Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Part One)

Witches in the Catskills and the infamous galloping Hessian of Tarry Town! Welcome to America, as we explore part one of Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, Charles M Skinner's collection of American folklore from 1896.

'Had he not halted horses at the plow so that neither blows nor commands could move them for two hours? Had he not set farmer Raught's pigs to walking on their hind legs and trying to talk? And was he not the chief of thirteen night-riders, whose faces no man had seen, nor wanted to see, and whom he sent about the country on errands of mischief every night when the moon was growing old...'

Tales From Antiquaria is a podcast dedicated to exploring the legacy of work published regarding folklore and local history during the golden age of antiquarian writing in the nineteenth century.

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Episode written, produced and presented by Eli Lewis-Lycett. All source material taken directly from the stated publication. Main theme music by Humanoid Media. Incidental music from Restum-Anoush. 

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Witches in the cat skills, the infamous galloping Hessian, and the prophets of New York. My name is Eli, and this is Tales from Antiquaria, Myths and Legends of our Ownland. Folks, welcome to America. Our first collection from Across the Pond tonight, and part one of two we're spending in the US, with Charles M. Skinner's 1896 Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. The idea of covering a folklore collection from the US is one I've had from really early on in the podcast. A couple of years ago, I was in New York and I came across St. Paul's Chapel, which was built in 1766 and looked wonderfully out of place, nestled as it is in the streets of Lower Manhattan. And I remember thinking at the time the idea for the podcast was already percolating. And I remember thinking, I wonder if during the eighteen hundreds in America there were folks with that same desire to preserve local lore as there was in such abundance in Britain. Well yes, there was, and this collection is chock full of such folklore. We'll be covering two main aspects of the collection on the podcast across the next two episodes. The section entitled The Hudson and Its Hills, and that on the Isle of Manhattans, which uses the original Dutch name for Manhattan Island. Again, the complete collection is a much larger work covering folklore from across the US, and we may well return to it someday. But for now, it's our preserve to get us stuck into these northeastern sections from a work published by the J.B. Lippincott Company from Philadelphia in 1896. Charles Montgomery Skinner was born in New York in 1852 and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By his early thirties he'd moved back to New York City and was working as a reporter for the Brooklyn Times. An avid writer with a genuine passion for folklore, in many ways his inspiration came from the same place as many British collectors. To preserve folk traditions and legends before the new industrial age swept them from cultural view. Myths and Legends of Our Land was the extremely popular centerpiece of his campaign. And he explains this well in the collection's preface. It is unthinkingly said and often that America is not old enough to have developed a legendary era. For such an era grows backward as a nation grows forward. No little of the charm of European travel is ascribed to the glamour that history and fable are flung around old churches, castled, and the favoured haunts of tourists. Yet the Rhine and Hudson are frequently compared to the prejudiced of the latter, not because its scenery lacks in loveliness or grandeur, but that its beauty has not been humanised by a love of chivalry or fairy. Yet the record of our country's progress is of deep import. And as time goes on, the figures seen against the morning twilight of our history will rise to more commanding stature, and the mists of legend will invest them with a softness or glory that shall make reverence for them spontaneous and deep. The bibliography of American legends is slight. And these tales have been gathered from sources the most diverse records, histories, newspapers, magazines, oral narrative, and in every case reconstructed. The pursuit of them has been so long that a claim may be set forth for some measure of completeness. But whatever the episodes of our four historic centuries may furnish to the poet, painter, dramatist, or legend building idealist of the future, it is certain that we are not devoid of myth and folklore. It's where myth and history combine that legend is most interesting and appeals to our fancy or our sympathy most strongly. And it is not too early for us to begin the collation of those quaint happenings and those spoken reports that gain in picturesqueness with each transmission. An attempt has been made in this instance to assemble only legends. For doubtful as some historians profess to find them, certain occurrences, like the story of Captain Smith and Pocahontas and the ride of General Putnam down Breakneck Stairs, are taught as history. While as to the folklore, this is too copious to be recounted in this work. It will be noted that traditions do not thrive in brick and brownstone, and that the stories once rife in the colonial cities have almost as effectively disappeared as the architectural landmarks of the last century. The field entered by the writer is not untrodden. Hawthorne and Irving have made paths across it, and it is hoped that others may deem its further explanation worthy of their efforts. To the Hudson and its hills we go. From the smoke of their forges in autumn came the haze of Indian summer. And when the moon was full, it was their custom to assemble on the edge of a precipice above the hollow and dance and caper until the night was nigh worn away. They brewed a liquor that had the effect of shortening the bodies and swallowing the heads of all who drank it. And when Hudson and his crew visited the mountains, the pygmies held a carroze in his honour and invited him to drink their liquor. The crew went away, shrunken and distorted by the magic distillation. And thus it was that Rit Van Winkle found them on the eve of his famous sleep. The Catskill Witch. When the Dutch give the name of Catsbergs to the mountains west of the Hudson, by reason of the wildcats and panthers that range there, they obliterated the beautiful Indian Onteora, Mountains of the Sky. In one tradition of the natives, these hills were bones of a monster that fed on human beings until the great spirit turned it into stone as it was floundering towards the ocean to bathe. The two lakes near its summit were its eyes. These peaks were the home of an Indian witch who adjusted the weather for the Hudson Valley with the certainty of a signal service bureau. It was she who let out the day and night in blessed alternation, holding back the one when the other was at large for fear of conflict. Old moons she cut into stars as soon as she had hung new ones in the sky, and she was often seen perched on round top and north mountain, spinning clouds and flinging them to the winds. Woe betide the valley residents if they showed a reverence. For then the clouds were black and heavy, and through them she poured floods of rain and launched the lightning, causing disastrous freshets in the streams and blasting the wigwams of the mockers. In a frolic of humour, she would take the form of a bear or deer and lead the Indian hunters, exposing them to tire and peril, and vanishing or assuming some terrible shape when they had overtaken her. Sometimes she would lead them to the cloves and would leap into the air with a mocking ho ho just as they stopped with a shudder at the brink of an abyss. Garden Rock was a spot where she was found often, and at his foot a great lake once spread. This was held in such awe that an Indian would never wittingly pursue his quarry there, but once a hunter lost his way and emerged from the forest at the edge of the pond. But fearing the spirit he turned so quickly to leave that he stumbled and the rock fell. As it broke a spring welled from it in such volume that an unhappy man was gulfed in its waters, dashed on the rocks two hundred and sixty feet below. The revenge of Shandaken On the rock platform where the Catskill Mountains house now stands, commanding one of the fairest views in the world, old Chief Shandaken set his wigwam, for it is a mistake to suppose that barbarians are indifferent to beauty. And there his daughter, Lottawana, was sought in marriage by his braves. She, however, kept faith to an early vow exchanged with the young chief of the Mohawks. A suitor who was particularly troublesome was Norse Reddin, a descendant so reclaimed from Egyptian kings, and who lived by himself on Cataskill Creek, appearing among white settlements but rarely. On one of his visits to Catskill, a tavern lounging Dutchman waged him a thousand gold crowns that he could not win on Lotowana, and stung by avarice as well as inflamed by passion, Norse Redding laid new siege to her heart. Still the girl refused to listen. And Shandakin counseled him to be content with the smiles of others, thereby so angering the Egyptian that he assailed the chief and was driven from the camp with blows. But on the day of Lotowana's wedding with the Mohawk he returned, and in a honeyed speech asked leave to give a jewel to the bride. The girl took the handsome box he gave her and drew the cover, when a spring flew forward, driving into her hand the poisoned tooth of a snake that had been affixed to it. The venom was strong, and within a few minutes Lotowana lay dead at her husband's feet. Though the Egyptian had disappeared into the forest directly on the acceptance of his treacherous gift, twenty braves set off in pursuit, and overtaking him in the Kalkberg, they dragged him back to the rock where father and husband were bewailing the maid's untimely fate. A pile of fagots was heaped within a few feet at the precipice edge, and tying their captive on them, they applied the torch, dancing about with cries of exultation as the shrieks of the wretch echoed from the cliffs. The dead girl was buried by a mourning tribe, while the ashes of Norse Reddin were left to be blown abroad. The devil's dance chamber. Most storied of our New World rivers is the Hudson. Historic scenes have been enacted on its shores, and Indian, Dutchman, Briton, and Americans have invested it with romance. It had its source, according to legend, in the spring of eternal youth. Giants and spirits dwelt in its woods and hills, and before the river had broken through the highlands, those mountains were a pent for spirits who had rebelled against the Manitu. After the waters have forced passage to the sea, these evil ones sought shelter in the glens and valleys that open to right and left along its course. But in time of tempest, when they hear Manitu riding down the ravine on wings of storm, dashing thunderbolts against the cliffs, it is the fear that he will recapture them and force them into the lightness cabins to expediate their revolt that sends them down huddling amongst the rocks and makes the hills resound with roars and howls. At the Devil's Dance Chamber, a slight plateau on the west bank, between Newburgh and Cromalbow, the Indians performed semi religious rites as a preface to their hunting and fishing trips or ventures on the war path. They built a fire and painted themselves. In a frenzy, they tumbled, leaped, danced, yelled, sang, grimaced, and gesticulated until the Manitou disclosed himself, either as a harmless animal or a beast of prey. If it came in the former shape, the augury was favourable. But if he showed himself as a bear or a panther, it was a warning of evil that they seldom dared to disregard. The crew of Hudson's ship, the Half Moon, having chanced on one of these orgies, were so impressed by the fantastic spectacle that they gave the name Doyles Dan Camper to the spot. Years afterwards, when Stoosfunt ascended the river, his douty retainers were horrified to discover hundreds of painty figures frisking there in the firelight. A few surmised that they were but a new generation of savages holding a parrow, but most of the sailors fancied that their assemblage was demonic, and that the figures were spirits of bad Indians repeating a scalp dance and revelling in the mysterious fire water that they had brought down from the river source in jars and skins. The spot was at least once profaned with blood, for a young Dutchman and his wife of Albany were captured here by an angry Indian, and although the young man succeeded in stabbing his captor to death, he was burned alive on the rock by friends of the Indian whose wrath he had provoked. The wife, after being kept in captivity for a time, was ransomed. Dunderberg. Dunderberg, Thunder Mountain. At the mouth of the Hudson is a gate of the highlands, a wooden eminence, populated by a crew of imps of stout circumference, whose leader is a bulbous goblin clad in a dress worn by Dutch colonists two centuries ago, and carrying a speaking trumpet, through which he balls his orders for the blowing of winds and the touchings off of lightnings. These orders are given in Low Dutch and put into execution by his imps, who troop into the air and tumble about in the mist, sometimes smitting the flag or topsail of a ship to ribbons, or laying the vessel over before the wind until she is in peril and going on beam ends. At one time, a sloop passing the Dunderberg had nearly founded, when the crew discovered the sugar loaf hat of the imp's leader at the masthead. No one dared to climb for it, and it was not until she had driven by that she righted. As she did so, the little hat spun into the air like a top, creating a vortex that drew up the storm clouds, and the sloop kept her way prosperously for the rest of the voyage. The captain then nailed a horseshoe to the mast. The hat rogue of Devil's Bridge in Switzerland must be a relative of this gainsome sprite, for his mischief is usually of a harmless sort. But to be on the safe side, the Dutchmen who piled along the river lowered their peaks in homage to the keeper of the mountain, and for years this was a common practice. Marioners who paid this courtesy to Dunderberg were never molested by his imps. A galloping Hessian. In the flowy gem cemetery of Tarrytown, a Hessian soldier was interred after substaining misfortune in the loss of his head in one of the revolutionary battles. For a long time after he was buried, it was the habit of this gentleman to crawl from his grave at unseemly hours and gallop about the country, sending shivers through the frames of many worthy people, who shrank under their blankets when they heard the rush of hoofs along the unlighted roads. In later times I lived in Tarrytown, one Ichabod Crane, who cherished sweet sentiments for Katrina Van Tassel, the boxom daughter of a farmer. Ichabod had been calling late one evening, and his way home being long, Katrina's father lent him a horse to make the journey. But even with this advantage the youth set out with misgivings, for he had to pass the graveyard. As it was near the hour when the Hesian was said to ride, he whistled feebly to keep his courage up, but when he came to the dreaded spot the whistle died in a gasp, for he soon heard the tread of a horse. On looking around, his hair bristled and his heart came up like a plug in his throat to hinder his breathing, for he saw a headless horseman coming over the ridge behind him, blackly defined against the starry sky. Setting spurs to his nag with the hope of being first to reach Sleepy Hollow Bridge, which the spectre never passed, the unhappy man made the best possible time in that direction, for his follower was surely overtaking him. Another minute and the bridge would have been reached, but to Ichabod's horror, the Hessian dashed alongside and rising in his stirrups, flung his head full at the fugitive's back. With a squeal of fright the schoolmaster rolled into a mass of weeds by the wayside. And for some minutes he remained there, knowing and remembering nothing. Next morning, Farmer Van Tassel's horse was found gazing in a field near Sleepy Hollow, and a man who lived some miles southward reported that he had seen Mr. Crane striding as rapidly along the road to New York as his lean legs could take him. There were yellow stains on the back of his coat, and the man who restored the horse found a smashed pumpkin in the broken bushes beside the road. Ichabod never returned to Tarrytown, and when Brom Bones, a stout young ploughman, married Katrina, people made bold to say that he knew more about the galloping Hessian than anyone else, though they believed that he had never had reason to be jealous of Ichabod Crane. It was noised about New Amsterdam 200 years ago that a round and bulky ship flying Dutch colours from her lofty quarter was careering up the harbour in the teeth of a north wind, through the swift waters of an abbey tide and making for the Hudson. A signal from the battery to heave to and account for herself being discredited, a cannon was trained upon her, and a ball went whistling through a cloudy and impunable mass. For timbers she had none. Some of the sailor folk talked of mirages that rose into the air of northern coasts and seas. But the wise ones put their fingers beside their noses and called to memory the flying Dutchman. That wanderer of the seas whose captain, having sworn that he would drown Cape Horn in spite of heaven and hell, has been beating to and fro along the bleak fuguan coast and elsewhere for centuries, being allowed to land but once in seven years, when he can break the curse if he finds a girl who will love him. On summer nights when falls that curious silence which is ominous of tempest, the storm ship is not only seen spinning across the mirror surface of the river, but the voices of the crew are heard as they chant at the braces and halyards in words devoid of meaning to the listeners. The Drop Star A little maid of three years was missing from her home in Genesee. She had gone to gather water lilies and did not return. Her mother, almost crazed with grief, searched for days, weeks, months before she could resign herself to the thought that her little one, Keuta, or the Drop Star, the Indians called her, had indeed been drowned. Years went by. One day a hunter came to the woman and said, I have seen old Second Doa, the last of his tribe, thank God, who bade me to say this to you that the ice is broken, and he knows of a hill of snow where a red berry grows that shall be yours if you will claim it. When the meaning of this message came upon the woman, she fainted, but on recovering her speech, she dispatched her nephew to the hut of the aged chief and passed that night in prayer. The young man set off at sunset, and by hard riding over dim trails with only stars for light, he came in the grey of dawn to an upright timber. It was coloured red and hung with scalps that had been cut from the heads of men at the Wyoming Massacre. The place was called Painted Post. Without drawing rain he sped along the hills that hem Lake Seneca, and then striking deeper into the wilds, he reached a smaller lake, where he almost fell from his saddle before a rude tent near the shore. A new grave had been dug close by, and he shuddered to think that perhaps he had come too late, but a wrinkled Indian stepped forth at that moment and waited his word. I come, cried the youth, to see the berry that springs from snow. You come in time, answered the old man. No, 'tis not in that grave. It is my own child that's buried there. She was as a sister to the one you seek, and she bade me restore the drop star to her mother, the squaw that we know as the new moon's light. Stepping into the wigwam, he emerged again clasping the wrist of a girl of eighteen, whose robe he tore asunder at the throat, showing the white breast and on it a red birthmark. Then leading her to the young man, he said, And now I must go to the setting sun. He slung a porch about him, loaded not with arms and food but stones, stepped into his canoe and paddled out upon the water, singing as he went a melancholy chant, his death song. On gaining the middle of the lake he swung his tomahawk and clove the bottom of the frail bottle. Boat, so that he filled in a moment and the chief sank from sight. The young man took his cousin to her overjoyed mother, helped to win her back in the ways of civilized life, and eventually married her. She took her Christian name again, but left to the lake on whose banks she had lived so long her Indian name of Dropstar. The Green Picture. In a cellar in Green Street, Schenectady, there appeared some years ago the silhouette of a human form painted on the floor in mould. It was swept and scrubbed away, but presently it was there again, and month by month, after each removal it returned, a mass of fluffy mould always in the shape of a recumbent man. When it was found that the house stood on the site of the old Dutch burial ground, the gossips fitted this and that together and concluded that the mould was planted by a spirit, whose mortal part was put to rest a century or more ago, and the spirit took this way of apprising people that they were trespassing on its grave. Others held out that foul play had been done, and that a corpse, hastily and shallowly buried, was yielded itself back to the damp cellar in a vegetable form before its resolution into simple elements. But a darker meaning was that it was the outline of a vampire that vainly strove to leave its grave, and could not because of a virtuous spell that had been worked about the place. A vampire is a dead man who walks about seeking for those whose blood he can suck, and only by supplying new life to its cold limbs can he keep the privilege of moving about the earth. He fights his way from his coffin, and those who met his grey and stifled shape with fishy eyes and blackened mouth lurking by open windows, biding his time to steal and drink up a human life fly from him in terror and disgust. In Northern Rhode Island, those who die of consumption are believed to be the victims of vampires who work by charm, draining the blood by slow drafts as they lie in their graves. To lay this monster he must be taken up and burned. At least his heart must be, and he must be disinterred in the daytime when he is asleep and unaware. If he died with blood in his heart, he has the power of this nightly resurrection. As late as 1892, the ceremony of heartburning was performed at Exeter, Rhode Island, to save the family of a dead woman that was threatened with the same disease that removed her, namely consumption. But the Schenectady vampire has yielded up all this substance and the green picture is no more. The Nuns of Carthage At Carthage, New York, where the Black River bends gracefully about a point, there was a stanch old house built in the colonial fashion and designed for the occupancy of some family of hospitality and wealth. But the family died out or moved away, and for some years it remained deserted. During the War of 1812, the village gossips were excited by the appearance of carpenters, painters and upholsterers, and it was evident that the place was to be restored to its manorial dignities. But their curiosity was deepened instead of satisfied, when after the house had been put in order and high walls built around it, the occupants presented themselves as four young women in the garb of nuns. Were they daughters of the family? Were they English sympathizers in disguise seeking asylum in the days of trouble? Had they registered a vow of celibacy until their lovers should return from war? Were they on a secret and diplomatic errand? No one ever knew, at least in Carthage. The nuns lived in great privacy, yet in a luxury before unequaled in that part of the country. They kept a gardener, and they received from New York wines and delicacies that others could not afford. And when they took the air still veiled, it was behind a splendid pair of bays. One afternoon, just after the close of the war, a couple of young American officers went to the convent and contrary to all precedent were admitted. They remained within all day, and no one saw them leave, but a sound of wheels passed through the street that evening. Next day there were no signs of life about the place, nor the following nor the next. The savage dog was quiet and the garden walks had gone unswept. Some neighbors climbed over the wall and reported that the place had been deserted. Why and by whom no one ever knew, but a cloud remained upon its title until a recent day, for it was thought that sometime the nuns might return. Francis Walcott's night riders among the Berkshire Hills, less than a century ago, that Francis Walcott, a dark, tall man with protruding teeth, whose sinister laugh used to give his neighbours a creep along their spines. He had no obvious trade, but the farmers feared him, so they had no trouble in making levies. Pork, flour, meal, cider, he could have what he chose for the asking. For had he not halted horses at the plough so that neither blows nor commands could move them for two hours? Had he not set Farmer Rought's pigs to walking on their hind legs while they were trying to talk? When he shouted Hup Hop Hup to the Farmer Williams children, had they not leaped into the mouldring of the parlour wainscut a yard above the floor and only an inch wide and walked around it, afterwards skipping like birds from chairback to chairback while the furniture stood as if nailed to the floor. And was he not the chief of thirteen night riders, whose faces no man had seen nor wanted to see, and whom he sent about the country on errands of mischief every night when the moon was growing old? These night riders met Woolcott in a grove of ashen chestnut trees, each furnished with a stolen bundle of oat straw. And these bundles Woolcott changed to black horses, when the night had grown dark enough not to let the way of the change be seen. These horses could not cross streams of water, and on the stroke of midnight they fell to pieces and were oat and sheaves once more. But during their time of action they rushed through woods bearing their riders safely, and tore like hurricanes across the fields, leaping bushes, fences, even trees without effort. Never could traces be found of them the next day. At last the devil came to claim his own. Woolcott, who was ninety years old, lay sick and helpless in his cabin. Clergymen refused to see him, but two or three of his neighbors stifled their fears and went to the wizard's house to soothe his dying moments. With the night came storm, and with its outbreak the old man's face took on such a strange and horrible look that the watchers fell back in alarm. There was a burst of purple flame at the window, a smell of sulphur, and Woolcott was dead. When the watchers went out, the roads were dry, and none of the village had heard wind, rain, or thunder. Rather, it was the coming of the fiend. I think it's probably one of my favourite episodes that I've recorded this. For me, one of the things that really struck me was the similarities that we have in this American collection and a lot of those that we have over in Britain from the 1800s. The locations are different, obviously, and some of the kind of origins of the legends, obviously, we've got Native American culture. But those stories that have made their way through beliefs for maybe a hundred years or so are really reminiscent of some of the kind of things you'd be hearing in the inns and around the countryside in, say, Lancashire or Cornwall. I really enjoyed the tale of the Galloping Hessian as well, somewhat less fantastical than the version that you get in the Sleepy Hollow movie. If the idea of headless horseman isn't too fantastical for you in the first place. I mean you go with you.