MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

Morton’s BMW Motorcycles presents Dr. Seymour O’Life’s MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

In Search of Big Red Eye • Part 1

Despite so many stories spreading the falsehood of New Jersey being an over-populated state lled with billowing smokestacks, old industrial areas, sprawling cities, and af uent suburbs, the truth is that the overwhelming majority of the state’s population lives in a roughly-de ned swath of land, basically stretching between Philadelphia and New York City. But, not many of them are aware that over 40 percent of the state’s land is either protected from development or classi ed as “rural/agrarian.” That’s right – a big part of New Jersey is either forest or farmland. Take a good ride along the tiny backroads of the Garden State there are many areas without too much in the way of human traf c to be seen. One such part is the northwest corner of New Jersey – the same region Backroads Central is found. Backing up this part of the state, also known as the Skylands Region is a small mountain range that runs along the eastern side of the Delaware River. The Kittatinny Ridge, a section of high cliff faces and large, rolling hills and valleys traversing the northwest part of the state, is one such area. Unlike the Alps and the Andes, relatively young in Earth geology time, this mountain is ancient and big. The name Kittatinny comes from a Lenape Native American word meaning “endless hill” or “great mountain.” Indeed it is as the actual ridge is cut through by the Delaware River at the Water Gap. Sunrise and High Point Mountains are all part of this ridge, which is composed mainly of quartz. The Shawangunks, north in New York, are also part of this long mountain that we see stretches into three separate states.

Although the ridge is fairly even elevation-wise there are a few gaps to be found. One being Culver’s Gap. Culver’s Gap was a route used by Paleo Indians and the Lenape Native Americans to go through the mountain to trade and hunt. While touring the Pocono Indian Museum, a mu-

seum dedicated to the Lenape and ancient paleo-natives, I came across a display of a giant gure of something unexpected and mysterious. Manlike, or ape-like it stood tall and powerful. Dark fur and large red eyes. “What could this be,” I thought? It was a representation of the Meesing. It was these same paleo natives that rst told the stories of a great beast that inhabited the mighty hills and forest of their lands. They called it The Meesing – sometimes called the Mask Spirit other times the Hunter Spirit. According to the stories handed down from generation to generation, the Meesing is a large and powerful, sacred medicine spirit who maintains the balance of nature, appears to Lenape men in dreams, and is the focus of certain traditional Lenape religious rituals. Some people (especially non-natives) have begun associating Meesing with Sasquatch recently, but this is not a traditional view of many Native American tribes; indeed have sasquatch/hairy man legends and you wonder if the Meesing was one of these? The Meesing was sometimes depicted as a supernatural face with one half colored red and the other half colored black. But many times with the now infamous red and glaring eyes. Jumping forward to modern times the legend resurfaced in the 70s’, when the folks began hearing horrible screaming noises in the middle of the night around the vicinity of the Kittatinny Ridge and speci cally Bear Swamp. As the months went on, outdoorsmen in the area began to report sightings of a towering humanoid gure with hair all over its body and eyes that shone with a bright red glow at night. In February of 1975, a motorist driving near the town of Bear Swamp reported that he twice saw an enormous hairy humanoid cross the road in front of his car. A few weeks afterward, a forest ranger walking along a Sussex County trail in High Point State Park reported seeing a creature “about eight feet tall with big red eyes.” Things got a bit more serious in February of 1975 when the Sites family reported seeing a creature “seven feet tall, covered with hair. Had a beard and mustache and walked on its hind feet.” Barbara Sites stated that she had gone out of the house early one morning to let her dairy herd into the pasture when she heard a sound in the distance that she described as “like a woman screaming when she was being killed.” Then she found her garage door torn from its hinges and six of the family’s pet rabbits mutilated and dead. The New Jersey Herald ran a cover story about the Sites family. For the remainder of the Summer of 1977, more than 50 reports of sightings and countless more reports of horri c screaming noises coming from the Kittatinnys poured into the local police departments. Department resources were stretched thin as of cers chronicled accounts of the residents’ encounters with this unidenti ed animal. Then, seemingly as quickly as he came, Big Red Eye disappeared. Or did he? Till next month… O’Life Out! ,