Files From the Edge (12 page)

Satan’s Cave

General Harvey purchased the Theall and McCollum mines in 1848, located two miles southwest of Brewster, on the west bank of the Croton River and mined them until his death in 1880. A year later, a John Cheever bought the mines and connected the two together with a 1,400-foot adit (horizontal tunnel), thus the Theall and McCollum mines were now known collectively as the Croton Magnetic Mine. The Croton Magnetic Mine was in operation from 1882 until 1899. During this time it produced more than one hundred thousand tons of high-grade magnetite before closing down. The reason the mine closed was unclear to me at the time, but it seemed to be the location of a considerable number of paranormal events, including sightings of unexplainable lights on the ground and in the sky.

After the mine was closed, the entrance was sealed sometime in 1904; shortly after, local residents called it “Satan’s Cave”—in the early part of the twentieth century, a local cult of “devil worshippers” known as the Fallen Ones went into the mine to perform rituals. According to police documents dated from that time period, local residents accused the group of being responsible for a number of missing children. Although no evidence ever connected any cult members with the alleged crimes, information I uncovered indicated local authorities dealt with and forced the cultists to stop. How they were dealt with seems unclear. To this day, the “old timers” whose families still live in the area will not discuss it. The actual number of people that belonged to this “devil worshipping group” is unknown, but the description from state police documents indicates they wore dark red robes with hoods. When I read this, chills went down my spine: at the time, a number of reports had come my way describing sightings of ghostly hooded beings near Reservoir and Lower Magnetic Mine Roads, very close to the entrance of the Croton Magnetic Mine. It became clear to me why the mine was now known as “Satan’s Cave.”

The Hooded Beings

Between 1910 and 1990, there were twenty-seven reports of people seeing one or more hooded beings along the Reservoir and Upper and Lower Magnetic Mine Roads. In most cases, the figures would appear out of thin air, sometimes right in front of a moving car, causing the driver to suddenly swerve off the road. In every case when the driver got out of the car to check if someone or something was hit, nothing was found. Fourteen of these reports indicate that the creatures had glowing red eyes, and all the ghostly encounters took place in the summer or fall after 9 pm. Some people in that area believe the hooded beings seen alongside the dark roads close to the mines are the ghosts of the devil worshipping cult known as the Fallen Ones, while others think they are alien visitors from another dimension. Whatever their origin, there is no doubt people are seeing
something
—sightings of these entities date back a hundred years. Although I could find several actual short news stories in the
Danbury News Times
dated between 1911 through 1950, a number of more recent accounts came to my attention during my investigation of UFO sightings in Putnam County.

The first was a 2003 phone call after I did a radio show on a New York station. Although the person who had the experience would not give me a name and phone number, he described an encounter I found quite interesting. The case involved a family of four, driving on Lower Magnetic Mine Road at about 10:30 pm on a hot summer’s night in July 1999. The children, ages eight and ten, were complaining that they were tired and were getting a little cranky. The parents, therefore, wanted to get home sooner rather than later. The father decided to take a shortcut to Route 6, and he bravely turned down the dark secondary road, driving very slowly and cautiously with the bright lights on. The area is known for deer that jump out of the woods and sprint across the road, so he wanted to be careful. About halfway through Lower Magnetic Mine Road, the kids complained that they felt “sick” and nauseous. Suddenly, a “man dressed in a hood and a long robe” seemed to appear out of nowhere from the left side of the shoulder and started waving his hands as if trying to get their attention. Their first impression was that someone was in trouble, so the driver slowed down the vehicle and as he did, a number of other hooded “men” came out of the woods from both sides of the road and approached the car, all of them waving their hands wildly in the air. The father yelled for his wife and kids to lock their doors and roll up the windows. He floored the gas pedal and sped off, never looking back. The family drove to the sheriff’s office to make a report with the Putnam County police. The impression the deputy gave them was that they had heard of this type of occurrence before but when the family asked who and what the hooded men were, the question was shrugged off. The police promised to investigate, but nothing was ever found and for some reason a police report was never filed.

During my investigation, the local police claimed they had “no such reports from that time.” This lack of cooperation with local authorities was not unusual; my reputation as a paranormal investigator seemed to precede me. In the early and mid 1980s, after the first publication of
Night Siege
, hundreds of people began UFO watching along the roads in Carmel, Brewster, and Kent Cliffs. On many clear nights, residents called police several times because the UFO watchers were blocking traffic and disturbing them. Perhaps the police didn’t want people driving up and down the dark roads looking for anything strange. A contact of mine who worked in the Putnam County courthouse told me paranormal and UFO reports that came to the attention of the police were filed as “closed reports” and were not available for viewing as public records. I can understand the want for security—after the excitement of the Hudson Valley UFO flap, local authorities were reluctant to release information concerning reports of the unexplained.

The hooded beings seem to be able to disappear and reappear and solid objects like cars passed right through them. Knowing this, one would assume they are not physical creatures but more like ghosts. The next account I will present also took place in July, but in 2002. This encounter indicates these creatures have the ability to become physical as you or me and can interact with the material world if they so choose.

The Beings With the Red Eyes

In the summer of 2002, a young woman left her friends house at 11 pm in North Salem, New York, and began her drive home to Brewster. She decided to take the back roads and drive around the reservoir; it was very beautiful that time of the year. As her car turned down Lower Magnetic Mine Road, she saw a figure standing in the road up ahead. At first she thought it was a deer, but when she flashed her bright lights, she could clearly make out an outline of a person. The figure started walking toward the car and it was apparent this mysterious apparition wanted to get her attention. She stopped the car, rolled down the window, and yelled, “Are you OK?” Without warning, her car was swarmed by “at least fifteen men and women” in long red robes who pounded on her car hood and started shaking the vehicle. The woman screamed when one of them opened the driver’s door and
tried to pull her out of the car
! She reported that when it grabbed her arm, its hands looked like leather and felt very cold, “like something dead.” Although the terrified woman could not see any facial features, she noticed clearly that when these figures turned their heads directly toward her, their eyes looked like glowing red coals. The woman fought back, kicking the creature away with one foot and used the other to step on the gas. As she sped off, she looked in the rearview mirror and saw the figures running after her until they just faded away in the dark. She arrived home, locked the door, and pulled down the window shades. She was afraid that the creatures would find her and try to abduct her in the night. To feel safer, she called two of her friends to come and spend the night. The next day, she debated whether or not to call the police and report the incident, but, decided against it.

There are many incidents like the two mentioned above that took place on this dark, isolated stretch of road. One very interesting encounter was made by a Mr. Harold Eglin Jr. who actually witnessed the hooded beings emerge out of solid bedrock. Harold’s story is fully documented in my book
Interdimensional Universe: The New Science of UFOs, Paranormal Phenomena, and Otherdimensional Beings
(Llewellyn, 2008). Apparently, sightings of the hooded beings near the old mines have increased—there have been more reports in the last two decades than in the past eighty years.

Spook Light

The area around the old mines is very strange indeed, with reports of UFOs, claims of alien abductions, ghostly apparitions, and strange creatures, but the greatest mystery was yet to come. In my final days of research at the Putnam County Records building, I found a number of old newspaper clippings so yellowed they were hard to read. The news stories covered a mining disaster at the Tilly Foster mine in 1895. According to local folklore, the ghosts of the men killed in a mine cave-in still haunt the area and have often been seen from Brewster to Southeast. At the time, I had more than ten unique reports in my files telling of a mysterious ball of light observed in the backcountry of Brewster; I was very intrigued. This ball of light was somewhat famous; it has been photographed and observed numerous times over the past hundred years.

The older residents of Brewster say the mysterious light(s) are ghosts of miners killed in the accident, while others say a UFO is to blame. To me, the reports seemed more like a phenomenon known in the paranormal world as “spook light.” Spook light is an unexplained light source that appears in the distance at a particular location with a regularity that seldom disappoints those who come to view it. Glowing in the night with an eerie, soft color, the light sometimes will pulse, change color, and dance about near the ground or at treetop level. When the curious try to approach the light, it will vanish as if purposely keeping its true nature a secret. Spook light is sometimes known as ghost light and has baffled the human race for centuries. Many theories have been offered to explain their presence, including hallucinations, UFOs, automobile headlights, ball lightning, electrical discharges caused by tectonic forces, and even ghosts, as the name implies. They are seen in every inhabited continent on earth, but for some reason, North America has the most well-documented reports. The curator at Putnam County Records advised me to visit the Library in Danbury, Connecticut, since all the old newspapers for the past hundred and fifty years on microfilm are kept there. My research would be easy: the exact date of the Tilly Foster disaster was November 29, 1895.

The Tilly Foster Mine Disaster

After spending a considerable amount of time looking around in the dusty cellar archives of the Danbury Library, I found the
News Times
article on the Tilly Foster mining disaster. It seemed to be big news at the time; the paper published stories on the tragedy over a period of almost a month. As I mentioned before, it is important to cover the mines’ history to get a full understanding of the folklore that developed over the years. The stories that began to be told after the mines closed down influenced the way paranormal events would be perceived by future generations.

The Tilly Foster mine saw a decline in production in the 1880s; the ore was now deeper underground and very difficult to safely remove with the technology at that time. In 1884, Andrew Cosgriff developed a system to remove the ore and replace it with artificial pillars because the greatest fear was that tunnels would cave in.
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Cosgriff’s method proved unfeasible; man-made pillars crushed easily under the weight of the rock above them. The lower levels were becoming dangerous and expensive to mine; water seepage was another developing problem. It was first thought that the water was coming from the Middle Branch Reservoir, but even after emptying it, water continued to seep into the lower levels. The next idea was to convert the Tilly Foster mine into an open pit by removing the cap rock and overhanging walls. For two years, workers chipped and hauled away rock. By 1889, the mine was a funnel-shaped pit 450 feet wide and 300 feet deep. Over the top of the pit, a steam derrick controlled cable cars that allowed workers to descend into the pit and remove ore.

Work continued to go deeper and by 1895, the mine reached a depth of 600 feet. The mine had a major problem: at this depth, the ore was at a steep angle and very difficult to extract. To make matters worse, there were a great number of faults (large cracks in the bedrock) and because of this, cave-ins were commonplace. On November 29, 1895, thirty-four men working in the pit removing ore from the northwest wall were trapped as tons of rock gave way along one of the faults. Thirteen men were killed and twenty-one were rescued after considerable time and difficulty. Ten bodies were pulled from the mine over the next forty-eight hours and three were never found. To this day, no one knows the names of the men who died in this accident; workers were mostly transient immigrants identified only by number, a method of making payroll and bookkeeping much simpler. The tragedy had a solemn effect on the mining community and although accidents were common, the number of deaths was so shocking it made national news.

Underwater Spirits

Tilly Foster was closed permanently in 1897; today the pit is filled with water that has an eerie greenish tinge to it. From 1941 to 1945, the U.S. Navy used the pit to train soldiers in deep-sea diving. After World War II, the military no longer used the pit—according to retired Chief Petty Officer Charles Burdent, a great deal of “weird stuff” took place underwater. Divers reported seeing apparitions of human-like figures working on the walls and floor that would disappear and reappear. They also claimed to hear clanging sounds (both faint and sometimes loud) like someone was using a heavy hammer to pound metal. At first, Navy doctors considered it some type of hallucination caused by the great depth, but not one of the divers exhibited any kind of abnormal physiological effect and the ghostly occurrences never took place at any other test site. The divers knew the site’s history, so perhaps stories of the ghosts influenced them and let their imaginations run wild. Divers also say they actually saw the old miners who died in the disaster, still working, trying to bring up the ore, unaware of their being dead. The mystery continues today: people who walk by the flooded pit at night claim to hear the faint cries of the men who died there, but if you try to discuss it at the local pub in downtown Brewster, the old timers will tell you, “It’s just the wind, but you shouldn’t go back there.”