Episode Highlight: The Dover Demon
Dover, Massachusetts, 1977
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On the night of April 21, 1977, a seventeen-year-old named Bill Bartlett was driving down Dover’s Farm Street with two friends when his headlights swept across something crouched on a stone wall. (1)
It wasn’t a dog. Bartlett was sure of that almost immediately. What he saw instead had impossibly long fingers gripping the rock, a head too large for its body, and a pair of lidless, glowing orange eyes that locked onto the car and didn’t look away. (2) “I thought it was a dog,” he said afterward, “but when it looked back at me with bright orange eyes, I knew it wasn’t a dog.” (3)
Neither passenger saw the creature. Both believed him anyway.
Bartlett, an amateur artist, sketched the thing from memory before the night was over: skinny, hairless, pinkish-gray, with the proportions of “a baby’s body with long arms and legs,” skin like “wet sandpaper.” Picture, more or less, the world’s absolute worst monkey. (4) Under the drawing, he wrote a kind of oath: “I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of Bibles that I saw this creature.” (5)
He wasn’t the last. Over the next two nights, two more Dover teenagers, in two separate locations, described something strikingly similar crouched near the water. The Dover police, somewhat unusually, took all three reports seriously, even while suspecting a prank nobody ever owned up to. (6)
What it actually was has never been settled, not by the police, not by the cryptozoologists who showed up within the week, and not by the decades of theories that followed. Want the full investigation, the competing explanations, and the one theory Loren Coleman never let go unchallenged? Listen to One Strange Thing wherever you get podcasts. You can find the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Check out our very extensive Episode Guide!
Footnotes
N/A, AP, “This Monster May...,” The Boston Globe, 1977.
Loren Coleman, Mysterious America, 2nd ed. (2007).
N/A, AP, “Gremlins in Dover?,” North Adams Transcript, 1977.
Loren Coleman, Mysterious America, 2nd ed. (2007).
Mark Sullivan, “Creature Lives On...,” The Boston Globe, 2006.
N/A, AP, “This Monster May...,” The Boston Globe, 1977.