Volume 32
Spring-Summer
2006 |
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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. |
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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.
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.
This column appeared 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 today.
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