From VOICES: Good Spirits by Libby Tucker

Volume 32
Spring-Summer
2006

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The legend says that moonlight still casts the shadows of the murdered lovers, and people can hear their screams in the woods along Spook Rock Road.

Libby Tucker teaches folklore at Binghamton University. She is the author of Campus Legends: A Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005). Her next book, Haunted Halls, will investigate college ghost stories.

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For some of us, there is nothing so cheering as a good ghost story. Simultaneously thrilling and spine-chilling, ghost stories remind us of the dimension of enchantment that makes life exciting. When I was a third grader at summer camp, I enjoyed hearing the older kids tell hair-raising ghost stories. Now, as a teacher of folklore at Binghamton University, I enjoy hearing students tell me about their own supernatural experiences. My interest in ghost stories has led me to write two books: one finished, the other still growing.

In choosing ghost stories as a research subject, I was inspired by the work of Louis C. Jones, author of Things That Go Bump in the Night (1959). I met Jones just once, when he gave me a ride to a New York Folklore Society meeting in the late 1970s, but I will never forget his interest in all things supernatural. As we drove north from Cooperstown to Saranac Lake, he told me ghost stories from some of the counties through which we were passing. Ghostly hitchhikers, haunted houses, and Indian ghosts were a few of the subjects of the stories he told that day. These stories and others can be found now in the Jones Folklore Archive, maintained by the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown.

Some of the local legends in the Jones Folklore Archive tell of Indians who died at a place called Lover’s Leap or Spook Rock. Both placenames show the influence of what Jones called the “Hiawathaization of the Five Nations,” which sentimentalized and romanticized Indian characters. Typically, Lover’s Leap stories involve an Indian “princess” who jumps from a cliff or another high place, crazed with grief at the loss of her lover. Stories about places called Spook Rock—of which there are several in New York State—seem more complex and interesting. They usually tell of an Indian’s or a settler’s murder, with parental disapproval, greed, and human sacrifice as motivating factors.

I first heard a Spook Rock story from one of my students at Binghamton University in the spring of 1978. As part of her term project, Regina Hoefner collected a legend from a female friend about a young Dutch woman who habitually met her Indian lover at Spook Rock in Rockland County. Outraged by this mixed-race courtship, Dutch settlers climbed up to the rock by moonlight and murdered the young lovers. The legend says that moonlight still casts the shadows of the murdered lovers, and people can hear their screams in the woods along Spook Rock Road.

Like other legends about Europeans’ settlement of the land that would later be called New York State, the legend that Regina collected recalls tensions between settlers and Indians. Its main focus is white settlers’ outrage at one of their own children becoming close to an Indian. The settlers’ punishment for mixed-race courtship is death. Shadows of the murdered young lovers, along with echoing screams, show how cruel and unjust this retribution was.

In another legend about Rockland County’s Spook Rock, collected by Binghamton University student Jeff Glantz from his mother, Susan Glantz, in the fall of 2004, the Indians are the aggressors. According to this text, when a Dutch farmer cheated some Indians while trading with them, the Indians kidnapped his daughter. They put her on their sacrificial rock and killed her. The girl’s spirit immediately rose up and shocked the tribe.

I was surprised to find Indians practicing human sacrifice in this legend, as human sacrifice was not part of the belief system of Indians in the region now called Rockland County. How can we explain this falsehood? Since legends circulate freely, it is difficult to know how the focus on human sacrifice developed. One early scholar, Charles M. Skinner, however, actively promoted the idea that New York State Indians practiced human sacrifice. In “Niagara,” in Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896), Skinner explained that Indians used to sacrifice a maiden of their tribe to Niagara Falls each year. The final sacrifice, he said, took place in 1679, in the presence of the Christian explorer La Salle, who tried to put a stop to the sacrifice. Sitting in a white canoe decorated with fruit and flowers, the daughter of Chief Eagle Eye waited for the current to take her life, but her father jumped in at the last moment to save her. Both died and were transformed into “spirits of pure strength and goodness.”

Skinner’s rendition of the Niagara Falls legend juxtaposes Indians’ savagery with the more enlightened viewpoint of a white explorer and culminates in the “ghosting” of the repentant chief and his daughter. Spook Rock legends about human sacrifice have a similar orientation. We might think that such legends would no longer appeal to contemporary New Yorkers, but the web site Discovering Rockland: History and Legend, assembled by elementary school children and their teachers, includes a variant of the Spook Rock legend about Indians sacrificing a Dutch farmer’s daughter. If children are being encouraged to tell stories like this, then the old stereotypes about Indians are too close for comfort.

A different interpretation of Spook Rock’s meaning comes from Evan T. Pritchard, the author of Native New Yorkers (2002). Pritchard says that Spook Rock is the most significant Indian landmark in the New York City area: a great council rock that used to serve as a meeting place for Indians from all around the Eastern seaboard.

These days, small groups of young people gather late at night near Spook Rock. Teenagers say that if you put your car in neutral at the bottom of the hill on Spook Rock Road, it will go backwards up the hill. There are “gravity hills” like this one all over the United States. If you ever take a drive on Spook Rock Road, you may want to put your car in neutral and see what happens next.

Libby Tucker’s Good Spirits column was published in Voices Vol. 32, Spring Summer 2006. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.