The Northfield Pigman

Northfield is a small town in central Vermont. In 1971 there was a sandpit next to the cemetery behind the high school. A dirt road ran over the hills to Moretown. Locals called the country along it the Devil's Washbowl, "a basin-shaped terrain of streams and caves full of fallen, moss-covered rocks."

In Joseph A. Citro's telling, it began at a farm. A man heard something in his trash cans. A Turkey Hill resident remembered it this way: "the thing stood up it was all white and covered in hair." It bolted into the woods.

Then came a school dance. A group of boys at the sandpit saw "a humanlike creature covered in white hair bound over the hill, kicking up sand." They came back "scared and literally crying." Braver students went to look. They found trampled grass and underbrush. No creature. In the sand were cloven marks.

Then the road. Drivers near the Devil's Washbowl saw it at night. "It appeared ghostly white in their headlights, darting from tree to tree or dashing in front their vehicles." One driver said the beast jumped onto the hood of his moving car before it leapt off into the bushes.

The darkest story involves a young couple. When the boy got out, he "was seized and brutally smashed against the side of his own vehicle." Afterwards he "displayed livid slashes across his chest and arms."

Man-sized. Upright. Walking on two legs. Between 5 ft 8 in and 5 ft 10 in tall, naked and covered with light, possibly white, hair. Long claws or talons where hands should be. And "the hideous face of a pig," with a piglike snout and beady eyes. Its high-pitched screeches, Jeff Hatch said, "would kind of circle you."

No eyewitness has ever been named. Nearly every account goes back to Hatch, a Northfield resident who knew the legend as a teenager and gathered the reports. Citro calls him "the Pigman historian." Hatch stood up at one of Citro's talks in Northfield, and the story appeared in Green Mountains, Dark Tales in 1999. Hatch also says he and friends found caves near the Devil's Washbowl, and a site at an abandoned pig farm, with straw bedding and small animal bones "like cats' and dogs'."

No police or game warden report has surfaced. No 1971 newspaper coverage has turned up. Andrew Liptak, who grew up near the road, suggests witnesses probably saw "a strange bear or a pig that got out of its pen." Bean's pig farm, Hatch recalled, was once home to "500-pound monster pigs."

The story kept growing. A fair-haired boy was rumoured to have vanished from Darby Farm. "Some say he became Pigman, others that he became Pigman's dinner." Later tellings added Sam Harris, a 17-year-old said to have disappeared the night before Halloween 1951. Citro proposed the nickname "Pigfoot." The Pigman has since appeared on VPR, on Monsters and Mysteries in America, in The Vermont Monster Guide with art by Stephen R. Bissette, and on a Darn Tough Vermont print. On Devil's Washbowl Road, a trinket-covered stump is known as the Pigman Shrine.