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The Legends and Myths of Sweet Hollow and Mount Misery … a Long Island mystery

Journal, Long Island, Mt. Misery and Sweet Hollow Road, Terrestrial Anomalies, Extra-terrestrial visitors, hairy monsters, abandoned asylums and assorted weird tales, The Legends & Myths of Mount Misery & Sweet Hollow Road

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This website started from wandering the hills known as Mount Misery and of course, Sweet Hollow below. Over time my thoughts changed on the subject, and I went from believer to hard core skeptic. Something happened there, absolutely, but I’ll be damned if anyone can figure out what.

Having been gone from there for nigh on a decade, my thoughts have changed again. From a distance, echoes from the past ring out and you can catch a glimpse of what served as the seed for today’s urban legends.

I get into this shit, I can’t help it. Some of these pieces are boring, even by my standards. But if you’re like I was, and hooked on the mystery, these are the facts you want to know.

The rest is a story about someone walking in the woods and wanting to believe, even if we never really pin down what.

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The first time I hiked up Mount Misery, I had ducked into into the woods across the road from the parking area off Sweet Hollow Road. The infamous sense of gloom which is said to haunt the area settled over me almost immediately, and I was hooked on the place.

I hadn’t heard the legends yet, so I was visiting the woods without preconceptions. I had assumed this was a pretty short trail, but as sunset approached, the shadows in the forest grew darker and longer. “Just how long does this trail go on?” I wondered aloud. “I’m in the middle of Long Island for Christ’s sake. How far can you walk without running into a convenience store?”

I came upon a building just off the trail, the two windows darkened like blackened eyes. The grass leading to it was mowed fresh, and yet there were no houses in sight. I approached it – not more than a garage really, but for what? I had a strong feeling I should go back. After a few more hesitating steps, and a look towards the sun which had now set below the tops of the trees, I did.

When I got home I looked up the West Hills, Sweet Hollow Road and then Mount Misery. And like the trail I’d been on, I found the folklore of that area goes on and on, into some strange, dark places.

Out building on Mount Misery. In another place, it wouldn’t have provoked a single chill, but on this part of Long Island, it becomes a piece of local mythology.

Sweet Hollow Road and Mt. Misery Rd: A tale of two woods

It could be argued, it should be argued that the mythology of this area is a tale of two roads. Sweet Hollow is nestled into the West Hills, and has its own collection of legends, separate from Mt. Misery Road, just up the hill. Sweet Hollow was the original name for Melville, but most of these tales are centered along Sweet Hollow Road, which leaves Melville and cuts through the hollow as it has for centuries.

Mt. Misery Road runs through the West Hills as well, just to the west. But its southern part actually lies in Mannetto Hills. There is no Mount Misery. It was originally just a section of a settler’s road that was particularly rough going, due to the terrain. Utterly miserable. I’m of the opinion that this section lives on as a trail, at the terminus of Gwynne Road, forested in West Hills County Park. It eventually hooks up with Mt. Misery Road at the infamous 666 log.

I wonder if it still has that painted on its side? There is a time and place for graffiti and I always found that one appropriate.

By 1930, when paved roads finally made it up here, the windy bit that ends at Gwynne Road was left to rot in the woods, and Mt. Misery Road ran straight north and south for a few years, till the Northern Parkway was built and severed its length.

Jayne’s Hill, also known as High Hill, particular during the early settlements was near the northern most edge of West Hills, further down and to the east of Sweet Hollow Road. Some claim this whole area, including Jayne’s Hill is Mount Misery. But that’s a modern fiction.

The top of Jayne’s Hill, or High Hill, the highest point on Long Island. At the top is a large boulder with a memorial to the poet Walt Whitman, who came up here on occasion and was born just down the hill.

West Hills was the white man’s name. Mannetto Hills is a rough translation of the native American name. There’s long been a rumor that the area of Mannetto Hills including Mount Misery was considered taboo to the original peoples, and perhaps the home of the Thunderbird.. But it’s just that, a rumor. Very little is known about their history here.

The trails on Mount Misery, encompassed by West Hills Preserve and the western part of West Hills County Park are transportation trails to a large extent. People have walked these trails since the nineteenth century at least, when they were considered roads. A lot of history has gone down here. It soaks through till one can feel it.

What we do know about the native American era points to their most revered hill, Manitou, being located within the modern day town of Plainview, and their sacred swamp covered by a football field.

It’s also believed that Mount Misery was cursed, that it was impossible to farm and therefore worthless, when the settlers traded the native Americans for it. But again, I can find no evidence of this in the historic record. Just the internet record. And a look at early maps of the area showed it was indeed farmed. Do you think Walt Whitman’s ancestors lived on Mount Misery and commuted into the city? They were farmers.

A lot of history went down in West Hills, but except for echoes in the folklore, you never hear about that. You hear the tales which used to grace the pages of fringe magazines of the sixties. Today we’d talk about how their readers likely wore aluminum foil hats.

And yet West Hills Park is swarming with people of all ages, looking for the foundations of the secret military hospital, which is believed to have stood here in the twentieth century, practicing mind control experiments on its patients. They’re looking for UFOs, Men in Black, devil worshippers, and of course, Mary.

View to the east from West Hills, towards Dix Hills

How the Mothman came to roost on Mount Misery

One of the reasons Mount Misery has grown in folklore stature, is it played a part in the book, The Mothman Prophecies, which became a major motion picture. Its author, John Keel became known as an expert overnight in many of the same things Mount Misery is known for. Despite the fact that up till then, and indeed in his later career, he freely admitted he was a storyteller, a writer trying to make a living. He wrote great stories we wanted to believe. And so people do.

Part of The Mothman Prophecies takes place on Mount Misery. Though from Keel’s geography, one would be hard pressed to believe he ever set foot there. Or take the advanced being that writes to Keel, this person who can peer into other people’s thoughts, who seemingly can’t spell. His letters are full of typos – not like those generated by someone who is attempting to convince people he’s human – but those made by people who just have bad spelling and grammar.

Perhaps the story sprung from a handful of cranks looking for someone to listen, and Keel just correlated their stories into something coherent. Or perhaps the area still echoed with legends now lost, which predated the age of the internet. The tin foil hats picked up the transmission, but the details were lost in the static.

West Hills County Park, Melville, New York

There are plenty of facts about the area, but they never make it into Keel’s book or research notes, and you seldom find them online. What you do find are secret conspiracies, which in the internet age have spread to include the people who live there.

You can find out a lot at the library at Melville. They’ll happily talk to you about the history of West Hills. When you ask about military bases, they can’t tell you a thing. People online say that’s because the locals don’t talk about it. People who live there, and who study the place say it’s because it never existed.

They’re both wrong. It did. Part of it is still there, or rather was last time I wandered Long Island. You just have to know where to look, and what it was called. And take everything you read on the internet with a grain of salt. This isn’t history. It’s folklore, storytelling and sensationalist journalism that gave birth to most of these legends.

West Hills School was partially burned in the past, but rebuilt. Unlike in the legend, the students weren’t locked in prior to the fire being started.

The burning schoolhouse and asylums of Sweet Hollow

Until the wealthy moved in, Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow were rural communities, and those were ripe with folklore. There was a school which burned in Sweet Hollow, just as the legends say it did. You can go there today even. That story still echoes down, till it became the story of the headmaster who locked the doors from the outside and set the building and his pupils ablaze.

Then there are the asylums of Mount Misery. As the story goes, the first was built very early on, in the 18^th or nineteenth century. It burned, killing the staff and patients alike. A few years later it was rebuilt, and suffered the same fate. Which explains the screams sometimes heard in the woods at night, along with the pungent stench of burned flesh.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were ripe with epidemics. Water from the spring was sent to Montauk for Teddy Roosevelt’s soldiers, who were being treated for Yellow Fever, brought back in 1898 from the Spanish American War.

West Hills County Park, Melville, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York

If there was a hospital around here during those years, it likely would have been called a sanitarium. Today we see that word and think an asylum, for the insane. But at that time, it essentially meant hospital. Could there have been a sanitarium here and over the years people have mistakenly taken to calling it an asylum? Absolutely.

In fact, there was a sanitarium down the road in Amityville, which did burn. Just not as tragically as the tale.

The important thing is when you walk these hills, you can believe the stories are true. For if you can muster a chill on a warm day in a dark woods, you’re recapturing how it likely felt to be an early settler, taking a short cut through these haunted woods.

The West Hill’s Lady in White … Mary of Sweet Hollow Road

One of the most famous ghostly archetypes is the lady in white. You find her all over the world, in all ages. In the West Hills, that role is filled by Mary. Mary fills many roles in the folklore of area, from the modern day back to the stories of asylums on Mount Misery.

While there was likely no sanitarium on Mount Misery, or Sweet Hollow Road, there very well have been a quarantine house, maybe just a family which were locked in because they had whatever disease was terrorizing the countryside. And it might have burned, either by accident or by a neighbor, who didn’t want the disease to spread.

This is a horrific thought to us today, as we wait behind locked door for a cure to the latest pandemic. In that era, there was no cure forthcoming for the death that spread throughout a community. With fear spreading faster than the disease, people sometimes found more macabre solutions.

And just maybe, that family which was locked away from society had a Mary in it. Perhaps that Mary was loved by the community, perhaps she was feared. But for some reason, that name has been attached to a lot of folklore on Sweet Hollow Road. It shouldn’t be surprising, as there is folklore about Mary in several places on Long Island, and throughout the world.

Going all the way back to the Bible as a matter fact, Mary pops up quite a lot, and frequently at wells. And the haunted spring in Sweet Hollow is just down the road from the burned schoolhouse.

The Peace and Plenty Inn, where Teddy Roosevelt bellied up to the bar, and before him Walt Whitman. It has a history going back to the 17th century, and its own ghost as well.

The legends of Sweet Hollow Road from the modern era

Sweet Hollow Road is known for beauty and urban legends. Here, Mary is a 20^th century figure, tragically killed under mysterious circumstances. Here she’s the Long Island version of a folk tale nearly 400 years old, the mysterious hitchhiker who turns out to be not of this world. The tragic victim of an auto accident still waiting for her lover to return to pick her up. The mysterious grave with only the name Mary carved on it, where if you call her name she appears.

The overpass of Northern State Parkway has a couple of legends attached to it, but both are common tales found not only all across the country, but the world as well.

Just up the road is Northern State Parkway overpass, where legend has it that a busload of children skidded off the icy road, killing several, if not all of them. Another legend has it that six teenagers hung themselves from the overpass in a suicide pact. If you stop below the overpass, and put the car in neutral, you’ll be pushed to safety by invisible hands. If it sounds familiar it probably is. It’s a story told all over the country, wherever the illusion works. It’s the local color which adds flavor.

And then there’s the police. One driver reported that after being pulled over, as the cop walked back to his car to check his driver’s license, the boy looked in his rear view mirror and saw that the back of the cop’s head was missing.

Then there’s the black dog with red eyes. If you see him at night, expect disaster to come down on you soon.

Or perhaps you take the wrong trail and end up high on Mount Misery, and come face to face with the Mothman.

Moss covered trails leading into the West Hills

It’s through the mothman, and John Keel’s book that I found my own answer to the mysteries of Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow. You see, stranger things happen all the time in this world. Some are stranger, far stranger than others. It doesn’t mean they’re impossible. But unless you’re there, and see it with your own eyes, you never know the truth.

In the end it comes down to whether you choose to believe. In some places it’s easier to believe than others. On Mount Misery, or down below in Sweet Hollow, it’s easier to believe, than not.

What to wear on weird Long Island

SHOP

The Legends and Myths of Sweet Hollow and Mount Misery: Part One, On Mary Hatchet and Sweet Hollow Road

Behind Urban Legends, Haunted Hikes, Haunted Towns and Cities, Mary Hatchet, Mt. Misery and Sweet Hollow Road, The Legends & Myths of Mount Misery & Sweet Hollow Road

Miss Bronwen barreled down Old Country Road, eastward towards Melville. I had just told her that originally Melville itself was called Sweet Hollow.

We approached the southern most section of Mt. Misery Rd. She asked if I wanted to go visit the Day Camp at the end, where as legend had it, a serial killer had taken out that day’s campers. I passed on that though there is an interesting old graveyard nearby.

We also passed the Presbyterian Church of Sweet Hollow, where many of the town’s early settlers are buried.

John Woolsey was known as the Sweet Hollow Giant. A big man, he could hoist a full barrel over his shoulder and walk down Sweet Hollow Road to town.

The American Revolution hit this area pretty hard. Though much of Long Island was British sympathizers, the folks in the West Hills were often rebels.

Wilmot Oakley was one such fellow, and found himself under attack by British soldiers. “Mr. Oakley fired his gun, and one of the intruders his pistol, which triflingly grazed the ear of Mr. Oakley. He handed his wife the gun, and took from her the loaded one ; fired it off, and his man fell. While she reloaded, he warded the other two of the rascals off with the gun in his hand. He then took the gun again loaded by Mrs. Oakley, fired, and the second man reeled and fell. The other man, seeing one of his comrades dead and the other fallen, ran out of the house, Mr. Oakley (with his gun reloaded) after him, fired at him as he was running on the road. The next morning traces of blood were seen in the road and on the fence, so that there is little doubt that he was wounded, though he escaped.”

“I am glad to say every effort was made to save the life of the robber, who lay in a dreadful condition on the floor of the parlor, but it proved unavailing. He followed his companion in wickedness before the light of day.”

I told Miss Bronwen “I haven’t found where Wilmot lived yet. What makes this place so special is there is actually more history here than folklore. I mean Walt Whitman was born just over the hill. And there are quite a few houses still standing from his family and others of the time.”

Walt Whitman Birthplace — Walt Whitman was born here in West Hills in 1819. The association between the poet and the place helps to create a sense of history which makes folklore in the area a bit more ripe.

Today we’re looking for the 19^th century, and a lady named Mary. I’ve spoken to people who were teens in the sixties, and some of her stories were around then, and undoubtedly, some are much, much older. I don’t find any documented references except those from the internet. And they might just as easily have been spread by me as a reputable researcher.”

I had her whip into the parking area for West Hills Country Preserve, where a trail led up Mount Misery, eventually hooking up with Mt. Misery Road. Those woods are said to be haunted by a variety of spooks. The trail ends at the barrier with 666 painted in red on it.

We crossed the street and went through the gates of Melville Cemetery. At one time there was a sign here which read “Life, How Short.”

Melville Cemetery on Sweet Hollow Road is thought by Many to be the last resting place of the infamous Mary, the central figure in many Long Island legends.

“What I hate is that all the focus on the legends of Sweet Hollow Road online, lead to a rather belligerent sort of crowd visiting the area. A few years back there were almost a hundred gravestones knocked over. There’s one person who works here, and there’s no way they can fix damage like that.”

“Why do people do such stupid shit?” she asked.

“Beer is a likely culprit,” I responded. “There has been at least one fatality around the graveyard, an unlucky kid hanging out the car window whose head struck a road sign as they were driving past. They’re always catching people up here at night, looking for Mary’s grave. ”

“There are actually a few Mary’s graves here, if you get to poking around. The story is well-known. Go to the grave and stand before the tombstone, shine your flashlight on it, say Mary three times and Mary will appear to you. Or Mary will strike you dead on the spot. Or you will die before the sun comes up. There are many variations, and not only in this graveyard, but in graveyards all over Long Island, and in fact, all over the world.”

She told me, “as a child, my sister taught me that if you stared in a mirror without blinking and repeated out loud “I don’t believe in Bloody Mary,” over and over again, you would eventually see her, which of course is an optical illusion much more effective if you are female. Another variation of the same story.”

Whitman-Rome House, is another colonial era house in West Hills with family ties to Walt Whitman. Behind it lies the WHitman family cemetery, which the poet visited on July 29, 1881. He wrote that the “crumbled and broken stones” put him in a somber mood. It is believed that many unmarked graves contain the remains of slaves held by Whitman’s family and other notable West Hills families.

I pointed to one stone with nothing inscribed on it but the word Mary. “People point to one or another stone like this, and believe this must be the Mary’s grave of legend. Sadly, if you look nearby you’ll usually see a family tombstone, right there, with the children listed, and the dates Mary died, along with her family. It was once a very common practice. No real mystery there about a tombstone with only a single name.”

“Mary can sometimes be seen standing next to her tombstone. Now I believe in ghosts, that’s possible. Or Mary is buried across the road from the graveyard, a suicide victim, not eligible to be buried in hallowed ground, and can sometimes be seen standing just inside the forest, watching. I’ve felt that, and even walked into the woods when I did, and was sure I felt someone there with me.”

We walked up the road towards the Northern State Parkway overpass. “I’ve heard this one,” she said. “A busload of children skidded off the overpass on an icy night, killing everyone inside. If you park below the overpass, and leave your car in park, invisible hands push you to safety.”

“And it works!” I said. “But if you look close you can see it’s really just a question of the car rolling down an incline, which can’t be seen till you get out and look closely. It’s a story you find all over the world. It certainly didn’t start here as it even worked with wagons before there were cars in some places.”

We stood in the shadow of the overpass, the trees on both sides forming a canopy and it was quite beautiful. I pointed upwards, “and there was the group of kids who hung themselves from here in a suicide pact, and at night you can sometimes see them hanging there.”

She looked up, blanched and head back towards the car.

“Of course I’ve found no evidence, no reports of anything like that happening here. And I’m sure since it would have been rather recent, historically speaking, there would at least be a collective memory of it. “

“And that’s the fun bit about Sweet Hollow Road. There is a lot of history here, and a lot of folklore. But being an isolated place, and a lovely place, it gets a lot of traffic. And since a lot of traffic often means beer and weed, urban legends get told. There stories are almost archetypes, go to tales when you want to scare someone. And that’s a practice which goes back to the furthest recesses of time.”

We got back in the car and drove down the road, only a minute or so to the gates of West Hills County Park and got out.

“We can walk down the road a bit,” I offered, “or we can hike up to the top of Jayne’s Hill if you like?”

“What are the odds you can get us there without getting us lost?” she asked.

I thought for a moment … “Slim.”

Jayne's Hill, AKA High Hill on Long Island — The top of Jayne’s Hill, or High Hill, the highest point on Long Island. At the top is a large boulder with a memorial to the poet Walt Whitman, who came up here on occasion and was born just down the hill.

“I opt for the road,” she decided, and starting walking across the grass.

“Across the road there, where the trails begin,” I said pointing towards the trees, “that’s where the black dog seems to be most often seen. It varies, but essentially it’s oversized and has glowing red eyes. Much like the Mothman and even the strange Bigfoot type creature people see here.”

“Did you remember to bring doggie treats just in case? Like the mailman?” she asked.

“It doesn’t seem to bite, or even want its belly rubbed. Essentially it’s seeing it that brings down the curse. If you do, you’ll die soon. Or someone you love. Or even a relative, which you might like at least.”

We walked further down the road. It’s a narrow road, no center line painted and not particularly made for those walking along the edge. But it’s a beautiful walk, the trees forming a canopy overhead, slightly rolling with hills and curves. And traffic was light, as it usually is.

“Mary is the lady in white of Sweet Hollow Road,” I carried on. The lady in white is a ghostly archetype, reported all over the world throughout time. Today we tend to think of it as a throwback to the Victorian era, likely because it was also a favorite of writers of that age, and it’s from then that much of what we know of gothic ghost stories developed.”

I looked behind us and seeing no cars coming, moved to the center of the road.

“There are several Mary and the car stories, which typically portrays Mary as an innocent. Mary and her husband were newlyweds going down Sweet Hollow Road when they were both killed in a car crash. Mary wanders the road in her white wedding dress, looking for her husband, and her husband’s phantom headlights can be seen scouring the road, looking for Mary.

“Mary is spotted sometimes, walking along the side of the road in a white dress. Mary darts out in front of cars and disappears. In another tale, Mary was a teenager whose boyfriend suspected her of cheating. In a fit of anger, while they drove through Sweet Hollow, he opened her door and pushed her out. Mary lived, but before she could crawl off to safety, another car ran over here like a bump in the road, killed her and kept on driving. Her spirit walks along the roadside now, looking for her jealous boyfriend and the driver who killed her.”

“It’s a part of what’s known as the phantom hitchhiker pantheon of folk tales and ghost stories. They go way back, long before automobiles. Ghosts alongside of roads which go along with you for a ways, before spookily disappearing. Or perhaps you never know till after you’ve said your goodbyes.”

She began singing in what sounded like my country accent …

“At the wheel sit a big man, he weighed about two-ten
He stuck out his hand and said with a grin
“Big Joe’s the name”, I told him mine
And he said: “The name of my rig is Phantom 309.”

I finished it for her …

“But, every now and then, some hiker’ll come by
And like you, Big Joe’ll give ’em a ride
Here, have another cup and forget about the dime
Keep it as a souvenir, from Big Joe and Phantom 309.”

“I never had you pegged for a Red Sovine fan,” I said with a kind of sideways grin.

She went full southern belle … “Oh I learned that from my daddy.”

Jacob Smith house, on Mount Misery, built about 1740

I rolled my eyes and carried on. “Unfortunately, for those who need to believe that one or more of these stories are true, all of them can be found as urban legends throughout the country. What the urban legends about Mary make up for in quantity, they lack in originality.”

“And since Sweet Hollow’s roots stretch back into the colonial era, witchcraft finds its way into the Mary saga. Mary treated the children of the area who had contracted smallpox, and unfortunately, several of them died. The locals as a result, accused Mary of being a witch, and stoned her to death. Children playing in Sweet Hollow from time to time feel her tender hands stroking their hair.”

Miss Bronwen’s shoulders visibly shook and she darted her head from side to side, looking behind her. I dropped the twig I had used to tickle the back of her neck unnoticed.

“Other tales are less specific, only that she was accused of being a witch and was hung, some say in Sweet Hollow itself, others in Huntington. This is of course easily shot down, as the town records for the era are in existence, and does refer to a couple of accusations of witchcraft, which resulted in no hangings or stonings, and none involved a Mary from the Sweet Hollow area.”

It’s been years since I walked down Sweet Hollow Road, and every so often I dream about the place. You never get to the bottom of the mysteries of Sweet Hollow Road, or Mount Misery for that matter.

The first question to ask to get to the truth of the legend is why Mary? All these events didn’t happen here, and certainly not by a women named Mary. But most legends have some grain of truth about them, and at some point there might have been a Mary who lived along Sweet Hollow Road, and perhaps something happened so memorable and so horrifying, that she’s become a magnet for urban legends, which stick to her name like glue.

Or perhaps it wasn’t horrifying after all. As a child in the midwest, I heard the story of Black Annie, who wandered the alleys in our hometown at night, looking for children who were out where they shouldn’t be. If she caught you, she’d rush towards you screeching “my children, my children,” in her delusions, believing you to be one of her children who were lost to her long ago. Some stories claimed that the walls of her house were papered with the skin of the children she found after dark.

In truth, the tale is believed to have originated in the British isles, and refers to a nun, hence the black clothing, who used to care for leper children. She lived in a cave so as not to spread the disease should she contract it, and the walls of her cave were covered with tokens that grateful children had given her.

So you see, in time, even the best among us can become horror stories, especially if parents can tell the tales to keep their children from wandering where they shouldn’t be.

Many of our urban legends and ghost stories were brought over by immigrants from other countries. And it’s likely that this happened with Mary, and also that some of the tales are much older than one would suppose.

But why the name Mary? Why is this name associated with legends and mysteries? In fact it’s a practice which goes way back, all the way to the Good Book, the Bible, with the story of the virginal Mary at the well. Mary had just drawn water when the angel Gabriel appeared to her and told her that she was to give birth. Some might say that lie has begat countless lies about Mary since then. Others might be more considerate and say legend rather than lie. And of course, there are others who simply believe.

Some might point to that other Mary, the Magdalene, as the source of mysteries attached to the various Marys. There’s a great body of evidence that this Mary was much aligned by the disciples, apostles and the authors of the various books of the Bible. The oldest tales have her afflicted with demons, something which wouldn’t be her fault after all, which gradually metamorphosed into Mary being a prostitute. Just like our Mary, her tale seems to have changed over time, and not for the better.

Of course, one can’t count out the fact that Mary was one of the most popular names throughout the ages. In the 19th century, it was hard to swing a dead cat, black or otherwise without belting a woman named Mary.

As I wrote about the story of Mary Hatchet at Head of the Harbor, legends about women named Mary are especially common around wells and springs. In Ireland, a lot of the cures and miracles that are associated with the cult of Mary are attributed to Saint Brigid, who actually predates Christianity, whose shrines are typically found at wells and springs, and whose pagan origins became entwined and replaced with the worship to Mary the virgin. In fact springs are considered sacred in most ancient cultures, from the people who built Stonehenge and who turned Glastonbury into the mystery it is today, to the native Americans. In a suburb of London a couple centuries back, there was a popular legend about a Mary remarkably similar to the Mary of American folklore, who was said to haunt a well.

That people coming to these shores brought folk-tales and legends with them isn’t even a matter for debate. Neither is the fact that they then began to associate these stories with landmarks near their new homes. Wells and springs were dangerous places, particularly when the wildlife on Long Island was likely to kill and eat you. After all, animals typically used the same springs as humans, so children were particularly vulnerable to these dangers. Tell a child to stay away from the spring because there might be wolves and they’ll go there every chance they get. Tell them that Mary might be there and they’ll think twice.

Mountain Mist Spring’s water was shipped to eastern Long Island to help treat soldiers returning from the Spanish American War in 1898. Springs were quite often associated with folk tales in early days, likely meant to be a deterrent to children playing in dangerous locations.

We were approaching a historic marker nestled among some trees. I pointed it out, “This spring is close to the intersection of Chichester and Sweet Hollow Roads. So it’s quite likely it was important. It was called Mountain Mist Springs, and the water from here was used in the early 20th century, bottled and shipped to Montauk to treat soldiers returning from the Spanish American War suffering from yellow fever. Remember Teddy Roosevelt and San Juan Hill?”

“Of course! He lived just down the road from me, in Oyster Bay Cove. A bit before my time of course.”

“Of course. And it’s just down the road, more or less. Teddy used to ride his horse up here to the pub, and also over to Harry Stimson’s house off Mt. Misery Rd. He was the Secretary of War during world war two. Harry and Teddy were fond of their horses.”

We continued on walking, “Certainly the spring was known of much earlier, and being a spring, it was likely considered a dangerous, and quite possibly a haunted place. Certainly the kind of place that a mother would warn children to stay away from, even employing what are affectionately called mommy lies to keep them away.

“My mother used to tell us it wasn’t good for you to eat too many plants … not a fan of fruits and vegetables. She said it would make you into a blooming idiot.”

I winced, “not particularly the kind of thing I was talking about, but still I’m nod politely and pretend you never told me that.”

She gave me the finger with a smile.

It’s a curious little intersection there, at Chichester and Sweet Hollow Road. You can almost see three historic sites at once. There’s the spring behind us. Down Chichester to the right is the Peace and Plenty Inn. And just ahead is the West Hills School, which is associated with a grisly fire. It did burn. That’s one part of the tale which is true.

The old West Hills school house was built in the 18th century, and as the population of the area in the 17th century was dismally low, it’s unlikely that there was an earlier one, lost to history. According to the grand-daughter of Lemuel Carll, when the old school building was partially burned in the 1880’s, she walked to Melville school. Once repaired, the building was used as a school until 1912.

Other accounts say it was completely rebuilt. No accounts that I’ve seen mentioned a loss of life in the fire.

“There are two main legends about this school. In the first, Mary, remember Mary? Well she’s at home at the intersection when her father, the school teacher returns from a hard day of work. She notices he has a funny smell about him, which he said was from smoke. When she asks why, he relates to her that, more or less, he got fed up with the noisy little rugrats, went outside the school, locked the door from the outside and torched the place. Then presumably danced his little happy dance as all the hapless creatures inside were toasted like marshmallows. Understandably horrified – as she was never a teacher herself, otherwise she might have been more understanding – Mary retreats to her room and hangs herself in shame. In another variation, Mary was the school marm and set the blaze herself.”

We had sat and snacked, just off the road in a little clearing. We were pretty sure we were trespassing but we’re harmless trespassers. I kept on …

“In yet another version, the father dispatches the students one by one with an axe, which is certainly a more hands on approach. And of course, in another, it was Mary wielding the axe.”

“With that, she becomes the infamous Mary Hatchet”, Miss Bronwell said.

“Exactly!” I exclaimed. “You do pay attention sometimes!”

“And I remember being drug all around St. James and Head of the Harbor, looking for her there as well,” she reminded me.

“As I said, it was near this spot that according to one legend, a house once stood where Mary and her family lived. As the tale is told, the house caught fire and Mary perished in the blaze. As the story goes, on lonely nights you can still hear her screams. And it is entirely possible that this story is true. A look through newspapers of the 19th century find many articles about fire in Sweet Hollow. It was remote, under populated, and as a result, fire and rescue services were basically non-existent. There are however, no articles that I’m aware of which refer to a woman named Mary perishing in any of the blazes, though I did find one of an elderly gentleman who was burned alive.”

“But the story doesn’t end there. Folklore and urban legends as well, are seldom told the same way twice. The same story told two slightly different ways over time becomes two separate stories. In this variation, Mary became an arsonist, who set the blaze in which she died, as well as her family. In others it wasn’t her home, but an insane asylum which Mary had been committed to, and the other patients and the staff burned alive as well.”

The older asylums on Mount Misery

The idea that there was an asylum, or multiple asylums on Mount Misery is a legend that will not die. (I cover this extensively here). There is almost no possibility that there was an institution here during the nineteenth century. There wasn’t a population to support it, there was no money allotted to it, and the infrastructure wasn’t there. Being remote, there weren’t enough people needing mental care – which was almost non-existent at the time anyway, to warrant the service. Some say it was for patients from New York City, but most of Long Island was farmland or wilderness at the time. They certainly didn’t need to come all the way to Mannetto Hills to find a suitably isolated location.

So Mary was never a patient in the mental institution on Mount Misery, nor a worker, nor did she set the fire that killed all the inmates and the staff. Which means she couldn’t have laughed as she burned alive, and therefore her laughter and the patient screams can’t be heard on Mount Misery. Nor can you occasionally catch the scent of burned wood and flesh, unless it’s from a different ghastly fire.

And that different ghastly fire wasn’t the second institution, built after the inferno that was supposed to have swallowed up the first one. Once you get past the colonial era, you’re in well-documented history. And there is no documentation of a mental institution in the area in the 19th or 20th centuries either. At least none that has come to light, and it would have to be hidden in a very dark corner of history to have remained hidden all this time. After all, if such a tragedy existed, there would be a documentary on PBS – Tragedy at Sweet Hollow.

One of the first asylums on Long Island was built in Amityville, and that structure did catch fire once. But not with wholesale death and destruction. And of course, that fire was well-reported, even in the New York Times. As are several other fires in mental institutions in the New York City area. This was a constant fear, and at times it did happen, sometimes with the loss of human life. It just never happened on Mount Misery, nor along Sweet Hollow Road. Which also brings into the doubt the integrity of all those ghost hunters out here who have EVPs of people being burned alive on Mount Misery.

Peace and Plenty Inn, dating from the 17th century was once the social center of the West Hills. And has its own ghost.

The ghost at the Peace and Plenty Inn

Just down Chichester we came upon a low slung, dark red house, obviously ancient.

“The Peace and Plenty Inn has been welcoming weary travelers and serving ale before they rang in the year 1700.” I gestured towards the left side of the building, the oldest part which was built about 1880. Teddy Roosevelt used to ride his horse here to belly up at the bar. Walt Whitman had a few here too. They used to gamble and guess the weight of pigs, but the project frequently got out of hand and turned violent.”

“The important question,” she said with a grimace, “is do they have a bathroom.”

I looked towards the woods, “actually they stopped serving about 1844, or thereabouts. Asa Chichester owned the place then. Business had dried up and shut the place down. Since then he’s haunted the Peace and Plenty. “Some say it’s his father, who was a rebel during the revolution. Lots of footsteps, footprints even, swinging doors, things moving, disappearing and occasionally flying through the air. May not be a particularly happy ghost.”

“So I’m not getting a bathroom?”

“There’s the woods?”

She wheeled and turned and started back down the way we came. We were a goodly distance from the car. And I know her well enough that she can make use of the bushes. But I pay for that.

“I’m not pissed off,” she said over her shoulder as I struggled to keep up. “But I saw a trail that leads up to Jayne’s Hill back there which should afford some privacy.”

“I can stand watch …”

“You can stand down there on the goddamned road.”

That bloody hatchet

Sweet Hollow is a short road, but a long enough road for Mary to make the leap from the innocent lady in white to the ruthless killer garbed in black, Mary Hatchet.

You find the full range of Mary’s emotions in these stories. There’s Mary the victim, where Mary was molested by her father, or sodomized by her boyfriend, and she takes her revenge with a hatchet to their skulls. In some tales, there were two sodomites, and as a result, she takes two lives every year, which of course is obviously bullshit as two people dispatched yearly with hatchets to the head would surely attract the media.

There’s the insane Mary, with cleaving the brains of her entire family for no other reason other than she wanted to. Or perhaps it was those pesky voices in her head. These stories can be found all over Long Island – all over the country.

I found I was rambling to a freshly relieved Miss Bronwell about Molly Hatchet? “Same story, only a prostitute in New Orleans, and Molly is of course a derivative of Mary. And the whole prostitute premise harkens back to the Magdalene.”

“You mean that horrible, horrible southern rock band?”

“Yes, the same. I actually had to leave their concert because watching them was making me physically ill. Could have been the dope though.”

“The important question,” she said, “is why were you at a Molly Hatchet concert to begin with.”

+ + +

Luckily enough, Mary Hatchet is a historical figure. Often depicted in drawings, engravings and photographs wearing a black, Victorian style dress and wielding a hatchet, Mary was quite a popular figure early in the twentieth century. She was one of the symbols of the Women’s Temperance Christian Union, who campaigned tirelessly to have the old demon alcohol prohibited. Which she eventually accomplished. These organizations often met secretly, and to avoid people disrupting their meetings, they never gave out the address. Only that the meeting would be held at Mary Hatchet’s house, hence the large number of Mary Hatchet’s houses found in folklore all over the country, and all over Long Island.

As memories of the Temperance movement faded from popular knowledge, the name stuck. It ties in with Lizzie Borden as well.

It’s this version of Mary who makes it onto the big screen, or at least direct to video. Of course they’re not the legend of Sweet Hollow Road, to borrow a particularly catchy phrase I read recently, “any more than masturbating to Posh Spice makes you David Beckham.” It’s just an excuse to swill a few buckets of gore and gallons of blood, capitalizing on a memorable name.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find there is no true story, only a rich body of legend. There are plenty of Mary stories to choose from. Just none are particularly happy.

“So,” she asked, drawing out the silence for emphasis. “What’s the real story? Why do all these stories exist, and in this place?”

“My guess is it’s the old maximum, ‘location, location, location.’ You’ve got native Americans to the south. The American Revolution to the north. You’ve got a genuine American hero of the arts, Walt Whitman born right over there. His family’s homes still dot the neighborhood. It’s got a sense of history that makes historic provenance believable.”

“And the beauty of the place,” she interjected. “It’s one of the loveliest spots on Long Island. The hollow here is like a hidden world amongst all the subdivisions and traffic. And the view from the highlands make the place look uncivilized, or undeveloped might be a better word for it.”

“And at night it’s truly a creepy place,” I added. It’s a thick wood, you don’t get a lot of light, you don’t see any houses, don’t really even hear much traffic. A lot of the trees are gnarled and broken. There are a lot of mountain laurels which just grow that way even.”

The parking lot for West Hills County Park was once more within view.

“My favorite folk tale about Sweet Hollow and Mount Misery,” I began, “is about the man you’d run into on the paths. He’s dressed in an old fashion manner, some say in rags. Hat slouched over his eyes, grizzly beard and carry an abnormally large head. If you ask what’s in the basket he’s happy to show you. As he throws open the lid with a cackle, you stare down into a basket full of human heads.”

“That sounds like it should be in one of those films,” she said.

“Exactly,” I answered. “But at the same time, it could be a story a hundred years old. Told around the fireplace, or told by a mother who wanted to keep her kids out of the depths of the forest.”

“Most of the stories are obviously from a more recent date. You find many of the same ones, all over the country, usually cropping up the last half of the twentieth century. Often with Mary as the main character.”

“It’s possible something happened here that left a black stain on the place. The details are forgotten, but it was so awful it started people talking. What they didn’t know, they filled in from their imagination and gossip. As the generations went on, the truth was forgotten, but the stories had a momentum of their own.”

“So in the end,” she added, “people make up stories about this place because it’s traditional to do so.”

“That’s right,” I agreed. You go to Sweet Hollow Road after dark, you tell a story. The night does the rest.”

“Do you have a favorite Mary story?” she asked, as I tossed her the keys from my bag.

“I do!” I replied. “Mary is seen wandering the woods along Sweet Hollow Road. No reason why, no horror or gore, just a ghost moving through the trees. Which is why I like the simplest story the best. I’ve hiked most of the trails on Mount Misery, Sweet Hollow and West Hills, in summer, winter, spring and fall, ain day and night. I’ve stood over Mary’s grave and said her name three times. I’ve called for her in the woods. And so far she’s not shown herself. I’m not saying she’s not there, just that so far, I’m still alive, and still walking the woods alone.”

“But why does Mary still wander those woods? Because we keep calling her back. She’s summoned by countless fear seekers, ghost hunters and curious teenagers each year, and no doubt will be this Halloween as well, and for many more to come. I have no doubt that from time to time, when someone calls, she’s there. There is something about us that needs the supernatural. And as long as we need Mary, she will come.”

Sweet Hollow Road, Melville, Long Island, New York

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The Legends and Myths of Sweet Hollow and Mount Misery: Part II, The Mothman and the Thunderbird of native American myths

Where you stand on mysteries such as the the Mount Misery Mothman comes down to belief. Are you a skeptic? Most people are, and the trend is growing with each passing year. As religion, and particularly the mysteries associated with religion fade into the past, superstition fades along with it.

And yet interest in the Mount Misery’s Mothman continues to grow. I still get emails from people looking for him. Why is this?

For the uninitiated, the Mothman is a creature which is obliquely dealt with in the film, The Mothman Prophecies and dealt with more directly in the book of the same name. Proponents of its existence believe it’s found throughout the world, as well as history. In this country, it’s usually described as being quite tall, very dark, almost black, like an impenetrable shadow, human in form but with expansive wings and no head. It typically has two glowing eyes, either floating above its body where a head would be, or in its chest, like a moth.

It’s been known to emit a loud cry, with bright lights including beams coming from its eyes. In some cases the light seem to burn a person’s eyes who see them, according to legend, permanently. Nobody seems to know what it means when you see it, though many believe it’s a portent of hard times ahead.

Hence the name, The Mothman Prophecies.

When the Mothman hit the big screen it was inevitable that people would hit the trails on Mount Misery. Sightings increased. The film made it to HBO and cable and the sightings continued. Then the film dropped off pop culture’s radar and the sightings dried up. That’s the skeptic’s view.

One would expect with the rise of the internet, that more people than ever would be seeing the Mount Misery Mothman, as it’s a poplar topic there. But in fact, there are very few sighting on Long Island.

Aerial mysteries in the skies over New York

Keel also reports that the sightings seem to have begun, or at least reports of them sprung up starting around 1966. He’s also the source of the first Mothman sighting in the area, attributed it to unidentified “neckers.” He further reported that many saucer and cigar shaped objects had been seen over Mount Misery.

A slightly more believable source would appear to be The New York Times, which reported on September 12, 1880, “One day last week a marvelous apparition was seen near Coney Island. At the height of at least a thousand feet in the air, a strange object was in the act of flying toward the New Jersey coast. It was apparently a man with a bat’s wings and improved frog’s legs. The face of the man could be distinctly seen, and it wore a cruel and determined expression. The movements made by the object closely resembled those of a frog in the act of swimming with his hind legs and flying with his front legs. Of course, no respectable frog has ever been known to conduct himself in precisely that way; but were a frog to wear bat’s wings, and to attempt to swim and fly at the same time, he would correctly imitate the conduct of the Coney Island monster. When we add that this monster waved his wings in answer to the whistle of a locomotive, and was a deep black color, the alarming nature of the apparition can be imagined. The object was seen by many reputable persons, and they all agree that it was a man engaged in flying toward New-Jersey.”

But those who would cite this article as a sighting of the Mothman has to discount the conclusions the Times jumped to.

“That this aerial apparition is a man fitted with practicable wings there is no reason to doubt … “The flying man is engaged in some undertaking which he cannot safely proclaim. In other words, he is an aerial criminal, a fact which explains the cruelty and determination visible on his countenance, and what can be the nefarious object which this probable wretch has in view? It cannot be simply theft and robbery, for it would manifestly be impossible for him, in his flying costume, to perpetrate burglary or highway robbery, or to pickpockets. It cannot be plumbing, for obvious reasons, neither can it be the sale of books published by subscription only. Yet the flying villain must have an object, and we have a right to assume that only a peculiarly nefarious object could induce a man to fly to New-Jersey or St. Louis in hot weather and without an umbrella or mosquito net. It has not escaped notice that of late Mr. Talmage has been wandering in the West in search of entertaining varieties of crime wherewith to embellish his sermons. It is also known that he returned to this City just before the flying man of Coney Island was seen.”

From the tone of the article it appears to be a take down piece on Mr. Talmage, who was a well known evangelist of the day. So though it’s often cited as evidence of the Mothman throughout history, particularly New York history, it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.

Laurel trees in West Hills are common, at times leaving the terrain almost impassible. It was the wildness of the place, alone with the steep terrain which led to the name Mount Misery, coined by those forced to travel through.

The Thunderbird metamorphoses into the Mothman

Those with a historical mind seek to tie native American mythology into the Mothman tale. It’s a variation on the Thunderbird myth, common to large swaths of the native American psyche. Including on Long Island.

The native Americans on Long Island certainly believed in the Thunderbird, which many people today theorize as the aboriginal north American ancestor of the Mothman.

The Thunderbird protected against the Great Horned Serpent, and was associated with rain, water and entities which sprang from the rivers and ocean. The Thunderbird was a shape shifter, able to take the form of whatever it chose, which is echoed in the Mothman’s ability to be seen as whatever form the viewer was inclined to see it.

Whether the Thunderbird was known to make its home on Mount Misery as urban legends suggest is unknown. Unfortunately, the only reports we have for the Mothman in this area appear after the film hit the theaters.

But there were reports of strange creatures in the area before.

John Keel states that the local expert on Mt. Misery in the sixties was a local D.J. named Jaye P. Baro, who not only spun discs on the radio but chased after them in the skies over Melville as well. According to Keel, Jaye managed to get a photo of a moving black object and described it as resembling a human, with a disfigured face, long black hair and dressed a long black garment. And from the look of photo, the creature had hands rather than wings It ran away into the bushes, and Baro and her accomplice ran in the opposite direction. The photo was published in Beyond magazine in July 1969, with an article on the mysteries of Mt. Misery.

Ms Paro’s article includes an eyewitness account of a resident who witnessed a fight to the death between the ghosts of two native Americans, while on a walk around her Mount Misery home. However, Ms Paro also refers to Mount Misery in an old book, Washington’s Spies, where it was said that the mount was a place where braves went to prove themselves. That however, is likely the Mount Misery in the Setaukets, further east.

The woods of Mannetto Hills and Mount Misery are thick, the canopy often blocking the light.

Is Mount Misery Mannetto Hill?

The area known as Mount Misery is a part of Mannetto Hills. The name Mannetto Hills was once commonly used to describe West Hills as well. Over time the Northern Parkway split the two into how they’re identified now.

If you follow the elevation of Mount Misery down and to the south, you come to the site of Moscopas, once considered a sacred swamp. In a land deed for the Bethpage Purchase, dated 1695 transferring ownership of the area to Thomas Powell, and signed by, among others, Sowwamacus, Moscopas is described as a “hole of dirt and water.” It also spells out that the native Americans reserve the “liberty of hunting and gathering huckleberries.”

Mannetto Hill was almost certainly considered sacred. According to Daniel Tredwell, writing in 1853, Mannetto Hill was the home of the great spirit Manitou, and in fact it was originally called Manitou Hill. He goes on to claim that Manitou Hill was the radiating point of several native American traditions.

Later on Gabriel Furman, writing in 1874 related “About thirty miles from Brooklyn and midway between the north and south sides of this island is a hill known by the name of Manet or Manetta Hill This however is a corruption of the true name which was Manitou Hill or the Hill of the Great Spirit which appellation is founded on the tradition that many ages since the aborigines residing in those parts suffered extremely from the want of water. Under their suffering they offered up prayers to the Great Spirit for relief. That in reply to their supplications the Good Spirit directed that their principal chieftain should shoot his arrow into the air and on the spot where it fell they should dig and would assuredly discover the element they so much desired.”

“They pursued the direction dug and found water There is now a well situated on this rising ground which is not deep and the tradition continues to say that this well is on the very spot indicated by the Good Spirit This hill was undoubtedly used in ancient times as the place of general offering to the Great Spirit in the name and behalf of all surrounding people and was of the character of the hill altars so common among the early nations.”

We know where Moscopas was. It was filled in for the construction of the H.B. Mattlin Middle School, at the corner of Manetto Hill Road and Washington Avenue in Plainview, the site of the actual swamp being where the athletic field is now. During the early years of the school, it would frequently flood by water seeping up from the ground, which many joked was the native American’s revenge for filling in Moscopas.

It’s generally agreed by most historians, that Manetto Hill was actually where it is located now, in the village of Plainview. In fact, the high point, where it is assumed the chief shot his arrow from is located where the water tower is now. Which makes more sense. Granted, it would still take a helluva pull on a bow to get an arrow from there to Moscopas. But not nearly as much as from the high point of Mount Misery.

Even geologists seem to have considered the two line of hills as one. Consider this, from Charles Merguerian and J.E. Sanders “Pleistocene Geology of Long Island’s North Shore,” utterly fascinating reading by the way, quoting an earlier manuscript … “The Mannetto gravel was named from the Mannetto Hills (West Hills), on the crest of which just west of Melville some of the best exposures of this gravel on the island were found.”

So my guess, dear Miss Bronwen, is that most of the legends associated with Mount Misery which relate to the native Americans, were transferred there by mistakenly thinking it was Manitou or Mannetto Hill, which explains another subset of the myths of Mount Misery, that which claims the area was sacred or taboo to the early native Americans of the area.

Unless they considered all of Mannetto Hills sacred, then they wouldn’t have thought Mount Misery was out of the ordinary. And as they still hunted and gathered berries on its slopes, that seems unlikely.

That the confusion goes way back might also explain why early maps, and indeed even today, part of the road on the western slopes of Mount Misery is called Manetto Hill Road.

The bottom line

The internet is eaten up with reports of people going into the woods at Mount Misery at night and spotting the mothman, all in black with huge wings and glowing red eyes. My first inclination is to say “too much weed.” But I’m also reminded of a story back from southern Illinois where I grew up. A group had come down from Chicago to go deer hunting, and came into town to visit the game warden with the albino deer they had shot, which had curious black markings on it. I imagine the wardens eyes rolled at the description, and wasn’t in the least bit surprised to see the cow that they had bagged in the back of their truck.

Simply put, most Long Islanders aren’t used to the woods at night. I’ve been on Mount Misery at night, and it’s very dark. If you go down the trails and not just the wide path at the end of the northern section of the road, it’s easy to get turned around. And it’s easy to panic. To one not accustomed to the woods and the creatures that live there, it’s not surprising that one might not expect to see a large bird.

Particularly as in the 1960s, in the area of West Virginia where the Mothman Prophecies take place, the Sandhill Crane was quite often spotted, and those buggers can have a wingspan of about seven feet and an impressive shriek. Even owls can have quite an expansive wingspan, and at night, to someone already on edge and unfamiliar with the critters, it’s easy to see how someone can make a mistake. To have an owl light from a tree near you in the dark, the sound of the wings flapping and the shadow passing over you can be a frightening experience, and it’s easy to see how young people tanked up on beer might wet themselves trying to get away. Of course there is the red, glowing eyes issue, but even that can be explained by headlights or flashlights in many occasions.

So the bottom line … can you find the Mount Misery Mothman? My guess is it’s a fiction spread by people talking about John Keel’s book, The Mothman Prophecies, who hadn’t actually read it. They guessed that he writes about the creature being here. Which he doesn’t.

But could there be an echo from ancient native American legends? I do believe it’s possible for landscapes to contain memories. If you want to wander the dark woods of Mount Misery looking for it, or its decendents, the southern bit, the part enclosed by West Hills Nature Preserve is your best bet.

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Stranger Things in the nighttime sky … In the sixties, a little boy sees a rocket in the sky over Carmi, Illinois that shouldn’t be there

Journal, Long Island, Mt. Misery and Sweet Hollow Road, Southern Illinois Hauntings and Legends, Terrestrial Anomalies, Extra-terrestrial visitors, hairy monsters, abandoned asylums and assorted weird tales

I found this photo, taken at Cape Kennedy when I was five years old. I’m the little blonde haired kid, whose mother has my arm in a death grip. Curiously enough, I still remember the view of the inside of that space capsule, which I’m seeing in this photo. A year or so later my mother, along with her best friend dyed their hair platinum and went full beehive. When they came home I refused to come downstairs, convinced they had been taken over by aliens.

It was the sixties in small town Illinois, I was a little boy, and was walking to my Granny Bert’s house. She lived a block away, I wasn’t quite halfway there, in front of the Duvall’s house. I used to walk barefoot, till one day I stepped on a dead squirrel’s skull. I still walked barefoot after that, but I looked down and watched where I was going.

That day I happened to look up and when I did, I saw it.

It was a rocket, pure and simple. At first I thought it must be a toy rocket, like you order from the back of comic books. But it was too high in the air, too large and too real. I could make out the markings pretty clearly, but it was about fifty years ago so no, I can’t say what they were.

When I first started making that walk, my mother would walk me to the end of our block, and Granny Bert would wait on the front porch, so I was always in view of one or the other. Sometime after Kindergarten they stopped doing that, and I was allowed to walk alone.

Granny Bert wasn’t waiting on me, which means it had to be between 1966 and 1970. I told her what I saw, she laughed and didn’t know what to think, so didn’t think much of it. Ben, my adopted Grandpa said it was probably government experiments. He watched a lot of science fiction on TV and at the time I believed he was the smartest person I knew.

(Years later, when dementia hit, he swore he’d been in Iraq when he was younger, working for the CIA. He was captured, he said, tied to a table but was still able to get his finger into his belly button. By rotating it counter clockwise, he was able to signal to the helicopters who swooped in and rescued him. The CIA and mind control went hand in hand even then, or rather finger in navel.)

Later I’d hear that there were missile silos in the area, but officially none existed here. We were too far west to be able to reach Russia, and the missile defenses for St. Louis were a couple hours away.

Aliens, or more government experiments?

I knew it wasn’t aliens that I’d seen. It wasn’t a saucer, it was a missile. I watched it long enough to see it was real, watched it punch through the clouds and disappear. It was too low to have been launched very far away. There are no air bases nearby. There was a small airport in town, but it was in the wrong direction.

I wasn’t the only one who saw strange things in the sky over Carmi. A few years later, on the night of February 9, 1975, a man and a woman just outside of town reported a blue object with either beams of light coming down, or lighted struts or legs. At the same time, they reported other aircraft nearby in the sky.

The prairie around Carmi, Illinois was the location of a number of strange lights in the night sky back in 1978. Law enforcement officers in the area, as well as citizens watched the lights, which traveled to nearby counties that same night. The next night they were reported around Evansville, Indiana, less than an hour away.

The alien invasion of Carmi, Illinois or “Whoa Bub! Did you see that?”

Carmi, the town where I live, did have a notable UFO event. It was August of 1978, the same year devil worshippers were reported outside of town. They turned out to be Dadaists, moved to the midwestern countryside. The UFOs never were explained to anyone’s satisfaction.

The Indianapolis Star wrote that police took calls regarding six strange lights, glowing red, green and white, traveling at high speeds and making precision, unusually sharp turns. Sgt. Dee Heil reported they were visible for six hours and seen by at least seven police officers – an Illinois State Trooper, two Carmi police officers, an Edwards County Sheriff’s deputy, a White County jailer and a town marshal. They were visible in the area from 10:30 p.m. Wednesday until 5 a.m. Thursday. “No Earthly aircraft just hangs in one area for seven hours,” Heil noted. “I’m not a star gazer, but I never noticed anything like this before,” he said. He also reported that the lights were about the size of the planet Venus.

The Detroit Free Press reported that “In Albion, the state police’s Clyde Paris watched through the scope of his rifle as five objects skittered in the blackness, darting vertically and horizontally at high rates. Meanwhile, back in Carmi, officer Willard Blazier went so far as to shine a spotlight toward one of the crafts. When he did, the craft halted and circled back toward him. He decided not to do it again.”

The next night they’d moved to nearby Evansville, Indiana. Once again, according to the Detroit Free Press, “A 25-year-old Indiana Vocational Technical College-Southwest student named David Acker was smoking a cigarette when he saw a triangle of red lights creeping across the sky. He lived near the airport, so at first he assumed it was just an airplane. “One light turned to the east, one went west, and one traveled straight ahead,” he told the Press.“

A West Sider reported a sighting as well, as did a Chandler police officer. All claimed to see the same thing: red lights that shone green as they departed. Almost as though they had taillights.”

The most commonly accepted explanation for the lights, at least among those who wanted an Earthly explanation, was an optical illusion involving stars.

An open minded non-believer

I believe in ghosts. I’ve seen them, I know they exist. But I don’t know what they are.

I’ve seen strange things in the sky, but nothing like a flying saucer. I believe we see unidentified flying objects all the time, just like my rocket, or the countless lights traveling high above fly over country. If I saw a saucer, I’m sure I’d believe.

I can believe there is life out there, and that they’ve visited here. It’s a big universe. But the nearest solar system, Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away, or about 25 trillion miles. The fastest conventional space ship that we have would take 78,000 years to get there. Now if you could travel faster than the speed of light, and there are those working on designs to do just that, you could cut that to days. The same for other civilizations coming here.

Then again, if you could do that, time travel would likely be possible as well. So the aliens you see could be your great-great-grandchild.

My point is, if they could find their way here across the vastness of time and space, why the hell would they need flashing lights? Those are for planes looking to avoid collisions. If you can travel that far through the universe you can avoid a 747 I’m sure. Turn signals perhaps?

To understand other forms of life, you need to stop believing the only form of life that counts are ones like ours. Perhaps there are life forms which don’t even require a body. Forms of life so complex that we simply don’t have the ability to understand them, even if we had the manual laid out in front of us.

We would likely have as much chance of understanding them, as the ant does understanding the mind of the person attached to the foot which is about to step on it.

Still, I find many UFO reports credible. It’s the explanations for the unexplained I have a problem with, similar to those who claim to know ghosts are all about.

Aliens? Maybe, but there is an earthly explanation for at least some of these reports.

The U.S. Government has admitted they didn’t put the brakes on the UFO question because it made great cover for some of their experiments. If you saw something like a rocket in the sky that shouldn’t be there, nobody would believe you. Those who did, would attribute it to another civilization, on another planet.

Union Station in Nashville, Tennessee, spent some years as a ruined hulk before being rehabilitated into a swanky hotel. It was during that period that there were reports of secret government programs operating out of there involving drugs and mind control, preying on the homeless and junkies which took shelter there.

Project MKUltra reminds us the government is made up of people, and people often suck

In the general scheme of things, a little boy seeing a rocket where there shouldn’t be one is no big deal. Governments keep secrets, at least in theory for our own good.

But what happens when you give people power over others, and the gift of secrecy to hide their movements?

Project MKUltra was a real thing. If you listen closely, you hear it mentioned in the Netflix show Stranger Things, and many others. It did exist, and was a program carried out by the CIA involving mind control. It was begun in the early 1950s, ended in the early seventies and many of their experiments were carried out on humans, both willing and unwilling. Quite a few of those people, never knew what hit them.

The word allegedly comes up a lot when studying Project MKUltra. The records were all destroyed on the orders of CIA Director Richard Helms, two years before the project was made public. A few records which had been misfiled told part of the story, as did interviews with former agents and participants.

The project allegedly got its start as an extension of research that was done in German concentration camps, in particular Dachau in World War II, as well as Japanese internment camps. Following the war, some of the “doctors” from the camp were brought to the states to coach American researchers in mind control. The ultimate goal was to control people to do their will, without question.

Developing the ideal mind control drug was one of their focuses. On a positive note, ProjectMKUltra helped usher in the summer of love in the 1960s. Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was a paid volunteer, and was given LSD numerous times. He liked it so much he started hosting acid parties at home, then moved them into San Francisco and called them The Acid Tests. The house band for the Acid Tests became the Grateful Dead, and their lyricist, Robert Hunter was also part of the experiment that Kesey took part in.

Pretty soon San Francisco was awash in LSD and that’s where the summer of love was born. A case of an experiment which got out of hand? Or perhaps an experiment where you dosed an entire counterculture, whose reach spread around the globe?

But it wasn’t all rainbows painted all over the blues. In Kentucky they dosed a mental patient with LSD 174 days in a row. As one agency officer was quoted, “they picked people who couldn’t fight back.” The CIA went as far as to setup brothels and dosed the johns, then watched through one way mirrors. The idea was someone who came into a brothel was already compromised and would likely keep their mouth shut.

They experimented with a wide range of drugs in addition to LSD, such as mescaline, cocaine, DMT, magic mushrooms, and more. They also tried hypnosis, isolation and sensory deprivation, electro shock as well as sexual abuse and verbal humiliation. Once the patient was tripping, they were then subjected to mind manipulation.

Keep in mind, this was often done without the person’s consent, and in fact they might never know who did it, nor why. So ask yourself, could you really trust the government’s explanations in that particular era?

If there was ever an era when we did trust our government, it ended in the 1970s.

View from Manetto Hills towards Mt. Misery Road. Though it looks to be a woodland paradise, once you leave the park, below the trees you find all of Long Island, teeming with life. But from up here at least, you still get a feel for what it looked like when settlers first moved onto Long Island.

The epicenter of UFO activity on Long Island … Mount Misery Road

I hear music, daylight disc
Three men in black said, “Don’t report this”
“Ascension, ” and that’s all they said
Sickness now, the hour’s dreadAll praise
He’s found the awful truth, Balthazar
He’s found the saucer news

E.T.I., Blue Oyster Cult. Written near Mt. Misery Road, 1976

It’s a few decades later and I live on Long Island. It’s not long before I start hearing urban legends about abandoned military hospitals and asylums, some of which connect with Project MKUltra.

That makes sense. The project was carried out at over 80 locations in the U.S. Hospitals were a prime location, and one would assume mental hospitals as well. Long Island is dotted with those, as well as myths involving UFOs, men in black, secret government psychiatric centers and bizarre experiments.

And curiously enough, those sites also share another kind of urban legend. Those of an extraterrestrial kind.

We had a work picnic at West Hills County Park, near Melville on Long Island. It’s a curious neighborhood, where Walt Whitman was born, and various members of his family lived, all the way back to earliest days of the colonies. Several of their houses are still there, along with others, some dating back to the 17th century. Over the hill and through the houses below is Walt Whitman Mall, alongside Route 110 which runs from Long Island Sound in the north at Huntington, to Amityville on the Great South Bay. For most of its length it’s six lanes or more, transporting tens of thousand of cars a day.

One street over is Sweet Hollow Road, barely two lanes with no dividing line and a canopy of trees overhead. It could be a thousand roads back home in Illinois, Indiana or anyplace in the rural midwest. The area is hoary with history, dating from when only native Americans occupied this land, through the colonial era and the revolution, up to the present time.

The road cuts through West Hills County Park which is an oasis of green in a sea of concrete. One street over is Mt. Misery Road.

At the picnic, a coworker is telling me that back in the seventies these are the roads they’d haunt to smoke a joint, and he filled me in on some of the urban legends of the seventies.

The strangest thing he saw there, was at one time the military shut it down. The story he heard has it that it was something to do with UFOs. All he could vouch for was the road was blocked off, there was a strong military presence and they had to toss the joint out the window.

The official line, as best as can be determined is that it was practice maneuvers by the National Guard. That the military would be welcome to use the area makes sense. Much of the ground was owned by Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War under Roosevelt in the second world war. His highland games were legendary, and in fact, he passed his estate on to the country after his death where it became a large part of West Hills County Park.

It’s still a favorite location for the homes of ambassadors and other government officials.

Despite alternate explanations, the UFO story stuck, as there were already reports of strange sightings in the neighborhood, stretching all the way back to native American days.

During that work picnic I found the park had several trails for hiking, and as I passed near it every day on the way home, I took to wandering West Hills. I started bringing along a camera, began researching the legends of the area, and that dear reader, is how this website was born.

View towards Manetto Hills, from just off Mt. Misery Road. People confuse Mt. Misery as being a mountain, or even a large hill. In fact, it’s just the name of the road, believed to have been given to it by early settlers who had the miserable task of carrying their loads up it.

John Keel takes Long Island mysteries mainstream

In 1975, the book The Mothman Prophecies appeared, written by John Keel, and following that in 2002, a major motion picture treatment.

While the film never touched on Long Island, the book contains a full chapter regarding strange occurrences on Mount Misery, which is a part of West Hills County Park.

According to Keel, the area was being visited by strange people, asking strange questions. In the book he recounts one witnesses testimony “They had high cheekbones and very red faces, like a bad sunburn,” she told me. “They were very polite but they said my land belonged to their tribe and they were going to get it back. What frightened me was their feet. They didn’t have a car … they must have walked up that muddy hill … but their shoes were spotlessly clean. There was no trace of mud or water where they walked in my house.”

Many of Keel’s contacts came from a Long Island disk jockey, Jaye Paro who worked for WBAB in Babylon, New York.

She had reported on UFOs around Mt. Misery, along with many other legends from the neighborhood. One article from the 1960s by Paro seems to have been the primary source material for most of what you find online about Mt. Misery and Sweet Hollow Road, along with the chapter of Keel’s book.

The issue of Beyond magazine which contained Jaye Paro’s article on Mt. Misery. Along with A MYSTERIOUS SEA MONSTER WHICH ATTACKS THREE FREIGHTERS.

Since so many people, myself included, have hiked the trails of West Hills and Mt. Misery, looking for the sites associated with the mysteries, it’s worth examining the magazine where these stories come from. It’s not the sixty’s version of the National Enquirer. It’s not that good, nor that reputable. It was the kind of story that people today love making fun of when they see it on TV. It was entertainment. Doesn’t mean it might not be true, or at least have elements of truth. But it was certainly buyer beware.

Ms Paro mentions the overbearing melancholy of the place, the wildness of the landscape even in modern Long Island, grisly axe murders, Native American ghosts, a poltergeist which drives a woman to her death and quotes locals as describing Mt. Misery as a supernatural volcano.

In addition to ghosts and hauntings, she presented eyewitness accounts of UFOs, strange messages being beamed into a resident’s television set and what appeared to be the first modern day report of the creature which came to be known as the Mothman.

Keel read her reports, and through her made several contacts. He eventually abandoned his belief that the visitors to Mount Misery and elsewhere were from other planets. Instead, he lent more credence to natural origins – sort of – such as the supernatural, or even demons. He also referred to them as ultraterrestials, entities which could adopt any shape they wanted.

One of the remaining buildings of Edgewood Psychiatric Center, once a part of the U.S. Military’s Mason General Hospital, on the Pilgrim Psych campus on Long Island. Close to Mt. Misery, it’s likely the inspiration for the rumors of a military hospital which practiced mind control experiments on Mt. Misery.

Bill Knell turns Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow Road into an internet phenomenon

Keel’s writings caught the attention of Bill Knell, UFO researcher of dubious character and reliability. Knell tossed those into his cauldron, with a batch of other unrelated folk tales and urban legends about Sweet Hollow Road/Mount Misery, and in the process created a mythology about the neighborhood which still sends hundreds, if not thousands of people to wander the West Hills looking for the strange. For that he deserves some form of credit.

Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t seem to be Mr. Knell’s strong suit. When I first started researching the area online about 2010, he was usually the person quoted. Over time its fame grew into a monster. Some stories you can trace, like the burned school. It did exist and still does. But it never burned with all the students inside. It was a small fire and the building was rebuilt on the same site.

Knell seems to be the source of the legend of a military hospital on Mt. Misery which conducted mind control experiments on unknowing soldiers.

There was no military hospital on Mt. Misery. Satellite images show that pretty conclusively. It’s just not there. But I did get a lot exercise hiking through the woods, looking for it.

There was however, a nearby military hospital, a psychiatric one, which fits the story almost perfectly. In World War II, the military took over Edgewood Psychiatric Center, a part of Pilgrim Psych, and built Mason General Hospital. It was used for “treating the psychological casualties of the battlefield as well as for other related uses.”

You can draw your own conclusions what “other related uses” might mean.

They even demolished the abandoned buildings about the same time the abandoned psych unit on Mt. Misery was supposed to have been torn down.

Sloppy research or was he simply trying to tie things into a neat, more commercial package? It’s questions like that which makes a person more skeptical about the legends that spring up in UFO hotspots, and some of the more far fetched stories.

Which brings us to the most well known of Long Island’s UFO hotspots, Camp Hero out on the tip at Montauk. Camp Hero was built to protect New York from invasion by sea during World War II. Officially known as Montauk Air Force Station, it was designed to look like a fishing village to fool German u-boats.

According to the book, The Montauk Project, Experiments in Time, secret research was going on at Camp Hero involving contacting aliens, mind control, teleportation and time travel. It’s the latter which according to legend, went too far and resulted in a hole ripped in the fabric of space and time, which allowed a bigfoot like creature to come through. Which still lurks on the grounds of Camp Hero State Park.

The book spawned countless conspiracy theories, some hold water, most don’t. With so many turds floating, it’s impossible to see the lone jewels that sunk down to the bottom. You could spend a lifetime investigating the story and never find an answer, because it’s quite possible that there is no answer to find.

The legend also spawned a popular series on Netflix, Stranger Things. Though the setting was changed to Indiana, (near where I grew up and where I have lived … they do a good job of capturing the place in the 1980s) the plot follows the Montauk Project legend pretty closely. It’s obviously fiction, but good fiction. And watching it that way, it gets harder and harder to see it as really happening.

The skeptical mind and the rise of UFO sightings in the 20^th century

A keen eye will notice a hotbed of UFO activity often takes place around military installations. Particularly those with a connection to the atomic bomb. There may be some validity to this.

CNN reported that seven ex members of the Air Force detailed experiences they’d had working at nuclear weapons facilities. Covering the decades from the sixties through the eighties, they spoke of UFOs hovering, and systems failing when they were in the area. Which means if true, aliens are here, and can shut off at will our most powerful weapons.

In fact, some of the most compelling evidence which has come to light recently came from the military, albeit via the Freedom of Information act. But it seems that in the end, the government sticks to its line that there is no credible evidence that aliens have been here, or live amongst us.

You can easily make the case that books, films and TV shows featuring secret experiments and flying saucers in the fifties and sixties led to a phenomenal increase in sightings.

One argument skeptics put out there is that the sightings sprang up because saucers entered the public consciousness. This is true. And at the same time, films about secret government experiments were on the rise as well.

Or, it’s entirely possible that the visitors only arrived about then, and that the films sprung up in response to a developing story, as more sightings to came to light.

It’s also worth remembering, less than a century before 1950, people didn’t normally think about flying machines. They didn’t exist. So it would make sense that they saw lights in the sky as something else, from ancestors to fairies. Which could explain why you don’t have a lot of sightings before the middle of the twentieth century, when air travel and of course, air warfare became part of the fabric of society.

And could explain why red lights in the dark might well become the Mothman’s eyes, rather than saucers in the sky.

The Sleep For Less Motel near Sydney, Nebraska. In January of 2020, as well as the December before, squadrons of mysterious drones were seen in the nighttime sky around here. Though responsibility was claimed by some investigating secret government programs, their explanation doesn’t cover all the reports. Some sightings can be attributed to hysteria, but in the end, the case was never solved and the sightings faded away.

Drones take over as the UFO of choice

Drones could be the next chapter in UFOs. Last December and this January of 2020, a fleet of drones were repeatedly sighted in the skies over Colorado and Nebraska. Rumors began to swirl, from secret government projects associated with nearby missile silos, to aliens, to drone operators out to fuck with the locals.

The world press picked up on the story and the authorities had to admit they were baffled. Many of the reports turned out to be fake, or even regular drones and in some cases, stars.

Like the UFO epidemic of the fifties and sixties, a few sightings of something unusual provoked fits of hysteria, wild explanations and conspiracy theories.

One of the areas where the drones were spotted was near Sydney, Nebraska. The New York Post quoted retired meteorologist Dan Carlson who spotted the drones four times near his farm near Sydney. “Drones flew in pairs on two nights. Their speed, impressive range — over the distant horizon without landing — and proximity to nearby missile silos makes him suspect the US Air Force at least knows of the flights.”

“I do not buy into the conspiracy theories. I am not living in fear of an alien invasion,” he said.

There are over 150 Minuteman nuclear missiles in the area, and it was speculated that one had gone missing and the drones were on a search and recovery mission. Others believed that it was the military training a missile defense system. All relevant government agencies, including the military denied any involvement.

I spent the night in Sydney last year, driving with my lady from Salt Lake City to southern Illinois. From time to time it was impossible not to hum the mysterious tones from Close Encounters in this part of the country, and it was easy to see why more strange things are seen in the sky here. There’s a lot more sky than in most places, a darker sky where stars, planets and strange lights shine brighter.

We pulled into the Sleep For Less motel late at night, fried from the road. The motel itself was like a time capsule, from the days when UFO reports were new, and springing up in places like this all over the country.

Standing outside at night, far from the interstate, the air crisp, the buzzing from the neon sign the only sound, it’s hard not to look up at the sky. And if you see something that shouldn’t be there, it sets your nerves on edge.

In February, an answer came forward when a member of the group, ArchAngel RECON, that tracked aerospace projects went public with what they’d been doing.

“We track and capture the aerospace target nicknamed the TicTac or UAP from various encounters such as with the USS Nimitz ship. This is a human made aircraft with human made technology that happens to defy known physics and outperform the best current known radar and fighter jet capabilities while operating on a power source that would in theory also change our entire knowledge in that sector.”

The group claims to have sighted their target on many occasions, at least in their mind, proving its existence.

They also noted the hysteria they had unwittingly caused. “It’s also important to note that the concern then grew to a scare, which did indeed produce an environment unlike the actual scene that likely started this whole thing, and undoubtedly, in my view, that will be the mass hysteria explanation given to this story.”

In the end, even ArchAngel RECON disavowed some of the drone sitings, and several law enforcement agencies disputed their claims. And yet since then, the sightings seem to have faded away, interest has waned and at least for some, the unexplained drones remain unidentified flying objects.

The Carmi Air Force Station was built in 1955, as a radar base.For a year there was over a hundred soldiers stationed here, in the middle of nowhere to provide support for a small radar operation. A year later they were gone and the base shut down. For years afterwards, rumors spread that there were missile silos in the area. *Curiously, its ruins are located in the same area as the UFO sightings of 1978.*

The little boy and the rocket

I don’t have the luxury of dismissing everything out of hand. When I was a little boy, I saw a rocket where it shouldn’t have been.

And now it’s ten years since I wandered the West Hills of Long Island, and I’m back in the midwest. I can stand in my back yard and see the spot where I looked up and saw the missile. With hindsight and a lifetime of following the subject, I put my mind to what it could have been, and so I invent my own conspiracy theory. It’s likely total bullshit, but it gives me something to think about when I’m looking up at night.

One would think that here in the middle of nowhere there wouldn’t be a secret military connection. But I realize that’s not true.

A mile or so outside of town is the old radar base. Carmi Air Force Station was built in 1955 by the 704th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, with the mission of filling in the gaps for the 784th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron at Snow Mountain AFS, KY, assigned to protect Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Most of the gap fillers were unmanned. The base at Carmi sported a AN/TPS-1D radar set. It was a small, extremely portable unit, and could be mounted on a truck. Or it could be broken down into packages and carried by ship or cargo plane. It was ideal for carrying to the front lines because it was so portable, and so small. In fact, it could be carried by pack animals or even on foot with enough people.

So why is it that for the year that the base was in operation, there were about 120 people stationed here? And why was it a manned station when the others were unmanned? Why was the unit disbanded when they left Carmi?

Suddenly there was a cut in the budget and the base was abandoned.

Perhaps whatever they were building out here was completed, and they moved on to the next location. It’s hard to fathom why they needed so many soldiers to run such a small station here in the middle of nowhere. As with anything military related, there might be a good reason, there might not, but you’ll never known because it’s a need to know thing.

My lady lived in Missouri in the late sixties, an Air Force brat. She lived there for about a year, while her dad was helping to install a computer system. In all likelihood, it was part of the missile defense system for Kansas City or St. Louis. It took about a year, and then they moved on to the next location.

The obvious suspicion for the radar base is to support missile silos, and as I said, there have been rumors of those in this area for a long time. A silo is pretty low maintenance once built, and is of course underground. A look at the historic aerial images of the base does show some suspicious round markings, which you’d find at a silo site. They remained visible until that area was dug up by the government in the eighties or nineties to remove some old diesel tanks, underground. The area is now covered with gravel.

Like all good conspiracy theories, it can’t be proven true or false. But it does explain a rocket in a blue sky that shouldn’t have been there.

UFOs and secret experiments are the opposite sides of the same coin. Thoughts of UFOs, of strange creature like Bigfoot or Godzilla even, open our minds to possibilities. Our mistrust of secrecy, particularly from the government makes for easy explanations for phenomenon that by nature, can’t be explained.

When you’ve identified a UFO, it’s simply a flying object. And where’s the fun in that?

Whilst writing this article I walked over to the spot where I saw the rocket and took a photo. Obviously the missile here is dropped in, but it’s pretty close to what I remember seeing.

The UFO which needed a quart of oil

It’s a spring night and I’m sitting out on the patio with Todd Lane, my musical partner and hetero life-mate. We’re talking about the rocket, my new conspiracy theory regarding its origins, and things in the sky, looking upwards at the stars. I think of my friend back in New York, Lou, fighting cancer now. He always wished he could come back here with me sometime to see the stars without the glare from the city lights.

Lou, the view is great and you’re always invited.

We hear a noise in the night, sounds like a car that needs oil, clacking along the empty streets. It gets louder and we realize it’s not a car, it’s in the sky. About then two red lights and a white one appear over the trees. It disappears again behind some more trees, then turns a corner and we see it off to the south. It looks like a drone, sounds like drone even, though a bit sputtery. It could be just over on the other side of the house, or a bit further away even and larger than it looks.

I’m reminded of the first time I saw sky lanterns, a few years back. All I saw was a flaming light in the sky, which suddenly changed course and zoomed off. Followed by another. And another. I called the police, and only later learned what it was when my kid explained it. The sharp turn in direction and speeding off happened because they caught a draft.

It blew my mind that night though.

We’re watching the light, and about that time it shoots up higher in the sky and hovers there. The three lights are vertical, two white ones on top, a red one on bottom. It was then we realize it was hovering, and doing so silently.

For a few seconds we watch it, asking “what the hell is that?” Then the buzzing commences again and it turns and flies off, quickly.

The first thing we both think is drone. Then I ask, how did they shut the motor off when it was hovering? That’s the question he had. Turn off a drone’s motor in mid flight and it falls like a rock. And how else do you make a noisy drone go quiet than to shut off the motor?

I’m sure there is a logical explanation for the drone hovering silently that night, just as there is a logical reason for the rocket I saw streaking through the sky as a child. Personally I don’t care to know. I’m content for the flying objects in my sky to remain unidentified.

What to wear on weird Long Island

SHOP

The Legends and Myths of Sweet Hollow and Mount Misery: Part III, Research on the asylums of Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow

Behind Urban Legends, Haunted Hikes, Haunted Towns and Cities, Mary Hatchet, Mt. Misery and Sweet Hollow Road, Terrestrial Anomalies, Extra-terrestrial visitors, hairy monsters, abandoned asylums and assorted weird tales, The Legends & Myths of Mount Misery & Sweet Hollow Road

Mount Misery, West Hills County Park, Melville, Town of Huntington, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York — Mount Misery, Halloween, 2008

“So why have I lived my whole life on Long Island, less than twenty minutes from here, and have never heard of Mount Misery, if it’s supposed to be such a paranormal hotspot?” Miss Bronwen asked, looking out over the valley below. “I’ve heard of West Hills County Park, I’ve even heard of Sweet Hollow Road, but I never heard any mention of this place until you started prattling on about it.”

We were sitting atop the southern end of Mount Misery, having entered the nature preserve across the cemetery on Sweet Hollow Road and then heading up. This is the less frequented area of West Hills County Park, south of Northern State Parkway.

“In short,” I replied after giving it some thought, “blame it on the internet. “It should be said, because there is so much bullshit going around about this area, that there is no Mount Misery. According to legend, Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow Road have been haunted as long as anyone can remember. Supposedly the native Americans who lived around here considered Mount Misery no man’s land. They spoke of strange lights which appeared on it, livestock disappearing on its slopes, as well as mysterious creatures spotted in the woods. Which might explain why they had no hesitation about trading it to the early settlers The old Indian path which is now Old Country Road was one of their main thoroughfares, and the ridge of what people call Mount Misery begins to rise just to the north of that. When the settlers found they had to cross it, at least according to legend, they had a hard go of it, as you saw from just hiking up here. You can imagine how tough it would be with a wagon, or carrying supplies, hence the name Mount Misery.”

I rambled on, “According to the surely honorable James Truslow Adams, back in 1916, this whole area up to Jayne’s Hill, which was then called High Hill, was actually known as Mannetto Hills. Then there was West Hills over there, Dix Hills beyond and …

She yawned.

Autumn in Mannetto Hills, overlooking West Hills

“I’m only telling you all this because I know you’re kinky for geography.”

“Oh yes,” she replied flatly. “And cartography makes me wet.”

“Mount Misery has always been the road, not a specific height. As such, anything in this area could be said to be on Mount Misery. Which has caused a lot of confusion over the years. Here’s an example. Over there, west of Mt. Misery Rd. used to stand Highhold, the estate of the Secretary of War during the second big one, Henry L. Stimson. Whenever you find a reference to it, it’s said to be in West Hills. And if you look at a topographic map …”

“Swoooon” she moaned.”

“You’ll see that there is no way that the land under Mt. Misery Rd. is the same hill, from north to south. It’s undulating hills. I have a geographical paper on the makeup of the earth here, that’s to die for, and it lays out the area pretty clearly. With no mention of any Mount Misery.”

“And the only reference to Mount Misery I’ve even seen as an area rather than a road, has it over west of the road around where Highhold stood. With West Hills to the north rather than the east.”

The sun was setting on the afternoon before Halloween, and the autumnal leaves were taking on red and golden hues. It was hard to believe as we looked out over what appeared to be wilderness, that we were looking out over one of the busiest highways on Long Island. The view from here is sudden and surprising, the trees hiding the numerous houses of the well to do, the park and the valley below seeming to be nothing but unbroken forest, rising again in the distance as Walt Whitman’s West Hills.

“What does a bunch of pre-colonial era legends have to do with the internet?” Miss Bronwen asked.

I continued, “It all seems to begin and end with Bill Knell.”

“Who in the hell is Bill Knell?” she groaned.

“Glad you asked,” I replied. “He used to run a site called ‘The UFO Guy, as well as about a million others,’ and has written on a variety of bizarre topics which can be found online. His reputation, if it could be said that he has one, is that he’s a writer you wouldn’t normally trust. Even one of his kids said he’s a bullshitter when it comes to his writing. And then there’s the whole video piracy thing. In short, normally if he told you a fantastic story, you wouldn’t take the time to put on hiking boots to check it out for yourself. Unless your hiking outfit also includes aluminum foil hats.”

“Then aside from the view,” she asked, “why are we up here?”

I answered, “In folklore there is usually some truth. As Mr. Knell seems to have a habit of working off of other people’s research, he played a pivotal part in keeping the legends of this area alive. He’s an online authority on Mount Misery because he was the first person to get this stuff up there. Even if it was bullshit.”

“We know a lot of his ‘inspiration’ came from John Keel and his book “The Mothman Prophecies. Who got much of his information from Jaye Paro, a Long Island DJ in the sixties who wrote for an obscure, sensationalist pulp magazine, specializing in UFOs, ghosts and anything bizarre. It’s possible Knell did some research of his own, and possible he just made the rest up. My guess is he had all these elements and wove them together into a more or less coherent history of a place.”

“His claims include a couple of insane asylums built early on someplace on Mount Misery, as well as a military hospital, built in the 1940s. In addition to that he claims it’s a hotspot of UFO activity, Men in Black and even the Mothman of The Mothman Prophecies fame.”

“You mean that dreadful Richard Gere flick?” she asked.

“That’s the one, though to be honest I kind of liked it. The movie is of course based on the book by John Keel, and the Mothman, who gets short shrift in the film is supposedly a regular on Mount Misery. When I first started coming here I was convinced this was an ancient story, because it said so on the internet. That was before I realized what I read online is just Knell’s stuff endlessly rehashed. Or even my own now, which was based on his writing as well.”

Miss Bronwen zipped up her jacket and stood up, stretching. “So does Mr. Bill offer any evidence to back up his claims?”

“Not really,” I replied. “He cites sources, but those are notoriously difficult to pin down. Much of what he writes appears to be rehashing of urban legends, from many different places around the country, and perhaps – how to say this delicately – while displaying a staggering lack of knowledge about Mount Misery’s geography.”

“Usually people refer to the valley down there as Sweet Hollow, which itself isn’t exactly correct, and the highlands to the west of it as Mount Misery. Knell certainly does. And for the sake of argument, I’ll buy that. After all, an early settler coming out of the plains and seeing a ridge of hills wouldn’t necessarily know the geography well enough to know what he was facing. All that would have been important to him was “ugh, big damn hill to get over.” Further confusing the issue, he speaks of Mount Misery being a main route used to cross through the area, but he certainly can’t mean Mt. Misery Rd., as it runs today. It’s definitely not shown on DeWitt’s map of 1802, but I do believe it’s on the Traveler’s Map of 1847, which seems to show both it and Sweet Hollow Road, though not labelled. But it only shows the northern most section.”

“Mt. Misery Rd. stretches from the end of Chichester Road to the north, down to Old Country Road to the south, but it’s cut in half like a snake by Northern State Parkway. If we were to hike down the trail to the west, we’d come out at the top end of the southern section, which is a water facility for Suffolk County and a day camp for children. When it starts up on the other side of the parkway, it’s a dirt road for hikers and horses only for about a third of a mile, before it’s once again paved. Somewhere in there you leave Mannetto Hills and enter West Hills.”

“But I believe it was only a continuous road from the late 19th century till the Parkway came in, and I’m guessing the section that is a dirt track now never was paved. Or hadn’t been for long, as Secretary Stimson used to hold his Highland Games up there, which was very much an equestrian pursuit, until the 1920s when the roads were finally paved. And Northern State Parkway came in during the thirties.”

Mount Misery, Melville, New York, Halloween, 2008

“Right where the dirt track turns to pavement on Mt. Misery Rd., at the infamous 666 log, there’s a trail which goes to the east. That trail, winds through the woods a bit and picks up another dirt track, which is the culmination of Gwynne Road, which of course is paved from Sweet Hollow Road over to 110. And that I believe is the original road – the dirt trail from the Gwynne Road/Sweet Hollow intersection was likely the miserable section – and from that trail north on today’s Mt. Misery Rd., up to Chichester. At least that’s what appears to be shown on the Traveler’s Map of 1847.”

“I’m guessing this isn’t going to be the most exciting story you’ve ever told me?” Miss Bronwen asked, arching an eyebrow.

Colyer House on Mt. Misery Road — THe Colyer House was built by Walt Whitman’s father for the poet’s uncles, and has stood on Mt. Misery Road since 1819

“You’re guessing right. The Coyler house on the road there was built about 1819 by Walt Whitman’s father, so we know the road was in existence by then, even if it was just a farm road. But we don’t know how well travelled or developed those roads were. In fact, when Whitman visited the house in 1850, they reached it by hiking ‘across lots,’ rather than taking the roads from Jericho Turnpike, which would have included Mt. Misery Rd if it was there. Most of the existing residences from that time, especially those built by the Whitman family, are further east. And of course that’s where Route 110 eventually became the dominant north/south highway in the area. As far as Mount Misery being a major crossroads as Knell says, I just don’t see it. And then there’s the military hospital …”

“Ha! I did a Google search on Mount Misery before we came here and who should come up but you,” Miss Bronwen called out triumphantly. “Are you’re saying now that your claim to fame is based on bogus information?”

“I believe so,” I replied. “According to Knell’s story, the hospital was built to care for the wounded from World War II, but there wasn’t enough of a demand. It was closed down, then reopened mysteriously in the fifties. He supposedly spoke to a fellow who was stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who took sick and was sent to the hospital on Mount Misery. Most of his time was spent in a fog, then he suddenly recovered, and as he left the facilities he saw a sign which said “Area 5.” Back in North Carolina he was told Area 5 was for psychological warfare testing, and not to ask any more questions. Likely part of the MKUltra Project. Of course the fellow is never named, and that’s the only story Knell offers as evidence. He goes on to say after the hospital was closed, voices were heard coming from it, as well as lights being spotted inside. Supposedly in the seventies some teenagers broke in and fell down an elevator shaft, and were seriously injured. And after that it was torn down.”

Some of the remaining buildings of Edgewood Pychiatric Center, once a part of the U.S. Military’s Mason General Hospital, on the Pilgrim Psych campus on Long Island. Close to Mt. Misery, it’s likely the inspiration for the rumors of a military hospital which practiced mind control experiments on Mt. Misery.

“But?” Miss Bronwen asked, leaving the question hanging in the air.

“But I can’t find any evidence that there was ever a hospital here,” I continued. “It’s certainly not apparent on overhead photos of the area from the fifties through the eighties. It wasn’t supposed to be all that large, but there aren’t many places here that it could have existed. I’ve only spoken to a couple of locals who have heard of it, and they heard of it of course, off the internet. The only other independent mention of it that I know of was supposed to be from a project on West Hills County Park, carried out by a boy scout. Supposedly he found some oblique references to ‘the hospital’ in the papers of the family that donated the land for the park. But I never saw that report.”

“And the other locals you’ve asked?” Miss Bronwen asked.

“Never heard of it,” I replied. “Including several people who lived in the area all their lives. Knell and others attribute this to the fact that it’s supposed to be a secret, and that the locals don’t want people snooping around. The Scooby Doo theory if you will. ‘We would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those darned kids!’ And it makes the whole thing seem quite eerie. The more people you ask, the higher the wall of silence becomes. Until you start to realize, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s just that the story probably isn’t true.”

Miss Bronwen nodded, “And so the whole military hospital story is a fabrication?”

“A case of mistaken identity,” I replied. “The 1947 Huntington Town Planners Map shows no hospital. And since that was just after the end of the war, I would expect it to be on there, if it in fact existed. Remember, it wasn’t a secret at that time. However, John Leita author of Long Island Oddities told me his theory on it, which makes a lot of sense. He believes the hospital was actually Mason General Hospital, or Edgewood, which was carved out of Pilgrim Psych, and was located in Deer Park.”

“It was built in the forties, used as a military hospital in World War II for the treatment of traumatized soldiers afterwards, and closed up in the seventies.”

“So maybe the story has an element of truth, just the wrong location?” she asked.

“Exactly. Why would they even need a hospital on Mount Misery for mind control experiments, when they had a huge facility equipped to do that less than ten minutes away? Now why Bill Knell wouldn’t know this I can’t say. Supposedly he knows where on Mount Misery the hospital stood, and even stated the steps leading to the hospital are still there. I mean I spent god knows how many days looking for those steps out here, as well as other people. And no one that I’ve heard of has ever found anything that can’t be explained.”

“And the location you found which is listed on Google as being a possible site of the Mount Misery Military Hospital?” she asked with a smirk. “Maybe that was the older asylum that people talk about?.”

“That’s pretty unlikely,” I answered. “According to the legends, the first asylum was built and burned in the 1700s, which is almost certainly poppycock. A second asylum was supposedly built and burned again, sometime later, but I find it hard to believe that the foundations would be visible from either the eighteenth or nineteenth century. And if it was here in the twentieth century, or even the late nineteenth century, there would be records of it.”

“Why do you say the asylum story is poppycock, other than you like using that word?” she asked.

“Okay, so the legend is that back in the 1700s there was a lunatic asylum built on Mount Misery. As the care for the insane was so poor, actually brutal, it was built here, far from towns and villages so the screams of the patients wouldn’t bother the locals. Others say they brought patients from New York City out here, but remember, there wasn’t even a decent road back then. According to the legend, it was burned down by one of the inmates, the infamous Mary, with all the patients and workers inside. Some time later it was rebuilt, and in another legend, once again burned down, and again blamed on the hapless Mary, though we presume a different Mary this time.”

“Mary certainly was resilient,” Miss Bronwen said.

“She’s the legend who will not die here,” I replied.

“In the early 1700s, this area was part of the British colonies. Psychiatric care was in its infancy, and asylums were rare. Had there been one here, it would have been quite unique, and would no doubt have been documented. Typically, people cared for the mentally ill at home. It’s entirely possible that there was an early farmer in the area who had one or more members of his family that suffered from mental illnesses. And perhaps, as according to the legend, the house burned down, killing all who lived there. Most myths and legends spring from some grain of truth after all. But you have to remember, during this time there were very few people living in the area. I believe in about 1800, there were only 45 residents. Huntington was still small as well. New York City was a few days ride away, and of course the difficulty of getting people up Mount Misery has already been spoken of. There simply wasn’t the population here to warrant an asylum, nor the staff to work there, and it was too far away from the population centers, with too poor of roads to make it feasible to send patients here.”

Walking through the woods on Mount Misery, you often come across strange places like this one, which looks ideal for UFO landings. The haunting mood of the place tickles the imagination.

“So there was no sanitarium on Mount Misery?” she asked, sounding a bit disappointed.

“There I believe you might be hitting on another truth. The word sanitarium. People tend to associate the word sanitarium with asylums for the insane, but in the past, this wasn’t the case at all. A sanitarium was simply a place which housed people with chronic, or often, contagious diseases. And the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were rife with epidemics of one sort or another. Cholera was a big one, scarlet fever, typhoid, influenza, all were great killers, and all spread quickly.

“Here’s a story … Back home there was this big old abandoned house out in the country. And according to the stories, it used to be an asylum. Built in the the middle of nowhere for the same reason as this one. Eventually I asked the right person, and found it it was in fact once used as a sanitarium for cholera patients. The family who lived there were stricken by the disease, and were quarantined. As it was a large house with lots of rooms, when other people in the area took ill with the disease, they were sent to that house as well for quarantine. Eventually, all the inmates either die or recover and were released. That building survived, but quite often as the buildings were viewed as being diseased, they were burned.”

“And I suppose it wouldn’t be unheard of for the buildings to be burned with the patients still inside, if someone in the area was afraid of the disease spreading,” she said with a shudder.

“Christ, I never thought of that,” I replied. “Aren’t you the macabre one? But you’re certainly right. And it would fit in with the legends. Of course I don’t know of any evidence of that happening here. That’s the problem with the story of the asylums on Mount Misery, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence one way or another. There’s a comprehensive list of sanitariums in operation as of 1914 and there are none listed in the area. So if there was a sanitarium here, it wasn’t very large, and certainly not state or public funded. A quarantine house perhaps, but nothing more.”

“What about cemeteries and death records?” she asked.

“Good point. If you look at the records of Melville Cemetery on Sweet Hollow Road you do find clusters of deaths during certain periods. And one giveaway for epidemics is to look for multiple deaths among babies, infants and the very old. You find several babies and children dying in and around 1881 for instance, or 1935-36, but probably not enough to warrant a sanitarium strictly for epidemic purposes. Still, what you have to remember, is we’re dealing with legends and myths. And it only takes a grain of truth to start the whole process. A single freak of a moment that gets remembered because it’s so unusual or so horrific. Like one large family, quarantined in their house with some deadly disease, one of the family members forgets to blow out a lamp, the house burns down, and a hundred years later the story is transformed into an insane asylum, with one of the inmates burning the place down with all the patients and workers burned to death.”

“And no historic records of asylums in the area? What about poor houses?” Miss Bronwen asked. “People with mental issues were often housed in those.”

“Between 1650 and 1799 there are only three public asylums, or almshouses on record in the state of New York that I’ve found. Two in New York City and one in Albany. Between 1800 and the end of that century, the only public almshouses and asylums nearby that I can find is one in Amityville, and the Jones Institute, which I believe was around Hicksville. According to its census of the time, the Jones Institute was for accommodation of the poor that came from Oyster Bay and North Hempstead. They had ‘four idiots’ – one male, three female, and three who were blind. And incidently, when it was in full swing, it only had four employees. So a large asylum with lots of workers is certainly a myth. I did find mention that some of the communities of the area moved the poor or those who were considered ‘idiots’ into farms in rural communities, and it’s possible that some of them might have found their way to farms in the Mount Misery or West Hills area. But that’s certainly not an asylum, and as I said, I can find no record of this happening. Just to the south and west, between Old Country Road and Round Swamp Road, which is only a few miles from here, was the Nassau County Sanitarium, which was a tuberculosis ward. And that would be in Knell’s definition of Mount Misery. But that dates from the 1930s, and it certainly never burned down. Still, perhaps that somehow became the nucleus for the asylum on Mount Misery?”

Night falls on Mount Misery at Halloween

Miss Brownwen stood up and stretched, her arms reaching up towards the darkening sky.

“It’s getting dark,” she said. “And even if there were no asylums, no loonies burned alive, no mothmen and no UFOs, I don’t really want to go down that hill in the pitch black.”

I stood up as well and picked up our knapsack.

“I suppose you’re right, but can you really think of any better place to be on Halloween, than the haunted South Woods of Mount Misery?”

Miss Bronwen grinned and started back for the trail.

“Well, they say misery loves company,” she said.

What to wear on weird Long Island

SHOP

The Legends and Myths of Sweet Hollow and Mount Misery: Part IV, On UFOs and Men in Black on Mount Misery

Long Island, Mt. Misery and Sweet Hollow Road, The Legends & Myths of Mount Misery & Sweet Hollow Road

Mount Misery in Snow — Towards the top of Mannetto Hills and Mount Misery

Dearest Miss Bronwen,

I never had the opportunity to finish telling you about the men in black, and grey as well, and I knew you would spend the rest of your life wondering about them.

You know the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen on Mount Misery? This winter when I hiked up there alone during the snow – you know how I hate going up that hill at the best of times. But when I got to the top and was going down the trail I found I was following a footprint. A single footprint. Somehow, a one legged person had made it up there, and without benefit of cane or crutch. For as long as I cared to follow it there was that single footprint. I still can’t explain that one …

___________________________________________

Walking in the woods at night is creepy enough. There’s nothing more terrifying and lethal than nature itself. The supernatural gives an otherworldly kind of fear to the journey. But add in the fear of abduction and that brings a sense of reality to your fears.

It’s not unusual for a remote, wooded place to take on the reputation of being dangerous. It likely started with mothers warning their kids away from places like that, the mommy lies.

My personal theory is horror movies of the late sixties and early seventies gave people something new to fear. Abduction by occult groups. That a TV movie, Satan’s School For Girls could account for a rise in reports of devil worshippers should come as no surprise. After the popularity of UFO flicks in the fifties, reports of those rose as well.

Mount Misery became a place afflicted with devil worshippers. That term of course means nothing. Actual Satanist are harmless. People stoned out of their gourds pretending to worship some evil being are another matter altogether. But you don’t find a lot of examples of this in the annals of crime. Even Manson after all, had political motives.

Devil worshippers need blood and Mount Misery has a legendary history of cattle mutilations, going way back. I can find no historical trace of this, just online anecdotes. So with devil worshippers in the mind, these mutilations become attached to them with the advent of the internet.

But go further back and it’s UFOs to blame, government secrecy, and perhaps, alien secrecy.

The birth of the Mothman and Men in Black

If the legends of the Mothman and Men in Black have a father, it is John Keel. Keel’s history as an author began in the 1950s with a book on the mysteries of India. Returning to the states he became immersed in the study of UFOs and all things paranormal.

Keel was a prolific writer who wasn’t blessed with particularly lofty ideals. A hack in other words. As a screenwriter he claimed to have written scripts for Get Smart, The Monkees, and Lost in Space. And as a writer of pulp fiction, among countless others, he wrote an article titled “Are You A Repressed Sex Fiend?”

As you might guess, after reading the article I realized the obvious. I’m not repressed.

Wikipedia states that “Keel popularized the term “Men in Black” in an article for the men’s adventure magazine Saga.”

Perhaps that was part of his appeal. Equal parts UFO hunter and Raymond Chandler, his writing is easy to read and he has a knack for keeping you turning the pages. He tells a compelling story too.

In the article Mothman: An Exposé, Ed Grabianowski puts it succinctly, “He crafted a far-flung, imaginative tale of government conspiracy, beings from other dimensions, creepy men in black trying to suppress Mothman witnesses, with Mothman flying above it all as an avatar of disaster and tragedy.”

And it worked not only in West Virginia, where most of the book takes place, but on Mount Misery as well.

By 1967 he had abandoned the idea that UFOs were extraterrestrials, and instead began forming a construct that they were a form of invisible intelligence that manifests itself in whatever manner the visitee happens to believe. His concept, which isn’t easy to understand and even harder to explain, attempts to tie everything from fairies to vampires to the mysterious sightings on Mt. Misery to this invisible intelligence. He came up with the term “utlraterrestrials,” and pushed forth the idea that they are actually of this world, but an advanced civilization living here among us.

Now to me, the concept that Melville could be a hotbed of an advanced civilization seems a bit of a reach, though the bacon cheeseburger at the Sweet Hollow Diner is indeed out of this world.

And yet in “The Mothman Prophecies, that’s just what Keel describes. “An elderly woman who lived alone in a house near the summit of Mount Misery, the highest point on Long Island, had received a visit from this quartet in early April 1967, immediately after a severe rainstorm.

“They had high cheekbones and very red faces, like a bad sunburn,” she told me. “They were very polite but they said my land belonged to their tribe and they were going to get it back. What frightened me was their feet. They didn’t have a car … they must have walked up that muddy hill … but their shoes Were spotlessly clean. There was no trace of mud or water where they walked in my house.”

That same week another visitor came to Mount Misery. This was a woman with striking white hair who claimed to represent a local newspaper. She carried a book “like a big ledger” and asked the witness a number of personal questions about her family background. When I later checked ‘with the newspaper I found they employed no one of that description.

The local Mount Misery expert was Miss Jaye P. Paro, a radio personality then with station WBAB in Babylon, New York. Miss Paro is a dark-haired, dark-eyed young lady with a soft,

haunting voice. At that time she conducted an interview show, largely devoted to the historical and psychic lore of the region.”

Paro feeds Keel inspiration from the radio waves

As a popular DJ with listeners tuning in for the latest on UFOs and other Long Island mysteries, she found herself inundated with tips from callers.

Paro told Keel that through one of those tips, she had made contact with two aliens named Apol and Agar.

He recorded in his notes … “During the week of Sept. 3rd. Jaye encountered an old man wandering around Mt. Misery. She talked with him and found him very frightened. He knew all about the house and was terrified of the people. He said they were going to kill him and his wife. He was a contactee but had ‘talked’ and now he fears being taken.”

“Later, when Jaye met him again his face was all black and blue. He said they had beaten him up. Every night, he says, something disappears from his home (he lives on Mt. Misery, near the school). Tables, sewing machines, furniture, etc. are gone when he and his wife wake up in the morning. He believes that when everything has vanished from the house, then he and his wife will go too.”

And from his notes of September 29, 1967, a Friday … “Early this evening Jaye visited the Mt. Misery base and found six terrestrials there. … At one point, one of the communication devices suddenly went on and

a voice delivered a message to Appell and the others. The Aliens became upset over this message and told Jaye that it meant that the moth man was coming to Long Island soon.

I have the unhappy feeling that some new trouble is brewing out there.”

And then on February 22, “Bewildered neckers reported strange activity in broad daylight around the mount. Cars, mostly old models, going down the dirt roads and disappearing. Tim’na went to investigate. Found the area inundated with dogs of all sizes and kinds. Hundreds of dogs along the roads. They seemed to be just milling around. Did not run out into the road as dogs normally would do.”

“Tim’na went back later that deg and all the dogs were gone. She also reported seeing cars of people in trance-like states. She did not attempt to speak to any of them.”

A more recent UFO siting on Mount Misery

There are a considerable number of direct UFO reports in the area, which seem to me to be pretty reputable. Even if we don’t know what they saw, as the Long Island sky is full of moving lights.

Emily Binder, 64 reported that she saw a triangular UFO with a bright light on each tip, moving towards Mount Misery in 2017.

Ms Binder went on to say “I sat in my car at the stop sign and just watched the UFO,” says Blinder, a retired insurance customer service representative who admits feeling uneasy whenever she is near Mount Misery because, like a lot of people, she believes the woods are haunted. “Then I followed it as best I could, but it moved off to Mount Misery and was gone.”

Blinder describes the craft she saw for at least 30 seconds as having “no exhaust signature nor wings — and was silent.”

My own introduction to Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow Road came from a coworker, who told me about some odd occurrences up there in the mid seventies.

Towards Gwynne Road, once Mt. Misery Road

He used to drive those two roads with friends, the ideal roads to smoke a joint. It was isolated, never any cops and creepier than hell.

He told me they were cruising up there one night, and they’d just lit the joint, came around the curve and was confronted with the United States military. He said the rumor was it had something to do with a UFO crash in the woods on Mount Misery, it stayed closed off for a few days and they had to toss the joint out the window.

The official explanation he later heard was that they were National Guard training sessions. But he swears it wasn’t National Guard blocking the road.

One of the bands he played on his eight track while he cruised the roads was Blue Oyster Cult. What he didn’t know was their guitarist, Buck Dharma was living in the area and had just written Don’t Fear The Reaper here. He had the music for another song, but no lyrics till their manager, Sandy Pearlman brought him these:

I hear music, daylight disc
Three men in black said, dont report this
Ascension, and thats all they said
Sickness now, the hours dread …

Dead leaves always give up motion
I no longer feel emotion
Where prophecy fails, the falling notion
Dont report this, agents of fortune

All praise
He’s found the awful truth, Balthazar
He’s found the saucer news.

That song, E.T.I., along with Reaper appeared on their breakout album, Agents of Fortune in 1976. The lyrics are thought to describe the discovery of a UFO crash site and the government coverup that follows.

Towards Mannetto Hill from Mount Misery at sunset

Facts can be a poor substitute for faith, or how my eyes opened

“Mount Misery is the tallest point on Long Island and a place where several towns intersect. “
Bill Knell

I had been hiking in the West Hills and in the Mount Misery area for over a year, and I was sitting on top of Jayne’s Hill, the highest point on Long Island. It used to be called High Hill, and even an outsider like myself knows that fact. There’s even a marker at the top, a tribute to Walt Whitman.

That’s when it hit me. How did Bill Knell and John Keel before him both get this wrong?

Bill Knell is another of the authorities on Mount Misery. Mainly by virtue of being one of the first people on the internet to talk about it. His website went down years ago, so you can’t even see his research. Just quotes on other sites. That makes the tale even more mysterious.

I point this out because it’s important when discussing things like UFOs, Men in Black and the paranormal in general, to take into consideration the reliability of the source. Most of the evidence is hearsay at best, often many generations old in its telling.

Online, the problem is even worse.

There is no Mount Misery per se, just a road with that name that travels over a number of hills. None of them are Jayne’s Hill.

Bill Knell took from Keel, and it’s my guess neither of them ever walked to the top of Jayne’s Hill. And might never have driven down Mt. Misery Road either.

So if Knell fails on even basic geography what does that say for the rest of Knell’s story, and Keel’s before him?

Keel’s source on Mount Misery, Jaye P. Paro, came to his attention as the author of an article on the area which was published in Beyond magazine in July 1969

So I have to admit that I’m a bit skeptical about Beyond and other magazines which were popular in the sixties, that tried to pull off folklore, storytelling and downright fiction as fact. Also, much of Keel’s work has been thrown into question by people who have investigated his writings, and noticed that certain tales seem to change over time with his telling of them, and he eventually confessed he was simply a hack writer, trying to make a buck.

Keel wasn’t the first to write about the Mothman. That was Gray Barker, who predated Keel with the Men in Black in the article They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, published in The Silver Bridge in 1970.

Keel and Barker were rivals at first, which then degenerated into what Ed Grabianowski reports as “the two authors accusing each other of being androids in league with the MiBs.”

The two eventually made up and in a letter written by Barker to Keel, the author claimed they were just “taking the piss” out of the public. “The kookie books are about all that I can sell these days. I lost the ‘sensible’ subscribers … long ago, so I get a kick out of letting it reflect the utter mental illness of the field.”

The men in black stories are so poorly documented, and so strange as to be laughable. The representative of an advanced race who writes to Keel can’t seem to master, or even be proficient at basic spelling. Keel’s experts and witnesses, and Knell’s as well since he seems to draw exclusively from Keel, have all seem to have disappeared without a trace, and when you do find references to them the reference invariably leads back to Keel. He does refer to articles in various magazines, most of which he had connections with, with the same lack of integrity as Beyond magazine. Of course, that the sources have disappeared is only further proof for those who see a conspiracy in keeping this evidence surpressed. And who knows? Perhaps they’re right. But unless the government or the M.I.B.s themselves open up the archives, we’ll never know.

Sitting there on top of Jayne’s Hill with the sun going down, I realized I’d been had. The tales of the Mothman, the tragic tales of the asylums, the secret military hospital the Men in Black and UFO sightings were all likely a good story, well told by writers adept at spinning a tale which would hook a certain cult of readers.

I was just one of countless people who had hiked these trails looking for answers to mysteries that didn’t even exist. Those that did were misplaced, misremembered and often didn’t even happen here.

So why as I walked back down the hill into the shadows of the trees, did I still feel afraid?

How did Mount Misery become infamous?

I remember the mid to late sixties, when a lot of these stories seem to have sprung up. The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits had just gone off the air, but had made an impression on popular culture. Godzilla and his son, Ghidorah, Mothra and others were rampaging through the cinema, and of course there was the whole space program and the race to the moon, along with the underlying fear of the Ruskies getting up there and putting nuclear weapons in space.

Rural areas are often beset by strange lights in the skies and strange creatures on the ground. The area where I grew up had its own shaggy haired, bigfoot style monster, and I can recall mysterious lights in the skies one evening that kept the local police force quite busy. I remember one afternoon as a child, looking up into the sky, and I swear this is true, saw a rocket directly above me. Which might not be so odd after all, as there have been rumors that my area of southern Illinois was home to nuclear missile silos, which might have been used for testing. In short, there were odd things afoot for real, and when a populace is already stimulated to believe in such things, it doesn’t take much to set them off.

The internet is good at whipping people up into hysteria, even if in this case it’s a virtual hysteria. The more people talk about it, the more information there is to find on the subject. The more information, the more it seems legitimate.

And when the original source material is either lost or obscure, it just deepens the mystery, and makes it harder to see what the intent of the author was.

It’s my guess Keel and Paro knew that most people saw through their stories, but read them for their entertainment value. Mount Misery was an ideal subject as few people on Long Island even knew where it was. There was no reason to go there, unless you lived nearby.

But go there they do, a couple generations or more now. We go looking for a thrill, or a chill. We’re drawn to a mystery we’re pretty much convinced is based on bullshit, but it’s a lovely day in the woods at least.

That’s bullshit too. There is a aura of menace in the West Hills. Some go there and don’t feel a thing, but a lot of people pick up on that feeling of gloom so often reported. The first few times I went I didn’t know anything about the place, but my reaction at times bordered on terror. It’s an interesting woods, with twisting laurel trees and moss covered rocks edging the trails, but not a particularly happy place. It feels too ancient for that.

A walk through the forest of Mount Misery at night will certainly do that. And perhaps if you go, you’ll see something that can’t be explained. There’s certainly enough circumstantial and anecdotal evidence to suggest that something strange has gone on in this area for a long time. But like the flying object of the same name, whatever extraterrestrial or ultraterrestial life lurks on Mount Misery will for now remain, unidentified.

______________

I took my kid and my niece up there late one afternoon, to watch the sun set over the hills. Now my kid was probably seven or eight, and he knew most of the stories. My niece was older and like me, interested in history and mystery. We have to solve things whenever we can.

Of course as it grew darker, my kid was more concerned with the man who walks in the woods with a basket of human heads than MiBs. So we started down the hill.

But somehow I got turned around, and we found ourselves on a trail I’d never been on. It was summer, the mosquitoes had bred prodigiously and they were hungry. We were tasty. The sun had disappeared before we started down. It was now too dark to see the trail.

Now a rational mind will tell you if you go either east or west, or south even, you’re going to hit a road pretty soon. But try telling that to a scared eight year old when the trail refuses to run any direction for any length of time.

In the dark even I started to panic. Till finally the trail started climbing again, and I knew once we got to the top it would be easy to find our way back down again.

Even though one couldn’t help but imagine we were being led back to the top for a reason.

A year or so later I got an email from a reader asking for a tour of Mount Misery. At night. I checked out her social media accounts and she seemed sane enough. Plus she did mention paying. We agreed to meet at the Sweet Hollow Diner the following night.

She showed up driving a BMW, with her college age daughter in tow. We went inside, had one of those cheeseburgers you were always going on about, and she asked if I wanted to go there tonight.

She had, she said, a joint as well.

Obviously I agreed that this was the perfect night and we made our way up to the parking lot on top, and started walking. I think she got one hit in, her daughter two before the fear hit them. It does get damned dark up there, even on that broad, open trail. Perhaps that made it even more terrifying, to see that vast expanse of forest where it shouldn’t be, there in the middle of modern day Melville, with two of the busiest highways on Long Island cutting through in the distance, and still invisible from here.

For in the woods on Mount Misery at night, the present fades away and you find yourself in the past. Even if you don’t believe the legends, you can feel something up there that you just don’t feel other places.

It’s my guess that people have been feeling it there since before Europeans set food on Long Island.

There are more stories of course, but those will have to wait for a later, better day.

Till then I hope this finds you and yours very well, and I remain …

Yours
T

What to wear on weird Long Island

SHOP

Mt. Misery and Sweet Hollow Road

Sweet Hollow Road and Mt. Misery Rd: A tale of two woods

How the Mothman came to roost on Mount Misery

The burning schoolhouse and asylums of Sweet Hollow

The West Hill’s Lady in White … Mary of Sweet Hollow Road

The legends of Sweet Hollow Road from the modern era

Read more about Long Island’s Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow

What to wear on weird Long Island

The older asylums on Mount Misery

The ghost at the Peace and Plenty Inn

That bloody hatchet

Read more about Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow Road

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Aerial mysteries in the skies over New York

The Thunderbird metamorphoses into the Mothman

The bottom line

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The alien invasion of Carmi, Illinois or “Whoa Bub! Did you see that?”

An open minded non-believer

Project MKUltra reminds us the government is made up of people, and people often suck

The epicenter of UFO activity on Long Island … Mount Misery Road

John Keel takes Long Island mysteries mainstream

Bill Knell turns Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow Road into an internet phenomenon

The skeptical mind and the rise of UFO sightings in the 20th century

Drones take over as the UFO of choice

The little boy and the rocket

The UFO which needed a quart of oil

What to wear on weird Long Island

Read more about Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow Road

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The birth of the Mothman and Men in Black

Paro feeds Keel inspiration from the radio waves

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The skeptical mind and the rise of UFO sightings in the 20^th century