It is up to you if you believe or fail to believe in the power of any of the subjects of this book. One thing you cannot deny, though, is that the tradition of an ancient and indigenous supernaturalism is still active in New York state. It would be best to respect it.
7
Power Spaces
It demonstrates . . . that there was once indeed something strange and irresistible, which can be seen today in legend, symbol, and ruined monuments.
FRANCIS HITCHING, EARTH MAGIC
Landscape Magic
In 1955, South African travel writer Laurens Van der Post (1906–1996) tore off into Botswana in search of the mysterious, ancient Bushmen, who these days are often called the San. As his expedition neared the fabled region of the Tsodilo Hills, their African guide warned the whites not to do any sport hunting. Word didn’t get to a small advance party, who shot an antelope and a wart hog who had doubtless loved their lives. Such an uncanny plague of calamities commenced that even the skeptics among the whites suspected that their troubles might be supernatural.
Their African guide Samutchoso drew off by himself and sat in the sun. He gave the appearance of holding a solemn ritual, then a dialogue with invisible presences. He returned with the counsel that “the spirits” were angry with the whites forapproaching the holy region with blood on their hands. The whites were starting to believe in African landscape magic, and the misery didn’t let up until they all performed a ceremony of contrition—signing a letter of apology, sealing it in a bottle, and burying it under an impressive ancient rock painting. Still, the spirits had a message for group leader Van der Post: Soon he would hear bad news. So it was; at the first village he came to, a telegraph was waiting to inform him that his father had passed away.
We could cite a twentieth-century story like that on every one of the continents. The sites of traditional ancient power places like these were once everywhere about us in upstate New York. Some were sacred, and any of them could operate negatively if offended. How many of us are camped above them, meeting inspiration and spirituality every day and not knowing why? How many of our haunted houses and cursed zones could be atop them? This is a chapter about some of the ones known in Iroquois country.
Folklorists have known for a long time that supernatural folklore tends to cluster about certain sites or regions. A dramatic example of that would be Stonehenge, attributed in medieval legend to witches, giants, wizards, dragons, fairies, and possibly even the devil. Paranormal scholars—the good ones—notice the effect today. As strange as it may sound, reports from the modern mythology—including mystery monsters, UFO sightings, and unusual earthly energies—tend to pile up in small zones.
Once you identify one of these power places, you can just about presume there will be a story or two about a ghost. Another constant comes in the fact that the most prominent American paranormal places usually have some connection to the people who were here before us. Most of the power places in New York were spiritually significant in one way or another to the precontact Native Americans.
British scholar Paul Devereux has made a study of Native American shamanic landscapes. “It is often difficult to separate spirit haunts,” he writes, “from more generalized American Indian concepts of sacred places.” As we said at the start of this book: Where do you draw the line between the sacred and the spooky?
The classical—Greek and Roman—world believed in two kinds of sacred places. The most obvious were man-made, what Sig Lonegren calls “sacred enclosures”: churches, temples, altars, and monuments people had designated as holy through architecture and devotion. Some were as simple looking as a pile of dirt. Some were as elaborate as the Parthenon or as monumental as the Great Pyramid.
Like all the territory at the underbelly of the Great Lakes, New York state was once dotted with earth-and-stone monuments much like the ones of Europe. Most of them were simple burial mounds, but others were geometric shapes like circles, ovals, and octagons. Some were even human and animal effigies. Virtually all were built by people who preceded the Iroquois. Not many were left by the start of the twentieth century, but some of their former locations are known. These sites tend to pick up folklore, even when no trace of the monument remains.
Another kind of sacred place is natural. One knew the gods had made these places to be special by the way they looked or felt. Fountains, falls, faults, caves, hills, and mountains predominate. Others are simple groves and inconspicuous springs. Something in the energy or ambience of a site projected to people that this was a great spot to get closer to the spirits. Iroquois country is rich, too, in these.
In his 1992 study of Native American sacred places, Andrew Gulliford detailed some styles in the pattern, which include:
Sites associated with traditions and origin stories
Trails and pilgrimage routes
Traditional gathering areas
Offering areas (altars and shrines)
Vision-quest and individual-use sites
Group ceremonial sites (including sweat lodges and singing spots)
Ancestral habitation sites
Battle, burial, and massacre sites
Sites of pictographs and petroglyphs
Observation and calendar sites
Gulliford makes his observations in the broad American West. Only sites meeting the last two categories—pictographs and calendar sites—are hard to find in Iroquois country.
Human activity can sacramentalize a place. Think of battlefields, forts, religious monuments, and burying grounds. Human activity can also outrage it. We’ll take a look at sites in Iroquois territory that have attracted supernatural folklore and tradition. These places are all spooky. And visionary.
WITCHES’ WALK
(Seneca Country)
The whole region of Allegany State Park is one of intrigue. Stone ruins, strange artifacts,
