A strange half man, half pig creature has been rumoured to inhabit the woods surrounding Northfield, Vermont for decades. Here are some re-tellings of this most bizarre tale…

Sam Harris, also known as “The Pig Man” is the legend of a boy age 17 that went missing in the hills Of Northfield Vermont in 1951. The night before Halloween October 30, 1951 Sam set out with eggs in hand for what he called Picket night, a night of mischief. The next morning when his parents awoke and found him missing, this set off a huge search party that lasted weeks and involved hundreds of locals over hundreds of square miles. Although never found it is said there has been sighting of Sam who some say became possessed by the devil himself that fateful night. Sam Harris is known to slaughter pigs and eat their entrails and hallow out the pig’s head and wear over his all awhile terrorizing the small New England town locals. Sam still today haunts the hills surrounding Devil’s Washbowl where they say he lies with the pigs and is also known for bestiality spawning half man half pig offspring.

Source: http://cryptidz.wikia.com/wiki/Pigman

My family lived in Vermont for a number of years, in a small town called Northfield, south of Montpelier.

There’s a local legend in Northfield, of a thing known as the Pigman. The story has multiple versions, as most do, but there are some parts that are always the same. Back in 1951, the night before Halloween, this 17-year old kid named Sam Harris went out on his own with a basket of eggs to cause some mischief. Nobody knows exactly what happened to him, just that he never came home and was never found.

Years later, some high school kids were out drinking behind the school one night during a dance when this… thing… came walking out of the woods on two human legs. It was naked, covered in white hair, and was wearing a hollowed-out pig’s head like some grotesque mask.

Naturally, the kids tore out of there and went and told people. Word spread, and some farmer admitted he’d seen a figure matching that description digging through his garbage one night. Some pigs had also gone missing recently. More sightings were made of “The Pigman”, as it became known, but many times the claims were just kids wanting to get attention.

Now, whether this thing is Sam Harris or this thing ate Sam Harris, nobody in town knows for sure. But what they do know is that it isn’t afraid of people, and it really likes to eat meat.

There’s a place just outside of Northfield known as The Devil’s Washbowl, with a river and waterfalls and a number of caves. After more sightings of the Pigman were made out by The Washbowl, some people went investigating and found that one cave in particular was littered with animal bones, some of which were pig. It got around that they’d found the lair of the Pigman, and it became popular for teens to go out to the Devil’s Washbowl at night and try to catch a sight of him.

My sister and a couple of her friends went out to The Devil’s Washbowl their senior year. They took sleeping bags and flashlights and all the gear you’d take to go camping. I wasn’t there to give a first-hand account of what transpired, I was only 8 at the time. I can only tell you what was told to me.

There were six or eight of them, depending on who you ask, all couples. They picked a number of caves, one for each pair. My sister and her boyfriend were in their cave. She was rolling out their sleeping bags and he was trying to start a fire when they heard some shouts and then screaming from one of the other caves.

When they got there, the girl was curled up in a ball in the farthest corner of the cave, and her boyfriend was nowhere to be found. She told them that the Pigman had come trudging into their cave, completely undaunted by their presence. The guy had started shouting at it, both to drive it away and to get the others’ attention.

The Pigman casually picked up a large rock and struck the guy in the side of the head with it, knocking him unconscious. It picked him up, slung him over its shoulder and shambled out of the cave just moments before the rest arrived. Nobody had seen it exit the cave, nor seen signs of it at all. They did find the rock lying on the cave floor with blood on it, and bare footprints in some soft creek mud outside.

The girls all drove into town and went straight to the police. The remaining boys, whether it was two or three of them, grabbed flashlights and makeshift weapons and scoured the woods around the area. The footprints disappeared at the edge of the road, and they lost the trail there.

Search parties were set up. Police and K9 units and a big coordinated effort including several other adjoining townships’ police forces. A couple days later, some articles of the guy’s clothes were found by a search dog. They had been left torn and scattered in an abandoned farmhouse a town over.

The missing teen’s photo was put up in the area, and one guy came forward. He said the other night, he’d awakened to the sound of someone lurking outside his house. He checked out his kitchen window and there was someone rummaging through the trashcan by his garage. The person was only wearing a faded and ripped pair of jeans. When the man hit the porch light, the intruder had looked up, and it had looked just like the kid in the photo.

The only difference was that his body was covered with white hair and his eyes looked kind of hollow.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/17fkks/the_pigman_of_northfield/

The Pigman of Northfield, Vermont

The time? 1971. The place? A high school dance in picturesque Northfield, Vermont. I’m sure you can imagine the scene. Crepe paper streamers, teens dancing to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, bell bottom jeans, mediocre orange punch. A scene of small town serenity. However, small towns often have weird secrets, and Northfield’s most shocking secret came to light that night when a group of students ran into the dance. They looked scared, and some of them were in tears. They had been drinking beer in a sandpit behind the school, they said, when something strange came out of the woods. It was tall, naked, and covered in white hair. And although it walked on two legs, it had the face of a pig. Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of the teens – they even abandoned the beer in their panic! Some of the braver students ventured out of the dance to investigate the sandpit. They didn’t see the monster, but did find the grass and underbrush had been trampled down. Something had been there. And thus the Pigman appeared in Northfield.

After the dance was disrupted, the locals made some strange connections. A farmer said he had seen a hideous naked figure rummaging through his trash a few nights earlier. More eerily, people remembered how a teenage boy disappeared from his family’s farm six months ago. At the time authorities thought he had run away, but now people wondered if something more sinister had happened. Could he have been transformed into this strange monster? Or perhaps been eaten by it for dinner? A monster had to eat, and an awful lot of animals had gone missing recently… The Pigman was seen in Northfield off and on for years, often around an area called the Devil’s Washbowl. Motorists saw him run across the road, and teens who went to make out in the Washbowl sometimes had a surprise guest disrupt their romantic interlude. Although the creature himself was somewhat elusive, physical evidence suggested he was real. A local man named Jeff Hatch and his friends found some caves near the Washbowl filled with animal bones, and found a similar stash of gnawed bones in the town’s only pig farm. Strange cloven footprints were also found in the soft ground. I don’t know if we’ll ever know who (or what) the Pigman is. The top two theories are that the missing teenage boy somehow devolved and became feral, or that some lonely farmer and a particularly friendly pig … well, you know what I mean. I don’t think genetics work that way, but try telling that to the teens in Northfield, who still get spooked at night when they go drinking out in the woods. Source: http://newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/pigman-of-northfield-vermont.html