This 860-acre tract of land is located along the northern side of Maple Valley Road, about 250 yards east of the intersection of Route 102 (Victoria Highway), about ten miles from Providence. The tract has something of a reputation as a “ghost town,” as the woods are dotted with evidence of Colonial-era agriculture, including a multitude of fieldstone walls, foundations, wells, rock-wall pens that once held livestock, and the stone foundations of numerous buildings. In 1760, a dam was built on Turkey Meadow Creek, north of Maple Valley Road, and two abandoned stone quarries likely date from roughly the same period. Remains of a sawmill (ca 1760–1785) can be seen at the brook. The lion’s share of this land was part of the Shawomet Purchase (1642), and was then obtained by the Waterman family in 1672. After almost a century, the Watermans sold the land to Caleb Vaughn in 1760. Probably, the most celebrated structure here is the meager remnants of the Isaac Bowen House, a center chimney that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Much has been made of the low stone cairns that are situated between Turkey Meadow Brook and Biscuit Hill Road (to the north), and the usual bevy of wild assertions have been made as to their possible origin, everything from Phoenician to Celtic settlers (and stranger things, as we’ll soon see). In truth, they are likely only the remains of furnaces used in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries to produce large quantities of charcoal, and rock piles made by Colonial settlers and the Narragansett Indians before them. One marvels at the constant invocation of Celts, Vikings, and other European races as an explanation for the creation of such cairns, as though Native Americans lacked the know-how to simply stack stones.
However, the most colorful interpretation of the Parker Woodland cairns — and the most relevant here — is to be found in the writings of the Hungarian-born orientalist Arminius Vámbéry (who, by the way, was an acquaintance of Bram Stoker’s; Vámbéry makes a cameo appearance in Chapter 23 of Dracula, when Van Helsing refers to “my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University”). The “Coventry Center stones” are briefly mentioned in Vámbéry’sWerewolvery in Europe and Rituals of Corporeal Transformation(London, 1897), a digression from his study of supposed episodes of werewolvery in Ireland during the spring of 1874. In the book, the author tries to link a string of Gévaudan-like attacks in County Limerick to “a tradition among the people. of ‘raths’ or ‘hollow hills’ leading down into the chthonic realm of theGælic Daoine Sidhe.
He pauses in his examination of the “Black Beast of Limerick” to note that the “mysterious cairns in Rhode Island, while having no known link to fairy lore or even the mythology of the Red Indians, were, in the year 1843, the scene of an attack that appears to fit the pattern herein suggested.” Vámbéry proceeds to discuss the death of a mill worker, named as John Shattuck, who “. is said by newspaper accounts to have been slain by an enormous wolf. Some witnesses, however, dispute the identification of the killer, agreeing that it was a beast, but that the creature walked upright, yet was no bear.
I can’t say that I’ve ever been much for stories of wolf-men (or man-wolves), but, reading this section of the ms., I was struck by the prevalence of such stories in legends, superstition, religion, and folktales. Cynophobia on a cultural (or even species) level, something that almost seems hardwired into human consciousness. Wolves (along with jackals, foxes, wild dogs, etc.) are a sort of all-purpose boogeyman, from the Christian bible to the Qu’ran,from the Aesopica to the Brothers Grimm, the “Big Bad Wolf ” to Lon Chaney, Jr. Wolves, like snakes, have played the fall guys and villains in my thologies since almost forever.
In fact, I can even cite an example from my own childhood. When I was a kid, my maternal grandparents lived out in the wooded mountains maybe five or six miles south of town. And ever since I was very small, they both regaled me and my sister with stories about something they called the “wolfeener” (I never saw the word written out, so that spelling is admittedly one of my own invention). They both claimed not only to have heard this creature’s peculiar, high-pitched howl, but, on one occasion, to have seen it with their own eyes. They insisted that, though wolflike, it was no wolf — that it was larger, fiercer, and, well, just different. My grandfather, who was a brick mason by trade, could reproduce what he said was the creature’s call, and that sound never failed to scare the bejesus out of us. Even my mother claimed to have repeatedly heard the animal. I recall my grandmother once coming across a photograph of a hyena in a book, and telling me that when she’d seen the wolfeener, it had looked a lot like that; she had been adamant on this point.
I have often thought that this word they used—wolfeener—might have originated somehow from wolverine,though the wolverine has been extinct in the southern Appalachians since the end of the Pleistocene, some ten or eleven thousand years ago. For that matter, to my knowledge, red wolves (Canis rufus) were extirpated from Alabama by the early 1920s, when my grandparents were still small children. And coyotes (Canis latrans) didn’t reenter the state until after the 1960s, so neither red wolves nor coyotes seem likely suspects for the actual identity of the “wolfeener.” Of course, one wonders what stories their parents and grandparents told them,about a much wilder land. Okay, enough of this crap. Back to Harvey:
“. Local folklore attributes the ancient stone mounds south of the mill where Shattuck was employed to Native devil worship, and also consider it a site frequenty chosen for the sabbats of witches. The mounds were, therefore, feared by locals and generally avoided. A witness to the attack upon Shattuck claimed that the beast emerged from one of the mounds and, afterwards, retreated back into the earth, by way of the same cairn from which it had arisen.
”Vámbéry then proceeds to recount a second, earlier incident involving the George B. Parker Woodland cairns, this time dating from 1828 and involving a young woman named Sally Waite, said to have been the youngest daughter of a farmer “. who worked a plot of land not very far distant.” According to Vámbéry, the Waite girl suffered a series of “nightmares and waking visions” in which she witnessed elaborate “ceremonies conducted by demonic entities dwelling below the mounds, involving the blood sacrifice of both farm animals and human infants.” She “. repeatedly claimed that these beings were calling out to her, wishing for her to join them in their unholy fellowship and subterrestrial depredations.” She is reputed to have said, “The night has teeth. The night has claws, and I have found them. Walking through these woods, I have faced it.” After talking so openly of her dreams, Sally’s parents began to worry about both her sanity and her soul, and are said to have consulted a local Presbyterian minister. Then, on a snowy night in January, the girl slipped out of her family’s house (shades here of Susan Ames) and was found dead, two days later, her frozen and mutilated body spread out across one of the cairns. “Much of the corpse had been devoured, and tracks discovered in the mantle of new-fallen snow were queer, recalling no animal familiar to the people of the countryside. They seemed to vanish at the periphery of one of the mounds. Though there was much panic and talk of tearing open the stone heaps to find and destroy whatever lay inside, I can find no record that any such action was taken.”
Unfortunately, Vámbéry fails to cite his sources, and I have personally been unable to find any newspaper or periodical account of either incident, nor have any of the locals I’ve interviewed known of them. However, I have succeeded in uncovering an intriguing pair of sightings dating from the mid-1950s, recounted in an article in Argosy(April, 1962) by Don Valigursky, “A New England Wolfman?” In this short and somewhat lurid article, two sightings of a “hairy beast that walked upright” were made along Maple Valley Road. One might, at first, relegate these to Bigfoot lore (not unknown to the state), except that the witnesses both emphasized that the “loping monsters” they saw exit the woods and cross the road in front of their car’s headlights (both sightings were at night) had long, dog- or wolflike muzzles. In one of the two sightings, the driver — named as Mrs. Joann Laycock of Foster — reported that “I hit the brakes when I saw it come out of the trees, because at first I thought it was a deer. I’m used to seeing deer on the road at night, and you don’t want to hit one. But I soon saw it wasn’t a deer, and it rose up on its hind legs and stared directly at me, looking through the windshield. Its eyes were red in the headlights, and I’d swear before a court of law that the thing smiled at me before crossing the road and vanishing into the forest again. I saw its teeth, and they looked like a dog’s teeth.” Again, local newspapers do not back up these stories, nor have I found any evidence that the two witnesses named in the article ever lived in the area, or even existed (though both names may certainly have been changed for publication). Don Valigursky, I will note, also wrote a number of articles in the 1970s on the “pigman” of Northfield, Vermont, and one on Sasquatch sightings in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.