Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.
Henry Hudson was a brave explorer from yesteryear who demanded that Ohio be spelled with an ‘O’ at both ends. That really seems like a brazen waste of vowels to us. Not as bad as Hawaii though. Seriously – ‘Hawi’ would get the point across just fine – plus we heard their school system already teaches it like that. All we’re saying is the island state would probably fair better on the SATs if the answers more closely reflected the crummy curriculum.
And no doubt Henry Hudson, who we think we might have been talking about a second ago, would probably agree. As would the Gnomes he claimed to have happened upon in the Catskills.
Although Henry Hudson is known mostly for discovering rivers and then being thrown overboard by his mutinous crew, that’s not the only thing on his globe trotting resume. As the story goes – he was boating around the new world looking for an easy route to the East. Along the way he made friends with many an Indian tribe. Some of these tribes gave a warning – something like ‘If you hear music in the middle of nowhere, don’t look for it’s source.’
Sounds like easy advice to follow, right? Not so much according to AmericanFolklore.net:
“That night, Henry Hudson and his crew anchored the Half Moon in the shadow of the Catskill Mountains. Around midnight, Hudson heard the sound of music floating across the mountains and down to the river. Taking a few members of his crew, he went ashore and followed the sound up and up into the Catskills. The sound of the music grew louder as Hudson and his men marched up to the edge of a precipice. To their astonishment, a group of pygmies with long, bushy beards and eyes like pigs were dancing and singing and capering about in the firelight. Hudson realized that these creatures were the metal-working gnomes of whom the natives had spoken.”
And what would you do if you stumbled upon a weird scene like that? Hudson & crew got sloshed with them. In the process – Henry learned a thing or two about the gross little dudes. According to CoasttoCoastAM.com:
“…Hudson was told that [the gnomes] were from “somewhere else” and that they come into our world every twenty years.”
The story gets weirder actually. The Gnome-brew the crew slurped down turned them all gnome-like for the night. Hudson had only been sipping the stuff as he talked with the gnome chief. When he saw that his peeps had metamorphed into little figures that we can only assume were disgusting, he hurried them all back to the ship before anybody got Troll 2-ed, if you know what we’re saying.
It’s unclear what the source of this encounter is. We haven’t found a place to say where it was recorded. The mutiny was written in a crew member’s journal. We’d like to assume the same for the gnome encounter.
And you know what they say about super-weird stories with no original documentation – they’re? definitely true.
So, you know, be careful all along the Hudson River.