treaty (1794), the oldest still-honored pact between the United States and the Iroquois.
The splendid Greek Revival courthouse we see today was wrought in 1857 by architect Henry S. Searle (1809–1892), most likely on the spot of the earlier one. Searle’s original was squarer than what we see today. The wings that make the courthouse rectangular were put on in 1908 by another Rochester star, J. Foster Warner (1859–1937). Both tended to design buildings that would someday be haunted, and this one does not disappoint.
Some memorable guests have made in-life appearances here, which always gives a prod to psychic folklore. In the original courthouse on this square, Red Jacket defended a Seneca accused of murder in 1794. (Stiff-Armed George was convicted but later pardoned by state governor George Clinton.) Cult leader/community founder Jemima Wilkinson was tried here in 1800 for blasphemy. Batavia’s famous William Morgan (1774–1826), allegedly kidnapped and murdered by the Masons, was jailed here in 1826. In the updated courthouse, suffragette Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) was tried and fined in 1873 for voting in the presidential election. Two executions that took place here—those of Charles Eighmey (1876) and John Kelly (1889)—involved illicit love affairs and unseemly gallows scenes. We have many candidates for ghosts. This is one of the liveliest sites in the upstate.
The Ontario County Courthouse, Canandaigua, with a stone marker commemorating the 1794 Pickering Treaty
Every courthouse has its cast of mortal grievants. We have here a diverse and nether legion. One comes in the image of a Native American male, rumored to have been hung for some crime or other. A ghostly black man appears, too, suspected to be a runaway slave returned South, if not local abolitionist Richard Valentine (1798–1874), still blaming the system over the court case that had ruined him. Even an image identified as Red Jacket is reported here now and then, maybe lamenting one of the few cases that got away from him.
One curious thing is the way the building itself has been supernaturalized. When the verdict against Anthony was announced, they say, the scales of the statue of justice atop the building clattered to the ground. Faces are said to peer and arms reach out of the courtroom walls. Men working near the dome have been stunned by the building’s reactions, shuddering and moaning like a giant organic being under attack by hammer and chisel. It’s as if the Iroquois sense of the power of place spires up through its foundations.
This is not by a long shot the only upstate site to represent a human train wreck of history, a place or zone at which memorable events tend to pile up; nor is it an exclusively Native American site. But what in New York is exclusively anyone’s? We’re all just passing through, or over. This psychically energetic site illustrates again that the Native American element cannot be separated from any aspect of New York life. The clearest ghosts at this site may be figurative ones, the ghosts of a ceremony.
Go back to that fortnight in 1794 as the Pickering/Canandaigua Treaty was made. Between October 18 and November 12, sixteen hundred Native Americans camped about the well-wooded region. Hunting parties brought in one hundred deer a day. Native witnesses included a Longhouse all-star team: Farmer’s Brother, Cornplanter, Red Jacket, Little Beard, and Handsome Lake. Sometimes called the Calico Treaty, it declared peace, set aside reservations of land, and provided the annual delivery of a batch of cloth—calico—from the U.S. government to the Seneca. The hand-off still takes place. Drop by that stone outside the courthouse any November 11 and see for yourself.
THE KICKING CHIEF OF COOPERSTOWN
(Mohawk/Oneida Country)
Cooperstown ought to have ghosts. Founded in the late 1700s, it’s one of the
