Be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense,
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope.
Shakespeare, MacBeth
Wide right!
Van Miller
We come to the end of another NFL regular season with, hopefully, plenty of football life beyond it for the Buffalo Bills. I love this team, these coaches, this front office, and these owners. Things look bright for any team that has that quarterback! Still, not once have the Bills won football’s ultimate prize. And fate/refereeing has not been kind to the Bills so far this year. I’ve seen inconsistent officiating cost the Bills (in my opinion) two important games that would seriously have impacted playoff position. They always seem to have to battle the odds. Maybe the refs disfavor Rust Belt teams, as if they need any more adversity. The idea comes to more than one of us that the Bills could be suffering from a collective hex.
Should any of us take the subject seriously?
To me the question is like many in American politics. If a lot of people think a certain way, their belief becomes a force that has to be addressed. On that basis, there is a body of logic to curses. Let’s talk within that logic. Let’s talk Native American tradition here, too, since all the local speculation seems rooted in it.
Both man-made sites and natural places can be cursed and target those who may do no more than simply pass through. Curses can be launched by the force of the living or the outrage of the dead. Curses can affect nations, organizations, families, and individuals. Curses can be concentrated in single, small objects that affect all who spend time close to them.
If there is a Bills’ curse, it might be one of those more related to the site.
Before the AFL-NFL merger, the Bills had their turns at the top of the league heap. They won two AFL championships in a row before losing to the Kansas City Chiefs and missing the first Super Bowl. These two AFL triumphs were never acknowledged as world championships, since the bigger NFL was considered the badder. The Bills’ home base was the now-defunct War Memorial Stadium (“the Rockpile”) on Buffalo’s east side. This was before the Bills made their move to the town of Orchard Park. In that process we may have a clue.
In 1972 work started on the then-named Rich Stadium. Soon the neighborhoods fringing the construction site thought more than the landscaping had changed. A number of families on the edge of the country tract got the sense that their homes had turned haunted. They experienced troubling dreams, emotional disturbances, strange physical phenomena, and creepy apparitions – ghosts. Word got out that the construction had disturbed burials. That part of the story is true.
Word got out that the construction had disturbed burials. That part of the story is true.
In the process of clearing the former farmland, a tiny graveyard had been found, that of the Joseph Sheldon family, second owners of the property. Dating from 1832, it was abandoned by 1924 and not rediscovered till the early going with the stadium. My late friend Orchard Park historian John Printy oversaw its loving restoration. Other graves may have been disturbed.
Named for the settler-era Seneca chief Old Smoke, Smokes Creek curls through the town of Orchard Park and sends tendrils through the area of the stadium. Along it for centuries had been settlements, possibly those of the Eries or the Wenro, Iroquoian-speaking groups later absorbed by the Iroquois Confederacy. According to Arthur Parker in a 1920 bulletin of the New York State Museum, a Wenro burial ground had been somewhere on the tract used by the stadium. Earlier settlers had treated its bones and grave-goods like landfill. The 20th-century construction was just scratching a scab. Word got out that this was the root of the negative effects.
A Wenro burial ground had been somewhere on the tract used by the stadium.
The link between “Native American burial ground” and supernatural act-ups is one of the oldest cliches in Hollywood. It’s like radioactivity as a back-story for monsters in post-Hiroshima creature-features. Some of the time, of course, at least in folklore, the back-story is at least close to true.
The situation made sense to the Seneca I interviewed in 2001. “Things act up when our ancestors are disturbed,” said Joyce Jamison of the Cattaraugus Seneca Reservation.
“That’s what ought to start happening,’” said Algonquin teacher and author Michael Bastine when informed of the pattern at the Stadium. “Little stuff going wrong around the house. Animals getting spooked. Cats running away, dogs shying away from certain spots in the house and yard. People getting creeped out, turning to drugs and stuff. Even families breaking up. Lotta people don’t realize that sometimes these things aren’t coincidental. Sometimes they have causes.”
Since my article on this stadium curse (in Spirits of the Great Hill, 2001) I’ve met former residents who are still searching for answers. One woman who approached me after attending one of my talks reported that her stadium-side house was so active in the day that she called in a priest, who, a minute into his visit, sensed the psychic temperature and just looked at her. “Why did you wait so long to call me?”
Author, researcher, Haunted History Ghost Walks tour guide, and my good friend Rob Lockhart spent some of his childhood years in a house in the area and remembers a rumor-cycle among the neighbors. “To hear them talk, (curious events) were an everyday occurrence. It was something (people) learned to live with.”
I’ve heard a couple stories about what happened next. In one, the elders of the nearest reservation, the Cattaraugus, approached the Bills as a civic service and offered to ease the spirits of the dead. In another, the psychic trouble was so dramatic that the Bills organization made the outreach.
Accounts diverge from there. Some hold that the Seneca were rebuffed and never let to do their work, and that this is the source of the continuing plague. Others believe the healing was done, but that the elders were disrespected, possibly never presented the gift due to healers for their services. (This gift is just an honorific, but it’s a respect-sign.) I don’t blame the Bills for not understanding the protocols of Native healing. But this may have cranked the energy up again, this time redirected toward the football team.
Cursed or not, the Stadium may be haunted, at least during its construction.
Cursed or not, the Stadium may be haunted, at least during its construction. It was one of the handful of local sites that stood out to my late friend the Seneca storyteller DuWayne “Duce” Bowen (1946-2006) when I asked him in 2003. Apparently some of Bowen’s buddies had worked at the Stadium and reported ghostly apparitions, particularly in the tunnels.
In 2001 I started trying to validate a few more of the back-stories of the Bills curse. If there had been a Seneca ceremony in the early 70s, written mention of it should exist somewhere. Historian Printy knew nothing about it. The publicity department of the Bills couldn’t find any record of the event. Mike Vogel of The Buffalo News went through decades of News archives with no more success.
Many I talked to in the Seneca community remembered – or would say – nothing about this rite of healing. Other Native Americans in the area (as well as many whites connected to the community) are sure some kind of ceremony was done. It may simply never have become public. It would also figure that no one might remember. The elders involved in 1973 may have all crossed over.
The name of the team might be the source of the curse, and because of the namesake.
I’ve heard it said that the name of the team might be the source of the curse, and because of the namesake. While as an individual, onetime Rochester resident William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846-1917) respected Native Americans and campaigned for Native rights, his traveling “Cowboy and Indian” circus doesn’t look very sensitive to 21st-century eyes. It made caricatures out of western Native Americans. There could well be Native power-people willing to blight anything bearing his name.
There are those who believe in a curse but say that it is directed not just against the Bills, but at the sporting fortunes of the whole Buffalo area, including the Sabres. (Can you say, “No goal”?) The source of the blight may be older than the stadium.
Some Erie County residents recall old family stories about fallout from a running race between the citizens of Buffalo and the Seneca of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, probably sometime between 1800 and 1840.
The Iroquois/Hodenosaunee nations have always loved sports. The Buffalo Seneca were fine runners who knew they should easily beat the farmers, blacksmiths, and shopkeepers of the budding city. Still, the whites figured out some way to cheat and ended up winning. Because of that offended pride, the Medicine People pronounced a weighty curse on Buffalo. Its athletic enterprises will never win what matters most, it was said, until justice has been done.
Michael Bastine remembers a different story with a more recent origin: the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, which apparently featured a number of sporting contests, including at least one game of lacrosse.
Now, the Iroquois/Hodenosaunee nations invented lacrosse. The original sport – ball-like-objects, sticks, teams, running – would have been recognizable today, though it was rougher. (The rules were somewhere between those of the modern game and the Siege of Stalingrad.) Like hockey to Canadians, lacrosse is a point of pride to the Longhouse folk. The Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels (1912-1980) played pro lacrosse before finding fame with The Lone Ranger as the unforgettable “Tonto.” Many of the world’s best players today are Native.
The Pan-Am was a chance for the Seneca to show their national game in front of representatives from the entire world. Shoddy officiating, though, gave their opponents an unjust victory. (They must have had the same refs who worked the Bucs game against the Bills in December.) Word has it that the clan mothers who watched the contest launched a bolt of mojo at the sporting fortunes of the Buffalo area.
Word has it that the clan mothers who watched the contest launched a bolt of mojo at the sporting fortunes of the Buffalo area.
To hear some people talk, the sports thing is just a symptom. The curse is on the whole Buffalo region, and the Bills just happen to be the figureheads. Again local legend cooperates. One alleged source is the famous Seneca statesman Red Jacket (1750-1830).
Why would Red Jacket look to anyone like a likely curser? Part of it may be that majority-cultures often stereotype minority-cultures as the wielders of occultism. The Romans did it to the Celts. All of Europe did it to the Gypsies. Some whites think any Native American could whip up a curse, and Red Jacket is the most famous one in Western New York history. Red Jacket was accused of witchcraft once during his lifetime, but surely for political reasons. The accusers were Seneca rivals with motives, “the Prophet” Handsome Lake (1735-1815) and his brother the war-chief Cornplanter (1740-1836). A witchcraft charge could be a good way to get rid of your enemies. In those days the solution was permanent. The charges didn’t stick on Red Jacket, and most Seneca today don’t think he was a witch. (A shaman… Now that’s not so far out of the picture.)
Whether or not he could curse you, Red Jacket had his reasons to be mad at Buffalo.
Whether or not he could curse you, Red Jacket had his reasons to be mad at Buffalo. He never wanted to play ball with the suits in his lifetime or rest in a white cemetery after it. That heroic monument at Forest Lawn would be a source of postmortem outrage, even if it’s not him under it. When the whites decided the great orator was special and came hunting for his remains, it’s an open question what they got. One of my contacts on the Cattaraugus Reservation said, “We just gave them dog bones.” Red Jacket’s resting place is elsewhere, the Seneca say, and nobody’s talking.
Red Jacket’s resting place is elsewhere, the Seneca say, and nobody’s talking.
Michael Bastine knows Native spirituality. “Is there any way to straighten out this curse?” I asked him.
“Maybe if the people who have the responsibility for the Bills would go to the Seneca and the Tuscarora elders and ask for a little help with this, we might get it turned around. I think a lot of them today might be ready to be understanding on behalf of the community. But the approach would have to be made in a respectful manner. If it’s just gonna be lip service…” He shook his head and made eye contact. “Not gonna happen.”
But is this NFL franchise really star-crossed? Yeah, they lost four straight Super Bowls in the 1990s. That also means they won four straight AFC championships, one involving the greatest comeback in NFL history. That looks pretty good in a lot of towns right now. The Bills were the winningest franchise of the 1990s. We are certainly the only town with the distinction of having had a running back who led both the NFL and the California Highway Patrol. (That televised steeplechase in the now-notorious white Bronco. Come on. You know that one. OJ. The Juice.)
But in the metaphor of the curse, that’s just how it reels us in. It depresses us with long stretches of failure and tantalizes us with bouts of short-range success. It takes us just close enough to the ultimate prize to have us thirsting it and hungering it. Then on the only stage that counts, like MacBeth’s witches, those juggling fiends, it lets us down. The kick will drift wide, “home run throwback” will still be a pass, and a skate will be in the crease.
The kick will drift wide, “home run throwback” will still be a pass, and a skate will be in the crease.
For those of you who, like me, wish well for the Bills yet are troubled by this article, take heart. Native American medicine – magic – doesn’t always work. The Oneida William Honyhoust Rockwell (1880?-1960) recalled an incident involving the Senecas’ Confederacy-cousins.
Around 1900, the baseball-crazy Oneidas challenged a semi-pro team of whites from Cazenovia to a game. They didn’t understand the disadvantage they faced. One old-timer scouted the whites and convinced his comrades that they might need a little help. An elder prescribed a spell that would keep the whites from scoring a run.
“Go into the graveyard and pick an old grave. Make a hole in the earth and reach around with your hands until you come up with an old toe bone. Take it with you to the field you’re going to play on and bury it under the pitcher’s box. Take some of the black dirt with you, too, and let every man on your team rub his hands with it before the game. And, finally, just before the game, the whole team has to take a swig from the same bottle of whiskey, then cork it up and put it away. When you pitch to the White men, it will look to them like you are throwing them two balls to hit.”
The only part of the formula that bothered the team was the single bottle, and the measly swig of it per player. All was done as prescribed, though: Bone, bottle, and burying-dirt were in place by game time.
The Oneidas lost 22-0.
The incident left Rockwell scratching his head. Decades later he met the great Native American athlete Jim Thorpe (1887-1953) and couldn’t help getting it off his chest. How could we have lost with all that Medicine behind us? Thorpe – baseball, football, and Olympic champion – could only venture the guess that the white men were able to hit both balls.
Mason Winfield is the author of fifteen books on the supernatural and paranormal and the founder of Western New York’s original ghost-walk enterprise, Haunted History Ghost Walks, Inc. To sign up for his weekly newsletter “Notes from the Spirit Way,” visit here.
Lead image courtesy Dave Cosentino