HIGH HAT
Many Native Americans testify without hesitation that there is some large, humanoid critter on the prowl in our wooded regions. Most of us have heard of the giant apelike being, variously named Bigfoot, Skunk Ape, or Sasquatch, that’s been reported all over the United States. While its SAT scores may not get it into Duke, to the Iroquois it’s no simple brute. To them, it is a very old, august being with the wisdom of the woods within it. Its power makes it capable of being dangerous.
Iroquois country has a surprising number of sightings, and a few beings in Iroquois folklore might be the same thing. The last of the Stone Giants fled to the Allegheny hills, and there may be some connection to High Hat, a bogie of the same region memorialized in the tales of Seneca storyteller DuWayne Bowen.
High Hat is a giant, bestial humanoid fond of the taste of human children. We seldom hear of him far from his swampy haunts. His oddest feature is a stovepipe hat that reminds people of Uncle Sam, Abe Lincoln, or the archetypal image of a white undertaker (tall, craggy, and lank). Not only Native Americans see him.
White construction workers spotted him at dawn and twilight during construction of the Kinzua Dam, usually at the edge of bodies of water. Abe Lincoln, they nicknamed him because of the hat. We wonder how old he is.
This man-animal morph makes us think of other shapeshifting beings, including witches, shamans, and even the Christian Devil. Around the year 2000, reports started surfacing from the Tuscarora Reservation about some big, speedy beastie they called Tall Man. It played high-speed hide-and-seek with reservation kids on ATVs, which calls for some pretty slick running. It also takes a lot to spook the Tuscarora.
“There’s definitely something out there that can kill us,” says Michael Bastine. “If you decide to take a shot at one of those, you better be sure it’s a good one.”
THE LEGS
One of the oddest bogies in the New York forest was this critter called the Legs. There may be no more descriptive term in the Iroquois psychic lexicon.
These legs are described as a body-sized pair of human gams with just a bit of torso visible. They may have an eye or two on them toward the hip or one apiece on each upper thigh. Sometimes there is just a single big eye, presumably at the navel. This cyclopean single orb sometimes bulges in and out as it studies its much-amazed humans. Other witnesses notice no eyes at all, just . . . legs.
It—or they—show up only after dark, typically running by you in the woods. Normally that’s the end of it, but sometimes they drive you crazy running circles around you until you try to get away from them, collapse exhausted, and—more on that later.
In the early 1900s, Parker interviewed people who claimed to have seen the bogie in action. No one has ever been hurt by the Legs, but things don’t usually work out too well for people who see them. It’s often a forecaster of disaster.
While the Legs could probably clean up at the Special Supernatural Olympics, it’s questionable exactly what their purpose may be. To many who have spotted them aimlessly running, the only point would seem to be getting a workout.
In reservation circles, Michael Bastine has heard a bit about these critters, and some of it is for adults only. It seems that a female version of these legs stalks philandering men on their way home, scares the devil out of them, catches up to them, and lays a big wet one on them in a way that must be imagined. This kiss holds its own distinctive, lingering redolence. Ahem. The wife will have no doubt about where he has been—for the last time.
Maybe this was part of the original picture of the Legs, and turn-of-the-century commenters were too prudish to say it. Maybe the spooky stems have a variety of pursuits. Forgive us for uncertainty on this point. As Arthur Parker observed sagely of the bogie, “No one has ever made a complete examination of one.”
THE MISCHIEF MAKER
Like the shaman, the image of the Native American trickster has been immensely captivating to contemporary whites. Figures more or less like the trickster are found in literature and folklore all over the world, but the character seems nowhere as important as it is in Africa and North America.
The Iroquois have their own trickster-figure. His Seneca name is Shodisko, and he’s a lower-level deity. Sometimes called “the Brother of Death,” this Iroquois Loki loves playing practical jokes on people, not always caring if they do harm. He has a vast array of tricks and can turn himself into many different forms.
While Coyote, the animal-like trickster, stars in cycles of tales among southwestern Native Americans, this figure seems of far less importance to the Iroquois. Even near neighbors the Algonquin make a lot more out of their own tricksters.
LONGNOSE
Many of the bogies of the Iroquois woods come with some lesson to teach. This seems to be a major point of some of the tales, maybe none more so than with Longnose.
Longnose is a humanoid critter whose tapir-style snout and other head-borne appendages—nozzles, tubes, and tentacles—remind us of fantastic, ornamental Aztec drawings. In some tales, this Longnose is a simple monster, a stalking nocturnal predator. One of the most terrifying sounds in the northeastern woods would be his snuffling calls behind you on the trail or around you in the trees. Thankfully, there might be only one of him, so he can do only so much damage. He’s not often described as being above human size, but he’s at home in the dark woods, and he’s got some way of getting you if you’re out alone.
In other tales, though,
