Folklore hangs the name Red Jacket on ghosts in his section of Forest Lawn, by the sites of Canandaigua and Batavia courthouses at which he spoke, and at still-standing Williamsville and Lewiston inns at which he might have been overserved. The best report of a sighting comes from a folder of notes willed to the Buffalo Museum by volunteer archaeologist and Erie lakeshore antiquarian Everett Burmaster (1890–1965).
As a boy around 1900, Burmaster and a pal cut through the Cattaraugus Reservation on a foggy night. As they passed a ruined house, they heard strange rustling sounds and saw a mass of mist take the form of a man in a heavy coat and beaver hat. The apparition drifted right through a fence and became indistinct, then invisible. It turned out that this had been the home of Red Jacket’s stepdaughter. The box holding his bones had once rested there, and the locals had seen him many a time. They see him still—in a young, vigorous form.
My Seneca contacts also think Native burial ground was emptied as fill beneath Buffalo’s streets and roads, hence Red Jacket’s spectral reappearance may be an afterthought. Maybe a bit of him is everywhere with us, then, under our feet, in the air, in the trees. The image of Native Americans as spiritual counselors of white Americans may, after all, be what this book is about, but still, it’s a mite trite the way countless Victorian-era mediums hauled Red Jacket up as a spirit guide. Blessings on you, old He Keeps Them Awake, wherever you rest or return.
THE TONAWANDA PRESBYTERIAN
(Seneca Country)
Buffalo scholar and preservationist Austin Fox (1913–1996) (Church Tales of the Niagara Frontier) figured that 1868 was a good year for the construction of the Tonawanda Presbyterian Church. It’s been remodeled and looks younger than that would make it, but the Seneca operate with the assumption that its core is decades older. Some say that Reverend Asher Wright (1803–1875) transcribed at least part of Seneca Prophet Handsome Lake’s Code in a building on this site, possibly an older version of this one. (The prophet himself died in 1815.) Whatever its age, the building has an illustrious legacy, including a psychic one.
Some Seneca consider this the most actively haunted building in western New York. People who visit the church routinely see and feel things out of the normal. Even in the middle of the day, something raises their hair; something touches them on the arm; something brushes their shoulders. At night when the building is empty, something plays the piano. In 2005, our Mohawk friend Andy Printup recalled rumors that the lights of the church turn themselves on at night. “This is no high-tech church with automatic lights,” he said. His brother used to go by there frequently and reported the effect himself.
This church became so proverbial as a haunt that the reservation had to recruit security to watch it for periods in the 1980s. White thrill seekers came here routinely in hopes of witnessing something spooky.
Our favorite report is one from a Christmas season, remembered for us by Seneca Jean Taradena in the late 1990s. A dozen members of a choir were getting ready to practice. The doors opened and footsteps came down the aisles behind them. Thinking it no more than fellow choristers on the way, they kept their eyes ahead of them on the minister. “Let’s wait for them,” he said, looking down at his music. The footsteps stopped, as if a party were waiting, and the singers turned to look. No one visible was there. “Well,” said the minister, packing up with a feeble smile. “I guess we won’t practice today.” They got up and filed out. Through the back door.
HAUNTED ROADS
Buildings and battlefields aren’t the only things that get haunted in New York state. There are streets and sections of road in every community that pick up formidable bodies of supernatural folklore. Many of them had deep roots in Native American tradition and have to be considered power sites, of a different sort than a haunted human enclosure.
New York’s most prominent old footpaths are well known, and most have been turned into numbered highways by now. Many of our haunted roads were once stretches of them.
Some of our psychic highways may also be what are called (in England) corpse paths, the routes the human dead in their coffins traveled to their last rest. All across medieval Europe, these often short paths from church to graveyard were considered wonderful places for spirit spotting on the right nights of the year, generally power nights relevant to the specific society. (The night varied. In Germany, this would have been April 30, Walpurgisnacht. In Scandinavia and much of England, it might have been June 24, the traditional Midsummer’s Eve or St. John’s Day. In Celtic countries the night would have been the variously spelled Samhain, our Halloween.)
While in old Europe, the corpse path was usually a walkway with little other use; today our village streets often fall into the configuration. Some city streets link several churches and graveyards in a single mile. We drive over them every day. We live on them. Funeral processions take them, too.
Short stretches of some of these New York power tracks are also leys. This is a much-used term in today’s spiritualist New Age. Depending on whom you talk to, leys are:
Lines of spiritual force along the landscape
Sacred pathways
Alignments of sites (both naturally sacred or man-made and religious)
The only definition that can be proven to an open-minded skeptic is the last. Preindustrial people did set up their sacred sites
