RETURN OF THE SPECTRE MOOSE

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 36, 12 February 1938, Page 27

RETURN OF THE SPECTRE MOOSE

For more than a generation Maine has had a "spectre moose," says the "New York Times." There was one thirty-six years ago, another in 1017, still another in 1932, and now he is stalking again, this time in the Chesuncook region along the west branch of the Penobscot River.

Always hunters get near enough to be appalled by this gigantic beast, but seldom within range for an effective shot. In the accumulating lore of the forest he .is described as ten to fifteen feet high, "dirty white" in col^ our, brandishing immense antlers.

Not only his ghostly hue but also his keen scent, acute hearing, and seemingly magical power of instant disappearance have built up the legend of a wraith. Sceptics say there "ain't no sich critter," but a man named Houston brings the story of the latest visitation.

On his way to camp after a timber cruise around Chesuncook Lake, Houston came to an open bog of about thirty acres where sixteen moose were feeding. Standing just inside the edge of the timber within eighty yards of the herd he noticed three big bulls.

He almost had the ague when he saw that two of them were like pygmies beside the third, monarch of the

herd, which he declared was a monster. Besides the spectral colouration; there were the antlers again, twenty points on one side, twenty-one on the other, with a palm at least eighteen inches wide in the velvet.

This giant moose, or one of his progeny, has been a wonder and a mystery of the Maine woods since the fall of 1901, when M. A. Cashing, a Boston sportsman, reported sighting him near Chairback Mountain in the Katahdin region. Within a few months he was observed by Clarence Duffy, an Old Town guide, and. the late John Ross, a Bangor lumberman, around the Lobster Lakes.

In the years since then Gilman Brown, of West Newbury, and Granville Gray, a Bangor taxidermist, have been among those who have shivered at the apparition in the dusk. They took pot-shots at the monster, but he would vanish ahead of the bullets. Now the law decrees that no moose shall be killed. One doubter up St. John Lake way argues that it "ain't no moose, but is only an old grey horse that's broke loose from a logging camp and gone wild." But no horse stands fifteen feet high. And that's why the "spectre moose" is still threshing around in the woods.