Creative History

  The evening of December 22, 1909 was clear but definitely cold enough to snow as temperatures dipped well below freezing once the sun set that afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester at the end of the first decade of the 20th century despite being known as a statewide transportation hub, and the largest city in central Massachusetts, was still predominantly a walking city.  Some automobiles had already begun to clog the newly paved streets of the city and illuminate passersby with their headlights on the night of December 22, 1909 but as workers rushed home from factories and offices and headed out to the shops in Worcester’s busy downtown to buy last minute Christmas gifts for their kids, the majority of them still travelled by foot and the sidewalks that night were packed with pedestrians. At exactly 6:45 just as the holiday shopping crowd was at its peak on that cold winter’s night in Worcester, over a thousand of the city’s inhabitants looked up in the nightti...

  On a cold night in the middle of January about a dozen farmers, shopkeepers and police officers set off into the woods. This ragtag posse is armed with shotguns and revolvers.  They have brought their dogs along to fetch the game that they’re out hunting.  They are following tracks in the freshly fallen snow, hoofprints, but these hoofprints are not like those of a horse or of any animal that these men have ever seen before.  These hoofprints are large and cloven in two like the tracks of a devil. All night, for the past several nights, the residents of Springfield Township, New Jersey, have heard a gut-wrenching screeching howl filling the air.  And they have been startled and awoken in the middle of the night, from their deep winter’s slumber, by the thudding sound of hooves landing on their rooftops.  Now, a group of armed citizens has taken it upon themselves to set out to try and kill or capture the creature that has been terrorizing them all. ...