Vögel der Seele, Rilke called his angels, “birds of the soul.” Birds are symbols to most world societies, often as emissaries of the spirit. Intermediaries between the realms of earth and sky, they rise, vanish, and rest again. Some have been messengers and prophets, and others totems of warrior cults.
The battlefield birds, though, crows and ravens, are usually more than that. Associated with war and destiny, they know where death is soon to come and bodies to be had. In their visits with the eternal, they learn the fates of heroes and the ends of empires. Why do the real ones keep coming to Fort Hill?
The old name of the outlet of Owasco Lake was Deagogaya, “the Place Where Men Are Killed.” Was this a memory of some tragic event that took place at Fort Hill, even a battle that preceded the Iroquois? What have the crows learned to remember?
GREEN LAKE
(Onondaga Country)
Nine miles east of downtown Syracuse is a state park holding comma-shaped Green Lake. In the heart of Onondaga territory, it lies just a short walk north of the Great Migration trail that lies under today’s Route 5. The lake may have been made by a titanic waterfall spilling off a retreating glacier, hence its preternatural two-hundred-foot depth. One of its first white names was Lake Sodom, possibly linking the tale of Lot’s calcifying wife with the heavy sulfides in the water. Green Lake is meriomictic, meaning that the top layers and the bottom—like human society—don’t readily mix.
The lake is aptly named. Its color is depths beyond green, an effect caused by low plant life and lack of suspended matter in the water. That explanation doesn’t take away the wonder.
The Power of Green Lake
Green Lake is a gem, an emerald, a crystal. This is a power lake whose dominant legends concern a gigantic serpent, a snake being that partners with a human-size shape-shifter or else takes a human form itself. In this guise, it beguiled a young mother into trading her infant for the serpent’s own beglamoured bairn. A few moments later, she felt something clawing at her; the changeling infant on her back had become a hatchling crocodile. She heard her own babe crying in the swamp.
She pondered suicide by jumping off a high point into Green Lake, but a voice within told her to live. She presumed it was the Great Spirit. She went to her husband.
The couple consulted the medicine man. Their little son was at peace, he told them, with the Good-Minded Spirit who had decided to break the power of the snake of Green Lake for good. He needed their help, though. Could they draw it into the open by making offerings of sacred tobacco from a high point above the lake? This they did. The water dragon reared and roared, and the Good-Minded Spirit made his appearance. It went under, never to resurface.
The Onondaga name for this lake was surely a reference to this legend: something like Kiayahkoo, meaning “happy with tobacco.”
SQUAKIE HILL
(Seneca Country)
Squakie Hill is a ridge in Letchworth State Park just north of the village of Mount Morris. It’s a place of mystery—sacred, for one thing. It hosted the White Dog ceremonies that some whites were allowed to witness. When the Seneca dispersed for their reservations in 1827, Squakie Hill was the site of their farewell dance to their ancestral valley, the Genesee.
The hill had a reputation for trauma and witchery, too. It was dimly remembered to have been a concentration camp for captives. Squakie could be an Anglicization of the name of a nation the Seneca blamed for bringing witchcraft among them. The name could be derived from Kahquas, the name for the Neutral Nation, rumored to have lived there once. It could also come from that of the Sac, or Sioux (the Fox nation), some of whose members may have settled here as prisoners. All this could account for the hill’s occult legacy. (Magic is typically the resort of society’s underdogs: slaves, servants, and the dispossessed.)
Even the “ancient mysteries” connection comes in at Squakie Hill. Seneca old-timers were sure that a mystery population, possibly even pre-Columbian whites, lived here before them, speaking a different language. The Great Slide of the Genesee River took place nearby in 1817, and a bank-side burial mound spilled non-Native bones and goods into the drink. Odd stonework found at the top of the hill in 1915 was sensed to be Hopewellian and even much like the oddities at Bluff Point. One of our confidants reports handling an ancient European-style sword taken from Squakie Hill.
The UFOs seem to hone in on Squakie Hill. A local confidante tells us of the mid-1970s UFO sighting by a scout troop camped on Squakie Hill and even provided the names of the investigating New York state troopers. This sighting was far from the first. In fact, while the UFO business might seem a high-tech matter to its believers, its connections to other paranormal phenomena are solid. As if they navigate New York by its watery alleys, the UFOs like the long north–south lakes and river channels: the Niagara, the Genesee, the Seneca, and the Hudson.
At least the appearances of Iroquois supernatural bogies have been reported at Squakie Hill. Doctor Seaver’s Life of Mary Jemison mentions it as a traditional home to the Great Flying Heads. The Seneca always figured the hill was haunted because the witch John Jemison—Mary Jemison’s serpent-blood-sipping son—was bushwacked there in 1817. Jemison had killed two of his brothers on Squakie Hill, and his two murderers took their own lives there as well. With that pedigree, it ought to be haunted.
Squakie Hill today is partly wooded parkland with a couple of roads. Its rolling terrain
