Paranormal Creatures of the RI Region: Bigfoot, Giants, Ghosts, and the Old Coot

Pictured: A photo alledged to show the "Old Coot" published in the Jan. 27, 1939, edition of the North Adams Transcript.

Every corner of our rural region has a story about something strange in the woods, on the river or in the sky. But it’s more than just whispers and rumors! There’s research, witnesses, historical records! As the night grows longer, darker, and colder it’s important to have all the facts on what might be out there beyond the woodline.

So we’ve done the research for you. What follows is a list of the most notable paranormal experiences reported in our own back yards. 

The Bigfoot Researchers of the Hudson Valley

Red Hook, Dutchess County—Hook Line & Sinker Bait Shop, 99 Mill Road

When I wrote about the Bigfoot Researchers of the Hudson Valley way back in 2016, the group's base was the Hook Line & Sinker Bait Shop, which lead researcher Gayle Beatty owns. Beatty says she first heard something in the woods as a teenager, camping alone on Stissing Mountain in Pine Plains, when a loud, inhuman cry sent her running home. Her group searches woods and nature preserves around the region, and she says the Hudson Valley is prime territory. "There are hundreds in the Hudson Valley," she says. "They live in clans of five to 20."

The evidence the group points to includes eye shines, which Beatty says the group has seen from "over 20 in a single group," along with stacked rocks, branch structures and a bundle of swamp flowers wrapped in grass that she once took as a gift. In February 2015, Hyde Park school nurse Debbie Ray found 19-inch footprints near her home, and the group cast them in plaster. Ray, who joined the group after that, says the creatures respond to "music and tobacco and incense and drumming."

But where’s the proof? Beatty says, "No photo or video, even a clear one, will ever satisfy anyone." She ties the sightings to the region's reputation: "I know that the Hudson Valley is known for paranormal and UFO activity and those go hand in hand with sightings of Bigfoots." 

The Old Coot

Mount Greylock, Berkshire County

The Old Coot is said to be the ghost of William Saunders, a Civil War veteran from Adams who returned home in 1865 to find his wife remarried and lived out his life as a hermit near the Bellows Pipe trail. iBerkshires reports that hikers have seen him heading up the mountain and never coming down, and Joe Durwin writes that the North Adams Transcript published photos said to show the Coot in 1939 and 1979.

Kipsy, the Hudson River Monster

Tivoli, Dutchess County, and the Hudson River

Kipsy takes its name from Poughkeepsie, and the first reports of the river serpent came in 1886 newspaper articles. On August 30 of that year, boatmen and swimmers in the Rondout described a creature about 55 feet long, and more sightings followed through the fall. On December 31, a schooner captain in Tivoli reported a creature splitting the ice. Claims that Kipsy appears in Native American legends or that Henry Hudson's crew saw it also exist.

A folklore encyclopedia entry says the object seen in 1886 was later identified as a burned timber from the steamship Daniel Drew, and other proposed explanations include a drifting log, manatees, and sturgeon. In 2018, sonar scans picked up a 14-foot Atlantic sturgeon near Hyde Park. The entry says no photograph of Kipsy exists and the only images are paintings, including a 1989 mural in Poughkeepsie by Margaret and Richard Crenson. Brian James, who developed the Esopus Library's "Legendary Creatures of the Hudson Valley" program, suggests Kipsy and Lake Champlain's Champy could be misidentified manatees, harbor seals, or sturgeon.

The Hudson Valley UFO Wave

Stormville Airport and the Mid-Hudson, Dutchess County

From March 1983 through the summer of 1984, people in Westchester, Dutchess, and Putnam counties and in Fairfield County, Connecticut, reported silent objects outlined in white, red or green lights, often in a V-shape or a circle and as large as a football field, according to accounts of the sightings. J. Allen Hynek, the former scientific adviser to the Air Force's Project Blue Book, called the sightings "absolutely weird." State police and the New York Power Authority attributed the lights to light planes flying in formation from Stormville Airport in Dutchess County, and the pilots called themselves "the Martians."

The 1969 Berkshire UFO Sightings

Sheffield and Great Barrington, Berkshire County

On the night of September 1, 1969, dozens of people in towns across the southern Berkshires—by some counts hundreds—reported seeing the same large, silent object in the sky. The tale has been so prolific there was even a Tanglewood concert inspired by the sightings earlier this year. The best-known account belongs to Thomas Reed, who says he and his family had a close encounter near the Sheffield covered bridge. The Berkshire Eagle reports that Reed passed a polygraph test with about 99.1 percent truthfulness.

In 2015, members of the Great Barrington Historical Society voted 6 to3 that the event was "historically significant and true," though some local historians and journalists remain doubtful. A state marker at the Thom Reed UFO Monument Park in Sheffield commemorates the incident, and Netflix's “Unsolved Mysteries” dramatized it in a 2020 episode. This spring, composer Daniel Wohl and the quartet Hub New Music performed his piece "Mirage" at Tanglewood's Linde Center, with one movement drawing on the 1969 reports. Hub flutist Michael Avitabile says, "Everybody seems to look up when they want an answer."

Dudleytown

Cornwall, Litchfield County

Dudleytown is an abandoned settlement in Cornwall's Dark Entry Forest, a few miles south of Cornwall Bridge. Families including the Dudleys farmed it from the 1700s, and its population declined in the mid-1800s as Midwest farmland opened and the local iron industry wound down. The legend says the Dudleys descended from Edmund Dudley, an English nobleman executed for treason under Henry VII, and carried a curse to Connecticut that brought crop failures, madness, and violent deaths.

Local historians found no genealogical link between the Cornwall Dudleys and Edmund Dudley, and the stories trace back at least to Edward Comfort Starr's 1926 A History of Cornwall, Connecticut, according to the New England Historical Society. Walter Kilham, an architect who lived there as a hermit starting in 1938, told The New York Times in 1989, "I tell them if you believe in ghosts, I guess you'll find one." Actor and paranormal enthusiast Dan Aykroyd called Dudleytown the "most haunted place on earth" in a 1993 Playboy interview, and visits and vandalism rose after The Blair Witch Project in 1999. The land has been privately owned since 1924 by Dark Entry Forest, Inc. Cornwall police have responded to vandalism cases there since the 1990s, and the site is closed to the public.

The Claverack Giant

Claverack, Columbia County

In 1705, a Dutch colonist found a roughly five-pound tooth on the bank of the Hudson River at Claverack and traded it to assemblyman Peter Van Bruggen for some rum, according to the Catskill Geologist. Puritan minister Cotton Mather embraced the colonial governor Lord Cornbury's view that it belonged to a biblical giant from before Noah's flood. The Columbia County Historical Society says it was later identified as an Ice Age mastodon tooth.

The Camp Eagle Creature

Washington and October Mountain State Forest, Berkshire County

On August 21, 1983, four friends were cooking out near Camp Eagle, an abandoned Boy Scout camp on Felton Lake in Washington, when two of them heard noises and went to look, according to New England Today. Eric Durant, 18, and Frederick Parody, 22, both of Pittsfield, saw a large figure on the trail. Durant told the Berkshire Eagle it "stood on two legs." From their car, the men saw it again crouched in the bushes, with dark brown fur and glowing eyes, and they estimated it at six to seven feet tall.

Joe Durwin, writing for iBerkshires, reports that a Boy Scout leader and a Scout described a similar creature on October Mountain the same weekend. In the summer of 1989, a hiker on a well-traveled trail near the mountain's top reported a reddish-brown creature with long arms stacking rocks.

The Hoosac Tunnel Ghost Miners

North Adams, Berkshire County

The Hoosac Tunnel, 4.75 miles long, carried its first train on February 9, 1875, after construction that began in 1851. Historians report there were 135 verified deaths among the workers who built it. The deadliest accident was the October 17, 1867 explosion in the central shaft that trapped 13 men 538 feet down, and survivors called the project "the Bloody Pit." Berkshire tourism says people have heard moans and even seen phantom miners near the tunnel, which is still an active rail line today.

The Kinderhook Creature

Kinderhook, Columbia County

Reports of a large, hairy creature around Kinderhook made local headlines in the late 1970s, according to the New York State Library, and the animal became known as the Kinderhook Creature. On September 24, 1980, 70-year-old Martha Hallenbeck and several relatives reported a hulking creature outside her rural home, and a nephew fired a shotgun into the air. Her grandson Bruce Hallenbeck, a film critic and radio personality, wrote about the encounter to Albany Times Union columnist Barney Fowler, who published the letter. The folklore journal Voices says the column "triggered a deluge of encounters."

That November, Barry Knights and Russell Zbierski told Hallenbeck that five hairy creatures with cone-shaped heads converged on a road, and the two men ran. Hallenbeck later wrote The Kinderhook Creature and Beyond: A Personal Reminiscence, and filmmaker Seth Breedlove's documentary The Kinderhook Creature: In the Shadow of Sasquatch, which is based on that book, came out on digital platforms on March 24, 2026. 

Spook Rock

Greenport, Columbia County—Spook Rock Road, east of Hudson

Spook Rock is a boulder along Claverack Creek, about a mile and a half east of Hudson off Route 23B, that carries the tragic psychic energy of two lovers. According to the Columbia County Historical Society, a Mahican maiden loved a young man from an opposing tribe, possibly Mohawk, against her father's wishes. In the version in Ruth A. Stickles's Folklore of Columbia County, a storm dislodged an overhanging rock just as the maiden reached her lover, and both were crushed beneath it.

Settlers believed the rock turned over briefly each time a church bell tolled for a death, freeing the lovers for a moment. Some people report hearing the maiden's cries or seeing her wander the road in search of him. A historical marker the William G. Pomeroy Foundation erected in 2016 carries the line "When church bell rings, rock turns over, lovers appear."