The Spectre Leaguers of Cape Ann, Gloucester, Massachusetts

Summer, 1692. King William's War had brought French and Native American raids to the Maine frontier, and refugees had fled into Essex County. In Salem, the witch trials were under way. Gloucester, on Cape Ann, kept a fortified garrison house where families could shelter. About two miles away, at The Farms behind Good Harbor Beach, lived a young yeoman named Ebenezer Babson with his widowed mother, Elinor.

It began with noises. About midsummer, the household heard something almost every night, as if people were running about the house. Then Babson saw two men leave his house, and heard one speak. "The man of the house is come now, else we might have taken the house." He moved his family into the garrison.

The strangers looked like Frenchmen and Indians, in blue coats and blue shirts, carrying guns. One wore a white waistcoat. They spoke in an unknown tongue.

July 14. About half a dozen men were seen near the garrison and chased. Babson's gun missed fire, above a dozen times. When it finally went off he cried that he had killed three. The men reached the spot. The fallen rose and fled in different directions. The dead body had vanished.

The next day, Ezekiel Day's scouting party saw men dressed in blue near a fresh meadow, two miles from any house. On July 17 figures came out of an orchard, walking backward and forward, striking with a stick upon John Row's deserted house. Richard Dolliver counted eleven in all. He fired into the middle of them. They dispersed.

On July 18 Major Samuel Appleton sent about 60 men from Ipswich. Still the figures came. They crossed a low, miry place without leaving tracks. They gave Babson a disdainful look as they walked by. On July 25 he saw three men on rocks above the sea, one with a gun on his back. His gun snapped again and again.

Gloucester's minister, Rev. John Emerson, examined the witnesses "with much critical Caution," as Cotton Mather put it. Mather printed the account in Magnalia Christi Americana in 1702, as an example of "a prodigious war made by the spirits of the invisible world." Emerson's verdict was plain. Gloucester had not been alarmed by real French and Indians. "The Devil and his Agents were the cause of all the Molestation."

Real raiders were the first reading, and the reason the troops came. Emerson argued against it. Armed men could not have evaded the town for weeks with nobody hurt. Historian Mary Beth Norton, in In the Devil's Snare, places the alarm inside the fear spread by the frontier attacks. Others speak of mass hysteria, or of a precursor to Salem. The story also grew in the retelling. In Charles M. Skinner's version a captain fires a silver button from his doublet. In John Greenleaf Whittier's poem "The Garrison of Cape Ann," prayer drives the spectres away. Neither ending appears in Emerson's account as it is quoted today.

Twentieth century ufologists found another echo. They called Gloucester a possible "Colonial Hopkinsville," after the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville close encounter, where witnesses said bullets did not hurt the visitors. Samuel Adams Drake titled his chapter on the episode "The Spectre Leaguers." The name stuck. Men at the edge of the corn, falling under musket fire, and rising again.