The Ghostly Wild Man of Far Rockaway

It was very definitely off-season at Far Rockaway, Queens, in November of 1885. So Frank Foster, a Brooklyn man who happened to be walking on the beach one day, was startled to see a six-foot-tall bearded apparition come staggering out of the winter surf. He had long hair and was dressed in nothing but a "piece of salt sack." Foster thought that he had "a face like the satyr in the famous Hoffman House picture." This painting, "Nymphs and Satyr," was painted in 1873 by William-Adolphe Bougereau and hung in the Hoffman House hotel in New York.

Several other people saw the "wild man" on the beach, too. Captain Reinhart of Life Saving Station No. 6 said that he tried to confront the man but he vanished into the sea. Several men went onto the beach at night and saw the wild man dancing on the sand, but he disappeared into "a great breaker" and was gone. John B. Ennis had a similar encounter with the wild man, who was "dancing like one deranged" but screeched and ran into the sea when he caught sight of Ennis.

The wild man frightened Mrs. Falling's guests when he peered into a window at her hotel. Her son went out with a gun to look for him. But he again vanished into the water "close to the iron pier." Women and children were afraid to go out alone. Men patrolled the beach armed and ready to attack the wild man, to prove whether or not he was a ghost. They reported that he was covered "with auburn hair as long as a horse's mane."Some people thought he was the ghost of a drowned sailor. Some thought he was an escapee from an insane asylum. But no one knew for sure.

On December 3rd the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which had been covering all of the excitement, published a curious article. It stated that the wild man had packed up and gone away to Hoboken, New Jersey. He was, they said, an "expert swimmer" who had been employed the previous summer to advertise one of the hotels. He was hired "to create a sensation to attract trade to the beach, but the scheme did not take. He dressed in a buffalo skin, which is on exhibition at the Gem of the Sea.*" Nothing was explained about why the man would be swimming about in a piece of sacking, acting extremely strangely, in the middle of November.

Then on Christmas Eve, a "badly decomposed' body washed up at Rockaway Beach, near one of the Life Saving Stations. No one knew who it was. Maybe it was the wild man, some thought. But the following summer, in August 1886, a "Coney Island tramp" named Andrew Morrison** was arrested for behaving erratically, and making noise, in the Berliner Concert Hall.***The Eagle noted that he was also known as the "Wild Man from Rockaway." And once again, the Eagle provided no additional information. So it remains a mystery: who was the wild man of Rockaway?

* I found a couple of references to a boat called Gem of the Sea in the BDE in the 1850s, but nothing else. It was probably an establishment on the Rockaway boardwalk.

**There was one Andrew Morrison in Queens in the 1880 census (only 2 others in NYC, one a man in his 80s, the other a child). He worked in a rubber factory and was age 49, married with children [Andrew Morrison household, 1880 US Census, College Point, Flushing, Queens, NY; p. 296, #85/100, Series T9, Roll 917, ED 267].

***Again, I could not find any information about this concert hall. I would think that it was either in Brooklyn or Kleindeutschland in Manhattan (Lower East Side).

SOURCES

Images: "Nymph and Satyr" from Wikipedia (link is above); Rockaway Beach photograph from NYPL Digital Gallery.

From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

"A Wild Man Who Disappears Into the Sea at Rockaway," Nov. 30, 1885, p. 6.
"The Wild Man at Rockaway," Dec. 1, 1885, p. 4.
"The Wild Man is Still Visible," Dec. 2, 1885, p. 4.
"The Departure of the Wild Man," Dec. 3, 1885, p. 4.
"A Body At Rockaway Beach," Dec. 24, 1885, p. 8.
"He Indulged In A War Whoop," Aug. 17, 1886, p. 4.
"Old and New Rockaway," Oct. 3, 1886, p. 4.