LOST ARTIFACTS OF THE NIAGARA FRONTIER: LOST CIVILIZATIONS, ANCIENT KINGS, AND GHOST ARTIFACTS
A Land That Likes to Keep Secrets
The Niagara Frontier has always carried more history than it cares to explain. Even on a quiet morning, when mist rolls off the river like breath on glass, the landscape feels older than its towns. We learn about the familiar chapters—the Haudenosaunee trails etched into the ridges, the crackle of the War of 1812, the Roycroft craftsmen shaping East Aurora into a cradle of the Arts and Crafts movement, the industrial roar of Niagara Falls powering half a continent. But then Shadows of the Western Door, that marvelous, obsessive compendium of local anomalies, steps in and points to the things history books don’t know what to do with.
Not myths.
Not campfire stories.
Real documented puzzlers, tucked deep in archives, town records, and museum drawers.
They feel like footprints pressed into soft earth—undeniably real, and maddeningly out of place.
Viking Whispers From the Chautauqua Backwoods
Sources: Chautauqua County Historical Society Archives; Wayne County Historical Bulletin; Ebert R. Russell papers.
Chautauqua County has a long tradition of producing strange finds that make archaeologists twitch. One of the most persistent figures behind them was Ebert Russell (1881–1968), an antiquarian whose notebooks—still held in the Chautauqua County Historical Society—document dozens of curious objects collected from the 1890s through the 1930s.
Among them is the Sodus Bay spearhead, discovered in 1929 and catalogued by the Wayne County Museum, described by early researchers as “European in manufacture.” Another account, recorded in the Wayne County Historical Bulletin, tells of a white oak in Lyons whose trunk bore metal ax-marks dated by early tree-ring analysis to a time before European settlement. And buried in the wet hush of the Conewango Swamp, locals uncovered a carved cone-shaped stone face—photographed and described in local historical reports as having “Old World characteristics.”
No serious historian claims Vikings paddled into Chautauqua Lake or marched along the Erie Escarpment. But the artifacts are real. The records exist. And the interpretations—often cautious, sometimes heated—are part of a century-long scholarly debate about possible pre-Columbian contact.
The forest itself, meanwhile, stays beautifully silent.
The Summit Fire Tower is a steel fire-lookout tower erected in 1926 by the Allegany State Park Commission on a summit referred to as South Mountain in Cattaraugus County. It was one of a set of fire towers in the park used for spotting forest fires; by the end of the 1970 fire season the tower’s lookout function ceased.
The Allegany State Park Stone That Wouldn’t Explain Itself
Sources: Allegany State Park archival photos (1970s); Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers, Vol. 8 (1980); Barry Fell correspondence.
Deep inside Allegany State Park, just beyond the entrance to the Red House Tent and Trailer Area, a sandstone slab once rested quietly among a row of boulders placed there to keep cars off the grass. It looked like any other rock—until the summer of 1976, when five-year-old Debbie Howard and her grandmother spotted strange, straight-lined markings carved across its surface. Debbie’s parents, Dr. David and Dr. Irmagard Howard of Houghton College, took a closer look and realized the lines were too deliberate, too geometric, too intentional to ignore.
They notified Irmagard’s father, Dr. Clyde Keeler, a researcher of ancient history based in Georgia. Keeler drove to Allegany almost immediately. What he saw convinced him to contact Barry Fell, the Harvard zoologist turned epigrapher whose work on ancient scripts was widely known—and widely debated.
Fell examined rubbings and photographs of the stone, later analyzing them in his Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers(Vol. 8, 1980). He argued that several markings resembled characters from the Iberian-Celtic alphabet, though he noted the stone had suffered severe frost damage, leaving most letters as fragmentary strokes. From those fragments, Fell offered a bold reading:
“This stone was engraved for Zari the King, who perished and was interred here.”
According to Fell, if the inscription was genuine, “King Zari” would have lived several hundred years before Christ, making the rock a memorial marker to an ancient traveler or inhabitant of the region—far predating European contact.
Park officials at the time had no clear record of where the large boulder had originally come from. It might have been moved from deeper inside the park, or it might have rested near the campground all along. Large erratics like it often remain close to their original positions. What was certain is that once its possible significance was recognized, the slab was moved for protection to the park’s Mason Shop, a building tucked near the creek along the Red House maintenance road.
Then the story took a turn worthy of folklore.
A fire swept through the Mason Shop in the mid-1980s, destroying the building. Park staff later claimed the stone had been inside and was lost—possibly shattered by the heat, possibly buried in the debris, possibly pushed into the creek during cleanup. Others whispered that it had been removed beforehand and disappeared into private hands.
No official explanation ever emerged.
The only things that remain today are the rubbings, a handful of photographs, and the testimony collected by the Allegany State Park Historical Society, particularly the detailed account preserved by historian Bob Schmid.
The stone existed.
People saw it.
Experts studied it.
And then it simply vanished—one of the park’s strangest unsolved riddles, a chapter torn from a book no one got to finish.
The Copper Ghost of East Aurora
Sources: Turner’s History of the Holland Purchase (1850), pp. 481–482; Oakwood Cemetery Records; early East Aurora oral histories.
Today, East Aurora looks like a town designed for Hallmark movies—brick storefronts glowing in the evening, snow settling gently on Roycroft porches, cafés and bookstores spilling warm light onto tidy sidewalks. But beneath that polished charm is a deeper, stranger history preserved in sources like Turner’s History of the Holland Purchase, Oakwood Cemetery records, and early nineteenth-century oral histories.
This was once home to the Meadowlands People, a prehistoric culture identified through archaeological finds around Cazenovia Creek—described in early New York State archaeological surveys as neither clearly Iroquoian nor Algonquian, but something older and poorly understood. Their pottery fragments, stone tools, and settlement traces appear periodically in local digs, reminding historians that East Aurora sits atop a cultural layer with no clear explanation.
Into that mysterious landscape came Ephraim Woodruff’s copper tablet, unearthed in 1807 and recorded in meticulous detail by Turner. A hammered copper plate with unknown writing on one side and an architectural engraving on the other, handled by multiple witnesses and then lost when Woodruff’s descendants moved west. No known Indigenous tradition in the region produced written copper tablets; no early settler had the tools or knowledge to forge one. Its origin remains a blank space in the historical record.
So yes—East Aurora is charming today, a backdrop for cozy movies and holiday cards.
But the ground beneath it carries a different story:
vanished cultures, unexplained artifacts, and a frontier that has always held its secrets close.
Why These Mysteries Won’t Die
These stories survive because they don’t demand belief. They demand curiosity. Each one sits on a foundation of real artifacts, real eyewitness accounts, real archival documents, and real scholarly disagreement. None provide enough evidence to rewrite history.
But none are flimsy enough to dismiss.
The Niagara Frontier has always been a place where timelines blur—where glacial ridges, dark river corridors, and old-growth woods seem to hold memories in reserve. And Shadows of the Western Door, with its steady hand and careful sourcing, doesn’t try to force an answer. It simply reminds us that the frontier was never empty, never simple, and never fully known.
Walk long enough into these woods or ravines, and you start to feel it:
the past isn’t gone here.
It’s just quiet.
Waiting for someone to notice.
For a deeper dive into these mysteries, I recommend reading Shadows of the Western Door. This comprehensive local history explores documented anomalies, archival records and eyewitness accounts across Western New York, offering a thoughtful look at puzzles mainstream historians haven’t yet solved. The author, Mason Winfield—a New York–based “supernatural historian” who studied English and Classics at Denison University and has written or edited eighteen books—collects articles that explore relics of unknown cultures, spiritual folklore and paranormal legends across the Niagara frontier.
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