Creepy Mysteries: Dover Demon

While on a night drive on April 21, 1977, three teenage boys in Dover, Massachusetts; Bill Bartlett, Mike Mazzocca, and Andy Brodie would see something they could not explain. As they drove along Farm Street in the dark, the caught a glimpse of something perched on a rock wall. But once the headlights from their car gave them a better look, they could clearly see this was nothing they had ever seen before. What they would describe was a pale and gangly humanoid with no discernible features. It had large eyes, and oval head, and skin described as looking like “wet sandpaper”. Bill Bartlett would later sketch a picture of the creature they saw that night for the police, being sure to note on his drawing that he swore “on a stack of Bibles I saw this creature”. This would become the definitive image of what has been dubbed the Dover Demon.

It would be easy to write off the claims of these three young men as a hoax were it not for something else which happened that night. At a little after midnight, John Baxter, was leaving his girlfriend’s house and walking along Miller’s High Road. He was alone on this dark stretch of the street until he noticed a humanoid figure coming his direction. What he described in his testimony was identical to the gangly creature the three teens witnessed earlier that night. The following night two more Dover-area teens would claim to see the Demon as well. The local authorities tried to write these reports off as hoaxes from bored teens. But this idea did not hold water considering none of these kids knew each other in any way, much less would they be able to collaborate on a scheme like this.

Famed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman would be the one to coin the name, Dover Demon during his research into the case. After interviewing as many witnesses as he could finding that their accounts of the Demon remained consistent. This begs the question, that if this is no hoax what could this strange being be? Many have pointed out the obvious similarities between the Dover Demon and the famed grey alien, perhaps suggesting this creature is of extraterrestrial origin. But perhaps the origins of this monster are rooted in the past. The Cree Indians who once lived in Canada and the northeast United States would tell stories of a trickster being known as the Mannegishi. The way the Cree described the Mannegeshi sounds remarkably like what those witnesses saw in 1977, leading some to wonder if there is truth to the old legend.

To this day we are no closer to discovering who or what the Dover Demon is. Every so often witnesses from the Dover, Massachusetts region still claim to see a slight creature with large eyes scurrying around in the woods near the roads. Could the demon be an undiscovered creature or perhaps something more supernatural? Is it tied to the legends the Indians of the region once shared? Perhaps we may never know.