Michael Adamovic is the author of Hudson Valley History & Mystery and Hudson Valley History & Mystery, Volume 2, which will be released on Saturday (Oct. 28).
You took trips to Harriman State Park to find a legendary lost silver mine of the Hudson Highlands, which is supposed to be near a rock shaped like an arrowhead. Will you keep looking for it?
If I get any new tips I will, but I’ve spent so much time over there, I had to give up. That area is so dense. There are so many shrubs, you could walk right by it without seeing it. I’m pretty sure I was in the right spot, and I did find man-made pits and a rock in the perfect shape of an arrowhead. I spent a lot of time looking for it and I wanted to put a photo in the book!
What was the most surprising thing you uncovered during your research?
The number of sea serpent sightings in the 1800s. In 1886 there was a three-month period in which hundreds of people saw something in the Hudson River. It was a little surprising to read about all of these pretty reliable eyewitnesses claiming that they saw a sea serpent. You’d expect to find a couple of people over the years, but how do you explain hundreds of people all seeing the same thing? I can’t imagine it was just a log that they all saw floating by. It was clearly something that was alive. Aleister Crowley [a British occultist] claimed to have seen one during the year he lived on Esopus Island. It was around World War I, so some people thought it was the periscope of a German submarine. I find that to be unlikely, and he tended to exaggerate a lot of things. Maybe he did see it, or maybe he just imagined it during one of his trances.
When did you start to think there was enough material for a second volume?
When I first started working on it. I started doing research and compiling places I thought would make interesting chapters, and I came up with a list of 30 places. I had to narrow it down for the first volume.
As with Vol. 1, you buried “treasure” near a site in the book and posted a riddle to be decoded. (See bit.ly/HudsonValleyRiddle2.) Did anyone find the first treasure?
It took two years. I made the second one a little bit easier. I didn’t think the original one was that difficult, but when you’re creating it, it always seems easier.
Will there be a Vol. 3?
I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I have two small children and finding the time for the research and writing does not work at the moment. The research takes about five times as long as the writing. I have to dig into primary sources and visit libraries to find newspaper articles from the 1700s. I had to visit a few libraries in Connecticut for the chapter on The Leatherman [a hermit dressed from head to toe in leather who wandered between the Hudson Valley and Connecticut in the late 1880s.] There were hundreds of articles written about him during his life.
