Cryptids of New England: Monsters of the Six States

Specter Moose

Northern Maine · Hunting reports and supernatural folklore

In the old Maine stories, the first surprise is not that the animal looks impossible. It looks like a moose—just far too large, far too pale and far too difficult to kill.

Hunters described a huge white or gray-white bull carrying an extraordinary rack of antlers. Shots that should have dropped it seemed to do nothing. In some versions, the animal charged. In others, it simply vanished back into the woods.

One of the best-known tales places hunter Howard Van Ness near Lobster Lake in 1892. According to later retellings, Van Ness fired on the pale bull and then scrambled for shelter when it came at him. The encounter survives through later accounts rather than a contemporary 1892 report, but by the early twentieth century the Specter Moose was already part of Maine’s strange-animal lore.

Researcher Michelle Souliere points to Curtis D. MacDougall’s 1940 book Hoaxes, which discussed recurring Specter Moose stories and earlier appearances dated to 1901, 1917 and 1932. By then, the pale giant had been wandering through Maine stories for decades.

An unusually light-colored moose, an exaggerated estimate of size or a wounded animal escaping into thick cover could all help start a tale like this. But folklore kept the part that mattered most: the hunter takes the shot, and the great white moose refuses to fall.

Cassie and Maine’s Coastal Sea Serpents

Casco Bay, Portland and Cape Elizabeth · Historical maritime reports

Off Cape Elizabeth in 1958, fisherman Ole Mikkelsen later recalled seeing something large and brown rise from the water. Its head came up. A foghorn sounded. The animal appeared to react.

By the time Mikkelsen’s story reached print, Maine already had a much older sea-serpent tradition. The name Cassie became attached to the creature of Casco Bay, where local newspaper material reaches back to the Portland Argus in July 1818. Captain Benjamin J. Willard later went looking for the reported animal but never brought one home.

Maine’s coast produced other serpent stories too. A famous encounter attributed to young Edward Preble in 1779 belongs to Penobscot Bay, not Casco Bay, and was recounted decades later by James Fenimore Cooper. It is part of Maine’s broader sea-serpent history, but not the same local story as Cassie.

The descriptions never settled into one perfect monster. Sometimes it was a serpent. Sometimes it was a large brown animal lifting its head above the water. What survived was something more elemental: a cold Maine bay, a small boat and a shape offshore that seemed much too large to belong there.

Wood Devils of Coös County

Northern New Hampshire · Woodland tradition with uncertain early documentation

You catch a shape between the trunks. It is too tall, too thin and too shaggy to make sense at first glance. Then it steps behind a tree.

That is the Wood Devil in its simplest form. Stories from northern New Hampshire describe lanky, hair-covered figures that seem almost built for the forest—narrow enough to disappear behind a trunk and elusive enough that the witness never gets the long look they want.

The creature is usually tied to the remote woods of Coös County, where later retellings place encounters in the mid-twentieth century. The frustrating part is that the deeper you chase those dates, the harder the original reports are to find. A 2024 essay hosted by New Hampshire State Parks preserves the tradition, but much of its trail runs through modern sources.

That uncertainty almost suits the Wood Devil. It is a creature defined by never quite being caught in the open: one strange silhouette, one tree in the way, and then nothing.

Champ, the Lake Champlain Monster

Lake Champlain · Vermont, New York and Quebec

For many people, Champ looks like one thing: a small head on a long neck rising above the dark water of Lake Champlain.

That image became famous after Sandra Mansi’s photograph, attributed to 1977, appeared to show a long-necked form above the lake. Whatever the object in the photograph was, the picture helped define Champ for generations of readers and visitors.

Long before the Mansi photograph, newspapers were already giving the lake monsters of their own. On July 24, 1819, the Plattsburgh Republican published an account attributed to Captain Crum, describing an enormous serpent in the water. The report is spectacular enough that it is difficult to know how seriously the newspaper expected readers to take every detail.

Another familiar piece of Champ lore reaches all the way back to Samuel de Champlain. The usual retelling says Champlain encountered the monster in 1609, but his own account describes a fish rather than the long-necked creature now associated with Champ.

The Mansi photograph has its own unanswered questions, including uncertainty over scale and exact location, and floating timber has been proposed as an explanation. None of that has stopped the legend from thriving.

Lake Champlain is vast, cold and shared by Vermont, New York and Quebec—exactly the kind of place where a distant wake or sudden shape can become a story before it reaches shore.

Our Champ case file follows the legend in detail. For New England, Vermont has one of North America’s most famous lake monsters swimming along its western edge.

Memphre of Lake Memphremagog

Newport, Vermont, and Quebec · Cross-border lake-monster tradition

Lake Memphremagog stretches north from Newport, Vermont, into Quebec—a long, narrow body of water with enough distance and dark surface to hide a story almost anywhere.

Its monster is Memphre. Witnesses and local storytellers have described long necks, dark bodies and fast-moving shapes breaking the surface before disappearing again.

One of the better-known modern accounts comes from Barbara Malloy in 1983, who reported seeing a long-necked animal moving quickly through the lake. Stories like hers helped turn Memphre into part of Newport’s local identity rather than just another nameless thing in the water.

The legend is often said to begin in 1816, though that date reaches us through a later source. Kingdom Games traces the early encounters to an 1854 journal attributed to Ralph Merry IV, reportedly preserved with the Stanstead Historical Society.

The historical trail may be uneven, but the image is easy to understand: a long lake, a dark shape gaining speed and just enough time to see a neck before it slips back under.

The problems of distance, scale, wakes and partial views are the same ones explored in our guide to lake-monster evidence and misidentifications.

The Dover Demon

Dover · Three encounters in April 1977

For a little over a day in April 1977, ordinary roads around Dover became the setting for one of New England’s strangest creature stories.

Four teenagers reported seeing an unusual figure across three encounters. Bill Bartlett said he saw it on or climbing a stone wall beside Farm Street: small-bodied, with an enormous head and bright orange eyeshine. John Baxter later reported a strange silhouette near a brook. Abby Brabham and Will Taintor described a crouched figure beside the road.

The details were not identical. Bartlett remembered orange eyeshine; Brabham described green eyes. The witnesses also moved through overlapping social circles, something that is easy to lose when the story is retold as four completely independent strangers seeing the same creature.

Still, drawings and investigative records survive, and the basic image proved almost impossible to shake: a small, long-limbed figure with an oversized head appearing suddenly beside familiar roads.

The name “Demon” came later to dominate the story. The witnesses themselves described something strange and physical—not a supernatural demon.

Read the full Dover Demon investigation for the original descriptions, drawings and the way the creature’s appearance changed through later retellings.

Pukwudgies

Especially southeastern Massachusetts · Woodland folklore and modern encounters

Something small moves between the trees.

Not quite an animal. Not quite human either.

Pukwudgies are small woodland figures associated especially with southeastern Massachusetts. Modern descriptions vary, but they are often portrayed as short humanoids with dark or gray skin, sometimes hairy, appearing beside trails, watching from the woods or disappearing the moment they are noticed.

In the stories, they are not always passive. Some simply watch. Others are said to follow travelers, beckon from a distance or lure people farther into the forest. Their size makes them easy to miss; their behavior is what makes them unsettling.

The name has older roots in Indigenous little-person traditions of the region, while the Pukwudgie familiar in modern Massachusetts folklore has taken on new features through generations of retelling.

Those stories still find their way into modern encounters. In 2023, folklorist Peter Muise published an account from a Norwell woman who said she was walking her dog before dawn when she saw a small, dark, hairy figure nearby. She watched it for a time before it disappeared from view.

Maybe an animal moved through bad light. Maybe an old name was later attached to an ordinary mystery. Either way, the Pukwudgie survives because the basic story is so simple: something moves in the woods, notices you, and is gone before you decide what you saw.

The Gloucester Sea Serpent

Gloucester Harbor and Cape Ann · Formal investigation, 1817

In August 1817, people around Gloucester Harbor began reporting something enormous moving through the water.

Witnesses described a long creature whose visible sections rose and fell like a string of floats or humps crossing the harbor. The sightings attracted enough attention that the Linnaean Society of New England did something extraordinary for a monster story: it appointed a committee and began collecting sworn testimony.

The surviving report preserves the investigators’ questions and the witnesses’ answers. They even asked that statements be recorded separately, an early attempt to keep one witness from simply repeating another’s story.

Then the investigation got stranger.

A small, misshapen snake was found and briefly treated as a possible juvenile form of the great sea serpent. That idea did not hold up, but it became one of the most memorable detours in the case.

What makes Gloucester different is not that somebody proved there was a monster in the harbor. It is that so much of the hunt survived. Two centuries later, we can still read what people said they saw and watch a scientific society struggle to make sense of it.

The historical San Francisco Sea Serpent reports leave a similar kind of mystery: sometimes the paper trail survives long after the animal—or whatever looked like one—is gone.

Glawackus

Glastonbury · Predator reports and public hunts, 1939

Something was making noise around Glastonbury in the winter of 1939, and people could not agree on what it was.

The reported animal seemed part dog, part cat and entirely difficult to pin down. Soon it had a name almost better than the creature itself: the Glawackus.

Historian Joe Durwin traces the opening newspaper episode to the Hartford Courant of January 15, 1939, reporting an unsuccessful hunt the previous day. Game warden Charles Allshouse considered a mountain lion. A bobcat was another possibility. Neither explanation stopped the story from growing.

The hunts became part mystery and part local entertainment. Later, cave explorer and writer Clay Perry helped stage a supposed encounter using a fake specimen made from a fur muffler.

That hoax did not create the first reports. It shows what happened after the Glawackus had already become irresistible: once the town had a monster, people wanted to keep it alive.

The Winsted Wildman

Colebrook and Winsted · Newspaper episode, 1895

Riley Smith was picking berries when his bulldog suddenly decided it wanted no part of whatever was in the bushes.

According to the newspaper story, a naked, hair-covered figure burst from the brush and disappeared. The dog’s fear became part of the tale, and so did Smith’s reputation: the paper went out of its way to tell readers he was considered reliable.

The Colebrook Historical Society reproduces the episode under an August 21, 1895, Winsted Herald date, followed by more coverage on August 28 and September 4. The reporting mixed genuine curiosity with humor, including a later joke about a camera being too frightened to work.

The most interesting part is how human the figure sounded. It was not described as a giant ape or some clearly nonhuman beast. It was hair-covered, naked and humanlike—the kind of description that leaves several uncomfortable possibilities open.

Later retellings sometimes push the Wildman toward modern Sasquatch lore, while another frequently repeated claim says journalist Louis Stone eventually admitted inventing the episode. That confession is much harder to pin down than the story itself.

So the 1895 mystery ends where it began: a berry patch, a terrified dog and something hairy crashing out of the bushes.

Glocester Ghoul: A Monster Beside the Buried Treasure

Glocester · Supernatural treasure lore and newspaper retelling

In the story, treasure seekers in Glocester encounter something that sounds less like an unknown animal and more like a nightmare posted on guard duty: scales, horns, wings and fiery breath.

The creature belongs to Rhode Island’s old buried-treasure lore, where supernatural guardians could stand between treasure hunters and whatever fortune they believed was hidden underground. The Glocester Ghoul is closer to a dragon guarding a hoard than a strange mammal glimpsed beside the road.

Folklorist Peter Muise, drawing on research by Stephen Olbrys Gencarella, traces the tale through an 1889 Providence Journal piece and a more embellished 1896 New York World version. That later account attached the notorious pirate Albert Hicks to the story, helping push the legend into even darker territory.

The Glocester Ghoul is folklore with a newspaper trail. There is no clean sequence of zoological sightings to investigate, and that is not really the point. The fun is in the image that survived: treasure in the dark, men foolish enough to go looking for it, and something monstrous waiting nearby.

And one useful warning for anyone following the geography: Glocester, Rhode Island, is not Gloucester, Massachusetts, home of the 1817 sea-serpent investigation.