The Stone Giants seem likeliest of the four major Iroquois creatures to have had some origin in reality. So many Native nations of the Northeast have legends about ancient giants that some people interpret them as ancestral memories. The evidence of forts and battlefields attests to prehistoric wars. Some even interpret the Stone Giants to have been European visitors, possibly Vikings, who may have worn metal armor. Tuscarora historian David Cusick never doubted these giants and placed them in dim antiquity, estimating that they came from the north about twenty-five hundred years before Columbus.
A sense of the unknown past of their territory surely had to affect the Iroquois. Some vanished culture left stone-and-earth monuments all over upstate New York, ones that have fed the imagination of all subsequent holders of the land. (The builders had to be giants!) Pre-Iroquoian flint points are sometimes found in Iroquoian burials, often imbedded in masks representing Stone Giants, as if the Iroquois connected the antiquity of the points with the mythic beings.
Giant human skeletons have been reported at dozens of sites in Iroquois territory. Some were buried with artifacts that looked strange to the white settlers. Some skeletons were said to have been the remains of people who would have been nine feet tall. Add to that the regional mythology of Bigfoot, and it could make you wonder how real the Stone Giants were.
THE GREAT FLYING HEADS
The Iroquois have a penchant for direct description. The name says it all about these Great Flying Heads: bodiless, enormous, humanoid heads who either shot through the air where they wanted like Superman or flew by means of tiny, hyperactive wings. The height of a man, they were fitted with dreadful saucer eyes, huge jaws, tusklike teeth, and bear-size arms with wicked claws. Wild, flaring manes trailed behind them.
A ravenous meat eater, the Flying Head was one of the most dreaded beasties of the Northeast. Often drawn to fires in the woods and fresh-cooked kills, it shoveled anything it wanted down its gullet.
The original Flying Heads were envisioned as spiritual beings, zipping about the world before the time of mankind. Associated with the power of wind, they may even have been miniversions of a god whose Seneca name is Dagwanoenyent, meaning “whirlwind” or “cyclone.” When an overnight storm mowed channels through a forest, laying trees about like twigs, it was thought that a couple of Heads had been at work.
In most tales, the Flying Head was a dim bulb. One we see in a common tale peered through the window of a cabin and saw a young girl roasting chestnuts in the coals and plucking them out with tongs. The Head figured that the coals themselves were a delicacy and barged in, determined to have its share, perhaps an appetizer before the main course of the girl. It wolfed down a cropful of red-hot coals and soared off in agony. No one in that village ever saw the beastie again, so maybe it burned to death.
The Flying Head had shape-shifting magic. It could make itself the size of an ordinary human skull if it needed to, in which case its mane would have made it look much like a medicine mask. There are stories of it flying in its small form into human homes and interviewing the inhabitants it had not yet decided to kill and eat.
The Flying Head may have been a brute, but there was more to it. In some tales, the Heads are grudgingly benevolent. Later tales pictured them as material beings who, when they weren’t eating people, might intercede for them against other monsters. Usually this means standing up for human beings against Stone Giants or witches in a wizard’s duel, a common northeastern motif.
In other tales, the Heads can work as healers, serving as a source of inspiration for the common faces of Iroquois medicine masks. They come to hunters in the woods or as visions in dreams, often long enough to direct the making of masks and even serve as models.
We haven’t heard contemporary reports of these Flying Heads anywhere in Iroquois country. Even in the settler days, according to Mary Jemison, the Iroquois talked about them as if they were things of the past. There were regions, though, groves or hills, known once to have been special to them. I’ve heard of one in Seneca country near Letchworth State Park.
THE VAMPIRE CORPSE
The Iroquois had a lot of stories about evil, semidead, humanlike beings sometimes called vampires or cannibal corpses. Not all of the Six Nations’ variety are bloodsuckers like the Romanian vampire or the Scottish glaistig. Still, they were so similar to the human predator of European folklore that we have to call them vampires. Variants abound.
The culprit can be a dead human, a simple corpse that something overtakes. It may be the body of a witch or sorcerer so full of its own otkon that the force lasts on after physical death. Sometimes the demon is an airy specter or ghost, physical enough at the business end for a bit of chewing. The Iroquois vampire can be a virtual skeleton, sometimes even what seems to be a separate species that only looks human. It could even be a servant of the otherworld like the monsters that wait along the perilous course of the human soul in Egyptian mythology.
It’s hard to tell if these are different tales—regional variants—or if the subject of them has different forms. Ah well, the European vampire is a shape-shifter, too, at least within a range of animal forms: bats, wolves, rats, moths. Maybe the stories are about the same critter. But forget the suave Victorian counts or runway models of the twenty-first-century vampire industry. The Iroquois bogie is a reanimated corpse that wouldn’t score at a zombie festival.
The Vampire Man
There were rumors about the old man. He lived by himself far from the village. In his last sickness, people came to make his
