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This is your chance. This is your opportunity. This is your comeback. Purdue Global, produce online university for working adults. Start your comeback today at purdueglobal.edu. Welcome, legendary listeners. Thanks for tuning in to From the Vault, a second look at some of our classic episodes. Look for a new episode every week. Now, can you go back and listen on your own at ournewenglandledges.com? You bet.
But you won't get the added bonus of an After the Legends segment featuring new commentary about that episode from your old pals Jeff and Ray. So let's open up the New England Legends vault and revisit another legendary episode. Hey everybody, welcome to the vault. Welcome to the vault and we're glad to... Ray? What? What? What is that behind you? What's that? Oh, that could be the Glastonbury Glowacus. Hide! First air July 18th, 2019. Enjoy.
Glastonbury, Connecticut, just a bit southeast of Hartford. And we're driving around looking for what, Jeff? Ray, it's some kind of creature. That's not much to go on, man. A creature, like big, small, does it fly, swim? I've heard some reports that it's got the head of a dog and the body of a lion. Maybe even a horn on its head. How does something like that hide in Glastonbury? I don't think a creature like this has to. Today, we're on the hunt for the Glastonbury Glowacus.
I am Jeff Belanger. And I'm Ray Ogier. And welcome to episode 100. Hold on. That is, yeah, that's amazing.
Episode 100 of the New England Legends podcast. If you give us about 10 minutes, we'll give you something strange to talk about today. We certainly will. That's 100 episodes in 100 consecutive weeks without missing one. Amazing. Thank you to everyone who's been there from the beginning, and thank you to those of you who are just joining us for the first time today. And a very big thank you to all of our Patreon patrons who helped us make it this far.
If you want to become a bigger part of the movement, head over to patreon.com slash newenglandlegends. And for as little as three bucks per month, you'll get early access to new episodes, plus bonus episodes that no one else gets to hear. And you can also email us anytime at info at rnewenglandlegends.com if you got some feedback or a story idea for us, which is exactly how we heard about this week's strange tale. We got an email from Eddie Guimont.
from Glastonbury who mentioned the creature and we ran with it. All right, speaking of strange tales, does this Glastonbury Glowacus have a tale? In most versions of the story, yes, it does. All right, let's head back in time and see if we can sort this out. ♪
It's early January of 1939 here in Glastonbury, Connecticut. The population is about 3,800 people in the 52.5 square mile farm town. And that's about what the population was 100 years earlier, meaning things haven't changed much. But about this time, something strange is happening on Glastonbury Farms.
Animals are being attacked. Farm animals are turning up mutilated, and the farmers are left scratching their heads as to what caused it. We have to remember that farm animals do get attacked by dogs, coyotes, foxes, bears, and all kinds of other animals. It happens, the farmers know it, and they know what those attacks look like. But this? This?
This seemed a little different. Pet dogs are also being killed and others are being clawed and left bleeding. A goat or two goes completely missing while animals are being found dead. And now everyone is a little spooked. And that's when Nat A. Sestero, a young newspaper reporter for the Hartford Times, gets wind of the animal attacks and writes up a story for the newspaper. After all, this is news. Yeah.
Locals need to be aware that something is terrorizing area farms. "I wrote it as a straight news story," Sestero said of this article. And that may have been the end of things, just a curious news story about animal attacks.
But then another writer at the competing Hartford newspaper called the Hartford Current sees Sestero's article and decides his readers might like a different take. And that would be a man named Pelton Ferry from the Hartford Current. He's a stringer, meaning he's paid by the column inch of words published. So he starts writing these sensational articles about an unknown beast roaming the countryside of Glastonbury, killing animals and pets. And readers, they only want more.
So now two newspapers are doing their best to scoop each other on sightings of this strange animal. There were all sorts of theories about what kind of animal it was. One was that it was a cat-like creature that escaped from some kind of circus. Several people had said they'd seen something, but the descriptions varied widely. Reports are coming in every few days, and more articles go up. People are describing what they saw. People like Joseph Bonvulier of Hartford. I'm positive it was a black, powerful beast.
I shot at it Saturday morning with my double-barrel shotgun. The left barrel fired but missed. The right barrel failed to discharge. Then more witnesses come forward with more information, like Rhoda Herrick of Hartford, who was also a hunter. Late Wednesday afternoon, I saw a slinking animal on the New London Turnpike at Ten Curves. It was a dark, tawny color.
It was about three feet long and two feet tall with a cat-like head. People are describing what looks like a panther. Black panthers are typically found in Africa and Asia. And then there's black jaguars that are found in Central and South America.
Where they're definitely not found is North America, and especially New England. Sure, yeah. Which leads some to speculate that maybe this animal escaped from a zoo or carnival and is now roaming Connecticut. While the escaped animal theory would easily explain everything, it doesn't close the case because other witnesses come forward and start describing a larger animal the size of a lion with a more canine head. And the newspapers are just eating this up.
What happens next will propel the story from strange animal sighting into the stuff of legend. Local radio personality Lowell Thomas broadcasts that there's an unnamed Connecticut scientist that identified this beast and gave the creature a name. And what name would that be? The Glowackus.
I like it. It sounds almost Latin. As you can imagine, other folks in the media start to question who this unnamed source is. Accusing this radio host of fake news, I guess? Exactly. Okay. And that's when the current comes clean. All right. The term Glowackus was made up by the paper's assistant state editor, Frank King. King admitted that he made the term from Glastonbury, wacky,
And us. The Gloacus. Right. Got it. And now this creature has a unique name, almost scientific. Differing eyewitness reports with ongoing sightings and Gloacus fever strikes Glastonbury. And now people are hunting this thing. The Hartford Courant prints this hand-drawn map marking where the sightings happened, where animal attacks have occurred, and speculating as to the path that the creature's taking through the town of Glastonbury.
The eyewitness accounts are getting stranger as well. There's talk of horrible blood-curdling screams coming from the beasts that echo through the hills of Glastonbury. Another person claims it cries blue tears, and another says it's got a single horn on its head. The Glowackus fever is spilling into every part of life in the greater Hartford area, and newspaper advertisers...
Don't plan to miss the boat. Jeff, check out some of these ads from the January 24th, 1939 Hartford Daily Current. Oh, my gosh. These are great. Right? This ad is from Plaszczakowski Incorporated, 73 Pratt Street in Hartford, if you're interested. They make clothing from animal pelts. And the headline of the ad reads, We will gladly take the Gloacus pelt and make a Gloacus coat or scarf at our regular rates. Here's another one from the Laurel Oil Company. Okay. It reads,
Be ready for a quick getaway from the Glastonbury Glowacus by using Laurel Oil, Esso Gasoline, and a new Atlas battery. These are amazing. Okay, here's an ad from the Binet Salons that says, don't look like a Glowacus. Get yourself some permanent waves for $2.95 to $3.45.
I guess the price depends on how gloackus-like your hair is at the time. Right, right, right. All right, one last ad. Okay. This one is from Mohican Market and Bakery. Okay. There's a tiny line at the top that reads, we cannot agree to supply you with, and then in big, bold letters it says, gloackus steaks. And then it goes on to read, they'd be much too tough and stringy to please you. Okay.
Instead, they'll sell you sirloin, cube, or round steak for 33 cents per pound. Oh, this is great. Right? Now, the Glastonbury Rifle Club, they create this mock-up of the gloackus that its members can shoot at on their range. And then the whole town decides to throw a gloackus ball. Wow. It's this townwide dance where you can come shake a leg in honor of the weird creature that no two people seem to describe in the same way. Wow.
As winter melts to spring of 1939, locals get tired of Glowacka's fever and they just move on. So do the sightings stop? I mean, is the creature killed or something? No. Oh. The sightings continue. Many people all over town continue to report seeing this thing. And even though some 200 hunters have searched for the beast over the winter, no one has claimed to hit it with any bullets.
So pretty soon the newspapers move on as well and they stop reporting the sightings. And the town goes about its business until the creature's just kind of a memory. But it never completely goes away. All right. In 1966, seven horsemen riding in Deep River, Connecticut...
which is about 20 miles south of Glastonbury as the crow flies, report they see something strange and immediately think of old stories about the Gloacus. The town's first selectman is among those riders and says when the creature stood on its hind legs, it was as tall as a man. So after the second splash in the mid-1960s, eyewitness accounts of the Gloacus go silent again as the creature drifts into legend, only to get dug up every few years in one of those remember-when newspaper features.
So driving around Glastonbury today, do you think we'll see any sign of a lion-like creature roaming the streets? I really don't. But do you think it really happened? I think something weird and abnormal was lurking in Glastonbury in 1939. I mean, too many farm animals and pets were killed by some predator, and there were way too many eyewitness accounts to dismiss this story.
But as the legend grew and as the newspapers printed any crazy account someone brought to them, the beast quickly evolved from some kind of escaped zoo animal to a horned beast no one has ever seen before. I mean, maybe it was like a black mountain lion or something like that. All right. Mountain lions do make their way down to Connecticut on occasion. Okay. Even today.
But I looked into this, and while some experts accept the possibility that a mountain lion could be melanistic or black in color, there's never been a confirmed case of this variation on an animal. Ooh, so the plot thickens. It does. Well, then I only have one possible explanation for what this creature was. What's that? A gloacus. A gloacus.
It's as good a name as any, Jeff. Yeah. Hey, congratulations on 100 podcast episodes so far, buddy. Congratulations to you too, Ray. Thank you. We debated whether we should have some kind of extravaganza show to mark 100 episodes. Showgirls, dancers, yeah. Well, they were here. They just didn't see them.
But in the end, we agreed that, as with all of our episodes, this one could be someone's first. So would rather you experience what we do each and every week. And if you want to see our entire archive of shows, plus links to the New England Legends television series on Amazon Prime and PBS, dates for my upcoming story tour, visit our website at ournewenglandlegends.com.
And if you enjoy what we do, please tell a friend or two. Yes. Post about us on your social media or give us a review on iTunes. Brag about us. Yeah. Those reviews really go a long way in helping others find us. We'd like to thank Eric Altman for lending his voice acting talent this week. And we'd like to thank John and Beth Judd for also lending their voices. Hey. And that would be the same John Judd who composes and performs our theme music each and every week. So thank you, John. Thanks, John. Until next time, remember, the bizarre is closer than you think.
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This is such a cool animal. I love the name. I like how the name was combined with the town and what it looked like and all that. Glastonbury Wacky and us. This is probably one of our top 10 episodes most discussed. You think so? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. When people are just like, look, Luwakus. When people bring up the podcast, this one gets mentioned quite a bit. Should we put it on a t-shirt somehow? You know, so the guy who recommended the story to us, who gave him a shout out, Eddie, gave him a shout out in the podcast. Yeah.
He came to one of our beer events at... I think it was in Providence. Oh, at Narragansett. Narragansett. Yeah, Narragansett Brewery. And he showed up wearing a Glowackus t-shirt. Oh, I don't remember that. Yeah, because I think he's from Glastonbury. So that's how he knows so much about it. But I think he had a Glowackus t-shirt. Oh, that's cool. Or he showed up somewhere...
where I was at and he had a Glowackus t-shirt. So they already exist. Yeah. And it's such a great story because it's one of the most American stories ever, right? So...
number one, you've got two competing media outlets, in this case, newspapers. And one of them is just going nuts and throwing the facts out the window and whatever crazy thing comes in, it was getting people buying papers so they would do it. And then the other one was like, let's just stick to the facts. Animals are getting attacked at farms. Farmers need to know that. Keep a watch, you know, get your rifles ready.
uh good information and and the hartford current was like we it's from outer space you know like it didn't matter you know like let's sell ads the ads were so funny right the let's get a permanent don't look like a gloackus ladies you know and um and so i they just totally cashed in on it and then was the creature found was it hunted down and bagged uh what happened and what happened is
We just moved on. Yeah. We got bored with the story. Right. There's only so many different combinations of what you saw. Yeah. It was like the second most American thing that could have happened. The first was when they started selling ads being like, hey, everybody's buzzing about the cloacus. Let's put it in your advertising. That was the most American thing that could happen. The second most American thing was,
Okay, what else is going on? We're bored. We're just bored with this. Animals still being killed? Sure, but whatever. You know, like, let's just find something else. Yeah, the news cycle ran out. Something else happened. It was about a month. It was about, like, a month or so that it just, the buzz built, hit a crescendo. It was on the radio. And then people were like, eh.
What else you got? There's probably people that did see something, right? Absolutely. But then there's other people that just jumped on the bandwagon and made stuff up. So who do you believe? You heard right from the eyewitness accounts in the podcast. It was a black...
tawny creature, looked like a black cat, like a panther or a cat. Something that does exist on this earth, didn't belong in Connecticut, sure. I mean, could have escaped from a zoo, a menagerie of some kind, whatever. Could have been any number of very normal, natural things that would have hunted prey. But the news would have been out about that, you would think. You'd think someone would have been like, oh yeah, we had a panther. Oh, we misplaced a panther. Got loose from our menagerie or our zoo or whatever. That would have been in the news. You'd think, yeah, because that would explain it. But
But there's no fun in that. So it went from like this thing that is actually unique, but abnormal for the region, but normal for the world to like, you know, has a horn and looks like a lion and cries blue tears. And you're just suddenly like, what? You know, I mean, it just got into crazy town. Yeah. And that's probably because one of the newspapers was like, look, print it. Just like...
Just whatever. We'll listen to anybody. We're not going to fact check. Yeah, you say it. Good enough. We're not going to check their mental status. No, we're just going to take everybody's word for it. It's kind of like the media today. They probably heard a story and went, not enough. Give me more. A little bit more. Switch that to this. And now we have something. So head of the line, just, I mean, I'm not putting words in your mouth. Was it crying blue tears? No.
I guess maybe I wasn't that close to see, but it could have been. Okay, but we'll put that down. Yeah, we'll just put probably crying blue tears. Probably. But take out the probably. The editor said, leave the probably out and say it's just crying. Excuse me, Mr. Reporter, you know how close I'd have to be to see if it was crying anything? I mean, like face to face. Yeah, but...
you know, trust me on this. Okay, I guess. Ray Ogier said it was crying blue tears. And so, you know, the story just gets wild and wild. So lest you think today it's a modern phenomenon for the media to just go nuts and make stuff up, it's always been around. Yeah.
Well, the National Enquirer was famous for it. Star, you know, all those rag magazines at the checkout line. Weekly World News was the best. Weekly World News, yes. Elvis had my alien baby or something. You just infringed on a copyright right there. I'm pretty sure that was word for word one of the headlines.
And there was a documentary once with the guys that run Weekly World News. And they're just like, well, where do you get your stories? And they just looked incredulous. And they went, we make them up. Yeah. Right? Right? Isn't it crazy though that there are people that do believe that it's real? Oh, National Enquirer. That's a real... Those are real stories. Really? Because there's something about print. Yeah. It's right there. I mean, you can get like... Hey, somebody wrote it down. Must be true. USA Today is right there in the newsstand. Your local newspaper is right there. And then at the top...
What was Weekly World News? And you're like, it's all print. It must be true. And now it's AI. So everything we see, we believe now. You can't even trust anything anymore. Yeah. That's a scary turn of events. Like, look at that body on Kathleen Turner. I had no idea that she could still wear a bikini like that. Yeah.
That's not her. That's AI. I had no idea you could wear a bikini like that, right? Right? Don't I look great? That might have been AI. It's all over my Facebook feed. Now that I think about it. Yeah. Just weird pictures that are being passed off as real. Well, because it enforces something you already want to believe. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. So if it's pro something you support and it's AI and fake, you think it's real and you pass it along. If it's anti something you don't like...
you believe it and you pass it along. Cause you're like, yeah, see, you see what this monster is doing. Right. And so, um, yeah, we're in a mess here, folks. It's not going to get any better. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Yeah. We need critical thinking. We need to, you know, step away from the social media and, and recognize that we are being manipulated to get clicks and keep our eyes on there. Cause that's, that's the new media. Hmm.
But anyway, the Gloacus. Maybe that's why these old stories are so great, because they were a warning 100 years ago. 1939, almost 100 years ago, saying, hey, things can get out of hand.
The Glowackus Ball. They had a Glowackus Ball. What was that? It was a dance. Oh, a ball dance. Yeah. Oh, sorry. I don't know if it was just a big ball in the town common and a tribute of Glowackus. We don't want people going down some weird...
You're right. Who calls a dance a ball? They used to. They used to, yes. Yeah, now it's a sock hop. That's what all the kids are doing, right? Yes. They're hopping their socks. Rave, I don't know. Even rave is outdated. Oh, Jeff. I'm so old, I know. It's called a zombie prom. That's what it's called. That makes sense. That makes sense. Anyway, yeah. No, but this is one of those super fun stories.
because it got so much ink and you could watch and you could watch like the so legends in the olden days you know before media they could take years and years and years to evolve from like one simple thing to something crazy it could take years decades generations and we watched it happen um
in the newspapers in the span of like four or five weeks. That's how fast this legend went from something strange, hunting farm animals to, you know, this magical creature. Now with social media, it can happen in like four to five hours. Seconds, minutes. Right. Yeah. You're just like, you could post it in the morning and then by the afternoon it's evolved and changed and because that's what happens. But, but legends have a way to grip us. And, and I love this one so much. Glastonbury Glowackus, uh,
The whole thing was a tongue-in-cheek sort of like joke on itself, but also lots of people saw something and were still talking about it.
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