Members Editorial
Dover Demon
Members editorials are the expressed personal opinions of the members who wrote them and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of the Haunt Masters Club as a whole.
Paranormal Research & Investigation
Northeast Tennessee, Southwest Virginia & Western North Carolina
On the nights of April 21st and 22nd in Dover, Massachusetts, in 1977, there were three separate alleged sightings of something strange. Bill Bartlett and two other seventeen year-olds first sighted the creature as they were driving through the area, crawling along the wall of Farm Street. An hour later, fifteen year-old John Baxter apparently startled the creature, and it ran from him and hid underneath a tree. The next night, eighteen year-old Will Traintor and fifteen year-old Abby Brabham spotted the creature beside the road as Will was driving.
Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman was the first investigator to question the six teenagers and was the first to nickname the creature the “Dover Demon;” the press eventually made the name stick. When Bartlett, Baxter, Brabham and Traintor all drew pictures of the creature they had seen, he called in ufoologists Joseph Nyman, Ed Fogg, and Walter Webb. The teenagers had described a creature about the size of a goat, with a very large, watermelon-shaped head, rough, flesh-colored skin with no hair, long and slender arms and legs, and no nose or mouth. The only true difference in their stories was that the first three to have spotted the creature said it had glowing orange eyes when the car’s headlights had struck it, but Abby Brabham said it had had green eyes. It sounded very much like a Grey, the classic form of an alien most people envision.
Right away, skeptics began to pull the teenagers stories apart. Since they were kids, they thought, they must have been up to no good and concocted this story on their own. When it was discovered that one of the eye witnesses was a fan of science fiction, this seemed to seal the deal for most people. However, investigators and teachers did not feel the six were making it up. Some people began to say that it must have been an out-of-season baby moose that they had seen.
But, perhaps this creature is real and has been around for a very long time? The Cree Native North American Indians in Canada have a legend that little people, known as Mannegishim, or Gahonga, look very similar to this creature. However, in their mythos, these water sprites lived hidden between the rocks of rapids and enjoyed nothing more than capsizing canoes as they went by.
The story doesn’t seem to end there. In Chile in 2004, Germán Pereira was taking a picture of two Chilean national police. When he got the pictures back, he noticed something odd in that particular picture. Walking across the street, unbeknownst to the two policemen, was a small, flesh-colored, hairless creature with long, thin arms and legs. Some people say this may be the Dover Demon, who’s just moved on.
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