Giant Skeleton in
Pennsylvania Mound
from Ancient Man: A Handbook of
Puzzling Artifacts, William R Corliss, Sourcebook Project, 1978.
American Antiquarian, 7:52, 1885.
A large Indian mound near the town of
Gasterville, Pa., has recently been opened and examined by a committee of
scientists sent out from the Smithsonian Institute. At some depth from the
surface a kind of vault was found in which was discovered the skeleton of
a giant measuring seven feet two inches. His hair was coarse and jet
black, and hung to the waist, the brow being ornamented with a copper
crown. The skeleton was remarkably well preserved. Near it were also found
the bodies of several children of various sizes, the remains being covered
with beads made of bone of some kind. Upon removing these, the bodies were
seen to be enclosed in a net-work of straw or reeds, and beneath this was
a covering of the skin of some animal. On the stones which covered the
vault were carved inscriptions, and these when deciphered, will doubtless
lift the veil that now shrouds the history of the race of people that one
time inhabited this part of the American continent. The relics have been
carefully packed and forwarded to the Smithsonian Institute, and they are
said to be the most interesting collection ever found in the United
States. The explorers are now at work on another mound in Barton county,
Pa.
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The Giants of
Yosemite Valley
By Bobbie Short - sierra@n2.net
- 7-16-99
-
- The year, 1885. In
California's great Yosemite Valley under the misty expanse
near Bridal-Veil Falls, a party of silver and wannabee gold
miners discovered what was to become the mystery of the
decade. While having lunch, Mr. G. F. Martindale who was in
charge of a party of miners, noticed a pile of stones that
was placed against the wall of a cliff.
-
- Seasoned miners, they were
familiar with the natural formation of rock, this particular
grouping struck Mr. Martindale as being unusual and seemed
not to have been placed naturally. Realizing that if
something in the wild is not placed naturally, he could only
conclude human hands placed it there.
-
- The miners set about removing
the pile of stones. Behind the pile of stones they found a
wall of rock that had been shaped and joined together with
knowledgeable masonry. The joints between the rocks were all
of uniform 1/8 of an inch in thickness and according to the
reports from the men who were there, it was a beautiful job
of stone work.
-
- "As pretty as any wall on
any building that I have ever seen" is the way one
miner described it. Thinking that they had perhaps stumbled
upon some lost treasure, the party of miners proceeded
without delay and issuing great haste began tearing down the
wall to get to the incredible riches that surely must lie
within. Disappointment fell a heavy weight upon their heads
as, in the end, they found the vault empty save a very large
mummified corpse that lay on the ledge, which was carved
from the natural stone for the express purpose of burial.
-
- Lighting their carbide
headlamps they set about examining the vault to see if
perhaps they had overlooked something perhaps a map or some
other clue to where the inevitable treasure might be hidden.
Treasure of course being far more interesting than the
fossil bones of a giant mummy.
-
- What they found was another
vault that had been carved from natural rock - 9 feet 3
inches high, 18 feet 6 inches deep and 8 feet 4 inches wide
- containing a tall mummified corpse that was 6 feet 8
inches tall. The corpse was wrapped in what appeared to be
animal skins and covered with a layer of fine gray power.
The miners removed parts of the animal skins to view the
corpse and found it to be that of a woman holding a child to
her breast.
-
- The mummy was then taken to
Los Angeles where it was placed before men, considered to be
of great science in those days, most of whom agreed that is
was a "relic" from a race that must have inhabited
this country long before the American Indian. Tall people,
they claimed, from a race which preceded the coastal
natives?
-
- All agreed that the height of
6 feet 8 inches tall in death must have represented an
actual height in life of about seven or more feet. If their
height relationship between men and women was approximately
what it is today, then they concluded the males of the
species could possibly have been some eight feet tall. The
most popular theory of the day was that the lady was a relic
of some royal family of a lost Stone Age tribe of giants.
-
- Interestingly enough, Captains
Cooke and Magellan both wrote in their ship's logs of a race
of giants that inhabited what we now know as the Pacific
coast of South America. Cook was even supposed to have
captured one of the giants reported to be nine feet tall.
Unfortunately, the giant escaped by breaking the ropes that
bound him to the mast and jumped off the ship, overboard
into the sea. In an additional excerpt, Capt. Cooke wrote in
his log that he was himself was 6 feet 3 inches tall, (which
was very tall for those days when the average was about 5
feet 4 inches tall and under) and he could easily stand
under the arm of the giant. Cooke's report started a furor
that was to last another 100 years and cause many to seek
these giant people.
-
- In the next century, many
reports were filed stating that various of our major
explorers had sighted the giants of what was then called
Patagonia - but none had contact or for that matter even
attempted to capture one of the giant men. Then suddenly,
around the year 1650, the reports of sighting giants stopped
abruptly. Perhaps the giants moved inland, perhaps because
they moved far away. They couldn't have just vanished. They
could have simply become unpopular attractions and thus
slipped gradually into oblivion. The fact remains that once
up a time, they were there.
-
- The Yosemite Valley, where the
mummy was found has always been considered to be a place of
great mystery by the Indians who lived there, the
Ahwahneechees. The folklore of the Ahwahneechees relates a
story of a giant who came into the valley long before the
white man arrived. The giant's name was Oo-el-en. They were
vicious giants for they liked to eat the meat of the
Indians. Oo-el-en would catch the adults and carry them away
to a hiding place near the foot of Cascade Falls. Oo-el-en
would then cut the people into small pieces, hanging their
meat in the sun to dry into jerky.
-
- The legend says that the
Ahwahneechees finally killed the giants and burned their
bodies. This rules out the possibility that the giant mummy
of the Yosemite Valley might have been Oo-el-en. However, if
there was a giant, where did he come from and was there more
than one of her kind. We may never know - sadly, all the
Ahwahneechees are dead, the last having died in 1947.
-
- The one thing the
Ahwahneechees did leave was a written record of their long
and complex burial rites. These Indians usually burned their
dead - as they believed that by doing so they released the
spirit of the deceased more quickly, so as to escape the
evil spirits that lie in wait to grab it. The important part
of the ritual in relationship to the mummy of the Yosemite
Valley was that they always wrapped their dead in skins of
animals before they were burned. If you recall, the mummy of
the Yosemite Valley was wrapped in the skins of animals and
covered with a fine gray powder. Ashes, perhaps?
-
- The learned scientist of that
time, July of 1895, all agreed that the mummy predated the
Christian era. It is therefore doubtful that the mummy was
in any way connected with the Indians, as they were believed
to have settled in the Yosemite Valley about 800 to 1000
years ago.
-
- It is important to note at
this point that the Ahwahneechees were also very small
people, most being less than 5 feet 3 inches tall. However,
there have been traces of a much earlier people that have
inhabited the Southwest.
-
- This fact was pointed out
dramatically in 1866 by a miner name Mattison. No real
discoveries have been made since that time by anyone other
than qualified archaeologist because it was about that time
the advent of mechanized mining began. Mattison, from Angels
Camp, California, found a skull almost 130 feet underground
in the underground shaft of his mine in Calavaras County,
California.
-
- The discovery shook the
foundations of the Genesis itself.
-
- What intrigued Mr. Mattison
was why an Indian would dig a grave that deep in the ground
when most were buried at about 6 feet. He knew the skull
belonged to a very old Indian because it was fossilized and
encrusted with the same kind of gravel distinctive to the
earth in the mine shift. He took it to one of the bars in
Angels Camp on his next trip to town. There, he came across
a doctor who told Mattison that if it was an Indian, it was
a deformed one. The doctor pointed out the heavy to thick
brow ridge which ran across the eyes and nose - he pointed
several other differences in the cranium between this and
other Indian skulls of more contemporary period which were
occasionally dug up around those mining camps. The unknown
doctor prevailed upon Mattison to report the find to Mr. J.
D. Whitney, a geologist, and when shown the gravel-encrusted
skull, he checked it with the gravel in its burial place and
found the two to match. The skull had been found under four
strata of lava and three strata of gold-bearing gravel. Thus
Whitney reported it probably had been buried near the end of
the Pliocene Era - a million years earlier.
-
- Was it a human skull or was it
the skull of some man-like creature that walked the
California soil a million years ago? Indian lore teaches us
that there were creatures that ruled here long before the
Indians came. According to some, they are still here, unseen
by all but a few who have been lucky enough to spot a
Bigfoot or a Sasquatch, or in other countries, a Yeti, a
Nguoi Rung, a Chinese Yeh-ren or the Kapre and so forth.
-
- Was the Ahwahneechee Giant of
Yosemite Valley related to a Sasquatch? If you recall, the
mummy found in Yosemite was 6 foot 8 inches tall, which
represented a height in life of close to seven feet. Was the
mummy a Sasquatch, or are the Sasquatches the evolved
ancestors or mutated ancestors of the mummy of the Yosemite
Valley. Perhaps a hybrid? Was the skull found in Calavaras
County the forerunner of both of these species, one which
vanished completely and the other forced to go back into the
ancient ways of the forest hiding forever from Man? The
facts are there and they are undeniable. The conclusions are
and must always be yours.
-
- I am still in the process of
researching Calavaras County files and newspaper archives
for a better description of the skull. If anyone has any
information related to these events or newspaper clippings
or other archival resources for the Ahwahneechees or
historic Angel's Camp, California [other than the internet]
I would appreciate hearing from you.
-
- Bobbie Short
-
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The Lovelock Mummies
from The Unexplained, Karl P
Shuker,Barnes and Noble Inc., 1997.
In 1911, several mummified remains of
mysterious red-haired humans ranging from 2-2.5 meters(6 1/2 to over 8
feet) tall were disinterred in Lovelock cave, 112 kilometers (70 miles)
north-east of Reno, Nevada, by a guano mining operation. These
substantiated the local Piute Indians' legends of such people, which they
called the Si-Te-Cahs. Yet scientists proved oddly reluctant to
investigate these remains and eventually most the bones were simply
discarded by the miners. What was left was salvaged by various local
people, only for most of it to be destroyed when the shed they were kept
in caught fire and burned to the ground. However, one of the Lovelock
skulls, almost 1 foot tall, is preserved with some related bones and
artifacts at the Humboldt County Musuem in Winnemucca, Nevada, and various
Lovelock artifacts are also held at the Nevada State Historical Society's
musuem in Reno.
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Giant Amerindians by
Chad Arment
Most archaeologists who specialize
in North American studies give little credence to reports of an extinct
race of giant Amerindians. It is true that most reports of giant skeletons
have been shown to be hoaxes or have lead to dead-ends when an
investigator attempts to track down the bones. Circumstantial evidence
abounds in the form of snippets of reports in various semi-Fortean
publications. These can lead to the false impression that there is ample
evidence available to determine if such a people existed. The question of
giant prehistoric Amerindians has intrigued some scientists, however.
Iscan and Kessel (1997) reported on an osteologic analysis of prehistoric
southeastern U.S. Indians. Their study was based on the skeletal material
of over 100 subjects, reporting a maximum average height of 169.8 cm for
males, 164.0 cm for females. These figures could be considered
"tall", but not extraordinarily so. The authors suggest a few
reasons why so many of the early explorers claimed to see
"giants" among the tribes they met.
Most Fortean stories about giant skeletons
unearthed in North America lack any real details. Most are being passed
along second-hand (or third-, or fourth-,...). There is, however, one
intriguing tale from a Kentucky folklore book written by Michael Paul
Henson (1984). Henson relates how he actually examined a body dug out from
under a large rock ledge along Holly Creek in east-central Kentucky. In
1965, a landowner, Kenneth White, was building cattle stalls under the
ledge when he found a "perfectly preserved skeleton" which
measured 8 feet, 9 inches in length when reassembled. He states "the
arms were extremely long and the hands were large. By comparison, the feet
were very small." The skull was "30 inches in circumference. The
eye and nose sockets were slits rather than cavities, and the area where
the jaw bone hinges to the skull was solid bone. It would seem that the
person could not have opened his mouth." A powdery white substance
covered the skeleton, but no tools, weapons, or other human implements
were found with the bones. The body was buried approximately five feet
underground. Henson and the farmer assumed the skeleton to be a large,
deformed Indian.
Unfortunately, White reburied the bones
rather than taking them to a university for examination. Henson died in
1995, and any further notes he may have had on this fascinating story are
unavailable (Henson 1996). I would suggest that further investigation of
this tale could produce interesting results. We do not have exact locality
for this report, but Holly Creek appears to be run through both Wolfe and
Breathitt Counties in Kentucky.
Certainly, the evidence for a true race of
giant Amerindians is lacking, but there are certainly other possible
explanations for a large bipedal human-like skeleton being found in North
America.
Henson, M.P. 1984. Tragedy at Devil's
Hollow and other Haunting Tales from Kentucky. Bowling Green, KY: Cockerel
Corp.
Henson, M.P. 1996. More Kentucky Ghost
Stories. Johnson City, TN: The Overmoutain Press.
Iscan, M.Y., and M.H. Kessel. 1997. Giant
Amerindians: Fact or Fantasy? Southeastern Archaeology 16(1): 73-78.
(Source: North American
BioFortean Review #1, www.herper.com/NABR.html)
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