BY BARBARA CLARK
About 20,000 years ago, the massive Laurentide ice sheet that covered much of what is now Canada and the northern United States began its slow retreat after a stay of more than 2.5 million years, ending the last great Ice Age on the continent. One of the countless debris fields the glacier left behind turned out to be a unique, crooked arm of land that many hundreds of years later became a peninsula named Cape Cod.
That crooked arm was inhabited several thousand years later by the Wampanoag, or People of the First Light, a native tribe indigenous to the Northeast woodlands. The tribe lived lightly on the land, adapting to the wilderness around them, tuning their habits and habitats to the seasons and to the surrounding woodlands and ocean.
By the time European explorers and traders arrived in force in the 1600s the peninsula had developed into a gravelly, deeply forested terrain of oak, cedar and pine woodlands, expanses of marsh, glacial boulders, sandy soil, wind-blown dunes and deep kettle ponds that had formed when the ice melted hundreds of years before.
And there were legends. Lots of legends.
Creation tales and sacred spaces
Pukwudgie country? A trail marker in the Maple Swamp conservation area of East Sandwich, where a group of Cape Cod Community College students hiked recently to look for evidence that Pukwudgies, creatures of Wampanoag lore and legends, may inhabit the woodlands in that area. The students are members of a Crytids Club at the college, spearheaded by Tyler Daniels, an associate professor in communication at the school.
Over millennia, the stories told by the Wampanoag people embodied the spirits and forces they experienced during their daily lives in an ocean-framed homeland.
In the “spirits” category, the giant Maushop was a beneficent power. He created Cape Cod’s neighbor islands Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard simply by dropping his giant-sized moccasins into the sea. Maushop taught the Wampanoag people to make use of the earth’s gifts to build their homes and canoes, and showed them how to create tools to hunt and fish, thus ensuring their survival.
An essay in the book “Spirit of the New England Tribes” includes detailed legends of Wampanoag life and culture. One of them described Maushop-type folk figures as “culture heroes”—“great benevolent beings and helpers of mankind.” Maushop “killed monsters that infested the land, and gave man the arts that made life worth living.”
The Mashpee Wampanoag also had Granny Squannit, a “dominant figure in Mashpee folklore” who has often been invoked as an enforcer for disobedient kids (“If you’re not good, Granny Squannit will get you”). She is tiny but powerful, and has always looked kindly on offerings of food left for her in the forest.
Despite his own size and power, Maushop—and the Wampanoags in turn—often had trouble contending with small but fearsome resident creatures called Pukwudgies, or Little People, local tricksters who could wreak havoc on those who disrespected them or tried to minimize their power.
European settlers add stories to the mix
For the European traders who came to Cape Cod in the 17th century, nature was not beneficent, but posed a danger on all sides. European explorer Samuel de Champlain, who visited Cape Cod in 1605 while mapping the eastern coastline from Nova Scotia to southeastern New England, described the region’s challenging navigation hazards, noting its “shoals and sandbanks, where we saw breakers on every side.”
Of the Pilgrims’ arrival in 1620, anthropologist John Chenoweth wrote, “They were fundamentally looking for land to till,” envisioning themselves in a domestic, more-pastoral landscape in which “farming was a God-given duty,” one that “signaled [the landowner’s] moral virtue and his prosperity to his neighbors.”
These incoming settlers viewed the land as a wilderness to be “tamed,” in strict accordance with their particular religious views of good and evil. They believed they had a “right” to the land, which meant that the natives’ territory and objects were theirs to take or use in any way they chose, sometimes setting themselves in conflict with their surroundings. This in turn gave rise to another set of vivid myths and stories.
Overall, the unique features of Cape Cod enhanced a varied collection of legends and lore. For both Indigenous inhabitants and later settlers, tales of spirits and monsters often helped translate nature’s capriciousness, and found a receptive audience among those who made their home in what could often seem to be a desolate landscape.
It’s ‘still a remote place’ off-season
So says author and educator Robin Smith-Johnson, now a Mashpee resident, who was raised in Orleans in a house that had at one time been the town undertaker’s home on Main Street. Her interest in all things fanciful and mysterious was piqued in a family that loved teaching and storytelling. Her parents sold books and antiques from a barn attached to the house, and her father loved to tell stories about the old undertaker’s home and its past occupants, including tales of “overflow” bodies stored in the barn. Her childhood growing up across from uninhabited marshland also fueled Smith-Johnson’s interest in mystery and myth.
Now a member of the adjunct faculty in language and literature at Cape Cod Community College, Smith-Johnson has carried on her family’s storytelling tradition, as the author of two books, “Legends and Lore of Cape Cod” and “Cape Cod Curiosities.” They are collections of what she calls “oddments” and legends, compiled along with accounts of real-life blizzards, shipwrecks and regional murder mysteries that have drawn public interest for many years. Morefanciful legends invoke the paranormal world and delve into a rich collection of Cape Cod ghost lore. Sea monsters, shadowy night visitors, resident ghosts and other hauntings have all staked out a popular place in the local zeitgeist.
Cape Cod is also home to a number of creatures, called cryptids, that loom large in the local imagination. For those with limited creature education, cryptids are beings such as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, who present as potentially real flesh and blood, although as yet their existence is scientifically unproven. Here lie our popular stories of the Cape Cod creatures called Pukwudgies and the dark, mysterious Marsh People.
On the trail: Tyler Daniels, associate professor of communication at Cape Cod Community College, sets out for a hike in Maple Swamp, East Sandwich, with student members of his extra-curricular Cryptids Club, to search for evidence that the elusive creatures of Wampanoag legend, called Pukwudgies, may live in the woods there. They are rumored to reside in several Cape Cod woodland locations, from Sandwich to Mashpee. (L to R) : TJ Petronelli of East Falmouth; Tyler Daniels; Isabella Cantillano-Sanchez of West Yarmouth; Liz Struhs of Bourne.
Cape Cod’s favorite cryptids
A search for these you-never-knowthey-might-be-real-Pukwudgies of Wampanoag renown comes with many variations on what the elusive creatures could look like. They are pictured as about three feet tall but possess outsized magical powers, often sprouting horns and lots of body hair or similar spiky growths, prominent noses and claw-like fingers.
As shapeshifters and tricksters, they can present as colorful orbs of light whose luminescence lures the unsuspecting to their misery—or doom. Smith-Johnson’s son Ross has written about several mind-bending encounters he has experienced with these mystery lights. All his run-ins, he said, were “in the Mashpee woodlands, the spiritual center of the Town of Mashpee and a sacred and spiritual place to the Wampanoag Tribe.” Once, near the Mashpee River, “there was what looked like someone standing on a little bridge” with an unwavering light of “luminescent blue.” Another time, he and a companion witnessed an approaching light of “vivid blue…(It) then turned orange and then a dark red,” pausing only about 15 feet away from them. Naturally, he said, “We…got spooked and drove away.”
Recently, field trips in search of local cryptids have taken on something of an “official” look. Tyler Daniels is associate professor of communication on the faculty at Cape Cod Community College, and for him the subject of cryptids is something of a personal specialty.
Daniels has been drawn to the paranormal ever since he was a kid, and he’s interested in “anything that is mysterious and yet to be discovered,” or “obscure and off the beaten track.” His Cape Cod Cryptids Club at the college has been meeting weekly for almost two years, drawing an enthusiastic group to workshops and expeditions in search of a glimpse of any such flesh-and-blood creatures…somewhere on Cape Cod.
Recently, a small group from the Cryptids Club, along with Smith-Johnson and her camera, went on a search for the local Pukwudgies, traveling to Maple Swamp, a densely wooded 5.7-mile loop trail in East Sandwich, where it’s rumored the creatures may be in residence. The group found what appeared to be a small wooden shiv, its point expertly sharpened to a spearhead shape, and just right for a small creature’s hand to grasp. There were rustling sounds, clearly not from birds, and three trees had been felled across the trail, each one consecutively larger than the last— perhaps intended as a hindrance to the hikers. The group decided to stay strictly on the marked trail and not risk someone wandering off, at the mercy of the clever shapeshifters.
Another semester, the group, with assistance from the Barnstable Land Trust, took an expedition to the Eagle Pond and Little River Sanctuary in Cotuit, a 182-acre parcel that includes varying terrain and—it’s possible—a Bigfoot or two.
“There’s nothing wrong with a healthy dose of skepticism,” Daniels said. The intrigue of searching is not dependent on any “scientific findings” that might make the creatures’ existence credible to skeptics. Rather, he said, the fun of these expeditions lies in the possibility: “What if we DO find something?” It falls into the “things waiting to happen—or yet to be discovered” territory. Ultimately, he noted, it’s about the enjoyment of simply “exploring the unknown.”
Atmosphere, geography and the Marsh People of Barnstable
Macabre happenings have dotted the history of Cape Cod and its settlers, no strangers to death and illness, including the deadly diseases of smallpox, measles and influenza. The creation of stories and legends that invoked powerful beings helped early inhabitants make sense of the many challenges they faced, when death was a constant visitor. It hardly seems odd to picture such spirits presiding over markers and stones in the many graveyards, or roaming the hallways of an old inn. Likewise, why not see humanlike figures shimmering in the humid reaches of a foggy marshland?
There’s an eerie “atmosphere” that settles on a stretch of Old King’s Highway between Yarmouth and Sandwich, just beside the Great Marsh, and it’s not all that hard to believe the tales of strange cryptid creatures called Marsh People, or envision a small, mud-colored being scuttling across the road in front of your car and then disappearing off into the foliage. They connect to a legend dating back to the 1800s when creatures “as black as marsh mud” were seen to emerge from the twilight to pull a horse or wagon down into the gloom, and then vanish back into the faceless flats. A more contemporary story goes that a group of kids hanging out near the Great Marsh witnessed “something” come out of the marsh, cross the railroad tracks and disappear into the dark. It’s enough to make you want to head home.
In an article titled “Massachusetts Cryptids,” Oliver Bennett wrote of such creatures: “Their deep and abiding presence in the stories and legends of the region serves as a reminder of the deep, abiding connection between the land, its people, and the mysterious beings that are said to inhabit the shadows just beyond the reach of human understanding.”
“Why are they here?” asks Daniels. The mystery continues to deepen and, it seems, forever engage us.