These circular formations are suspicious. People like the circle. It’s the mandala form. We tend to build circles everywhere. But when the form appears in upstate street-making, it raises the possibility that something old and Native American was there first. Many an American city plan has followed the pattern of an ancient circular monument.
The settlers shaped Circleville, Ohio, around a big henge, as did the citizens of Auburn, New York, with Fort Hill Cemetery. Joseph Ellicott’s descriptions of the flat-topped, circular rise at the site of Buffalo’s future center, Niagara Square, remind us of a tumulus like Silbury Hill in England.
Many of the ancient monuments that draw so much psychic karma were reported around Lake Chautauqua, whose Seneca name means “bag tied in themiddle.” Maybe people just didn’t handle it right, like the circle in West Ellicott. Maybe some of these sites are too strong to live on.
As if the curse had sated itself on human tragedy, the last decades, we hear, have been happy on this ring of fine houses. It’s not unusual for things to “act up” and then stop, for reasons of their own. Maybe the medicine people got word of the matter and took care of it.
Feasts of the dead have been held all over the world. The contemporary American version of one is Halloween. On this night in their society, the old Celts invited the spirits of their dead. Some Native Americans invited the corpses.
Many Native American ideas are totally unlike those of Europeans. Attitudes to the human body are not the least of them. In The Jesuits in North America (1896), Francis Parkman (1823–1893) describes a Huron (Wyandot) rite that would shock many of us.
As in many Native North American societies, the Huron kept the village dead in ossuaries or grand burial sites. Every couple of years, the bones were hauled up, dressed and ornamented by their former families, set at a feast, and literally “fed” bits of food. Then they were returned to the earth with gifts that beggared the village till the next such event. And so they were treated until there was nothing left of them to dig up. This ritual was a profound expression of the acceptance of all the phases of material existence, and of reverence and even tenderness to the family members whose spirits had left the world. It was also a connector of generations, a way to include the departed in life as they were in memory. The event seemed macabre and even fiendish to the first Europeans to witness it.
The Huron/Wyandot are an Iroquoian people sharing much in common with the Longhouse nations. We hear that the Neutral Nation of western New York, also Iroquoian, maintained this custom. The Six Nations may once have held similar rituals, and it may have been the influence of the Peacemaker and Hiawatha that caused them to go a different way. Could these extreme ceremonies linger, occasionally, as medicine?
The Girl without Eyes
One evening in the spring of 2006, I gave a lecture on Native American supernaturalism in a country library. One of the women attending left about halfway through. She was in the rainy parking lot when I came to my car. A forty-something woman, she had waited until the talk was over so that no one else might overhear our conversation. We talked across a car hood ten feet apart. As if afraid one of us had a contagious disease, she got no closer. She looked haunted. She started to talk, stopped, started, stopped. Then she started.
“Have you ever heard of something like the Feeding of the Dead?” I had, but I didn’t say much. I wanted to draw the story out. It was hard.
The woman looked and dressed upper-middle-class white. She said she had a bit of Native American blood. She had worked as a pharmacist on one of the New York reservations not far from the building of a former Indian school, a very haunted piece of ground. She had never felt comfortable in her building. She kept hearing strange, unexplained noises and soon saw apparitions. At first they were dark, shadowy, and small, like gremlins or little demons. Then they appeared in her home.
One night at closing time, she heard something unusual in the pharmacy she had thought was empty. It sounded like an agonized cough, as though someone straining to breathe had come in looking for help. She called out, then ran into the aisles. On a shelf out of sight of her counter sat a Native American girl. About thirteen, she was very dark-skinned, with a shock of unruly coal-black hair. She wore a high-collared, many-buttoned dress that could have been a Victorian-era school uniform. In place of eyes, though, she had only a viscous, slightly reflective darkness. It was as if her sockets were filled with oil. The apparition was so solid looking that the pharmacist thought the girl was real. It made no sound as the woman watched. After a firm second or two, the image blinked out of existence.
Almost every aspect of the pharmacist’s life took a downward turn after that. Even her sleep was haunted by nightmares. She would have been happy to believe her complaints were medical or psychological, but no doctors or counselors gave her the slightest help. This pharmacist was liked and respected by the reservation folk, and a sympathetic patient noticed her distress. Only then did she get the right form of medicine.
A couple of middle-aged male elders took an interest in her case. It took them months to get her right. They tried a number of remedies and cures she would not describe. What set the demons back for good was a ceremony she called the Feeding of the Dead. She wouldn’t talk about it, other than to say
