North Country Cryptids

This is the Allegheny River with Babylon Hill to the right…

A few weeks ago, just as dark was setting in, I saw a red fox in these trees behind the house, staring back at me. Such a sleek, beautiful creature. I’ve been hoping to see it again, so I go out every evening and stare into the woods, but it hasn’t returned.

Red foxes are cool…but can we talk about cryptids?  I know it sounds ridiculous, and I truly am a rational person. But there’s something in the woods behind my house up north—something other than a fox.  And while I mostly don’t mind it, I do sometimes find it a little eerie at night.  The forest is why I bought this place.  Living on the edge of the woods is my joy and my drug.  But when night falls, I sense a presence that troubles me.  Don’t get me wrong; I’d rather deal with cryptids than Pittsburgh traffic. (Not that the drivers in the North Country are any better; they’re equally bad in different ways. Up here, people go the speed limit minus 15. You have to give yourself an extra 15 minutes to get anywhere because there WILL be someone in front of you driving 15 miles below the speed limit.)  But when I shone my flashlight into the trees behind the house last night—taking that damned, accursed dog out to pee—a large, single orange eye reflected back at me, then disappeared. It makes me think back on the night a few months ago when I heard loud, eerie noises coming from these same trees—trees that I adore by day.

Of course I don’t believe in cryptids.  Wendigos, dogmen, bigfeet.  The archeological record simply doesn’t account for their existence.  However, I picked up a horror novella at Barnes & Noble that was set in Northern Pennsylvania: Cold Snap, by Lindy Ryan.  It’s definitely an amateur piece of fiction—too much description and too little story.  It deals with questions of grief, and loss, and guilt.  It’s about a newly widowed woman who goes with her sulky teenage son to a cabin in Northern PA to deal with her grief over Christmas.  But a creature that seems to be a moose turns out to be a wendigo.  (There hasn’t been a regular moose population in PA since the early 1800s, though a few do occasionally wander in from more northerly climes.)  Wendigos are Native American spirits who haunt the living.  They look like deer or moose…until they don’t.  They’re specifically Native American.  I often wonder about the Erie Indians who got genocided by the Iroquois in the 1600s.  (White people perfected the heinous art of genocide, but it has been practiced by other races, too—contrary to popular belief.)  You never hear much about the Erie, but they were the original inhabitants of Northwest Pennsylvania. It would make sense for their unhappy ghosts to roam these darkling forests… I don’t believe in such things, but it’s fun to think about when night is falling in the trees…