13 Curves might seem no more than a simple haunting were it not so suspiciously located on something called Onondaga Hill. As it is, we interpret 13 Curves as one of those wonderful cross-cultural morphs we get in New York state, a power place acting up and frying the circuits of the observers. To those who fail to see the Native American connection to this folkloric figure, it should be remembered that, whatever the melanin-content of the skin of the living, ghosts are often on the pale side.
WEST ROAD
(Oneida, Oneida County)
Like a lot of haunted roads, this stretch a mile or so west of Oneida Castle changes its name a bunch of times. It’s Smith Road at the bottom, Creek Road north of that, then Highway 10, Highway 54, and Pine Ridge Road. It’s also called Creek Road and County Highway 29 in other places.
Our contemporary Anthony Wonderley sifted many Oneida tidbits from the papers of Hope Emily Allen. In one of them from the early 1900s, Electa Johns recalled the haunting of her parents’ derelict house on West Road: “A stone rolls through it and then a ball of fire follows.” According to Johns, many West Road houses kept their hauntings even after the Oneida left. West Road may be just as famous for witchcraft as for ghost lights and psychokinetic stones.
ROUTE 5
Route 5 is the daddy of New York power roads. A three-hundredmile track from Albany to the Niagara, it is a rib, a spine of psychic energy that runs along the Onondaga Formation. This trail, the spine of Iroquoia, is ancient. There’s a good possibility that the foot-wide track the first whites encountered was made by beasts migrating east to west with the seasons. They could have been mammoths and short-faced bears. Paleo-Indians who hunted them used the track along the underbelly of the Ontario once the glaciers receded. The Jesuits called it the Iron Path since it was packed so hard and so much military hardware clanked along it. Only the Hudson Valley could even be suggested as the broker of that much New York state energy.
Today, this old track is paved over and massively traveled. In places, it is a virtual highway. In others, it is the main street of quaint villages, holding historic sites and buildings. Visit any one of them on the route and walk each side with a clipboard. Do a few interviews at any building older than fifty years. The ghosts you hear of may not all appear as Native Americans, but you will hear of ghosts. The effect doubles in stretches where 20A and 5 overlap. Sections outside Canandaigua get reports of altered animal forms. Other stretches are considered cursed and accident-prone.
While this was a migration trail, a hunting trail, and a warpath, it was also a vision trail. If it surprises the reader that something could be strongly all four, remember that the Native American mind was not nurtured on the Socratic dialogues, which arrive at many of their truths by winnowing down and excluding nontruths. The Native American mind had no trouble with one thing being strongly of one quality and also strongly of another.
THE SPIRIT WORLD
Without question, the Iroquois grieve when a loved one dies. If we had to give a character to it, we would say that their grief tends to be a melancholy and a sense of tribute, not the utter despair displayed by some whites. It could be because their faith in a life to come is so strong, seemingly like that of the old Celtic warriors, who borrowed from each other in life with the promise of repayment in the afterworld. This belief may not be a thing of the past among the Iroquois, and it could be with them from their earliest years.
Though not as famous as Davey Crockett or Daniel Boone, New York “Indian Fighter” Tom Quick (1733?–1795) was a similar figure. There was a real man, and there is a pile of folklore about him. Not all of that said about Quick is heroic. Though Quick is associated with Milford, Pennsylvania, the site of his birth, most of his adventures were in Iroquois country.
Quick’s Revenge
Quick grew up around Native Americans and was a great woodsman, in that sense the proverbial “white Indian” like the Deerslayer of Cooper’s fiction. His greatest gift, though, was an uncanny ability to sense danger.
In the turmoil of the colonial wars, Quick’s family suffered under Native attacks. Quick might have blamed fate, mankind, or war. He might have blamed the French and then the British Empire who launched these allied attacks. He might have blamed first Algonquin speakers or Iroquoians. He might have blamed individuals. Instead, he blamed all Native Americans.
Quick’s revenge was so drastic and bitter that it set off a cycle of retribution that lasted long after peace was declared. Quick never knew which Native American heencountered might be remembering a death he had dealt a brother or comrade.
One winter night in a tavern, Quick found that he had a sudden new friend. Drinking, joking, laughing at everything Quick said, a young Native American man proposed hunting together on the morrow. Quick doubted that all was as it looked. In the middle of the night, he emptied his new friend’s rifle of most of its gunpowder and reloaded it with ash from the fireplace. He did likewise with the powder horn.
The next morning, the brave inspected the loading of his flintlock with a bit more care than that of a man out for some sport hunting. “Why don’t you walk ahead of me awhile and break the trail?” he said when they set out. Quick obliged.
The pair were no sooner out of sight and hearing of the lodge than the white heard the pointless click of a rifle behind him. He looked around. “What did you see?”
Making an expansive gesture, the brave replied, “A fine buck on the other side of the creek.” Misfirings were common in the black-powder era.
