The Seneca had legends about the region between hill and river. The first of them to venture here found countless skeletons, all bearing the marks of violence. Thousands of young warriors had lost their lives in an event storyteller Duce Bowen suspected was a civil war between communities. The energy of brother killing brother made it more than an ordinary clash. Angry, confused, cut-off souls are thought still at work, giving their energy to the land over their bones.
Witches’ Walk may get its name from a single old trail winding through it, the proverbial route of the only folk who dared walk here at night. Only then was it so easy to spot them, huffing along on a frosty eve, red glows like inner fires coming out their mouths and nostrils, fanned fuller with every exhalation. Anyone who happened to be near at such a time—a hunter frozen in a stalking crouch, a lover awaiting a tryst—held pose, even breath, hoping stillness and cover would hide them. Bear, wolf, and panther turned aside and went their ways—unless, they, too, breathed the internal fire and gave greeting.
Supernatural folklore was vivid here throughout the nineteenth century, and the twentieth got a taste of its power, according to Duce Bowen. The train used to go through along the route of the current expressway by river and hills. One night a conductor saw something odd on the tracks ahead and got off to check. He never got back on.
Witches’ Walk today is a bushy, low area of Allegany State Park. The state has since routed an expressway through it, the picturesque I-86. The best way to get to Witches’ Walk is to ask directions at the Seneca Nation museum. If you belong there, they’ll tell you. And don’t go off the road at night.
HILL OF THE CROWS
(Cayuga Country)
Owasco Lake was the center of gravity of the Cayuga. Auburn, New York, just north of it, was their major community. Two of Auburn’s distinctions overlap. One is the illustrious Fort Hill Cemetery based around the burial ground and earthwork of a pre-Iroquoian culture. Upstate pioneers and national heroes, including Harriet Tubman, are buried here. The other distinction is unwelcome, the infestation of migrating crows that besets this historic burying ground twice a year.
It’s no surprise that Auburn would have been an ancient civic center. Many upstate cities were Iroquois capitals. Even in the prehistoric Northeast, the natural features that made for community growth pertained to commerce and travel.
It’s no shock, either, that Auburn’s Fort Hill would have been burial ground to prehistoric Hopewellians, contact-era Cayuga, and contemporary whites. We see this pattern in New York more than most would expect. Sites sacred to one culture tend to be adopted by each supplanting one. We see nothing like these crows.
For as long as we have records this biennial bio-bomb has perched at the cemetery every autumn and ravaged the city before setting off to its winter rest. All the months that the snows sweep or settle the upstate, countless coal-black scavengers breed and season on Mexico’s Yucatan. They return from Maya country and blacken our skies every spring.
Earthworks are clustered at the top of the high ground above the Owasco Creek. Early settler James McCauley studied the remains of the Cayuga palisade Fort Osco in 1820 and judged by the trees growing through it that it predated Columbus. Fort Allegan, right around it, was a Hopewellian fort at least 1,500 years old. Similar in style to the megalithic constructions in Europe, this ring fort held eight open spaces that might have been entrances.
Maybe as a sign of its mystical heart, the city of Auburn was passionately involved in some of America’s nineteenth-century movements: Spiritualism, women’s rights, and abolition. Today’s Fort Hill is a grand cemetery in which psychics, suffragettes, and abolitionists rest. Dedicated in 1852, it’s spilled well beyond its original bounds. But at the core of it is the famous earthwork. Much like a British henge, it’s a piled dirt monument that makes a ring and a ditch. It’s almost invisible today due to the development around it and its settling under all those winters.
But it’s easy to find. It’s the Fort Allegan section, rooted by the fifty-six-foot, local stone monument to Cayuga chief John Logan, a fighter against white expansion into Ohio and Pennsylvania. At the end of Lord Dunmore’s War (1774), Logan gave a short, noble, remarkable speech whose text made its way to Washington and impressed Thomas Jefferson as much as Caractacus’s address to the Roman senate.
Psychic folklore is often a sign of power places like these. When you see the flowers—apparitions—you wonder what sort of bed lies underneath. The whole cemetery seems, of course, to be haunted, just not by clear Native American ghosts. The apparition reports we get about Fort Hill are those of many New York graveyards, archetypal images like the seemingly omnipresent little girl ghost and the woman in white. Mystery lights and a pale horse or two are legion in upstate New York, and they have no known explanations in the folk tradition of this cemetery.
Logan’s Monument in the Fort Allegan section of Fort Hill Cemetery, Auburn, New York
A region’s ghosts are seldom frozen onto either the natural landscape or the one of folk memory. Psychic folklore is so plastic a thing that the reports you get of a site or region can vary radically depending on the day or decade you interview. In a morning of driving the streets around Fort Hill, I came up with rumors of “Indian chiefs” buried inside its trees,
