Nearly half a century later, ‘Dover Demon’ mystery still puzzles enthusiasts

In April of 1977, about 15 miles south of Boston, a very strange thing appeared at night that put the town of Dover on the map in the world of cryptozoology, the study and search for legendary creatures. Multiple teen drivers reported seeing an unidentifiable, alien-like creature with glowing eyes over the course of two days.

As word of these sightings spread, so did the legend of the “Dover Demon.” GBH's All Things Considered host Arun Rath spoke about the Dover Demon with Jeff Belanger, a folklore expert and host of the “New England Legends” podcast.

Arun Rath: There's no better person to talk about the Dover Demon than than you, because you know the story so well. I first read about it in your book, “Weird Massachusetts,” and you spoke to the first eyewitness, right?

Jeff Belanger: I did, I got to interview Bill Bartlett about the experience, and he, to me, is the key to why this case is so compelling. Bill is a fine arts painter, and I encourage you to Google him. His work is incredible — he's a painter and it looks photographic. He's got quite a bit of skill. His work has been shown in galleries all over. He's won awards and so on.

This is highly relevant to the story, because on April 21, 1977, when he was driving down Farm Street in Dover, he saw something perched on a rock. He said he was going about 40 miles an hour, he had friends in the car, and it was spring break. They were looking for a party or something to do.

And he sees this creature with glowing eyes — like the way an animal's eyes would reflect in your headlights. It's like nothing he'd ever seen and it startled him. He said something and his friends didn't see it, and he literally turned around to go get another look, but it was gone. The reason his fine arts painting life is so relevant is because he went home and he drew what he saw. And like many artists, he understands perspective and size and so on. He didn't have a camera back then, unfortunately, but he had his artistic eye and was able to draw this thing.

That might have been the end of the story, except a few hours later, a kid named John Baxter, who was 15 years old at the time, was leaving his girlfriend's house around midnight, about one mile away on Miller Hill Road, and he saw a creature. At first he thought it was a neighborhood kid sneaking around at night, but when he got a little closer, he saw this strange kind of bulbous head, these long, spindly arms and fingers, and then it just scurried off into the woods. He went home and also drew what he saw. Then the following night, a girl named Abby Brabham, also 15, was out driving with her boyfriend and she saw a creature that just at first they described as something like a naked kid, but realized it was like nothing they'd seen before.

So you're talking about a 26-hour period over the span of two days in April of 1977, but documented and rattled the people who saw it. Enough people believed them that eventually it made the radar of Loren Coleman, cryptozoologist and author who put the story in his book, “Mysterious America.” From there, it's just taken on a life of its own.

Rath: Is that why this is considered one of the most interesting cases for people who study this stuff seriously? You have three independent accounts of this thing, way more compelling than just one person seeing something weird.

Belanger: Right and then also, I think Bill Bartlett drawing it — and then John Baxter drawing what he saw, as well. If you put the two drawings next to each other, it's clearly the same thing, whatever that thing is. We can debate about that, and no one's ever identified it. It was Lauren Coleman who called it the “Dover Demon” — because Dover kind of went with “demon.” There was no sense that this is demonic or from another world. We don't know what it is and we still talk about it.

What's really interesting to me, too, is that you would expect copycat sightings, and yet there really haven't been any. This was such a small event in a small town — one day, really, a day and a couple of hours. You would expect other people to have copycat events, but they really haven't come up over the last almost 50 years.

Rath: How does this creature compare to other kinds of sightings?

Belanger: So you can contrast it with, say, Bigfoot. When I say Bigfoot, whether you believe in Bigfoot or not, I don't have to describe him to you. You have an image in your head: a big, hairy creature that walks in the woods and so on. That creature is spotted all over the world and with various names depending on the locality.

But the Dover Demon is unique in that it doesn't really match any description of any other cryptid from anywhere else. Not only that, the town of Dover has sort of come to identify with this creature. I used to own a T-shirt from the Dover Historical Society that had a cartoon version of Bill Bartlett's drawing, and it just said, “Dover Demon, do you believe?” — and that was sold by the the Historical Society.

Rath: Getting back to a Bill Bartlett, how did this affect his life? What was the reaction at the time and how has it stayed with him?

Belanger: I was lucky to get an interview with him because we had a friend in common. He's given this interview so many times over the years — and imagine if you're a really accomplished fine arts painter, and the work of yours that's most famous was drawn on a piece of notebook paper when you were 17 in high school, and then run in various newspapers and so on.

It makes him a little nuts to keep reliving the story. However, his story hasn't wavered in all those years. He tells it when he's in the mood to tell it to someone, and he's had no strange sightings since. Although he did say a year later he was parking with his girlfriend and he heard a thump on the car and saw this blur of a creature go by. Couldn't quite make out, but for him, he sort of connected it — maybe it was the same thing, and it was about a year after the first sighting in 1977? But that was it.

It's not like he continues to have sightings or sees other things, or has any sort of special abilities. He just had this one event, and every Halloween and every April, media reaches out to him and says, “Hey, you want to talk about it again?” And often he says, “I really don't.”

Rath: You and I have talked in the past about how I'm a fan of weird news. I subscribe at the Fortean Times, which is basically a journal of bizarre, unexplainable happenings. But often journalists don't like these kind of stories — or don't cover them seriously, maybe out of a fear of not being taken seriously themselves. What do you think about that in terms of how we talk about this stuff, how we regard this stuff in our local history and our journalism?

Belanger: I've looked at literally centuries of the way journalists have covered the unexplained from hauntings to monsters and everything else. There tends to be two ways that that journalists go at these stories. The preferred way — and it still happens today, and it happened a century ago — is that you're very matter of fact. The journalist says, “People in Dover are buzzing about this story, I've interviewed the relevant people, the witnesses, and this is what they say. You can take it or leave it. Believe it or don't. I'm just reporting that this town is buzzing about something, and this is what they said.”

The other way journalists go after these stories is either tongue in cheek or to ridicule the people, saying, “Obviously, this can't be real. Look at these silly folks.” And then at that point you're completely editorializing and as you know, that's not journalism, that's editorial. And that's true today. It depends on the venue or the outlet. It still gets covered that way.

And we weren't there back in 1977. Bill was. I spoke to him, and I find his story compelling enough that he doesn't know what he saw. And while it's so easy for people who are skeptical to say, “Well, maybe it was an animal with mange, maybe it was this, maybe it was an owl” — come on! He lived in that town his whole life. Once you've lived in a place for even a few years, you've probably seen just about every animal you're going to see in that town. You might see a coyote, you might see a turkey, you might see a deer, or a skunk. You know the animals and what they look like just from living where you live.

And you know when something doesn't look like anything you've ever seen before.