Known as the Dover Demon, an eerie cryptid with glowing orange eyes and no mouth was allegedly spotted in Dover, Massachusetts in April 1977.
YouTubeDescribed as a four-foot creature with a watermelon-shaped head, the Dover Demon allegedly terrorized a small town in eastern Massachusetts in April 1977.
Just 20 miles southwest of Boston, Massachusetts lies a picturesque hamlet named Dover. But hidden among its forests and backroads may be a creature known as the Dover Demon. It’s a chilling little cryptid, to say the least, with a watermelon-shaped head featuring glowing eyes and a body like an emaciated monkey.
Within but a few hours in April 1977, four teenagers in Dover claimed to have sighted this horrifying creature, and all of their accounts described the same thing in eerie detail: large, glowing eyes on an otherwise blank face.
But was the Dover Demon real?
The Chilling First Sightings Of The Dover Demon In April 1977
Wikimedia CommonsA sketch of the alleged cryptid commonly referred to as the Dover Demon, as drawn by William Bartlett.
Over the span of two nights in 1977, several teenagers reported to have seen a similar creature – and there has still been no explanation for these sightings.
William Bartlett, then 17-years-old, was the first person to see the Dover Demon. As he and two friends, Mike Mazzocco and Andy Brodie, drove along their local Farm Street just past 10 p.m., Bartlett witnessed a creature “standing on a wall, its eyes glowing [in the headlights]. It was not a dog or a cat. It had no tail. It had an egg-shaped head.”
The Dover Demon, as the creature soon became known, appeared more human than animal. Bartlett said that it reminded him of children with distended stomachs. But the head had no mouth, ears or nose.
The Next Encounters With The Dover Creature The Following Night
Google MapsA roadside stone wall on Farm Street in Dover, Massachusetts, much like the spot where the Dover Demon was originally spotted in April 1977.
Two hours after Bartlett witnessed the creature, 15-year-old John Baxter walked his girlfriend home near a heavily wooded area. He said he got within 15 feet of a creature that looked remarkably like the one Bartlett saw.
Baxter made a black-and-white drawing of the Dover Demon. He stated this creature had large eyes and tendril-like hands. He saw this thing standing next to a tree.
John Baxter/CryptomundoJohn Baxter’s sketch of what he observed.
The next night, on April 22 at around midnight, a 15-year-old girl named Abby Brabham saw the Dover Demon. It was standing upright next to a tree, she said, much like the sighting the night before.
The locations of the sightings, when plotted, lay in a straight line over two miles. All the sightings were made near water.
Bartlett remains shaken and haunted by the sighting even years later, “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.”
What Was The Dover Demon? Inside The Possible Explanations
Independently, all three witnesses of the Dover Demon had the same – or eerily similar — story. In all accounts, there was something that was kind-of human but not quite animal about the creature. It seemed undeniable that something uncanny had come to Dover.
Some chalk up the strange encounters to inebriation. While Bartlett says he and his friends were looking for beer that night, they never did imbibe.
YouTubeA rendering of the Dover Demon allegedly spotted in Massachusetts in 1977.
Alternatively, the creature could have been a foal or baby moose mistaken for something more sinister. Though April wasn’t foal season and moose were long gone from Dover at the time of the sighting, additionally, foals and moose don’t stand on hind legs. Nor do they sit on top of walls.
Barlett also denies that this creature could be an animal of any kind, “This definitely wasn’t [a fox or animal]. It was some kind of creature with long thin fingers. [The thing was] more human-like in its form than animal… I’ve always tried to guess what it was. I never had any idea. I wasn’t trying to be funny. People who know me know I didn’t make this up.”
Loren Coleman, a noted cryptozoologist from Maine, thinks all three sightings were credible. He spoke to the teens within a week of the reported sightings. “We have a credible case, over 25 hours, by individuals who saw something.”
Coleman believes that the Dover Demon doesn’t match any inexplicable sighting reported before, such as those of other famous cryptids and aliens like the chupacabras, Bigfoot, Roswell aliens, or the bat-eared goblins of Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1955.
J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO StudiesThe alleged alien creatures seen in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1955.
Stranger still, weird sightings like this isn’t out of the ordinary in Dover. This area of Massachusetts has had its fair share of weirdness throughout the centuries.
Other Alleged Paranormal Occurrences In Dover, Massachusetts
Coleman noted that the area in which the Dover Demon was sighted already had a history of unexplained activity.
“In the same area, you had three major legends going on,” including a sighting of the devil on horseback in the 1600s, stories of buried treasure, and then the Dover Demon. “I think it certainly says something,” Coleman continued, “It’s almost as if there are certain areas that ‘collect’ sightings, almost in a magnetic way.”
Dover could be one such place.
Mike Halsall/FlickrThe woods of Dover, Massachusetts, a town that has seen more than its fair share of alleged paranormal occurrences since the 1970s.
Then in 1972, just five years before the Dover Demon sightings, Mark Sennott swore he saw a creature in the woods. Something with glowing eyes had turned up in his car’s headlights, too: “We saw a small figure, deep in the woods, moving at the edge of the pond. We could see it moving in the headlights. We didn’t know.”
But whatever the reality behind this barrage of odd occurrences, the Dover Demon has since sparked a cultural phenomenon. There are video games and figurines of the alien-like creature from as far away as Japan.
The Dover Demon certainly makes for a good campfire tale, and a sufficient reminder to always have a buddy when driving down Farm Street southwest of Dover – just in case.
After this look at the Dover Demon, read about the Zozo Demon and how it terrified people nation-wide through a ouija board. Then, check out Mothman, the huge insect-like creature that terrorized a West Virginia town in the 1960s.
