The Strange and Unusual Podcast
Jun 29, 2026 · 54 min · 20 segments
A companion to the Appalachian woods episode: ten strange, eerie, and true things lurking in the forests of New England. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See…
Alison HorrocksHost
I want you to picture a quiet, well-off town southwest of Boston, Dover, Massachusetts.
On a night of April 21, 1977, three teenagers, separately, not knowing what the others saw, ended up having probably the strangest 24 hours of their lives.
17-year-old Bill Bartlett was driving with two friends down Farm Street when his headlights caught something on a low wall of loose stones.
What Bill described was a creature about the size of a small child with thin spidery limbs, fingers that grip the stones like tendrils, and a head far too big for its body.
No nose, no mouth that he could see, and two glowing eyes that caught the headlights.
He wrote next to it, I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of Bibles that I saw this creature.
Two hours later, and a mile away, 15-year-old John Baxter was walking home and saw the same thing.
The next night, a third teenager, Abby Bromham, riding in a car on a different road, saw it again.
The creature got its name from the cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, who lived nearby and investigated within days.
And that name, the Dover Demon, is honestly half the reason you would have heard of it.
The Dover Demon was seen across barely more than a single day in 1977 and never again.
I want you to picture a quiet, well-off town southwest of Boston, Dover, Massachusetts.
On a night of April 21, 1977, three teenagers, separately, not knowing what the others saw, ended up having probably the strangest 24 hours of their lives.
17-year-old Bill Bartlett was driving with two friends down Farm Street when his headlights caught something on a low wall of loose stones.
What Bill described was a creature about the size of a small child with thin spidery limbs, fingers that grip the stones like tendrils, and a head far too big for its body.
No nose, no mouth that he could see, and two glowing eyes that caught the headlights.
He wrote next to it, I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of Bibles that I saw this creature.
Two hours later, and a mile away, 15-year-old John Baxter was walking home and saw the same thing.
The next night, a third teenager, Abby Bromham, riding in a car on a different road, saw it again.
The creature got its name from the cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, who lived nearby and investigated within days.
And that name, the Dover Demon, is honestly half the reason you would have heard of it.
The Dover Demon was seen across barely more than a single day in 1977 and never again.
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