The Brain-Eating Thunderbird of Pennsylvania
Over the course of my nine-year career delving into the mysteries of the Great White North, I’ve made a handful of discoveries that actually gave me goosebumps. In 2016, I thought I correctly deciphered and interpreted a code that I found in an obscure family history, which I believed pointed to a treasure buried on New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island. In 2017, while doing research for my book ‘Legends of the Nahanni Valley,’ I came across the story of a man who shot a Nakani, or northern wildman, in the forgotten letters of a northern frontiersman named Poole Field. In 2018, I located and interviewed Frank Graves, a semi-legendary character whose northern adventures spawned two of the legends in my aforementioned book, from whom I acquired footage that was supposed to have been lost. In 2019, I discovered a connection between a TV episode from the 1950s and a mysterious map connected with Oak Island, Nova Scotia, the site of Canada’s longest-running treasure hunt. In 2021, I observed three eerie similarities between old Cree Wendigo stories and traditional Roman Catholic doctrine regarding demonic possession. And in 2023, my friend, Bexx Korol, told me about her family’s encounters with a little person in Port Perry, Ontario, a strange detail of which accorded perfectly with old Ontario pixie legends that I came across in a little-known ethnological treatise.
I recently got goosebumps again when comparing notes with my friend and fellow researcher, Kevin Guhl, author of the 2024 book ‘An Anthology of American Strangeness, Volume 1.’ Kevin, who has a special interest in the legendary Thunderbird photo supposedly taken in Tombstone, Arizona, in the late 1800s, had been poring over the writings of Hiram Cranmer, an eccentric resident of the tiny backwoods community of Hammersley Fork, Pennsylvania, who claimed to have owned a copy of the photo before his death in a house fire in 1967. Cranmer declared that the wooded hills of northern Pennsylvania sheltered a population of giant predatory birds, which he called ‘Thunderbirds’ after the legendary storm spirit common to native traditions across the continent. He attributed a handful of missing persons cases to the predations of these colossal raptors, which he believed were capable of carrying off fully grown men.
In an article on his website ThunderbirdPhoto.com, Kevin reproduced one of Cranmer’s statements regarding the predatory behavior of these avian behemoths, writing:
“The thunderbird seizes its victim by the shoulders, flies to a bare hilltop where it places its victim on its back then rips open the belly, begins eating while the victim is alive. Then it pecks a hole in the skull and eats the brains. Then if it is still hungry it eats the meat.”
Cranmer reiterated his belief in the Thunderbird’s skull-pecking proclivities to Al Bielek, a protégé of cryptozoology godfather Ivan T. Sanderson, who would go on to gain notoriety for his extraordinary claims regarding secret U.S. military tests like the supposed Philadelphia Experiment and Project Montauk. In 1963, 36-year-old Bielek, at Sanderson’s request, interviewed an elderly Cranmer in his remote cabin in the Pennsylvania hills. Bielek described the experience in a letter to Sanderson, writing:
“Mr. C was very talkative—says he has seen many Thunderbirds—since approx. 1899 (his first)… He described in detail the disappearance of several local inhabitants over the years, from old men to a young child – a girl of about 4, who was left alone for a few minutes by her sister while ‘berry picking.’ The girl was not recovered or found. An old junk dealer traveling alone in the fog ‘disappeared from his wagon’ and was not found. In one or two instances, the skeletons were found much later, invariably on a high and barren hilltop. They had been consumed, and apparently from his descriptions, included boring the skull to devour the brain…”
The Head-Piercer of the Village of the Dead
The notion of a skull-pecking Thunderbird reminded me of a pair of old legends that I touched on in my 2019 book ‘Mysteries of Canada: Volume I’ regarding a mysterious vale on the southern shores of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. If you drive ten minutes west of the sleepy town of Collingwood, Ontario, into the Blue Mountains, you’ll come to the Scenic Caves Nature Preserve. This enchanting natural area is dominated by towering cliffs, gloomy caves, and dark fissures that snake away into the rock. Centuries ago, this otherworldly vale marked the territorial boundary between Huron Indians and the related Petun or Tobacco Nation. Both peoples avoided the place, especially after dark, believing it to be haunted by the spirits of the dead.
The gateway to this ‘Village of the Dead,’ the natives believed, was a rugged 16-metre-tall limestone spire best-known today as ‘Standing Rock’. The Huron called this edifice Ekarenniondi – literally, ‘The Rock That Stands Out.’ The first written reference to this lithic anomaly appears in the Jesuit Relations of 1636 – a report written by French Jesuit missionaries in Canada to their superiors in Rome. In a chapter on Huron beliefs regarding the human soul, Jesuit missionary Father Jean de Brebeuf, who would be famously tortured to death by the Iroquois thirteen years later, wrote, “The souls which are stronger and more robust have their gathering place, as I have said, toward the West, where each Nation has its own Village… I asked one day one of our Savages where they thought the Village of souls was; he answered that it was toward the Tobacco Nation, that is to say, toward the West, eight leagues from us, and that some persons had seen them as they were going; that they passed near a rock called Ecaregniondi, which has often been found marked with the paint which they used to smear their faces.
“Another told me that on the same road, before arriving at the Village, one comes to a Cabin where lives one named Oscotarach, or ‘Pierce-head,’ who draws the brains out of the heads of the dead, and keeps them.”
Tuscarora American ethnologist John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt, in an 1895 article on the ‘Iroquoian Concept of the Soul,’ postulated on the symbolic significance behind the Oscotarach’s brain-sucking operation. Hewitt first reiterated de Brebeuf’s observation that the Iroquois believed that a man had two souls: one which resides in his bones after death, and another which travels to the Village of the Dead after the performance of an ossuarial ritual called the Feast of the Dead.
“When once the idea that the sensitive soul resided in the marrow of the bones, the most enduing portion of the human body, became firmly fixed,” Hewitt wrote, “it was not difficult to follow this with the further doctrine that the brain, encased in by the largest bony structure of the skeleton, was the appointed seat and abiding-place of the intelligent soul or spirit. The use of the war-club and the battle-axe would soon decide for the savage mind that reason and consciousness… abide in the brain, since a blow on the head from either arm drove from the unfortunate one all reason and consciousness; hence, it was also believed that the removal of the brains from the head rendered the sensitive or animating soul stupid and implacable and capable of committing excesses in the way of preying on the living. This view is recognized in the common Iroquoian tradition that on the way to the land of disembodies spirits, there dwells a person called ‘Head-opener’… who makes it his business to take the brains from the dead, some say to eat them, others, to keep them.” Here, Hewitt seems to be suggesting that the role of Oscotarach was to deprive ghosts of their reasoning, making them dangerous to living humans.
17th Century French explorer Pierre Boucher de Grosbois, Sieur de Boucherville, who served as the Governor of Trois-Rivieres in the 1660s, learned a different interpretation of the Head-Piercer’s function from his Huron allies. In his posthumous 1883 book Canada in the Seventeenth Century, Boucher wrote that the Huron believed “in the immortality of the soul, and say that after death it goes into a beautiful country; that before it can get there it has to pass a river where there is one who lays open the heads of all comers and takes out their brains, so that they no longer remember anything.” Here, Grosbois seems to be suggesting that the purpose of the Head-Piercer to was to eliminate any attachment a ghost might have to its former life, preparing it for eternal residence in the Village of the Dead.
The Thunderbird of the Scenic Caves
There is another indigenous legend associated with the Scenic Caves Nature Preserve which, when conjoined with the legend of the Head-Piercer, forms a disturbing parallel with Hiram Cranmer’s brain-eating Thunderbird of Pennsylvania. In his 1915 book Ojibwa Myths and Tales, Canadian cavalry officer Colonel George E. Laidlaw, a veteran of both the North-West Rebellion and the Boer War, included a brief legend told to him by Ojibwa elder Peter York of Lake Simcoe’s Rama Reserve.
“The old people once went to the Blue Mountains near Collingwood a long time ago,” York said. “At the end… near the Bay, a Thunderbird had its nest. It had two young birds. They were shaped like geese, but were naked and were about as high as a man’s chest and were of brownish red or russet color. By and by, they began to grow pin-feathers and get big. Then they went away. The old people went over several times to see them, and they first saw them during a thunderstorm.”
In a 1998 paper for the Petun Research Institute Bulletin, Canadian archaeologist Charles Garrad identified the legendary Thunderbird nest in the Blue Mountains as a bowl-shaped cavity immediately adjacent to the Standing Rock, described by British-Canadian archaeologist Fred Birch in a 1904 paper as “a sort of ampitheatre forty or fifty feet in diameter”. In a 2011 interview, Garrad noted that this nest-like depression is filled with egg-shaped rocks.
To put it succinctly, an expert on Pennsylvania folklore believed that Thunderbirds pecked holes in the skulls of human beings in order to eat their brains, and the Ojibwa claimed that a Thunderbird kept its nest in the same very spot where the Petun believed an entity they called the Head-Piercer bored holes in the skulls of the dead in order to eat their brains. Is it possible that a man-eating, skull-pecking Thunderbird once lived in the Blue Mountains, and that the Petun legend of the Head-Piercer derived from discoveries of its grisly leavings? Or are the striking parallels between Cranmer’s assertions and native legends regarding the Scenic Caves Nature Preserve merely coincidental?
Thundercrow
This is not the only eerie discovery that Kevin and I made while comparing notes. While reading one of Kevin’s articles on a mysterious and little-known cryptozoological phenomenon endemic to the United States and British Columbia, I noticed two astonishing parallels to a pair of native legends from B.C.’s Interior Plateau that I had come across years ago – astounding similarities which actually sent a chill down my spine.
In a June 8th, 2025 article published on his website ThunderbirdPhoto.com, Kevin wrote, “I’ve written previously about ‘Thundercrows,’ the name I’ve given to giant mystery birds that resemble crows or ravens. These are a subject of the avian cryptids known as Thunderbirds, a variety of gigantic, unidentified birds collectively named after the elemental being of Native American tradition.”
After referencing my 2018 interview with adventurer and cryptid hunter Frank Graves, who professed his belief that Thunderbirds resemble giant ravens, Kevin included a first-hand Thundercrow sighting sent to him in May 2025 by a man from Washington, who claimed to have encountered something extraordinary in the Evergreen State’s Olympic Peninsula. One early afternoon in April 2016, while hiking in the Hoh Rainforest south of the Hoh River, Kevin’s informant stumbled upon an enormous black bird perched atop a cedar stump. “It looked just like a giant raven,” the informant said. “I was 15 feet away from this bird. It turned its head and I saw a red slash under its eye. There were tufts of feathers behind its beak just like a raven would normally have and the blackest eyes I’ve ever looked into.”
Apparently startled by the hiker’s approach, this feathered behemoth, which the informant estimated to stand about four feet tall, unfurled wings spanning about twelve feet and flew off over the treetops, making a deep whooshing sound with every flap of its wings.
Kevin went on to reproduce an eerily similar sighting sent to him by the same informant, who claimed to have received it from the caretaker of his Washington cabin. One day, while putting out pancakes for the birds, as was his custom, the caretaker was astonished by the approach of two enormous black birds which appeared to be the same species as the colossal corvid that the informant had encountered on his hike. One of the birds, which the caretaker supposed to be male, stood over four feet tall, boasted a 12-foot wingspan, and sported a red slash under each of its eyes. The other bird, perhaps a female, was smaller in height, had a wingspan of about ten feet, and was completely black, without any red slashes under its eyes.
Kevin told me that, after publishing his article, he was personally contacted by renowned British cryptozoologist Karl Shuker, who sent him a link to his own article, published on New Year’s Day 2017 on his personal blog, KarlShuker.blogspot.com. In that piece, Shuker commented upon another brief article published on the bygone website Cryptodominion at least as early as June 2002, which was brought to his attention by a French cryptozoological correspondent named Raphael Marliere. A short paragraph on that page describes a piece of local folklore from the wooded heart of British Columbia. “The bush mechanics who worked in the interior of B.C.,” the paragraph reads, “claim that here is a valley, rich in timber, which is populated by enormous [ravens] bigger than golden eagles. They say these ravens are very dangerous animals, very opportunistic, and will not hesitate to tear [someone’s] camp apart. They are nearly flightless, and have much red in their tail plumage…”
While most native Canadian legends describe the Thunderbird as either an enormous eagle or an anthropomorphic man, the concept of the Thunderbird as a great black bird, and its association with the crow or the raven, have ample precedent in First Nations folklore. In his 1926 book Kootenay Why Stories, American politician and ethnographer Frank Bird Linderman, who trapped north of Flathead Lake, Montana, in the late 1800s, included an old Kootenay tale from the Columbia Mountains which described Thunderbirds as massive crows which take on the appearance of dark clouds when they prepare to make lighting. In their 1909 article on the mythology of the Blackfoot Indians, American anthropologists Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall described the Thunderbird as appearing in the form of a “large dark cloud”. And in his 1994 book The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt: And Other Blackfoot Stories, Canadian historian Hugh Dempsey wrote that the Blackfoot regarded the crow as “a messenger of the Thunder Spirit.”
While the black plumage of the aforementioned birds is interesting in light of these native legends, the red slashes under the eyes of the huge Washington raven described by Kevin’s informant, and the scarlet tailfeathers of the large ravens spotted by British Columbian bush mechanics, are details rendered fascinating by two native legends from B.C.’s Interior Plateau, recorded in the early 1900s by Scots-Canadian anthropologist James Teit.
In his 1908 treatise on the Shuswap Indians, Teit wrote, “The conception of thunder is the same as among the Thompson Indians. The thunder-bird is large and black, and covered with down or short downy feathers. Some part of its body – according to many, its head – is bright red.”
Despite Teit’s statement to the contrary, the Thunderbird of Thompson Indian folklore, in appearance at least, bears little resemblance to the large black red-headed creature described by the Shuswap. It does, however, have an oddly-specific characteristic which is eerily congruent with the monstrous raven of the Hoh Rainforest. In his 1900 treatise on the Thompson, Teit wrote, “The thunder is said to be a bird a little larger than a grouse, and of somewhat similar shape. Some describe the color of its plumage as wholly red; while others say that it resembles the female blue grouse, but has large red bars above its eyes, or has a red head, or some red in its plumage.”
Perhaps these similarities are merely coincidental, or perhaps a tremendous black bird with streaks of red in its plumage truly haunts the wilderness of North America.
Sources
“The Ideas of the Hurons Regarding the Nature and Condition of the Soul, Both in This Life and After Death,” by Father Jean de Brebeuf in Volume X of the Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (1636)
“The Iroquoian Concept of the Soul,” by John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt, in Volume 8 of the Journal of American Folklore (April-June 1895)
Ojibwa Myths and Tales (1915), by George E. Laidlaw
Canada in the Seventeenth Century (1883), by Pierre Boucher de Gosbois, Sieur de Boucherville
“Ekarenniondi and Oscotarach” by Charles Garrad, in the July 1998 of the Petun Research Institute Bulletin
“Garrad Talks Myths and Afterlife as the Petun Saw It,” by Barrie Advance in the May 2nd, 2011 issue of Simcoe.com
“New Thundercrow Sightings Around the Hoh Rainforest in Washington,” by Kevin Guhl in the June 8th, 2025 issue of ThunderbirdPhoto.com
“Are Giant Flightless Ravens Something to Crow about in Canada,” by Kark Shuker in the January 1st, 2017 issue of KarlShuker.Blogspot.com
https://www.angelfire.com/bc2/cryptodominion/preybirds.html
“The Shuswap,” by James Teit, in Volume II of the Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History (1908)
“The Thompson Indians of British Columbia,” by James Teit, in Volume II of the Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History (1900)
Kootenay Why Stories (1926), by Frank Bird Linderman
“Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians,” by Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall, written in September 1908 and published in Volume II of the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History (1909)
The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt: And Other Blackfoot Stories (1994), by Hugh Dempsey
Leave a Reply