I had not heard of the Dover Demon until I happened to be noodling around in the back matter of Hunter Shea’s novel about the Jersey Devil. He horror-fied this cryptid as well. In a way it’s a counterpoint to New Jersey’s official state cryptid: relatively new, little known, and only seen over a period of two days.
I’m a little surprised that the paranormal shows haven’t picked up on it. It’s quite obscure, apart from a few local reports at the time and on anniversaries of the sightings. The Lost Tapes Blair Witched it in 2009. There was a short film in 2017. And that’s pretty much it.
The story is that on April 21st and 22nd, 1977, in Dover Massachusetts, three teens had separate sightings of a weird-looking creature, two on the first night and one on the second. They described a smallish, orangey-pink entity, maybe three feet tall, with an oversized, watermelon-shaped head and glowing red eyes, a small, skinny body, and long, thin fingers. They all drew pictures of it, which were remarkably similar.
It didn’t approach the witnesses, let alone attack them. It was just there, perched on a rock or standing by the road or scurrying off into the woods. Two of the witnesses were driving by in cars, and saw the thing caught in headlights. The third was on foot, walking down the road.
The most skeptical interpretation is that this is a kid hoax. It was spring vacation, they were bored. They were all in on it.
But if that’s the case, it’s a little odd that they waited a couple of weeks to report the sightings. None of them has ever confessed to the hoax, that I’ve been able to find. There were no sightings afterward, no copycats. The creature appeared, showed itself, disappeared. It was never seen again.
So what was it?
Maybe it was an alien, but it didn’t coincide with any UFO sightings. Mutant monster? Lab escapee? There’s no evidence of anything of that sort.
The Lost Tapes episode makes up a fiction about would-be hoaxers in 2007, around the thirtieth anniversary of the sightings. These supposed indie filmmakers concoct a plan to dress a guy in a cheap monster suit and film a fake attack and rake in the cash. Instead, in classic Blair Witch fashion, they find a real creature, tape grainy, jerky footage of the encounter, and are never seen again, except for a few bloodstains and an empty monster suit.
This silliness is framed by a pretty decent mini-documentary describing the history and details of the sightings. Two possibilities are baby animals—a horse foal or a moose calf—though at that time of year, a baby moose would be, as one of the resident experts notes, “the size of a Volkswagen.”
It’s also possible the witnesses saw a snowy owl. The glowing eyes would fit, and the fingers might be the bird’s wing feathers unfurling. It might look pinkish-orange in the type of headlights that were common in 1977.
Or, a biologist suggests, it might have been an escaped exotic pet. She proposes that it may have been a slender loris. This nocturnal primate has long, skinny arms and legs and long fingers, and enormous eyes with what’s called the tapetum lucidum, a reflective structure behind the retina. Cats have it, as do dogs, horses, and owls. When they catch the light at night, they glow.
If it was an escaped pet, that would explain why it was only seen for a short time within a small area, and why there were no sightings after that. Either it found its way home, or a predator got it.
Of course it’s more fun to speculate that it’s a creature unknown to science. Cryptids don’t usually appear and disappear that fast. One sighting tends to beget another. People see what they hope to see, and feed on each other’s fears.
The Dover Demon showed itself to three people, for two nights. Then it was gone. There were no phone cameras to capture it. All we have are the witnesses’ sketches.
That’s as cryptic as a cryptid gets. Fiction aside, there have been no (subsequent?) hoaxes. No satellite sightings. Those three are it. That’s all they wrote.
