The Red Tree

Traditions of spectral canines of the sort best known from the British Isles are, as it happens, not alien to the States. Indeed, I have assembled numerous examples from various parts of New England. Though hardly as well known as the Barghest of Yorkshire or dreadful Black Shuck of East Anglia, there is, for instance, central Co

Though often sighted, the dog that haunts the steep volcanic Hanging Hills south of Meriden is said to leave no tracks and to utter a silent howl. The most oft-recounted tale associated with this apparition concerns the fate of one W. H. C. Pynchon, a geologist from Manhattan who frequently made excursions to the area to study its igneous rock formations. The April-June 1898 issue of The Co

Closer to home, there is Rhode Island’s own “phantom dog of Fort Wetherill” in Jamestown. Less renowned, perhaps, than its cousin to the west, sightings of this dog are also reputed to portend doom. In Tiverton, there are reports of a “pitch-black dog” that has been seen to transform itself into the figure of a woman, who then proceeds to play a violin before vanishing. Similarly, though less musically inclined, is the shape-shifting black dog of Newport, which also transforms itself into a woman who is given to peering in through windows.

That last detail is reminiscent of the famous Bête du Gévaudan, an unidentified wolflike animal that terrorized the peasantry of France’s Margeride Mountains from 1764 until at least 1767, slaughtering as many as one hundred and thirteen people.La bête was also alleged to have possessed shape-shifting abilities, and some of the reports indicate that, like the Newport lycanthrope, it was fond of gazing in through windows. Similarly, there are reports of a huge animal, suspected of being a werewolf, that is said to have wrecked a coach and laid waste to a farm east of Gresford in northern Wales in 1791, and to have stood up on its hind legs “like a human being” to gaze in through the windows of the farmhouse. The creature was said to have had blue eyes.

Yeah, I know. Precisely the sort of shit I needed to be reading before bed. Anyway, Harvey eventually finds his way back to the red oak and the strange happenings here at the “old Wight place”:

We see an element of the lycanthropic associated with the property, begi

During my research, I have assembled more than a dozen additional tales from the Moosup Valley/Coventry region featuring wolflike creatures, and oftenwere wolflike creatures. Many of these encounters are reputed to have taken place on the farm, usually within sight of the red oak, though a fair number come from what is now the George B. Parker Woodland Wildlife Refuge in Coventry. I will begin this catalog of lupine oddities with those sightings from the Parker Woodland.

This 860-acre tract of land is located along the northern side of Maple Valley Road, about 250 yards east of the intersection of Route 102 (Victoria Highway), about ten miles from Providence. The tract has something of a reputation as a “ghost town,” as the woods are dotted with evidence of Colonial-era agriculture, including a multitude of fieldstone walls, foundations, wells, rock-wall pens that once held livestock, and the stone foundations of numerous buildings. In 1760, a dam was built on Turkey Meadow Creek, north of Maple Valley Road, and two abandoned stone quarries likely date from roughly the same period. Remains of a sawmill (ca 1760–1785) can be seen at the brook. The lion’s share of this land was part of the Shawomet Purchase (1642), and was then obtained by the Waterman family in 1672. After almost a century, the Watermans sold the land to Caleb Vaughn in 1760. Probably, the most celebrated structure here is the meager remnants of the Isaac Bowen House, a center chimney that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Much has been made of the low stone cairns that are situated between Turkey Meadow Brook and Biscuit Hill Road (to the north), and the usual bevy of wild assertions have been made as to their possible origin, everything from Phoenician to Celtic settlers (and stranger things, as we’ll soon see). In truth, they are likely only the remains of furnaces used in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries to produce large quantities of charcoal, and rock piles made by Colonial settlers and the Narragansett Indians before them. One marvels at the constant invocation of Celts, Vikings, and other European races as an explanation for the creation of such cairns, as though Native Americans lacked the know-how to simply stack stones.

However, the most colorful interpretation of the Parker Woodland cairns — and the most relevant here — is to be found in the writings of the Hungarian-born orientalist Arminius Vámbéry (who, by the way, was an acquaintance of Bram Stoker’s; Vámbéry makes a cameo appearance in Chapter 23 of Dracula, when Van Helsing refers to “my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University”). The “Coventry Center stones” are briefly mentioned in Vámbéry’sWerewolvery in Europe and Rituals of Corporeal Transformation(London, 1897), a digression from his study of supposed episodes of werewolvery in Ireland during the spring of 1874. In the book, the author tries to link a string of Gévaudan-like attacks in County Limerick to “a tradition among the people. of ‘raths’ or ‘hollow hills’ leading down into the chthonic realm of theGælic Daoine Sidhe.

He pauses in his examination of the “Black Beast of Limerick” to note that the “mysterious cairns in Rhode Island, while having no known link to fairy lore or even the mythology of the Red Indians, were, in the year 1843, the scene of an attack that appears to fit the pattern herein suggested.” Vámbéry proceeds to discuss the death of a mill worker, named as John Shattuck, who “. is said by newspaper accounts to have been slain by an enormous wolf. Some witnesses, however, dispute the identification of the killer, agreeing that it was a beast, but that the creature walked upright, yet was no bear.

I can’t say that I’ve ever been much for stories of wolf-men (or man-wolves), but, reading this section of the ms., I wasstruck by the prevalence of such stories in legends, superstition, religion, and folktales. Cynophobia on a cultural (or even species) level, something that almost seems hardwired into human consciousness. Wolves (along with jackals, foxes, wild dogs, etc.) are a sort of all-purpose boogeyman, from the Christian bible to the Qu’ran,from the Aesopicato the Brothers Grimm, the “Big Bad Wolf ” to Lon Chaney, Jr. Wolves, like snakes, have played the fall guys and villains in my thologies since almost forever.