The Supernatural In Aroostook County Folklore

Ruth Ireland, a student of Dr. Ives, collected a story from Mrs. Vada Foster in Limestone on September 9, 1962 that began with a fire—a grist mill that burned down in Caribou. Mrs. Foster was just a little girl at the time, but she told a story of her father bringing her and her brothers to see the fire. As they watched the flames, amongst the noises and confusion, “two little devils suddenly popped up out of the ground! They were a little ways away, near the flames, almost a part of it, and they jumped an danced around, and seemed to be happily glad of the fire. They were about two feet tall, had arms, legs, a tail, horns, and big eyes. After leaping around for a few minutes, they popped back into the ground.” Mrs. Foster’s story tells of tiny creatures almost like they, themselves, are part of the fire that burned down the mill, and the next two stories share similar creatures of fire, themselves.

In Fall of 1962, Larry Young, another student, collected a story from Mr. Bodie Gray of Bridgewater, Maine, called by the collector “Covered Bridge.” In this story, there was apparently a covered bridge “that spanned the Saint John River” and the devil would cross it regularly at midnight. “The local strong boy became slightly inebriated one night and decided to meet the devil and have a bout of fisticuffs. He met the devil halfway across the bridge. The devil, upon seeing the drunk, became so terrified that he jumped over the side of the bridge and swam the rest of the way to shore.”

Folk stories end up in popular culture in many ways. One great example of a story where the devil challenges a young man can be found in the Charlie Daniel's song, The Devil Went Down to Georgia.

Figure 3: The video to the right gives a brief history of deals with the devil in music.

One night, the Devil may have been in The County because he had been drawn here by the friend of Elizabeth Snowman (storyteller’s) grandfather. She told the story to another Ives' student, Gilberte Snowman, in 1962. The story was told as follows: “Grandfather Shepard used to tell this story about a man who worked in the woods. This man used to swear and curse something awful. The other men used to warn him about swearing so much, but it did not scare him any. One evening it was his turn to feed the horses and he swore all the way to the barn. When he went in, he said he saw the devil appear to him. He didn’t say anything. Then the devil turned into a ball of fire and rolled out of the barn. It was said that  this man never swore again.” Had the devil been able to roll around as a ball of fire, he’d surely be put out the second he jumped off the bridge and into the Saint John River!

This would not be the last time the devil rolled away as a ball of fire in the collection of Gilberte Snowman’s folk stories. In an interview with Albert Montieth of 19 Pleasant Street in Caribou, Maine, Albert’s father was out with his friend, Fred Hitchcock, when they were returning from the Grand Hall toward Albert’s sister’s house. “Within 2 miles from her house, a man appeared and started walking along with them. They couldn’t touch him and he didn’t talk. Upon coming closer to my sister's house, a ball of fire appeared before them and started rolling away from them. It kept getting smaller and smaller, and when they came before my sister's house the fire and the man both disappeared. The next day, my sister died.”

In Montieth's story, the appearance of the devil is an omen of death. These omens, which are prophetic or reflect what will happen in the future, could also be considered superstitions; both are also rooted in folk culture. Superstitions are based on cultural beliefs that are not necessarily rooted in truth but in belief of the supernatural and many are not rational. Examples of omens of death include black cats, crows and even owls.  Click here , to learn more about this.

The previous stories of floating fireballs in Aroostook County may seem original, but there are many stories of floating lights throughout history and around the planet. Some believe that the fire is a form of phosphorus or flammable gas, like methane. Others imagine it is a strange and rare meteorological phenomenon known as ball-lightning. These stories offer scientific ideas for what might cause someone to see a floating ball of fire, but there are also legends and myths of supernatural fires, too. For example, according to  Mysterious Universe , “England, for example, has its very own squadron of ghostly lights. Depending on the particular region of the country that you care to examine, they go by the ancient names of the Pixy Light, Will o’ the Wisp, and Rolling Fire. The people of Wales have their own equivalent: it is known as Fairy Fire. The Chir Batti is an identical entity that haunts the land in and around the India-Pakistan border. Bengal is the domain of the glowing and flying Aleya. Brazil can claim the Boi-tata.” Could the balls of light that rolled around Caribou and Houlton those nights be fairy fire, or could there be a devilish creature that haunts the County?

Figure 4: The video to the right talks about fireballs known as Will-O-The-Wisp.

As you can see from this, their are commonalities in folk stories across cultures which we was discussed in the  first StoryMap  on Aroostook County Folklore.

One of the ways that stories evolve over time is due to something called  relocation diffusion . Relocation diffusion occurs when a group of people move from their homeland to new places and bring their cultural beliefs with them. Those cultural beliefs diffuse into the culture of the place where the group moved. Think about a family of four people: Mom, Dad, daughter and son. This family has a great story about the first time grandma cooked a fish and didn't know that she should remove the scales first. The daughter gets married and moves to a neighboring town, and the son moves across the country with his own partner. Each of these new families has two children and tells the story of the fish scales to them, only each time the story is told, it becomes a little different as different people focus on different details. One day, one of the children tells the story to a friend and that friend shares it with another friend who happens to have a similar story, only in her story, the grandparent was cooking a lobster and didn't know the shell was inedible. A visitor at that family's house shares another tale about edamame shells, and before you know it, the story has changed its entire shape and origin to fit the new space it occupies. The story below is an example of how stories change with cultures and change over time.

In one of the following stories, you will hear a place-name origin story about the Tobique River as told by a white resident in an oral history interview. It is unknown how far back this story goes, but stories--like people--travel and change over time. The original story might well have been related to an entirely different area, but the local translation of the story connected it to an area nearby. This is a common  folklore motif . In this case, it is important to note that Tobique is a Maliseet word and the river was named by the Maliseet long before white settlers came to the area. The story demonstrates how easy it can be to lose accuracy in history with each retelling of a story, and how it can change the perspective and meaning of a name. In this case, the name is colonized--white residents tell a version of the place's name origin that is in contrast to its actual history. The Maliseet word, Tobique, means " where one river flows beneath another ," but this folk story retelling changes its meaning and origin. How do you think it might feel to a Maliseet person to hear this version of the origin of their home's name? Does connecting the place name to the devil inadvertently devalue the Maliseet culture?

In Spring of 1962, local folklorists, Roger and Joyce Mitchell, collected 269 type-written pages of stories from Mars Hill, Blaine, Bridgewater, Monticello, Houlton, Amity, Smyrna Mills, Merill, Dyer Brook, and Hermon. While no burning balls of fire were shared, several stories of the devil himself were told to the couple. George Nal Bradbury was 84 years old when he told the Mitchells the story of a covenant, an agreement, between the devil and a man named Deacon Foster; the two entered into an agreement whereby they shared a farm. The following is a paraphrase of that story that ends in a white person's origin story for the name of the Tobique River:

The first year of the agreement, the devil confronted Foster only to be asked by the man which part of the crop the devil wanted for himself. The devil responded, “The bottom,” so Foster planted oats and gave the devil only straw.  

The following year, the devil told the man he wanted the tops, so this time Foster planted only potatoes, leaving the devil the useless greens that grew out of the earth, beating the devil at this game of wits.

Finished with the crop-gambling, the devil called for a game of rock-throwing. “They went to Tobique Point on the St. John River. The devil drew a line and stood up to it and threw. The rock, big as this house, went a mile or so down the river. You can still see these rocks." When Foster stepped up to take his turn, he managed to chuck the stone a half mile further than the devil, but the devil saw that Foster had dipped his toe over the line in the sand. The devil hollered, “Toe back!” According to this folk tale, this is how the Tobique River got its name—named by the devil in a lost gamble of stone-throwing, in spite of the fact that Foster supposedly cheated.   

Still, the devil was not through and made another bet. “He bet he could swamp a road and pave it faster than Foster could drive a coach and six. They started out, neck and neck. The devil just was moving things. The woods was thick there and Foster was fussy, but the devil did a good job. They went at it all day. The devil bridged the St. John River twice; and when night came, the devil was a half a mile ahead. That night, Foster disappeared. All there was left was a hole in the floor.” Did the devil finally win and make Foster disappear?

Figure 5: Notice the location of the juncture where the Tobique flows into the St. John River. This is the location of Canada's First Nation, Tobique Reserve. Interestingly, this white folk story of how the Tobique River gained its name must have originated in Canada since that is where the river is located. Could it have come into Aroostook County when settlers in New Brunswick migrated into this area?

According to  Christian material , the devil is the first of God’s angels cast out for his own arrogance and cursed to walk the Earth looking for souls to corrupt. According to the folk legends of the devil, he’s a clever, sneaky creature capable of tricking people. For example, he tricked Eve in the garden through guile and wit. Yet, according to Bradbury’s account of the devil to the Mitchells, as explained in the previous section, the devil was a dim-witted fool, simple enough to lose several basic bets against a farmer’s wit. Could it be that the devil is not nearly so clever as religious sources suggest, or perhaps these stories help us to imagine that the hard-working families of Aroostook County are smarter, braver, and tougher than even such a deceiving creation as the devil?

Well, you might find out for yourself if you follow the advice of Ted Boyce who was 79 when he told the Mitchells how Monticello residents could easily meet the devil. According to Boyce, there once was a man “Warren Parks (now dead) [who] had sent away and bought a big book and started studying it. After studying every night, he came to a part where he was supposed to go out at night and meet the devil.”

Boyce claimed that the devil must have been working with the book’s publishers because they somehow knew Warren had burned the book! They sent the man a letter asking why he burned the book if he had no wish to go through with meeting the devil. It should be little surprise then that years later, when a man told Boyce he could meet the devil to sell his soul, he needed only to “put a dime under a rock on the rockpile. Then the devil would get it and a person would have powers.” Boyce never chose to do this, though, as he had no wish to “monkey with that stuff.” So what do you think this story is trying to tell you? Sometimes, folk stories have underlying messages just like fairy tales, which are a form of folklore. Perhaps, it is telling us not to meddle in such things linked to the devil.   Click here  to learn more about the messages in folk stories.

If Boyce chose to leave a dime under a rock in Monticello today in order to meet the devil, he would have to  consider inflation  and leave 94 cents instead. Perhaps, it was best for Boyce and anyone else to save his dime and his soul.

Figure 6: The illustration to the right is of St. Augustine being tempted by the Devil. Notice the book, the paper and the quill. Boyce's story is not the first story about a man, a book and a deal with the devil.

Despite what you might imagine, the devil and witches have only a short history together, but all of New England seems to imagine witches dressed in prim,  Puritanical  clothing, paired to the devil and proven by spectral evidence. This connection between witches and Satan began during the  Spanish Inquisition , which was a period in medieval history where the Catholic Church burned millions of poor men, women, and children at the stake because the Church thought they were witches. You may have heard of a witch hunt; this is when a person goes hunting for someone they’ve already decided is guilty, and that’s just how the Inquisition worked, too. A book called the  Malleus Maleficarum , Latin for “Hammer Against the Witches,” declared that witches were all around us and married to the devil. At night, they would fly through the air to meet with this creature and do his evil bidding in exchange for small favors.

But here’s the trick—almost all the victims of the early  Witch Trials  were very poor people or people who owned land that the Catholic Church wanted, and to prove one’s innocence, a witch had to basically die. That is, a witch must either confess, risking her life as the punishment for being a witch was death, or she must prove herself not a witch by showing she has no supernatural abilities. One of the ways a witch prove that was by drowning, for it is said only witches could float. What has always intrigued the author of this article, though, is that if these witches were so powerful and scary, why did they always live in poverty, eat rotten food, dress in torn clothing and scraps, and were unable to escape from even the simplest of prison cells?

Figure 7: This illustration is from the 1720 book, The History of Witches and Wizards. Notice the way the people are dressed and the black character that looks like the devil flying with the witches.

Most intelligent people had long figured out that witches were not real—at least not how the Malleus Maleficarum described them—long before anyone settled in Aroostook County; and yet, one of the most famous witch trials in all of history happened when Maine was still a part of Massachusetts to a group of people who spread the witch-craze for hundreds of miles, filling the cells of every prison for decades before the slaughter of innocent people finally ended. In 1692, Salem Village was plagued by a group of children who claimed that they could see ghosts and demons talking to their neighbors. Apparently, this was all that was needed for the magistrates of the time to believe their community members were in league with the devil. This so-called “spectral evidence” was cited in the deaths of all 19 victims of the witch’s courts. What is spectral evidence? It is something a living person says a ghost told them. Can you imagine entrusting your fate to a court that allowed itself to believe that some people were witches simply because other people claimed they saw ghosts that told them so? And yet this is exactly how the early settlers of  New England believed in witches .

The Salem Witch Trials ended in May 1763 may have ended the persecution of witches, but it also left the idea of witches in the mind of British settlers who descendants become Americans. In addition, as people from other countries migrated into the United States, they brought their stories of witches with them. Witches became part of American folk culture and eventually popular culture. Some examples of witches in American popular culture include tv shows such as Sabrina: The Teenage Witch and Charmed.

It can take a long time before a community forgets what it believes to be common knowledge, and so many people believe in witches haunting the roads and forests of The County even now, and many such stories were collected by folklorists and authors alike. In Hilda Maher’s Spring 1962 collection of folk stories from Aroostook County, she tells a simple story collected from Erma Tidd Uberto, whose grandmother told her about “two neighbor women [who] were dear friends, but one day they got into an argument. One of them was churning butter at the time and the other one bewitched the cream so it would not churn. The woman churned for two days, but the butter would not come” or form itself into butter; in other words it stayed in liquid form. Another tale in Maher’s collection speaks of an old woman who turned herself into a cat to spy on neighbors who gossiped about her, but perhaps the most detailed story of a witch in Aroostook County is The Blue-Stocking Witch (as told by Aunt Betsy) in Suzanne Reynold’s book,  Tales of Aroostook , published in New York by Fortuny’s in 1940. A full digital collection of this book can be found online at the Bangor Public Library.

Ask anyone in Maine if they know a story of a witch—be it the so-called Witch’s Grave in Bowdoinham or the Witch of Casco Bay—and for some reason they’ll tell you her name was Lizzy (short for Elizabeth). Perhaps, this is inspired by the real-life horror story of  Lizzie Borde n’s trial for the murder of her father and step-mother in the late 19 ^th  century; Lizzy is a common name for witch stories. It should surprise no one then the Blue-Stocking Witch in Reynold’s book was named Lize Derry. Everyone who remembered her believed she was “possessed of the devil, and had sold herself to the Prince of Darkness for a huge chest full of silver dollars and certain evil powers.”

Lize Derry lived in a beaten down shack on the east bank of Brandy Brook with only her three cats for company. One of these cats was an oversized Maltese tom-cat with golden eyes who was said to be able to steer Lize’s tiny boat down Brandy Brook and through the Madawaska River with just a flick of its tail while Lize would calmly knit, seeming to have not a care in the world about how her boat bobbed along these frothy waters. She’d make this trip twice a month for supplies, and when she’d dock, she’d gamble at cards at the tavern, winning every match she played.

Figure 10: To the right is a map that shows where Lize Dery lived and the route she traveled to Caribou.

Now Lize’s tale comes fully stocked with magical powers. According to Reynold’s recounting:

“It is said Lize could transform herself into any animal she wished. That was one of her certain privileges. The form she most often took was that of a cream-colored Jersey cow and as such she was a beauty to behold. She also had a strange power over men. Most men feared her greatly. In the small settlement of forty persons scattered over a range of fifteen miles only two men felt at ease in her presence: Conley the tavernkeeper and Larry Kelly. It was told of Larry, who was quite a little beyond middle age and should have known better, that as much as five minutes after she had passed his house on her way to the tavern he would still be bowing and smiling, all of which disgusted his wife. Old Conley would rush across the store to open the door as she approached. He showered her with most gracious attentions and small wonder. She was practically the only cash customer he had and she spent exactly five shining silver dollars. The other customers paid him in furs, shaved shingles, and farm produce.”

Lize’s magical ability to turn into a Jersey cow kept her well-fed. According to the legend, she’d take the form of this cow and eat garden after garden until it seemed the settlers would have no staples for the long winter months. Supposedly Lize was embodying this Jersey Cow when, “One day Jan Frost caught her in his corn. Leading her into his barn he chained her to an iron ring in the wall. Being a very humane person he picked up a pitch fork to spread some straw under her that she might lie in comfort. He didn't leave her side for more than a minute, but when he returned with the straw there was no cow to be seen, and he heard a hoarse laugh around the corner of the barn. He knew that laugh. He could swear it was Lize Derry's.”

All who caught up to Lize Derry seemed to have a strange encounter. One claimed to have stopped by her home one cold evening and was the victim of a spell cast upon her, her coat smelling of brimstone for weeks afterward. Later, Larry Kelly seemed spell-struck (or sleep-walking) when David Parks stumbled upon the man seemingly caught in a hypnotic stare-down with a dog Parks believed to be embodied by the witch, Lize Derry. These superstitious experiences led the town to believe Lize must indeed be a witch, which is why they had no trouble believing the blue-stocking legend:

“Word was passed about that Mrs. Warks was about to do a bit o' dyeing [wool yarn]. On his last trip down the river, Conley, [the Caribou merchant], had brought back quite a quantity of  blue indigo  [which is a dye]. Warks had purchased several ounces, knowing where she could borrow a large iron kettle. The yarn was such a beautiful blue color that Nancy Parks who had been helping with the coloring ran to call the neighbors to see. Mrs. Warks spread the yarn on the outside cellar door to dry in the afternoon sun. That night before going to bed she thought she would go out and bring the yarn in and hang it on a line behind the stove.

“Much to her surprise she found the Jersey cow with the yarn wound around her horns. She was tossing it about the yard, and the minute she saw Mrs. Works she began to laugh. Mrs. Warks was gifted with second sight and could put a curse on anyone. So she said ‘Lize Derry, I know you and for the rest of your days you will have to wear a blue stocking. Until you get that stocking knit you will be unable to transform yourself again, and the leg wearing the blue stocking you can never change.’ The cow cantered up the road, one skein of the blue yarn swinging from her horns.

After Mrs. Warks put a curse on Lize Dery, the witch could transform herself into a cow as readily as before, but now she had wear a blue stocking on her left leg in whatever form. When Dery took the form of an animal, she was immune from any harm or pain. As an animal, she was shot by a musket multiple times. Dery, as an animal, was never hurt but her left left which wore the blue stocking could be injured.

“Several weeks went by before the cow was seen again, and when the men folks met in Conley's tavern to spend an evening over a game of cards they would ask each other why the evil one no longer roamed as a cow.” Evidently, Dery was too afraid of her left leg being injured.

Lize Derry’s antics were more than just cow-embodying and garden-eating, or mesmerizing men. According to many, Lize was a kind woman who used her so-called powers to help those in need. She may have saved a small child from certain death and helped others survive difficult health situations, and yet she created magic charms and seemed to bewitch many of her neighbors. When she died, one of her magical charms was found intact in her home, but to tell you the full details of that charm and those who found it in her home would be far too much a spoiler. Read the story for yourself  here.