An Accute representation of the Dover Demon
In April 1977, a strange creature from another world showed up in Dover, Massachusetts, a wealthy suburb that was otherwise very quiet and empty. It was there for more than 25 hours. The creature, which became known as the “Dover demon,” first showed up on April 21 at 10:30 p.m., when three 17-year-olds were driving north on Farm Street, a dark road that leads to Dover. Bill Bartlett was driving, and he thought he saw something move along the low walls and through the bushes to his left.
Then, when he turned on his headlights, he saw something he could never have dreamed of. It was a horrible creature from hell. Slowly, the creature turned its head and looked into the light. Its large, lifeless eyes looked like something from a horror movie. Bill said later that the eyes looked like orange marbles on a face with no other features and no nose that he could see.
Its head looked like an upright watermelon, and it was almost as big as the rest of its thin, spindly body. The hairless skin seemed to have the same texture as wet sandpaper. It was about 4 feet tall, and as it moved along the wall, it rapped its long fingers against the rocks.
Disrupting Peace
Bartlett couldn’t say anything when he saw it, and by the time he did, his headlights had already passed the creature. His two friends, who were busy with other things, had not seen it at all. John Baxter, who was 15 at the time, was walking up Millers High Road to get home after dropping off his girlfriend at midnight. As he walked, he saw a short person coming toward him. Since his friend lived on the same street, he thought it was him. Baxter tried to talk to him, but he didn’t answer.
The two kept coming closer and closer until the short figure stopped. Baxter also stopped and asked who it was. The sky was cloudy, and all he could see was a dark shape. When he took one step forward, the shape shot off to the left, down a shallow gully, and up the opposite bank. Baxter walked away from the stranger until he reached the gully. He looked across and saw something 30 feet away with the body of a monkey, the head of a watermelon, and glowing eyes. The long fingers of this animal were wrapped around a tree.
Initial Sketches by the Witness
Baxter felt uneasy all of a sudden, so he left the scene. Will Taintor, 18, who was a friend of Bill Bartlett, was the next person to see the Dover daman. Bartlett told Taintor what the thing was. Still, he and his friend Abby Brabham were shocked when they saw the thing on Springdale Avenue. Their description was the same as Bartlett’s, except that they said the eyes were green instead of orange.
When the witness was interviewed by the police, they were impressed by how consistent their story was. They were also impressed when the police chief, the principal of the high school, the teachers, and the parents of the youth all said that the youth were honest and reliable. One of the investigators, Walter Webb, said at the end of his investigation that none of the witnesses had been drinking or using drugs at the time of their sightings. As far as we could tell, none of the teachers or students involved in this case tried to go to the newspaper or the police to make their stories public.
Final Conclusions
Instead, word of the sightings spread slowly. As for the idea that the people who saw the demons were part of someone else’s joke, this seems very unlikely, especially since it seems almost impossible to make an animated demon that looks and acts like the ones people saw. So, who or what was the demon in Dover? Somehow, it seemed like it could have been an alien.
A look at Farmstreet, where the demon was found
Others say that the Cree Indians of eastern Canada might have called it Mannegishi, which means “little people with round heads, long spindly legs, and six-fingered hands.” The story says that these people live between rocks in the rapids of streams and rivers.