The Dover Demon
A monstrous delve into memory
Much of who I am today can be traced back to my time spent in libraries. As a kid, they were my secret garden, a place I could get lost in. As a teenager, they became a refuge, a haven in the middle of a wilderness I didn’t understand. It was in the library, around the year 2002, where I first learned about today’s Monster of the Week.
Decades before icons like Mothman and Bigfoot were viral sensations, the world of monsters was, for the most part, confined to the page. If you wanted stories about the unknown your best bet was to pick up a book, and I picked up plenty of them. It was in one of those books that I came across a short entry for something I’d never heard of before. Something with an ominous name, especially for this impressionable young kid in the heart of the Bible Belt: The Dover Demon.
The Sightings
It was April, 1977, in the small town of Dover, a quiet suburb in the shadow of Greater Boston. Here, in the span of roughly 36 hours, three teenagers on Spring Break claimed to see something they couldn’t explain.
It started with Billy Bartlett. He was 17 at the time, though early reports would mislabel him as 18. Bartlett was an artist, already making headway in the local scene as a member of Boston’s Copley Art Society. Around 10 pm one April night he was out driving with two friends along Farm Street in Dover when he caught sight of something on the side of the road.
“As the car got closer, the thing turned toward me and grabbed onto a rock on the wall,” Bartlett told reporters. “I have no idea what it was. It didn’t look anything like a dog or a cat. Its color was orange, and its eyes glowed. As soon as I got a good look at it, I gunned the motor up and got out of there.”
Neither of the other two boys in the truck saw the creature. And it’s likely Bartlett only glimpsed it for a few seconds. But when he got home, he sketched out a now infamous portrait of what would come to be known as the Dover Demon. According to the Holyoke Telegram, Police Chief Carl Sheridan described Bartlett as an "outstanding artist and a reliable witness".
The next sighting came from 15-year-old John Baxter, who spotted the creature a few hours later. Baxter was walking home from his girlfriend’s house near a creek in a heavily wooded area around Miller Hill Rd, which intersects with Farm Street, the area of Bartlett’s sighting. A Google Street View image of the intersection shows a rock wall that looks similar to the one Bartlett sketched.
“He was standing on two feet, on a rock - his feet were molded around a rock and he was leaning against a tree. It looked like a monkey with a figure-eight head” Baxter told reporters at the time.
Baxter also sketched an image of the thing he saw.
The third and final sighting came the following evening when 16-year-old Abby Brabham witnessed the creature while driving down Springdale Rd with her boyfriend, not far from the other two sightings. Brabham described the creature as having “a body that was hairless, and it was beige or tannish-beige, with no nose, ears or tail.” She also sketched the creature.
Newspaper reports from the Holyoke Telegram, the San-Antonio Star, and the Boston Globe all claim that police investigated the area, found no evidence of the creature, and that was the end of any official inquiry. But in each article, the police chief, Sheridan, who described Bartlett as a “reliable witness” expresses doubt about the idea that the sighting was a hoax. For what it’s worth, he seemed convinced that these three teenagers saw something on those lonely country backroads.
A Cryptozoologist Comes to Town
That could have been the last time we ever heard about the Dover Demon. The creature has never been sighted again, and likely would have gone down in history as a local legend — no more, no less — had it not been for the involvement of Loren Coleman.
Coleman might be the closest the Cryptozoology world has to a rock star. Over the span of six decades he’s written a dozen books, racked up multiple IMDB listings for everything from Unsolved Mysteries to In Search Of, and founded the world’s only International Museum of Cryptozoology. But more than that, he’s also put in hundreds of hours of fieldwork, often popping up at the scene of unexplained encounters to collect witness testimony and evidence. He’s made a name for himself as a respected reporter and investigator.
“Eighty percent of all the accounts that come to me are misidentifications … mundane animals - a few fakes, a few hoaxes," Coleman told the Boston Globe during an interview in 2006. "But it's that [twenty] percent of the core unknowns that keep me going.”
It’s Coleman’s involvement, and the respect he’s earned as an investigator, that — to me — lends credence to Sheridan’s claim that the Dover Demon was no hoax. A claim that, as of 2006 at least, Sheridan maintained in a similar interview with the Boston Globe.
‘‘That thing has haunted me for 29 years … I knew the kids involved. They were good kids … pretty reliable kids. ‘God only knows what they saw, I still don’t know. Strange things have happened. The whole thing was unusual,” Sheridan told the Globe.
Coleman interviewed all three teenagers just a few days after the incident, himself a then resident of neighboring Needham, Mass.
“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,” Coleman told a New Bedford radio station in 2007.
In his 2013 book, Monsters of Massachusetts (which features an Asylum films-worthy depiction of the Dover Demon on its cover), Coleman gives an in-depth report of his investigation, conversations with the locals and the witnesses themselves. If you’d like to give it a read, it’s available here. It was Coleman who named the creature, something I’m sure he didn’t expect to still be talking about half a century later. Honestly, the whole thing reads like an episode of Stranger Things. Complete with a sympathetic police chief, a strange, hairless creature in the shadows, and an interview with the teens’ science teacher. To the point where I wonder if the Duffer Brothers might have been inspired by the Dover Demon encounter. If anyone gets the chance to ask them, I’d love to know.
Coleman, like Sheridan, believed the teens were telling the truth. His final conclusion: the Dover Demon, whatever it might have been, was real.
Do I Believe?
My time spent in libraries as a kid led me on many adventures. Some of the books I read went on to become lifelong favorites, others faded into obscurity, and others, still, lingered on the edge of my memory, like a shadow on the side of the road, seen only for a moment.
When I chose the Dover Demon for today’s Monster of the Week, I knew I had to find that book. A book I could barely recall. It had a white cover that featured the Loch Ness Monster and an entry about the Dover Demon — that was all I knew. So with that information in hand, I set out on a Sunday evening to track it down. And wouldn’t you know it, a few hours later I found myself on the Internet Archive staring triumphantly at the cover of Monsters: A Reference First Book.
Thanks to my membership with the Internet Archive, I was able to check out a digitally preserved copy of the book. I had to be sure. I flipped it open to “D” and there, wedged between “Dogbird” and “Dracula” was “Dover Demon.”
The entry is, of course, lacking any detail or actual investigative rigor. And the book as a whole is…well…best viewed through the nostalgic lens of youth. It includes among its “monsters” Godzilla, King Kong, and The Blob. It seems to be a mixture of mythology, movies, and the unexplained. Importantly, it did for me what all great books do — it left an impression. Just as today, over 20 years later, reading Coleman’s account of the Dover Demon investigation has left an equal impression. This one more salient, of course, because it was intentional. I sat out to uncover the story behind that short blurb above and uncovered a history that, had it not been for one man’s search for the truth, would likely be lost to time.
I’m no Loren Coleman. No monster hunter. No chronicler of the unexplained. I’m simply someone looking to understand the world a little better. Someone who wants to look on stories like the ones told by Bartlett, Baxter, and Brabham and not assume the worst of humanity.
One of the greatest ongoing revelations of my life is that the world is not black and white, which seems like such a simple concept it should go without saying. And yet, the world often asks us to force complex ideas into simple yes or no boxes. Support this. Reject that. Embrace this. Deny that. Complexity. Nuance. The social internet has no place for these ideas.
When you’re always right, and your opposition is always wrong, what is the world but an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force? This is why I am choosing to find comfort in the unknown. In knowing that, though I may go looking for answers, I have to be willing to settle for questions.
‘‘It’s a thing that’s been following me for years,’’ a 46-year-old Bartlett told the Boston Globe in 2006. ‘‘Not the creature — the story. Sometimes I dread every Halloween getting calls about it. In a lot of ways it’s kind of embarrassing to me. I definitely saw something. It was definitely weird. I didn’t make it up. Sometimes I wish I had.’’
I don’t know what the Dover Demon was. Neither did Carl Sheridan. Or Loren Coleman. Those three teenagers, whose lives were unexpectedly entangled that spring in Massachusetts, are the only people who will ever get close to the truth. I choose to believe in them, which means I choose to believe in the Dover Demon.
So what do you think? Was the Dover Demon an alien? An enigma? A prank? Or something else entirely…let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading Monster of the Week, which is released every Tuesday (unless it isn’t) and features stories of the paranormal, the unknown, and other high strangeness. If you’d like to support me, please share this Substack with all of your friends — and your enemies. You can also follow me on Instagram @garyreddinwrites, though it’s mostly pictures of my cats.