I was lying in bed a few years ago, days before Hallowe’en. It was ten minutes ‘til midnight and the world was still. I had closed my eyes and quieted my mind and I’d just drifted off to sleep when a great clamoring cacophony filled the inky black sky outside my window.
On cold still winter nights the Eternal Hunter is abroad and can be heard as he urges his pack of dogs on to the chase…‘Tonight the Hunter is out. Tonight one had better stay at home.’1
But, wait? The Hunter stalks Blue Mountain. This sounded like a pack of dogs baying in the night sky.2 The sky was usually reserved for Odin’s Wild Hunt. On that mid-autumn evening I learned Canada geese migrate both day and night. Snow geese, too. Uproarious honking — not furious barking of spectral hounds — is what I heard.
This all came back to me recently when I was reading about Pennsylvania Germans’ name for the Canada goose, Awicher Yager. In the dialect it means, eternal hunter. I’ve read about The Eternal Hunter haunting Blue and South Mountains plenty of times but I’d not associated him with geese. I thought about local superstition and I wondered if the stories were adaptations from folk motifs connected to Northern Germany’s Wild Hunt and/or the Furious Host of Southern Germany. I also explored details of parallel myths recorded in England. A melding of Germanic and English motifs often combine to inform Pennsylvania’s tradition.
Historia Ecclesiastica, written by Benedictine monk, Odoric Vitalis, is believed to include the first written account of The Wild Hunt. It was published in 1092.3 The account is similar to the Germans’ stories of an Eternal Hunter haunting the hills of Pennsylvania!
But after William I conquered the realm of England, so great was his love of woods that he laid waste [to] more than sixty parishes, forced the peasants to move to other places, and replaced the men with beasts of the forest so that he might hunt to his heart's content.4
In many versions of Pennsylvania’s Eternal Hunter motif the hunter was a brash man who either a.) hunted on the Sabbath, b.) wounded a deer and was cursed to track it forever until he found it or c.) swore an oath to catch a certain animal (a deer or fox) even if he had to hunt for it into eternity.
Vitalis’ account, like Pennsylvania Germans’, included frightening apparitions or, “visions which appeared in terrible forms to various men.” In our hair-raising tale of the Eternal Hunter, unsuspecting men are spirited away, disappearing from the Blue and South Mountains after they encounter The Hunter and his dogs on cold, dark nights. Only a lantern will give the beasts pause — mesmerized by the light, The Hunter’s bloodthirsty pack will not attack.
An account of The Wild Hunt — the hunt led by Odin (Woden) — was published in 1127 England. Rather than the aural experiences described in Germanic accounts, the English version included, “the sighting of dozens of hideous huntsmen, black horses and goats and enormous dogs.” Gabriel’s Hounds.
One element found in the German legend gradually becomes detached from many regional English versions — the hounds as geese. Let’s discuss geese…
Giant Canada geese (Branta canadensis maxima) nest and winter here — they’re non-migratory; we have two subspecies, however, who do migrate:
The migrants comprise geese from the Southern ‘South James Bay’ population (Branta candensis interior), which fly over western Pennsylvania and the Atlantic population (Branta canadensis canadensis), who travel over eastern Pennsylvania.
In late-October I likely heard Canada geese, its the snow goose (pictured above) I believe spawned Pennsylvania’s legend of a nocturnal hunter haunting our woods. Snow geese (Anser caerulescens) winter in Pennsylvania and are extremely vocal, uttering a whouk-whouk-whouk sound resembling the shrill barking of dogs.5
“Strange, unearthly cries, so like the yelping of dogs, uttered by wildfowl on their passage southwards, should engender a belief in a pack of spectral hounds,” is a recognized motif in folklore.6 I am delighted to learn I (an amateur folklorist) am not the only one to make the goose-spectral hound connection!
As I read about The Wild Hunt, our Eternal Hunter and the scope of Pennsylvania’s migratory populations — I’m convinced geese (not hounds from hell and certainly not Valkyries) were to blame for the eerie sounds echoing through our ridges and valleys. Odin’s hunt rides during storms. After the Christian conversion it became associated with Epiphany, the Sabbath and the Eve of St. Thomas. It is most often recorded in winter (during Yuletide/Christmastide).78
In a recently published collection of oral histories gathered in the 1970s, a retired, local schoolteacher describes two experiences hearing The Hunter:
Many years ago, back roughly in the years of 1912 and 1914, my parents and I came home from a country picnic in a horse and buggy and upon retiring my father opened the bedroom window. In doing so, said to my mother, “Listen, the ewich yeager.” He called me from my room into his. He said, “I want you to hear this.” I took another window and heard this ewich yeager approaching.
[The] ewich yeager was coming from a westward direction traveling east and with his horn, blowing his trumpet and the dogs barking, roughly four by number, came clearer and clearer, louder and louder overhead and then traveling [east], the sound diminishing until it could no longer be heard.
The account clearly describes the aural experiences I’ve had with geese. And, especially with snow geese! Like a great storm they noisily approach, remain above you for some time and soon, as they diminish in numbers, so does their volume. According to the schoolteacher who witnessed The Hunter in 1912:
To hear the ewich yeager…you must have the right location for his travel, the right month, week, day, and hour and it’s a matter of only five minutes to hear him.
Around 1900 — little more than a decade before Mr. Degler’s experience hearing The Hunter, our population of snow geese was fewer than 3,000 birds in winter. I also know the Canada geese population was significantly smaller. Over a century later, during peak migration, we can count 200,000 snow geese in one day! There are now an estimated 10-20 million snow geese in North America.9
Mistaking geese flying over for a furious hunting party in the sky might seem a bit far-fetched today, but in the 18th, 19th and even, early 20th C, Pennsylvania German regions were steeped in superstition. Superstition was interwoven with the morality lessons of the church.
When European myth and folklore traveled with settlers into British Colonial Pennsylvania and adherents beheld in this place the forests of their homeland, their stories took root in this landscape. Deer, foxes, wild boar…our birds and waterfowl…flora and fungi, so much aligned with European folk and fairy tales. Regionally people began to cultivate a storytelling tradition based on the people and physical characteristics of that area — here, The Eternal Hunter haunts our Blue Mountain, a ridge of the Appalachian Mountains dominating the northern horizon. Our Hunt is significantly less terrorizing but still resembles the Odin legend — especially the versions popularized by the church.
Our Hunter is always male.10 As deer were and are plentiful in Pennsylvania, he is usually hunting white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). Likely, to instruct 18th and 19th C men to avoid hunting on Sundays he is often cursed after interrupting a Sabbath service or denouncing the Sabbath to rather instead, hunt for eternity.
In some counties affiliation with a drought transforms the Hunter from terror into hero. Some versions from the 1700s describe dire circumstances in which, “the creeks were waterless,” “crops had failed,” and “game disappeared.” In these tales, The Hunter goes “over the mountain” to chase back the deer and promises to do so for eternity. In other versions frightened German settlers are terrified to hear a pack of hunting dogs and the Hunter’s booming commands, only to emerge from their hiding places and discover the land has been replenished with plentiful game. Odin/Woden is, of course, associated with thunderstorms and so I wonder if the drought-associated motif doesn’t somehow originate with relief in the form of rain showers?
This I know for certain…
In late-summer rural folks celebrated the harvest. In lean years, a wave of fear and anxiety likely swept through our counties as winter was coming (St. Thomas’ Day) and a scarcity of food could prove detrimental. In Pennsylvania, Hallowtide marks the return of migrating flocks of geese — infrequent flocks with fewer geese flew over in past centuries. In other words, witnessing a flyover depended on month, week, day, and time and they were unpredictable.
Today, by St. Thomas’ Day and Solstice, flocks of geese are a daily occurrence and Epiphany ushers in a period of peak migration for snow geese, tundra swans and other waterfowl. Wildlife biologists now tag, track and monitor flocks.
Maybe there never was an Eternal Hunter? Could a couple thousand geese arriving near Hallowe’en and remaining through Yuletide fused with a people’s collective folk memories account for generations of families believing they’d experienced The Wild Hunt right here in south-central Pennsylvania? Perhaps.
Anything is possible within these woods…among these ridges & valleys. ♡
Would you like to hear Mary Oliver read her poem, “Wild Geese,” (beginning at 41:13)? It has to do with imagination, and our place…in the family of things. And, geese. The interview originally aired in 2015.
“I know that a life is much richer with a spiritual part,” remarks the poet, “I also think nothing is more interesting.” Oh, I couldn’t agree more, Ms. Oliver!
Brendle, Thomas R. and William S. Troxell. Pennsylvania German Folk Tales Legends Once-Upon-A-Time Stories Maxims and Sayings Spoken in the Dialect Popularly Known As Pennsylvania Dutch. Pennsylvania German Society 1944.
Korson George Gershon. Black Rock : Mining Folklore of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Arno Press 1979, 1960.
Lecouteux, Claude. Encyclopedia of Norse and Germanic Folklore, Mythology, and Magic. Inner Traditions 2016.
Ordericus Vitalis and Marjorie Chibnall. The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis. Clarendon Press 1969.
Fergus, Chuck. Pennsylvania Game Commission Wildlife Notes (pamphlet)
Henderson William. Notes on the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. Rowman and Littlefield 1973.
Houston, Susan Hilary. “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Western Folklore. Vol.23 No 3 (Jul 1964), pages 153-162.
Incidentally, the Furious Host, another terrifying spectral sky phenomenon was believed to fly on St. Martin’s Day (November 11). Saint Martin of Tours, is also associated with geese!
PA Game Commission
Some variations (historic) swapped out Odin for the classical goddess, Diana.