The Haunted History of Pelham, New York

Including Ghostly Tales of The Bronx, Westchester County, and Long Island Sound

Blake A. Bell

• Publisher: Excelsior Editions
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781438486741
• eBook ISBN: 9781438486758
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A fascinating fusion of New York history and local folklore sure to send shivers up your spine!

The Haunted History of Pelham, New York is an unusual and fascinating fusion of New York history and folklore. Recognizing that virtually every gripping regional ghost drama springs from kernels of fact, Blake A. Bell weaves spellbinding accounts of ghosts, spirits, and specters together with well-documented context for the stories to help readers understand the actual events and historical developments that underlie each. With nine sections including those on Indigenous American Hauntings, Revolutionary War Specters, Ghostly Treasure Guards, and Phantom Ships off Pelham Shores, Bell relates entertaining and dramatic ghost stories that have been passed from generation to generation as he helps readers understand how local lore came to be and why it is important to an understanding of the region, its culture, and its self-awareness.

PART I

INDIGENOUS AMERICAN HAUNTINGS

In 1848, local historian Robert Bolton Jr. claimed that the Indigenous Americans who lived in and around the shores of today’s Pelham and Pelham Bay Park comprised a band called “Siwanoys.” He claimed such in his seminal two-volume history of Westchester County, presumably repeating local tradition.¹ Many scholars, professional archaeologists, anthropologists, and local historians have since assumed that a band of Native Americans known as “Siwanoys” populated the region.²

The notion seeped into popular culture. Pelham has a Siwanoy Elementary School. There is a Siwanoy Place. Nearby are the Siwanoy Country Club and the Siwanoy Trail. Tradition and local history books say that Siwanoys signed a 1654 deed with Thomas Pell selling him the lands that became Pelham and surrounding areas. Clearly, Indigenous Americans had a rich and lasting impact on Pelham and its lore. But were these early settlers “Siwanoys”?

Indigenous Americans, of course, populated the region long before European settlers arrived. Yet, contrary to Pelham lore there was no distinct group of Natives that might properly be labeled “Siwanoys.” Recent scholarship supports, at best, a conclusion that the few early Siwanoy references were general in nature and not linked to identifiable groups of Natives or to specific individuals.

There may not have been a term in the Munsee dialect spoken by Lenape Natives in the Pelham region that sounded like “Siwanoy.” Even if there were, any such term may not have had the meaning many ascribe. Noted anthropologist and Lenape scholar Dr. David Oestreicher has stated that his research suggests that the term “Siwanoy” did not apply to a specific band or group. Rather, a word sounding much like “Siwanoy” may have been used by Indigenous Americans to refer to others nearby. “It was a loose term used to reference people who lived in an area and surrounding lands extending as far south as Delaware and as far north as New York, Connecticut or even … northeastern Massachusetts.” Today, of course, no one knows if the term “Siwanoy” had any meaning to the Indigenous Americans who lived in the area. Dr. Oestreicher, however, suggests that “it is guessed that the roots of the word ‘Siwanoy’ come from one of three other words meaning southerner, sea salt or wampum.”³

Similarly, John Alexander Buckland has published an important book entitled The First Traders on Wall Street: The Wiechquaeskeck Indians of Southwestern Connecticut in the Seventeenth Century. According to Buckland, the term “Siwanoy” is a derivation of Munsee terms intended not as a “name” of a tribe or clan of local Natives, but rather as a descriptive term that denoted an activity pursued by Natives not only in the Pelham region but also in other locations, including Long Island, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Buckland writes in his book:

[Indigenous Americans in the Pelham region] have been called the “Siwanoy.” Siwanoy referred to their occupation, however, and was not their tribal name. Many of their artisans made sewan, or wampum, along the shore, and they were the “Siwanoy” (“oy” means people), or “makers of wampum.” Other Natives, who lived on Long Island, in Pennsylvania, and even in Massachusetts north of Boston, were also called “Siwanoy.”⁴

Due at least in part to the mid-nineteenth-century work of Robert Bolton Jr., the term “Siwanoy” mistakenly emerged as a shorthand reference to local Indigenous Americans in the Pelham region who did not refer to themselves by any such appellation and may never have used the term.

Recent scholarship indicates that a group of Indigenous Americans with shared cultural traits, including a dialect of the Algonquian language known as “Munsee,” lived in an area that encompassed a large portion of New Jersey, Manhattan and Staten Island, portions of the Hudson Valley and all of the area of today’s Pelham and Pelham Bay Park, and northward toward Connecticut and western Long Island. Dr. Paul Otto, professor of history at George Fox University, has studied this group of Indigenous Americans extensively. He writes that the Natives of the lower Hudson Valley and the surrounding region “can be grouped as the ‘Munsees’ because of their shared cultural traits and the use of the Munsee dialect.”⁵

Dr. Otto has published a seminal work on the Indigenous Americans of the region who spoke Munsee: The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America.⁶ He writes that those to whom experts refer as Munsees did not group themselves as a nation, a tribe or even on the basis of small-scale villages. Rather, “their sociopolitical groups can be defined in a number of levels including villages, districts and maximal groups.”⁷

The Munsees, according to Dr. Otto, commonly organized themselves in villages and related territories. He notes, however, that villages or even groups of villages also “claimed sovereignty over larger territories such as tracts and districts.”⁸ Such local associations could form into what Otto labels as “maximal groups” when the need for “broad cooperation or consultation” arose.⁹

Significantly, Munsees “used unique names to identify these various groupings (usually at the village level or close to it) by which the Dutch knew them and recorded in their observations.” These included a host of collectives, among which was a grouping referenced repeatedly in seventeenth-century records as “Wiechquaeskecks.”¹⁰

Early Dutch and English records indicate that the Munsee band or group known as Wiechquaeskecks ranged in an area on the mainland north of Manhattan from the Hudson River to the Long Island Sound, well north toward today’s Connecticut border, and, perhaps, a little beyond.¹¹ The area included most, if not all, of the lands acquired by Thomas Pell from the local Indigenous Americans in 1654—lands that included today’s Pelham, Pelham Bay Park, and much of the surrounding region.

Analysis of what is known about the Indigenous Americans who signed the Pell deed in 1654 by this author—analysis well beyond the scope of this book—indicates that several of the Natives who signed the deed can be identified as Wiechquaeskecks. These include an important sachem and signer of the deed referenced as Anhõõke.

Research suggests that Indigenous Americans who signed the Pell deed in 1654 were not “Siwanoys” as local lore maintains, but rather were part of a grouping known about that time as Wiechquaeskecks. That said, the romance and tradition passed from generation to generation of Pelhamites that Siwanoys once roamed the region prevails and has pervaded local ghost stories. Those stories, presented in the four chapters of part 1, are recounted as they have been told for generations with all references to Siwanoys retained.

Chapter 1

Headless Apparitions of the
Haunted Cedar Knoll

She had heard the stories. Though a youngster, she had heard whispers of the haunted cedar knoll.

The ancient rocky knoll, strewn with hulking boulders, stood in Pelham Manor along Shore Road opposite Christ Church. Though it was the early nineteenth century, the youngster’s grandmother had heard frightening stories during her own girlhood in the late eighteenth century. As her life ebbed, the grandmother warned her little granddaughter against visiting the knoll.

Such warnings only piqued the brash little girl’s curiosity. She chose a windy night when a glowing full moon hung low in the sky to pick her way unsteadily up the boulders and rocks to climb the rocky knoll at its southern end.

Though the moon was bright, the furry branches of hundreds of ancient cedars on the rocky outcropping obscured much of the light. Because the moon hung low though, some light found its way beneath the branches. Shadows of the gnarled trunks and drooping branches striped the ground.

Each time the wind gusted, the furry branches shook and danced, casting confusing shadows that painted trunks, rocks, and ground. During one gust, the girl heard something eerie.

A howling shriek pierced the wailing gust. It curdled her blood. She knew howls of the wind. This was something sinister. As the shriek dissipated, she questioned her senses. Had she heard anything but wind? Then shrieks rose again above the whining gusts. She knew then she should have taken her grandmother’s warning to heart.

Instinctively the little girl crouched to lower her profile. Slipping from tree to tree and boulder to boulder, the courageously curious youngster crept toward shrieks and cries in the distance. As she made her way along the knoll toward its center, she could see an orange glow that flickered in the distance. The glow competed with the light of the moon and intensified the shadows of the furry branches that danced in the gusts.

The pungent smoke of burning green boughs brought tears to her eyes. She sneaked along and soon spied a fumy bonfire. Shadowy figures moved about the smoke and flames.

When she had made her way as close as courage allowed, she peered from behind a boulder. She spied a score of shrieking figures dancing around the fire. She first thought all had heads bowed, as though in prayer, as they danced about the flames. Soon she realized that she saw no heads, not because they were bowed and thus hidden from sight but because none of the furiously dancing figures had heads.

Wonder turned to horror. If the dancers had no heads, from where came the ear-piercing shrieks? Only then did she realize that the screaming dancers actually had heads. Each carried one.

Each dancer cradled within its arms a perfectly animated head that howled and shrieked. The eyes of each opened and closed, staring at the fire then looking toward the heavens as its wide-open mouth howled. Long dark hair cascaded from each head. The face of each was contorted and wrinkled.

Just as the little girl’s grandmother had warned, the dancers once were Indians. Indeed, the spirits wore Indian garb and danced in a ring around the fire seemingly unaware that anyone spied nearby.

The hellish spirits bobbed diabolically. Though the eavesdropping little girl sensed evil, the spirits seemed to be hopping and whooping in a joyous celebration. Occasionally, each lifted a leg in unison with all others. The heads chanted in cadence. Other times the figures tightened the circle toward the fire, dancing in unison, then backed away in unison, expanding their circle.

Once, after the circle expanded, the shrieks ended abruptly. Howling winds halted. An eerie silence settled. The girl froze. She held her breath, fearing she might have been discovered.

The silence seemed eternal. The girl prepared to flee. Had she been seen? Had the terrible demons sensed her presence?

Each spirit then tossed its head toward the fire—not in the fire but near it. The heads rolled forward and stopped. Silence reigned momentarily. Each head then began to shriek in cadence again. With that, the winds gusted and the headless spirits linked arms and danced again both about the fire and the shrieking heads lying near the flames.

After dancing for what seemed an eternity to the girl, the headless dancers stopped. Again, the shrieks of the heads lying near the fire ended abruptly. The howling winds stopped. Another eerie silence washed over the knoll as each headless figure stood motionless and each head lay quietly by the fire.

The little girl feared what next might happen. She had a horrifying, uneasy feeling. She wished she had listened to her grandmother and never crept onto the cedar knoll.

As her regrets welled, every head lying on the ground came awake and shrieked a blood-curdling, piercing scream as though in monstrous pain. The unholy sounds reverberated throughout the knoll and across the little town of Pelham. Screams seemed to shake the headless Indian spirits back into motion. Each rushed forward and grabbed whatever head was nearest, whether its own or not, and cradled it, again, in careful arms. Once all held heads, the dancing and shrieking began anew.

“The stories are true,” thought the little girl. But she had seen enough. How would she escape without being seen? What if she were discovered? Should she run or creep away?

As the shrieks continued, she glanced over a shoulder to choose an avenue of escape. As she did, the shrieks ended abruptly. All became dark and quiet. She glanced back toward the headless apparitions.

All were gone. The bonfire was gone. Neither smoke nor embers remained. The area was bare. The howling winds had ended. Tree branches no longer swayed. Moonlight once again cascaded through the treetops above, striping the ground below with the shadows of the cedar trees’ trunks and branches.

Despite the serene moonlight, the little girl turned and ran to the edge of the haunted cedar knoll. She nearly tumbled down the rocky decline as she scrambled off the knoll and onto Shore Road. She ran for her life toward home.

As she ran, her mind raced. “The stories are true!” she gasped to herself. She thought of her grandmother’s stories that rival tribes known as Siwanoys and Laaphawachkins¹ once lived in the region harmoniously until one of the Siwanoys murdered a member of the rival tribe. A blood feud followed and led to a deadly battle between the rival tribes on the great cedar knoll. The Siwanoys vanquished a score of their foes, decapitating each warrior and leaving their bodies on the top of the knoll. Each time the moon was full and the winds howled, the spirits of the dead Laaphawachkins danced in preparation for revenge against the Siwanoys.

The little girl ran frantically until she tumbled safely...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Perface
• Part I. Indigenous American Hauntings
• Part II. Revolutionary War Specters
• Part III. Ghostly Treasure Guards
• Part IV. Phantom Ships Off Pelham Shores
• Part V. Ghosts of the Murdered, Insane, and Suicidal
• Part VI. Wailing Ghosts of Pelham
• Part VII. Pelham Poltergeists
• Part VIII. Haunted Houses and Ghosts of Pelham Mansions
• Part IX. Quirky Apparitions and Shadow Ghosts of Pelham
• Notes
• About the Author
• Index
• Back Cover