Squatch Your Step on the Champlain Canal
In April of 1817, NY legislators passed the “Canal Bill” that breathed life into the Champlain and Erie Canals. Construction began on both, and laborers were tasked with constructing impressive engineering feats across a landscape fraught with known and unseen dangers. It was along the digging near Whitehall, as men built the Champlain cut in 1819 that the following incident occurred…
During the push to complete the section of Champlain or then
also referred to as the Northern Canal between Fort Edward and Whitehall,
laborers were working to dig the canal and build locks for the barges that
would bring goods along on the waterway. Often long days in the muggy heat,
these men would keep themselves in high spirits by song and with, well…
spirits! A few jiggers of whiskey would go a long way in keeping them motivated
to work a few more hours, a few more hours, and a few more hours. As the shadows
grew long on each day and they put their tools down, these men would return to
camp for a big meal and a hard night’s sleep. Many would be awakened, though at
first only just barely, by haunting sounds coming from beyond the wood line.
Few of them knew of the ferocious skirmishes that had happened near by during
the colonial days, but some would learn of the feats off Valcor Island when a
resident old timer stopped by late one sabbath.
As the work went on for a few weeks, the noises became
louder at night. Gruff grunts and then long deeeeep howls unlike any wolf heard
around the world. The vibrations would chill these men deep to their bones and
shake them from a sound sleep. Troubled, many of them shared stories of seeing
tiny lights moving about between the trees as they tried to force themselves
back to sleep. They looked like the shine from eyes of a beast, but high off
the ground. They would plead to the engineers that something needed to be done,
that sentinels or pickets should set up along the edge of the camp with fires
and guns to keep these haunting sounds at bay.
Most of the men in camp had come from Irish or Scots Irish
families, a few were new to American, but most were second or third generation
and all had grown up hearing of men transformed to wolfs in their lore. They
feared that the wolves of the wilderness would pull them limb from limb, but
how unsettled they increasingly became as those howls seemed to get closer and
closer at night, and that those shining eyes stayed high up amongst the
branches of trees at the edge of the woods. Not enough whiskey could calm their
evenings, and many threatened to walk away from the work even though they
needed the money it brought them.
One morning as the men gathered to begin their work, Silas,
a tall lengthy Yankee stood before them and asked for at least one more good
day of digging before they should all break camp and walk off the job. Silas
had tried to organize the men to plead to engineers and canal commissioners and
he was well liked, trusted, and respected amongst them. The crew began their work as the sun warmed
the air and it wasn’t much later than a commotion was heard along the line to
the north. Shouting and screams erupted
for a few moments, then silence. Startled, the other laborers carried their
picks, shovels, axes, and some even large rocks toward where the screams had
been heard. Determined, they sought to end the fear they’d all experienced for
once! As the crew gathered at the edge
of the ditch, Silas stood in muck that covered his boots. And there by his
foot, was a large bone sticking up from the fresh earth. As the crews eyes
moved, following the length of that bone, they saw others. Dozens of bones, and
then more. Some of the men gasped, others slowly moved in for a closer look.
These bones almost looked human, but they were so much longer than any man they
had come across. Silas slowly moved down into the ditch and uncovered more
earth, revealing a skull twice or maybe three times the size of his own head.
The wind picked up blowing the hats off several laborers,
the clouds darkened in an instant and the sun tucked behind the greyest of
them. Realizing that they were standing in an ancient burial ground, full of
bones in row after row, all from large human like figures. The laborers
trembled. From the wood line, grunts and howls grew on swirling air. For the first
time in the daytime, they heard the noises. Louder and louder, deeper and
deeper. Those vibrations cut into these men, standing in fresh soil, and they
could not move, they could not speak. No sounds escaped their mouths, and the
winds blew fierce. Tiny lights shown from the dark edge of the forest, then all
at once the noise stopped.
There amongst the labor crew, suddenly between them and
beside them, a dozen or more tall hairy figures with enormous bodies, long
limbs, and a wretched stench. The air went still, the clouds seemed to lower
and settle to the ground. The men could no longer see their own noses, and
terror froze them in place. Moments dragged on.
A humming sound rose up as if from the ground itself. A
crescendo lash as the hum cracked and…
After what seemed an eternity, the clouds lifted back to the
skies and there scattered in the mud, and the muck were the remains of all but
one of the laborers. They had had their skulls crushed as if they imploded into
themselves. The surviving man stood stunned, shocked by what he saw of his
fellow workers and that what surrounded him, churned within the soil and where
the bones had been was now a scene of carnage atop small yellow flowers budding
up from the ground. Between a few of them he could see impressions, like a man
would make as they walked through a field of grass. Footprints nearly twenty-four
inches long by nine inches wide. In his left hand a short ash tree stick, and
in his right a tuff of reddish-brown hair, and there on the air still lingered
a foul musky stench.
It would take nearly 30 years for the man to write his version of the events of that day, but the newspaper had reported in 1819 that several laborers along the Champlain Canal had simply left their work one day, never to be heard from again in the area. The survivor left his journal with a few sketch's to his son, who shared it with a few historians after his father passed. Superstition and fear of the ghastly howls that haunted those who held the journal meant it was never shared widely.
When the completed canal opened in 1823, tiny yellow flowers would bloom
along the berm-side bank for decades.
Read other ghastly stories about the Erie Canal here:
Winnies Haunted Doll
- https://friendsofschohariecrossing.blogspot.com/2019/10/winnies-haunted-doll-halloween-2019.html
Plod
Plod - https://friendsofschohariecrossing.blogspot.com/2019/10/plod-plod-halloween-2019.html
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