Known Range
The Council recognizes a core Mid-Atlantic reporting corridor with secondary records elsewhere. Map points represent archived reports, not confirmed populations.
Map methodology
Displayed points are plotted at the geographic centre of the locality named in each report, not at witness addresses or exact incident coordinates, which are held offline. Where several reports share a locality they are combined into a single point and listed together; dense PA/NJ clustering is not visually jittered to suggest precision the underlying reports do not support. Base mapping is supplied by OpenStreetMap contributors. Select a point to open its source entry in the Encounter Database.
Zone A: the core corridor
Eastern Pennsylvania carries the densest cluster in the archive by a wide margin: the Lehigh Valley, the Wyoming Valley, the Reading corridor, the lower Poconos, and generally the older river towns with a lot of stormwater infrastructure under them.
Northwestern New Jersey holds fewer reports but better ones. Phillipsburg, Warren and Sussex counties, and the Pine Barrens edge produce accounts that agree with each other on timing and on boundary use to a degree the Pennsylvania material does not.
Zone B: scattered
West Virginia, western Maryland, southern New York and central Pennsylvania. This may be a thinning continuation of the corridor. It may equally be three or four unrelated local traditions that we have gathered under one heading because we were the ones holding the folder. We have never been able to tell, and members should be wary of anyone who says they can.
Highest archive concentration: PA–NJ corridor
| Area | Archive pattern | Record density |
|---|---|---|
| Carbon / Northampton / Lehigh Counties, PA | Repeat-site records; creek and culvert associations | High |
| Luzerne / Lackawanna Counties, PA | Long historical record; multiple-witness events | High |
| Berks County, PA | Property disturbance and crawlspace reports | Moderate |
| Warren / Sussex Counties, NJ | Utility corridor and wooded-edge sightings | High |
| Southern New Jersey | Lower volume; auditory reports predominate | Low |
Two cautions about this map
A blank area is not an absence. Historical coverage followed newspaper access, the postal habits of correspondents, whether the local sergeant would take a call, and whether a Council volunteer happened to live nearby. Most of our map is a map of our own membership.
There is also no boundary. We have never identified a stable northern, southern or western edge to the reporting area. Outlying reports stay in the archive unless something conventional accounts for them.
Range classifications are revised annually. A single credible repeat site may alter local status without changing the broader regional assessment.
Historical range caution
Several possible early accounts originate inside the modern Pennsylvania–New Jersey concentration, but they are excluded from range calculations because attribution and dating cannot be verified.
Map rebuilt 2024 (D. Ahearn). Underlying case coordinates last verified Nov. 2023.