Dover Demon

The mundane explanations offered for the Dover Demon have not held up well, and the most detailed objections to them come from its chief investigator. The explanation proposed from the start was a young animal seen in the dark: a foal or a moose calf. A young animal with long legs, a large head on a thin neck and eyes that throw back the glare of headlights would match parts of Bartlett's description, and the moose reading has a named advocate, Martin S. Kottmeyer, whose essay "The 'Dover Demon' Likely Was a Moose" is included in the Greenhaven Press anthology Mysterious Monsters (2004). Loren Coleman answered both in the Boston Globe in 2006. He said that he had canvassed local horse owners after the sightings and that none had reported a missing horse, and that it was not foaling season. Only two moose were reported in Massachusetts in 1977 and 1978, he said, both in the centre of the state, and a yearling by late April would weigh more than 600 pounds and be "bigger than the Volkswagen Bartlett was in". On WBSM's Spooky Southcoast programme in 2007 he added that at the time Dover had more horses than people, and that no animal tracks were found. Bartlett has dismissed a mangy fox or dog in the same terms: "I know everything that could be mangy. This thing was larger." The case's strength is that three teenagers seem to have seen the same thing independently, and that claim also rests on Coleman. He said the sightings fell in school vacation week, that the three did not know each other well and that "they had not contaminated each other by talking about it"; by his own account, it was "only the next week, a couple of days before I interviewed them, that they really each started to figure out that more than one of them had seen the thing". The interviews therefore came after the witnesses knew of one another. The two drawings, by Bartlett and by John Baxter, were made earlier: each boy drew what he had seen on his own. The accounts also differ in detail. Bartlett saw eyes like "two orange marbles", Baxter eyes "glowing faintly but not with any color", and Abby Brabham green ones, a colour she insisted on to investigators. Brabham saw the creature on all fours, crossing the road; her driver, Will Taintor, glimpsed only something with a large head and a tan body crouched in the road; and neither of the two friends in Bartlett's car saw anything. Bartlett's own sighting lasted, by his estimate, seven or eight seconds, from a car doing 35 to 40 miles an hour. No physical trace was ever found. The Boston Globe reported in 2006 that no sightings had been reported since, and recorded two loose ends: a year later Bartlett heard a thump on a parked car and made out a small figure leaving, which he allowed could have been a youngster playing a prank, and Mark Sennott of Sherborn said that he and his friends might have seen something at Channing Pond on Springdale Avenue in 1972, five years before. Coleman's own summary to the Globe was "It's OK to say we don't know."