The Monster Missive: Sn. 21 Ep. 7 & Sn. 21 Ep. 8 (Patreon)

Our weekly newsletter, brought to you by MAU team members, Delainey Bowers and Conor Ryan, every Friday.

-Show Notes Spotlight-

A more in-depth look at some of the research covered in this week's Tuesday and Thursday episodes.

As avid listeners of the show know, sometimes our Tuesday episodes are based around calls from a certain state. We’ve waited so long to focus on The Baked Bean state because, well, let’s face it - there’s just not much paranormal going on there! If only it had a history of witch hunts, a triangular-shaped area known for its high strangeness, or an endless supply of old buildings filled with restless spirits. Since it definitely doesn’t have any of those things, we really had to try our best to still make it an entertaining listen!

For such a small state, Massachusetts is home to a surprising smorgasbord of cryptid creatures. Below are just a few of our favorites from this article by Preston Dominy,

The Black Flash (The Black Phantom, The Phantom Fiend, The Provincetown Phantom, or The Devil of the Dunes)

The entity was first spotted in October 1938 by a group of school children who “reported seeing something black lurking amongst the seaside dunes. They added that the humanoid was extremely tall, with pointed ears and glowing eyes.

Shortly afterward, a local woman named Mary Costa claimed to have seen the creature in front of the town hall. She described the eight-foot-tall Flash as having silver ears and glowing blue eyes and that it could jump impossibly high. 

More reports kept coming in, including from the police themselves. It could breathe blue flames. It was fond of maniacal laughter. It could make sounds like a buzzing insect. It seemed to appear in multiple locations at the same time. 

In December 1945, a group of four children saw the Flash approaching from the hills. They rushed inside and locked the door, with the Flash rattling the doorknob trying to get in. [One young boy] grabbed a pot of boiling water and poured it over the creature’s head. For once, the Black Flash refrained from uttering its trademark evil laugh and simply ran away with a gasp of surprise. It was never seen again.”

The Dover Demon

“On April 21, 1977, a car carrying three seventeen-year-olds, Andy Brodie, Mike Mazzocca, and driver Bill Bartlett, drove down Farm Street. Bill saw something he would never forget as the car’s headlights illuminated the stone wall running along the street. It was a hairless humanoid-type creature standing around four feet tall with peach-colored skin and glowing orange eyes suspended in a mouthless head shaped like a watermelon. The body and limbs were stick-thin, and the fingers were long and curled around the rocks. 

Two hours later, fifteen-year-old John Baxter was walking home from his girlfriend’s house when he noticed movement in the woods. Mistaking it for a friend of his, Baxter called out to the figure, who ran away down a nearby gully. He pursued it for a few minutes until he was startled to see, silhouetted against the moonlight, what he described as resembling a monkey with a ‘figure-eight’ shaped head and glowing eyes. He was especially unnerved to see how the creature’s fingers and toes curled around the rock it was standing on and the tree it was leaning against.”

The Gloucester Sea Serpent

“This snake-like monstrosity has reportedly haunted the waters around Cape Ann since August of 1817, when the crew of a fishing vessel reported seeing a 60-foot creature they described as black and leathery with a serpent’s head containing eyes ‘as large as pewter plates.’

A large cash reward was offered to anyone who could catch the serpent. The closest anyone came to claiming the reward was a pair of fishermen who fired muskets at the creature’s head, only to be disappointed when the animal slithered off, seemingly unaffected.

In July 1818, William Sargeant claimed that the serpent had passed so close to his boat that he could have touched it with his oar.

Sightings of the serpent have continued sporadically up to the present day, including a sighting in 1980 in which the serpent allegedly stared at them with ‘eyes of pure evil.’”

And that’s not even mentioning The Cobble Mountain Critter, the Hockomock Swamp Beasts, the Monster of Coca-Cola Ledge, the Silver Lake Frog Monster, the Tawny Mystery Cats, and pukwudgies! So next time you’re heading to The Puritan State, make sure you bring your monster hunting gear!

Actually, you might also want to bring your proton pack along with you as well. To absolutely nobody’s surprise - it turns out there are also quite a few ghosts that call The Bay State their home. There are some obvious haunted locales like the Bridgewater Triangle, the Lizzie Borden house, The Mount, and a host of spots in Salem including (but not limited to) The Jonathan Corwin House, The Hawthorn Hotel, Proctor’s Ledge, and the Joshua Ward House. And if you still have charged batteries left in your spirit boxes after visiting all of those places, here are just a few more to add to your itinerary thanks to this article by Mass Live. 

Taunton State Hospital (Taunton, MA)

“The psychiatric asylum was established in 1854 and originally went by the name Taunton Lunatic Asylum. The 19th-century asylum held many serial killers, non-criminals such as veterans who sustained brain injuries, and those with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Tourrette’s Syndrome were also admitted to the hospital. Electroshock therapy, solitary confinement and lobotomies were also common practices at the hospital.”

Visitors to Taunton report hearing the tortured screams and of former patients, finding occult symbols carved into the walls, and feeling dark, oppressive forces lingering in the basement.

The Hoosac Tunnel (Florida, MA)

“Over 190 men lost their lives while constructing the tunnel from 1851 to 1875 due to crude construction equipment such as highly unstable explosives and unsafe work conditions that had workers inhaling noxious, volatile, flammable gasses. The amount of blood, sweat and lives that went into the creation of the 575-acre tunnel that stretches from North Adams to Florida, earned the tunnel a disturbing nickname: ‘The Bloody Pit.’”

Visitors to the tunnel have reported witnessing the apparitions of ghostly miners, the roar of a disembodied train whistle, and disembodied groans of former construction victims. 

USS Salem (Quincy, MA)

“The USS Salem is a heavy cruiser built shortly after World War II and was commissioned to the Boston Navy Yard in 1949. The 700-foot heavy cruiser never witnessed battle. 

However, it was deployed to assist in rescue efforts for a series of 100 earthquakes that occurred in Greece in 1953.The number of civilians treated on USS Salem over the course of its 4-day stay in Greece is unknown, it’s estimated to be well over a thousand and of those thousand many suffered fatal injuries.”

The ship is known to be home to a number of apparitions including a burning man, a ghost girl who’s missing part of her face, a salty sea captain, a former museum tour guide, a pack of hellhounds that roams the halls at night, and creatures known as “The Scratchers” that claw at the legs of tourists. 

You certainly would not be the first person in Massachusetts to try and communicate with those on the other side. In fact, the state was a hotbed of Spiritualism back when it was all the rage. According to The West End Museum,

“By the early 1850s, Boston had become a center for Spiritualism. It was also where one of the first, and the longest-running, Spiritualist newspapers was first published in 1857: the Banner of Light. The Banner published essays on spiritual, philosophical, and scientific subjects; chronicled séances, lectures, and retreats; and ran advertisements for mediums and treatments for physical and psychic ailments. It also printed messages from the dead…”

If you were living at that time and just reading a newspaper didn’t quite wet your whistle, you could also go to a special summer camp specifically for communing with the dead! As The State Library of Massachusetts notes,

“While perhaps not as famous as the well-established community of Lily Dale in western New York, two Massachusetts villages have the distinction of starting as popular Spiritualist summer camps—Onset Bay Grove (now known as Onset Village) in Wareham and Lake Pleasant in Montague. Lake Pleasant, founded in 1870, claims to be the oldest continuously existing Spiritualist center in the United States…”

As of the posting of this Monster Missive, it looks like The National Spiritual Alliance in Lake Pleasant is indeed still in operation just in case you want to drop in for a game night or for some tea and crumpets!

Moving our focus further south, Vince told us about the time he saw three undulating green lights at night along the treeline in rural Missouri. This immediately brought to mind The Spooklight - from the Wikipedia entry,

“The Spooklight (also called the Hornet Spooklight, Hollis Light and Joplin Spook Light) is an atmospheric ghost light on the border between southwestern Missouri and northeastern Oklahoma. 

Numerous legends exist explaining the origin of the Spooklight including the ghosts of two young Native American lovers looking for each other, the ghost of a murdered Osage chief, the spirit of a Quapaw maiden who drowned herself, and the lantern of a ghost miner searching for his lost children.”

However, scientists and researchers have discovered that the glowing entity “is caused by the misidentification of distant car headlights.”

If you want to know a little more about the phenomenon, this segment from KOAM News Now should help fill in the blanks.

Interestingly, those aren’t Missouri’s only spook lights! On the Eastern side of the state are the Senath lights. As K8 News reports,

“According to the legend, an old house stood where now there is only cotton. A woman and her family lived there, and one night one of her loved ones went missing. The story differs here because some say it was her husband and some say it was her daughter. Either way, she had a lantern out looking for her, and that is supposed to be the light.

There is a catch, however. You must travel down County Rd. 602 to the area where Hangman's Tree used to be, turn your car around, facing the direction from which you came.”

In this video report, also from K8, they mention that, 

“…if someone drives down that county road and flashes their headlights three times, a couple of things may happen.

‘The light, when it shines on your car, will peel the paint off your car causing it to bubble up. Most of them say the car won’t start up until after the light leaves,’ said Karnes.”

Just a hop skip and a jump from Senath is Farrenburg, where Delainey was able to dig up this story in Art and Heritage of the Missouri Bootheel: A Resource Guide (1994),

“…we recorded several versions of the story of the Farrenburg lights, which tells of a headless man walking the railroad tracks while swinging a lantern and searching for his head. What is supernatural to some is merely swamp gas to others, but quite a few residents have seen or have heard of people who have seen lights and the story remains alive.”

I don’t know, it seems to me like people are assuming the man is looking for his head when maybe he is out for a nice little evening stroll. I mean, has anyone really asked him what he’s looking for? Either way, if you were really hoping to wander around the railroad tracks in rural Missouri sometime soon, you at least know that you might make a new friend now!

On Thursday, Rue regaled us with a tale about how a certain wind in a sleepy California town seems to induce nightmares shared by many of the residents. Our caller mentioned the Pomo people of northwestern California, so we focused our research there. According to this Wikipedia entry, in the worldview of some Pomo people, the Universe contained supernatural spirits who presided over different parts of the world – one entity dwelled in each of the four cardinal directions, one lived in the sky, and one resided below the earth.

In their oral tradition, Suupadax lived at the northern end of the world. The word is associated with a whirlwind or a violent wind, similar to the gales our caller experienced on the night of her shared dreams.

Relatedly, the Pomo also engaged with a ritual known as the “ghost dance.” The ghost dance had ties with a larger Native American movement during the 1870s that encouraged Indigenous groups to return to traditional beliefs and practices. The ghost dance was led by a shaman or medicine man/healer who was also referred to as a “Dreamer.” The belief was that Pomo men would perform the intricate ghost dance and in return a “big wind” would sweep through the land causing “dead warriors to come back, game to return, and all that was lost would be restored.” (All white people would die, too.) This info was gathered from The Pomo Indians of California and their neighbors (published in 1969).

Beyond that, the Santa Ana wind that blows through California is also sometimes referred to as “The Devil Winds” and carries its own rich folklore. You can read more about that in this great article by The LA Times. It’s a good thing we have a whole closetful of fun vintage windbreakers from the 80s at MAU HQ! We always make sure to wear one to bed whenever those mighty winds are blowing to make sure we wake up refreshed (and stylish)!

Tina’s call on Thursday had us reminiscing about all our favorite childhood slumber party memories. For instance, sneaking out of the house to meet with the local coven and signing a blood pact with the big man downstairs in order to become weirdly good at Kendama. But we don’t want to bore you with super common youthful memories like that!

Unfortunately though, on this call we did have to put on our mythbusters hat (which is, by far, our least favorite hat). Before we become complete bummers though, we found that the game that Tina played “light as a feather, stiff as a board” actually has a pretty fascinating history. As per the Wikipedia entry,

“The oldest known account of levitation play comes from the diary of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), a British naval administrator. Pepys’s account of levitation play comes from a conversation with a friend of his, Mr. Brisband, who claimed to have seen four little girls playing light as a feather, stiff as a board in Bordeaux, France. Pepys’s account of Mr. Brisband’s experience reads:

He saw four little girls, very young ones, all kneeling, each of them, upon one knee; and one begun the first line, whispering in the ear of the next, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and she to the first. Then the first begun the second line, and so round quite through, and putting each one finger only to a boy that lay flat upon his back on the ground, as if he was dead; at the end of the words, they did with their four fingers raise this boy high as they could reach, and he [Mr. Brisband] being there, and wondering at it, as also being afeared to see it, for they would have had him to have bore a part in saying the words, in the roome of one of the little girles that was so young that they could hardly make her learn to repeat the words, did, for feare there might be some sleight used in it by the boy, or that the boy might be light, call the cook of the house, a very lusty fellow, as Sir G. Carteret's cook, who is very big, and they did raise him in just the same manner.”

And in case you’re unfamiliar with how the game is played in modern times, the same Wikipedia entry explains that,

“One participant lies flat on the floor, facing upwards. The others space themselves around that person, each placing one or two fingertips underneath the participant's limbs. The person closest to the head commonly begins by saying something like "She's looking ill", which is repeated several times, and followed by, "she's looking worse", which is also repeated several times. The general direction of the call-and-repeat describes how the person is looking worse and worse, followed by saying "she is dying", and, finally, "she is dead".

Variations of the spoken part of the game occur. In a common, modern version, the person being lifted is told a story about their death and asked to imagine it happening to them. This is intended to unsettle the participants, and to convince them that something may have changed making it easier to lift the person than before.

All versions of the game end with the phrase "light as a feather, stiff as a board" chanted by those standing around the "dead" player as they attempt to lift their companion's body using only their fingertips.”

You know, giving people spiraling anxious thoughts about their own death, just good clean fun! There is in fact a scientific explanation as to why this trick is able to work and actually lift the participant so high into the hair to give the illusion of levitating. Again from Wikipedia,

“The key to the trick is timing: each of the lifters must apply the lifting force at the same moment. When this is done, the weight of the subject is divided equally between each lifter. Four people raising a 50–80 kg (110–176 lb) person into the air are each only required to lift 12–20 kilograms (26–44 lb).”

If you want a more visual explanation, this video covers the science behind it. So, although Tina may not have had a fully paranormal experience playing the game all those years ago, it is a good illustration of how sometimes something with a scientific explanation can seem magical at face value.

We also heard from Jane on Thursday about a classic flying saucer encounter she had in the 1970s while growing up in North Dakota. In the call, she does mention Minot Air Force Base, which happens to have a very rich history of UFO sightings. A massive flap happened between 1966 and 1968, so below we will cover one from each year. First, some backstory on the base from Wikipedia,

“Minot Air Force Base is a United States Air Force (USAF) installation in Ward County, North Dakota. Originally opened 69 years ago in 1957 as an Air Defense Command base, Minot AFB became a major Strategic Air Command base in the early 1960s, with both nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missiles and manned bombers and aerial refueling aircraft.”

So, aliens or not, the base itself was involved in some extremely secretive projects. As per this article in The Minot Daily News, 

On August 25, 1966, “Eight military members topside at the [Minot Air Force Base] launch control facility observed [a] mysterious flying object with bright flashing lights hovering near the perimeter fence. [The site manager] estimated it might have been 80-100 feet wide…and it was probably about 100 feet away from the facility.

…others who were at the launch control center the night of the incident or knew about the 1966 incident were told by the Air Force to never talk about it and that it never happened.”

Then, the very next year, these UFOs apparently returned. From Prairie Public,

“On March 5, 1967, Minot Air Force Base security teams were alerted when Air Defense Command radar detected an ‘…unidentified target descending over the…missile silos.’ When security police responded to the call, they saw a large metallic disk hovering over the silos. The disk was ringed with bright flashing lights. Before interceptors at the base were scrambled, the UFO left the silos moving first over the launch control facility, and then climbing straight up into the air before taking off at an ‘incredible speed.’”

Finally, this great little segment from Eyes on Cinema covers another incident that took place the following year on October 24th, 1968 including a nice introduction from two eyewitnesses. So were the UFOs extraterrestrial in origin? Foreign spy planes? Secret U.S. experimental aircraft? Regardless, if you are afraid of unexplainable objects in the sky, you might not want to go to Minot!

-Here There Be Headlines-

A round-up of bizarre, curious, head-scratching news stories that leave you saying "huh."

While writing this newsletter is fun, we really need to get back to digging an extensive secret network of tunnels branching off of the sewers under Brooklyn. Or, as we like to call it, “MAU HQ East.” Now that we see it written out we might need to come up with a catchier name for it, but you get the idea. Here are just a few strange stories that caught our eye this week to keep you busy until next week’s Monster Missive!

“Alexa, play AC/DC’s ‘T.N.T.’”

When daydreams turn into nightmares

What? Like you haven’t hung out in a sewer before?

Cemeter-bees?

Haunted Historical Headline