“I was told not to talk about this,” she said, looking ghostly herself in the mist. “They said that even talking about it might bring it back. I just wish I could understand.” I finished loading my books and lecture materials and gave her my card. I haven’t heard from her since.
The Buffalo Curse
By 1972, “the old Rockpile” on Buffalo’s east side had seen its last kickoff. War Memorial Stadium, stronghold of two-time AFL champs the Buffalo Bills, was to be abandoned in favor of a new stadium in a southern suburb. Work started on a broad country block three miles west of the village of Orchard Park. Not all was at peace.
It started in houses at the edge of the tract. Families became anxious, tense, and depressed. Pets got in on the act, shying away from spots in rooms and spaces in yards, even running away. Then there were outbreaks of poltergeist phenomena. Ghosts were sighted, inside and outside of homes. Families felt targeted, if not directly cursed. People blamed the budding stadium. They may have had reason.
Workers clearing the former farmland rediscovered the tiny 1820 graveyard of the Joseph Sheldon family. Abandoned in 1924, it was restored in the early 1970s. You can still see it—a fenced-in area in the north parking lot of the new stadium. Other graves were not so well treated.
One branch of Smokes Creek coils through the stadium plot. Along it had been much Native American habitation. Their burials were here, too. Some say the ground moaned when shovels pierced it. Word got out that this was the root of the psychic unrest.
Seneca Joyce Jamison concurred. “Things act up when our ancestors are disturbed.”
“That’s about what ought to start happening,’” said Michael when he heard the circumstances. “Little stuff going wrong around the house. People getting spooked, turning to drugs and stuff, families breaking up. A lot of people don’t realize thatsometimes these things aren’t coincidental. Sometimes they do have causes.”
For whatever reason, peace returned. Graves may have been moved and offended spirits eased. To this day, we meet people who lived nearby during the construction phase, and more stories surface. (“Why did you wait so long to call me?” said a Buffalo priest upon entering a certain house.) Seneca storyteller DuWayne Bowen considered the stadium tunnels still very haunted.
It’s rumored in some quarters that Seneca elders from the Cattaraugus Reservation worked traditional rites of blessing. It’s been hard to verify. The Seneca we talked to remembered nothing about it. Neither did late Orchard Park historian John N. Printy (1919–2001). The Buffalo Bills’ historian Beverly McQuillan found no written records, nor did reporter Mike Vogel in decades of Buffalo News files.
There’s also talk that the curse just shifted and hangs now over all Buffalo sports, tantalizing teams and their supporters, keeping the word of promise to their ears, breaking it to their hopes, and snatching ultimate triumph when just within reach. It could go well beyond sports.
This region of sublime scenery, rich natural resources, and a treasury of classic architecture has seemed blighted for generations. Provided with a Masonic, symbolic street plan, Buffalo started out with visions of becoming a grand capital. Torched by the British in the War of 1812, its luck steadily improved after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825. Buffalo’s high-water mark could have been the 1901 Pan-American Exposition at which—shortly after a visit to the Devil’s Hole, a Seneca bad-medicine spot—President William McKinley was shot. The Great Depression was a short hop later, and the late-twentieth-century loss of manufacturing jobs was the coup de grace. Buffalo is due a break, and soon. But what launched the blight?
Some go back to the psychic fallout of the presidential assassination. Others turn to the steady progress of New York state into a tax-and-spend, government-centered economy. Some blame developer and power broker Robert Moses (1888–1981), who destroyed the Niagara by routing expressways like defensive barriers between the citizenry and their fixed assets, their waterfront, and their splendid Olmsted Parks. Others blame a downstate power base that sees New York harbor as a local resource but Niagara Falls power as a state one.
One explanation is persistent. At some time during the settler period, the story goes, the Seneca were challenged to a foot race by the whites of Buffalo. The Seneca were marvelous runners, but through subterfuge, the whites managed to win. The Seneca medicine people drew together as one, they say, and whistled up a mighty curse. According to the story, Buffalo would never win anything significant until this wrong was righted. Some say that the curse has expanded to include the fortunes of the whole region. Like its football team the Buffalo Bills and their four-in-a-row Super Bowl losses, Buffalo will be taunted like Tantalus: After long periods of humiliation, success will come near enough to smell and taste and ever be snatched away.
Maybe it’s not too late for a cure from the medicine people. We recommend Erie County folk give that a try. Then vote out of office every politician who does not work to lower taxes.
THE CURSE OF THE BONES
You can pick your own start date for this: either the ice ages, 2000 BCE, or 1997.
Western New York is the traditional home of the Seneca, largest nation of the Confederacy and the swinger of the biggest Native political bat. But many other Native nations once held the area, including Blackfoot, Eries, Neutrals, and the Iroquois’ rivals, the Algonquin. Even the truly ancient mound builders could have been here. All these people rest in western New York soil.
Since the 1990 passage of the NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), all land development in the United States has to stop when Native burials are discovered. Human remains and artifacts have to be identified and respectfully reinterred. No project is too big to be delayed, rerouted, or even blocked. Native American representatives have the final say dealing with the matter.
In the best cases, living descendants of
