Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

As first reported in the Ipswich Chronicle, March 20th, 1954, there was a flurry of sightings, from Gloucester north to Newburyport, of one or more scaly man-like amphibians, monstrous things that menaced boaters and were blamed for the death of at least one swimmer. On the evening of March 19th, Mrs. Cordelia Eliot of Rowley was walking along the coast near the Annisquam Harbor Lighthouse, when she saw what she later described as a “horrible fishman” paddling about just off shore. She claims to have watched it for half an hour, until the sun set and she lost sight of the creature. Four days later, there was another sighting by two fishermen near the mouth of the Annisquam River, of a “frogman with bulging red eyes and scaly greenish-black skin” wading through the shallows. When one of the men fired a shotgun at it (I haven’t yet concluded if the men routinely carried firearms on fishing trips) it slipped quietly away into deeper water.

But the lion’s share of the sightings that spring seem to have occurred in the vicinity of the “ghost town” of Innsmouth at the mouth of the Castle Neck River (previously known by its Agawam Indian name, Manuxet, a name which still persists among local old-timers). Most of these encounters are merely brief glimpses of scaly man-like creatures, usually seen from a considerable distance, either swimming near the mouth of the river or walking along its muddy banks at low tide. But one remarkable, and disturbing, account, reported by numerous local papers, involves the death of a nine-year-old boy named Lester Sargent, who drowned while swimming with friends below a small waterfall on the lower Castle Neck River. His companions reported that the boy began screaming and a great amount of blood was visible in the water. There were attempts to reach the swimmer, but the would-be rescuers were driven back by “a monster with blood-red eyes and sharp teeth.” The boy finally disappeared beneath the water and his mutilated and badly decomposed body turned up a week later on Crane Beach, a considerable distance from the falls where he disappeared. The Essex County coroner listed the cause of death as shark attack.

“I’ve seen plenty of sharks,” Harold Mowry, one of the swimmers, told reporters. “This wasn’t a shark, I swear. It had hands, with great long claws, and it dragged Lester right down and drowned him.”

Another notable sighting occurred along the old Argilla Road near Ipswich on April 2nd. The Rev. Henry Waite and his wife, Elizabeth, both avid bird watchers, claimed to have observed a “monster” strolling along the east bank of the Castle Neck River for more than an hour, before it dove into the river and vanished in a swirl of bubbles. Mrs. Waite described it as “tall and dark, and it walked a little hunched over. Through the binoculars we could see its face quite plainly. It did have a face, you know, with protruding eyes like a fish, and gills. At one point it turned and seemed to be watching us. I admit I was afraid and asked Henry if we shouldn’t go for the police. Have you ever seen that Monster from the Black Lagoon [sic] movie? Well, that’s what it looked like..”

The last of the sightings were made in early May and no further records of amphibious man-monsters near Cape Ann or Ipswich Bay are available. One report of April 27th claimed that a group of school children had, in fact, found the monster dead, but their discovery later proved to be nothing but the badly decomposed carcass of a basking shark. It is impossible, I think, not to draw connections with the release of the Universal-International horror flick on March 5th. The old bugaboo of “mass hysteria” raises its shaggy head once more...

10.23 A.M.

Late for her meeting with Jasper before the drive to the train station and Lacey rushes upstairs from the collections, is already halfway across the central rotunda of the Pratt Museum’s exhibit hall when Dr. Mary Hanisak calls out her name. Lacey stops and stands in the skeletal shadows of the mammoth and mastodon, the stuffed Indian elephant, and Dr. Hanisak is walking quickly towards her, carrying the cardboard box with the Innsmouth fossil inside.

“Can you believe you almost forgot this thing?” she asks. “That would have been pretty embarrassing, don’t you think?”

Lacey laughs a little too loudly, her voice echoing in the museum. “Yeah,” she says. “It would have,” and she takes the box from the woman, chubby little Dr. Hanisak like a storybook gnome, Dr. Hanisak whose speciality is the evolution of rodent teeth. The box is wrapped tight with packing tape so there’s no danger of its coming open on the train.

“Then you’re all set now?”

“Ready as I’m ever going to be.”

“And you’re sure you want to do this? I mean, it’s awfully high profile. I expect you’ll be in newspapers all over the world when the reporters get a look at what’s in that box. You might even be on CNN. Aren’t you scared?”