Scariest Things in the Hamptons Over Time

In 1851, Herman Melville wrote the book Moby-Dick. It was about a giant 90-foot-long white whale that, angry, used its enormous strength to attack and sink a whaling ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship had taken on its crew in Sag Harbor. And the captain, enraged by the whale’s audacity, took off in a small boat after it, never to be seen again.

The book terrified many people who read it, particularly those in the Hamptons, where it all began. An entire chapter describes Sag Harbor back then, a whaling town, only one of three in all of America. (The others were Lahaina, Hawaii and New Bedford, Massachusetts). And in recent years, literary figures in Sag Harbor read this book aloud to audiences, in tag-team fashion, in such places as the Old Whaler’s Church, the John Jermain Library and Canio’s Books. This year’s reading took place between May 29 and June 1.

If this giant whale had become the scariest thing in the Hamptons back in 1851, it was ultimately replaced as the scariest thing by a 25-foot-long shark in 1975 in the movie Jaws. The Jaws shark was able to sneak up on and attack, kill, and eat tourists and locals who went for a swim here. The film, directed by Steven Spielberg, starred Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, who, in the penultimate scene, was swallowed whole in a bloody encounter just off the coast. The shark so frightened those who saw it because the movie was based on a book by Peter Benchley, who set the location for it in towns throughout the Hamptons. It had its world premiere at the East Hampton Cinema. And many of those who saw it refused to swim in the ocean.

This killer shark remained the next most terrifying thing in the Hamptons until the appearance of what became known as the Montauk Monster, which washed up dead near Ditch Plains beach in Montauk in 2008. Some felt a book called The Montauk Project, published in 1992, which purported to show government experiments involving time travel at secret laboratories in Montauk, might have triggered this.

This monster was a furry creature who apparently had lived and then died in the ocean. Only three feet long, it was horrible looking. It possessed a line of sharp, angular teeth and bulging eyes which some said gave it supernatural powers. And though this one was dead, surely there were more out there like it in the ocean.

At this point, dear reader, you may have noticed that there was a trend going on here in the Hamptons. Newer scary things were smaller than the ones that had come on the scene before. And also, they were scarier.

Indeed, the next scariest thing in the Hamptons, found to have potentially deadly consequences, were the ticks. The first of them, called American Dog ticks, were the size of marbles when engorged with human blood when one or more of them latched on to a human’s bare skin.

There were thousands of them, and they lived and thrived in the woods here in the Hamptons and people got sick with Lyme disease when bitten.

A new and potentially deadly kind of tick soon also appeared in the woods. These ticks were called deer ticks and though smaller than dog ticks, they could infect you with babiosis, a disease that if left untreated, could result in your death. This was around 2000. People now even wouldn’t go off the trails.

About 2010, a still worse kind of tick appeared. Only the size of the head of a pin, the lone star ticks could, if it bit you, result not only in a whole mess of illnesses but also allergic reactions. Many people in the Hamptons would not even go outside for fear of getting  attacked by these tiny creatures.

And now, what appears to be the new scariest things in the Hamptons are so small you can barely see them. Yesterday morning, I got a call from Dr. Freely Bennett, a man doing research at the Stony Brook University Science Research Institute at their campus in Shinnecock. He told me I needed to come meet him in his lab immediately. What he led me to when I arrived was a microscope on a table he had aimed at one of these tiny grains of sand that earlier had landed near the lab. He had picked it up with tweezers and here it was, a tiny frisbee-shaped white object sitting on a glass plate under the microscope.

Bennett motioned me to sit on the stool and put on a set of earphones. When I did, I could hear, barely, what sounded like some fast breathing. It was raspy and high pitched. I looked at him and he put his finger over his lips. I should wait.

Four minutes went by and nothing happened. But then, as I was about to look up at Bennett again, I saw a tiny door on the underside of the miniature frisbee slowly open. A tiny white probe came slowly out, and then some creature, even smaller and almost invisible under the microscope, waddled out halfway and stopped.

It was furry and gray with an antenna stalk sticking up from a single eye above a mouth with three fangs, and it spoke. Not to me, exactly — it did not seem to notice I was there — but to nobody because, well, nobody else except the professor was there.

“Thith ith your twenty-third and final warning,” it said in this high, squeaky voice. “Come out, wherever you are.”

Bennett motioned for me to press a button on the side of the earphones. When I did, the words were so loud they shook the lab.

“We are here,” the voice continued, “to take over your planet. Prepare to thurender.  Bring your leader to me at once. Or, in theventeen billythickles, you will all die.”

Bennett held out his arms, palms up, and shook his head. He didn’t know what to do. But he spoke to me.

“It has a lisp,” he said.

“Yes, it does,” I replied.

And with that, this horrible tiny creature turned, marched back up the pathway which rolled up behind him and went back into the frisbee. And that was the last we saw of him.

Well, you’ve all been warned. I guess.