Tic-Toc

**Tic-Toc** (Tictok/Tictawk) is a Native American spirit of the dead and vengeance from the Mohawk/Mohegan Indians of Upper New York. The origins of the legend are unknown, but it is known it has become a prevalent part of American urban folklore in the Northeast United States. It is said it tales its name by the sound of his bones clicking against each other as it walked.

According to legend, in the Late Eighteenth Century after the Revolutionary War, a Colonial soldier from Boston was traveling home to a small community named Endtown near modern Burlington, Vermont from New York City, New York. As he was passing through Washington County, he was coming up on the village of Salem's Village near Whitehall, New York when he came across a figure standing on the first hill outside of town:

"*a figure thin and tall and stretched like a tree with white skin and long midnight dark hair leaning on a long metal pole. He seemed barely alive, a chest bare dead corpse propped up on the rim like a warning to the living, gaunt and skeletal with ruined skin wearing tattered clothing. I did not think it could be alive until it seemingly heard me and turned its eyeless fleshless face toward me.*"

Terrified by the specter, the soldier fled to town and told everyone he met of the vision. A crowd of men followed him back to the hill to see the apparition for themselves, but nothing could be found. Laughed at and ridiculed, the soldier spent the night drinking to forget in a small hotel room before traveling on the next morning. Returning home, he told the tall tale several times and lived the life of a farmer and raised his kids. However, several months after, he found it necessary to return to Whitehall which meant passing through Salem's Village, but in the valley where it once rested there was now a vast lake (South Bay) caused by storms marking the spot with no evidence the town ever existed. For years afterward, the old soldier believed the apparition was a portent responsible for eliminating the town.

Since this telling, the story has been repeated several times with the Civil War, World War One or World War Two as the event in the story, However, the story is in question since there never was a city named Salem's Village in New York. Complicating the legend is that South Bay is part of an extensive waterway between New York and Connecticut and wasn't created by flooding.

Nevertheless, since the 1790s, there has been several stories of Tic-Toc appearing before thunderstorms that produce flooding in the Northeast United States. The figure has also been blamed for disappearances in rural parts of Washington, Saratoga, Warren, Essex and Hamilton Counties as well as parts of Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine. Reporter Melissa Strickland first heard of the obscure character while researching paranormal activity in Addamsville, New York and later in Mill City, New York. However, it was subsequently linked to the disappearances of teenagers camping and exploring the woodland northwest of Peytonville, New York, a case actually linked to a cult known as the Children of the Sun. Several locals reported seeing what they thought was a tall thin figure wandering the woodlands, and while Melissa heard the weird clicking noise attributed to Tic-Toc, she never did see it. However, many of the rescued teenagers held captive by the cult did report seeing a figure resembling Tic-Toc regularly wandering the area and luring away the cult members into the woods to be never seen again.