Bridgewater Triangle 2005

Over generations, many have believed the Hockomock is home to spirits, strange animals, and more. Stories abound: There are the vicious, giant dogs with red eyes seen ravenously sinking their fangs into the throats of ponies; a flying creature that resembled a pterodactyl, the dinosaur that could fly; Native-American ghosts paddling canoes; and glowing somethings hovering above the trees. There’s also talk of a shaggy half-man, half-ape seen shuffling through the woods.

Joe DeAndrade thinks the swamp may be the habitat of a creature yet to be identified. In 1978, DeAndrade, then 24, was standing on the shore of Clay Banks, a pond in Bridgewater near the swamp. His back was to the water. ”I was standing there, and for some reason I had to turn around," DeAndrade says. ”It was a chill or something inside me.

”And I turned around, and there, off to the right, maybe 200 yards away, there was this — well, I don’t know what it was. It was a creature that was all brown and hairy, like a big apish-and-man thing. It was making its way for the woods, but I didn’t stick around to watch where it was going. I ran for the street."

John Baker, a veteran fur trapper, was about a mile from his West Bridgewater home, on a canoe in a river in the swamp, laying muskrat lines on a winter night. Paddling along in the quiet, Baker heard a loud crash and rumble of an animal in the nearby woods. Frozen with fear, he saw a large hairy beast slog into the river and pass within a few yards.

”I knew it wasn’t a human because when it passed by me I could smell it," Baker said in an interview in 1998. ”It smelled like a skunk: musty and dirty."

For those readers in the Boston area, look for a new update, also, on your local television, to the Dover Demon story on this Monday night, October 31st, on Fox News 25 in Boston.

As Halloween fate would have it, I coined both words, "The Bridgewater Triangle" and the "Dover Demon," in my past writings, and I’m amazed they live on.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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