Many American Indian mythologies have stories of little people. The Wampanoag of Massachusetts’ legend is of the Pukwudgie. Jealous of the affection the Wampanoag showed the giant Maushop (well, the giant did create Cape Cod for them), the Pukwudgie began to torment the Wampanoag Indians, playing tricks on them, stealing their children, and burning their villages. Pukudgies are described as humanlike, two to three feet tall with large noses, and ears. Their skin is grey.
The Pukwudgie can become invisible, use magic, and create fire at the snap of their fingers, but their most dangerous antics involve shooting poison arrows (with which legend says they used to kill Maushop and his five sons), and turning into a half-porcupine/half-troll. These diminutive human-like monsters have been known to lure humans to their deaths either by poison arrow, or pushing the human off a cliff. Afterward, the Pukwudgie can control the souls of their victims.
Thunderbird
Another American Indian legend, the Thunderbird is an enormous bird that’s name comes from the thunderous beating of its giant wings. Seen over the centuries across the continent, the thunderbird closely resembles a family of bird called the Teratorn that existed between the Miocene and Pleistocene periods. These monster birds (Teratorn is Greek for just that, “monster bird”) had wingspans of eleven to twenty feet and weighed anywhere from thirty-three to 176 pounds.
American Indian stories of these flying terrors across North America are eerily similar. Thunderbirds can create storms, and shoot lightning bolts. They have been known to swoop low and scoop up children and animals for food.
Sightings of Thunderbirds have occurred all over Massachusetts, including this one from Easton as reported in The Boston Globe from a story written by famed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman. According to the article, police Sergeant Thomas Dowdy drove home from his shift during the summer in 1971 when a bird about six feet tall with wings twelve feet long lifted from the side of the road and soared over his vehicle and disappeared into the night.
An account on about.com by an anonymous author who posted as “Bob,” involved what he thought was a hang glider in the sky around dusk one autumn in 1995 near Weston, Massachusetts. Bob drove over a hill, and saw the “glider” heading straight toward his vehicle. Bob slammed the brakes, and saw something he couldn’t believe. The flying object wasn’t a glider; it was a bird with a wingspan of around twenty feet.
According to a story at cryptozoologynews.com, in August of this year, two men, who were water treatment operators working near Blandford, Massachusetts, saw a huge bird they at first thought was a small airplane. They realized it was not an airplane when it began to flap its wings.
Dover Demon
For a few days in the spring of 1907, then again in 1927, 1937, 1947, 1957, 1967, and last sighting in 1977, the town of Dover, Massachusetts was terrorized by what was described as a demon.
At around 10:30 p.m. 21 April 1977 seventeen-year-old Billy Bartlett saw a four-foot-tall humanoid creature standing near a wall on Farm Street. The creature had a head like a watermelon, and glowing orange eyes, but no mouth or nose. Bartlett told The Boston Globe in 2006 the demon was real. “I have no idea what it was,” Bartlett told The Globe. ‘‘I definitely know I saw something.’’
Five more witnesses came out claiming to have seen the demon in 1977, including fifteen-year-old John Baxter who stood within fifteen feet of the monster on Miller Hill Road at 12:30 a.m. as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house. The next day, fifteen-year-old Abby Brabham saw the demon sitting on Springdale Avenue.
Carl Sheridan, a former police chief in Dover, told The Globe the story has always bothered him. “I knew the kids involved. They were good kids … The whole thing was unusual.”
Find out more about the Dover Demon by clicking here.
Gloucester Sea Serpent
The first report of the 100-foot-long serpent in the harbour of Gloucester occurred in 1638 when British traveler and author John Josselyn wrote the tale of a “sea serpent, or snake, that lay quoiled (sic) up like a cable upon the rock at Cape Ann; a boat passing by with English on board, and two Indians, they would have shot the serpent, but the Indians dissuaded them, saying that if he were not killed outright, they would all be in danger of their lives.”
In 1817, fishermen claimed to see a snake-like reptilian beast with the head of a horse and a foot-long horn from the center of its head. It poked its head above the surface of the harbour, and looked around before sinking back into the depths. That was by no means the last sighting. Two women claimed to see the creature on 10 August 1817. By 1818, seamen and clergymen said they saw the monster.
In the 1920s it was sighted again
It was seen again in Kingsport
Sightings have continued through out the decades. Like in 1922 when a group of teenagers claim to have seen the monster while on their way to school.
Although the number of encounters has decreased over the years, however, two accounts of note have occurred in the 1960s, and in 1997.
Beast of Truro
During autumn of 1981, pets and livestock were slaughtered by an unknown creature around Truro, Massachusetts, a small town on the northern tip of Cape Cod. The first victims were dozens of cats found torn apart in an area of the small town. Various deaths continued through 1981 and into 1982 when hogs were found injured, their “flanks ripped by deep claw marks,” according to a story in The New York Times. People suspected a pack of wild dogs until the sightings began. Locals reported seeing a “large furry creature that they did not recognize,” according to The Times.
The clearest sighting was from a married couple from Truro, William and Marsha Medeiros, who were taking a walk near Head of the Meadow Beach. “It had a very definite long ropelike tail like the letter J,” Marsha Medeiros told The Times. “We figured it was about as tall as up to our knees and weighed 60 or 80 pounds.” The animal had a catlike face and short ears. Marsha Medeiros was convinced they had seen a mountain lion.
Others reported seeing something that looked like a mountain lion, although the last reported mountain lion in Massachusetts was in 1858. Despite numerous sightings, footprints were never found. Eventually the sightings, and animal deaths faded. Many people at the time thought the Beast of Truro was a mountain lion. By the witness descriptions, I would not be surprised if that is what it was. It would still be of interest to cryptozoologists, though, because of the "surviving Eastern Panther" theory. If mountain lions are still in Massachusetts, and are thought to have gone extinct there in the 1800s, that would still be a great discovery.
The other edge they hold is that they chopped Cape Cod off from the mainland in 1914 or so. Anything that wasn't on Cape Cod already wasn't getting on, short of a perilous swim across the Canal or a highly-visible trot across one of the bridges.
Even before then, most of Massachusetts had been cleared for farmland. This eliminated the routes that something like a cougar would use to get some Cape Cod eatin; in.
Cape Cod was also cut off by a stretch of urban territory that lays between Eastern Massachusetts and the more like-nature-used-to-be wilderness of New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine and Canada. Nothing that couldn't slink unnoticed through Worcester or Cambridge was going to be visiting Cape Cod.
This (and their particular climate) saves them a lot of the bears, wolves, cougars, wolverines, giant hogs, Sasquatch and other megafauna that other parts of the country have to deal with. They have had it pretty easy over the years.
When former farmland in mainland Massachusetts was abandoned as farming ceased to be America's primary occupation, wilderness crept back into eastern Massachusetts. We were protected by the urban corridor and, later, by the Cape Cod Canal.
According to Cap Code Town Data (See Link Below)
There are about 5 reasons to move and live tin Truro....
1) you like beaches,
2) you inherited property there,
3) you're an artist,
4) you dislike living near other people, or
5) you're an artist who loves beaches but dislikes living near people and you inherited property there.
That's why it-was-probably so disturbing when a series of animals began to be slaughtered in Truro. At first, it was the local cat population. More than a dozen Meow Machines from the same part of Truro turned up un-living. Then, whatever was responsible started going for bigger prey. The time was about September, 1981.
A hog that weighed 175 pounds was mauled badly enough to warrant euthanasia. The flanks of the hog were grooved with claw marks, and it's throat was mauled. A few days later, another hog pen in Truro suffered an attack by a mystery hunter. In this incident, two hogs were clawed in their pen. People across Truro also reported hearing strange, eerie, cat-like screams.
Experts said that the attacks were the work of either a dog or a pack of dogs. Packs of dogs are not unusual in the countryside, and they roll deep enough to kill deer and livestock. Anything beyond that- even things that we know are here now, like coyote, wildcat, and bear- would have been close to science fiction in the minds of authorities back then.
Hogs don't talk (except in Charlotte's Web), so they make poor witnesses. However, you can tell a lot by the damage that was done to them. You can't tell enough to say anything definitively, however. The wounds to the throat could have been canine, feline, or even ursine. The slashes to the flanks appear to be only feline or ursine.
Big cats, wolves, and bears all will tear out the throat of prey if able to. Cats use their claws to latch on to the animal. Bears will attack by swatting with their powerful paws in an attempt to break the prey's back. Either attack would be consistent with the wounds seen on the hogs.
The problem is that the animals were still alive and not consumed. A bear or a mountain lion would destroy a hog, while smaller animals wouldn't be able to inflict the wounds that the animals suffered. You can imagine the slashed hogs were maybe attacked through fencing somehow, which you'd think a bear would knock down or a lion would leap over.
A cougar's killing bite is applied to the back of the neck, head, or throat and they inflict puncture marks with their claws, usually seen on the sides and underside of the prey, sometimes also shredding the prey as they hold on. Coyotes also typically bite the throat region, but do not inflict the claw marks.
One thing was for sure... it wasn't a pack of dogs. It was something that no one their hadn't seen before around their, at least in the more recent lifetimes of the current towns people.
The mystery got wilder soon after. A local couple, the Medeiros, saw what they described as a mountain lion on Truro's Head Of The Meadow Beach. Other sightings soon followed, including a policeman, an accountant, a noted sculptor, and a school principal. All spoke of a slender, big cat with a long, J-shaped tail. The couple described it as knee high, 60 pounds, and definitely not a fox.
The sightings led to some terror. A cougar is a very bad thing to be attacked by. Several or so Californians a year are mauled/killed/eaten by cougars, also known as Mountain Lions. One of those walking around Truro would be very bad for the locals. Pets, livestock, kids and even adults were at risk. Unless it met an armed man or jumped into the water with a shark, it displaced the Cape Codder as the apex predator on Cape Cod.
The sightings also led to some skepticism. Eastern Cougars, which once roamed all over America, were then (and are still now) the subject of debate. Many experts feel that North America has two sorts of cougars.
One school of thought is that the Eastern Cougar is a subspecies of regular Cougars, while others feel that they're all in the same gang. Many biologists (then and now) believe that the Eastern Cougar is extinct, while others feel that it is making a comeback.
Cougars show up in New England now and then (one was killed by an SUV in Connecticut in 2011), but some and maybe even most officials feel that these are either escaped captives or western cougars who wandered extensively. The cougar killed in Connecticut was actually found somehow to be from South Dakota.
Either way, a cougar in Truro would be amazing. The last confirmed cougar of any sort in Massachusetts was again in 1858, before the Civil War. A cougar in the Berkshires would be amazing. One in Truro would almost defy science.
The Beast of Truro, who was also known as the Pamet Puma (the Pamet River, named after the Paomet tribe, lent the Beast his second nickname), was national news for a while in 1982. An article by the New York Times went viral (pre-Internet), and our Beast was being spoken of in New York, Florida, Maine and probably a bunch of other newspapers that I didn't actually see in my research on this subject. Long before she was dishing in the Herald, a then-unknown Gayle Fee was sent to obscure little Truro to seek out the Pamet Puma for the Cape Cod Times. Fee listed a "Bengal tiger" as a possible culprit.
Then, by early 1982, he was seen no more. This led to another mystery. Unlike other monsters like an alligator or an anaconda (which would freeze like a popsicle up here as soon as winter fell), a cougar can survive a Massachusetts winter, especially the milder Cape Cod variety. A cougar would be the apex predator on Cape Cod the instant he arrived, meaning that- unless he went swimming off Chatham- nothing ate him. No one reported hitting one with a car, and no carcass was found. There are more than enough deer on Cape Cod to support a big cat.
With no physical evidence (eyewitness sightings are not considered to be as reliable as tracks and scat, meaning that humans actually know less than sh*t), no definitive analysis could be made. State officials, who always try to be conservative in such cases, say that it was a dog or a pack of dogs.
With 20/20 hindsight, we can read and laugh at officials saying, "Some people even claimed it was a fisher!" Fishers, then thought to be urban legend on Cape Cod, are now accepted as legitimate residents.... just like bears and bobcats were thought to be extinct here until people started getting video.
Maybe he realized he was the only Beast for 300 miles, and the instinct to get laid drove him back to the mainland. Maybe he went for a swim, and a shark ate him. Maybe he was shot by a hunter who then realized that he had just blasted an animal that was thought to be extinct and which probably had a jail term attached to it.
Or maybe, just maybe.... on certain nights when the moon passes too closely, someone on Cape Cod- maybe even someone you know- sprouts fur and claws, and roams the night in search of his next 150 pounds of meat. It sounds funny now, but it wasn't so funny in 1981.
The moors of Truro have been quiet for 30 years now. State officials view the whole thing as the work of a dog pack. The locals who even remember the tale do so with a sense of humor- the Pawmet Puma has been immortalized with a 5K road race, for instance. The Pawmet Puma even has a Twitter account, and seems to be a Dawson's Creek fan.
The local white trash staggering out of the nearby taverns pose a greater threat to Trurorians than cougars do, and probably always have. The last megafauna attack on a human there was from the current villain, a Great White Shark. With a monster like that just offshore, hunting humans... only a fool would worry about a most-likely-mythical Beast of Truro.
Still... anyone who was sentinent and living in Truro in 1982 most likely will never feel 100% at ease on the moors of Pamet, on a dark night when the wind is up and the Hunter's Moon shines.
