Thursday, October 6, 2011

The Beast of Bowman Hill

This just in from CFZ-USA's Andrew Gable:

A few days ago, I received a message from Johnathan Lackey describing a sighting, which took place in Bucks County, Pennsylvania of something that seems similar to many of the descriptions of the Garden State's most famous monstrous resident, the Jersey Devil.

It's interesting that several reports of the Jersey Devil made during the week of January 16-23, 1909 were made in Bucks County in Bristol, Wycombe and Morrisville. In fact, Wycombe is only three miles from where this sighting occurred.

The actual sighting took place in 1977, when Lackey was a resident of Levittown. While driving south of Bowman's Tower (a landmark on the border of Upper Makefield and Solebury Townships) a creature leapt from the right side of the road. The creature was about the color of a deer and roughly the size of a medium-sized dog.

It had a body similar in build to a greyhound, a monkey-like face (which seemed to have a sheen to it), a long tail with a black tip, and rather long legs. It seemed to have a pair of owl-like wings, which were kept motionless as it moved across the road, leapt, and glided down the hillside opposite where it had emerged.

The area where this was seen has its own share of weirdness. Although the derivation of the Bowman name is unclear, one of the theories is a Dr. John Bowman, a crewman of the notorious Captain Kidd who was believed to have settled in eastern Pennsylvania and supposed in legend to have buried a treasure on the hill the tower is on (of course, the association of phantom dogs and buried treasure is a long one). There was also a copper mine of unknown provenance, although probably of German construction, found on the hill by accident in 1854.