The Haunted Reptile House

Charley Snyder was the head keeper of the New York Zoological Society - also known as the Bronx Zoo - in 1915. And he had a huge problem on his hands that summer: all the keepers of the reptile house were convinced that it was haunted by an unknown ghost. This ghost whistled every morning, around opening time,  from a window at the southeast corner of the reptile house.

At first, of course, some of the men thought that it was a practical joke. For two weeks everyone checked the window several times a day, trying to catch the culprit. But there was no whistler there. Some thought it might be a zoo visitor. Finally a keeper called Toomey told Charley Snyder in confidence that he thought it was a ghost. He said he had heard not just a whistling sound but a voice crying 'lookooser.'

This anecdote was passed around and soon all the employees at the zoo knew about it, "even Gateman Minks at the West Farms entrance." Sensible Mr. Decker, "a very sober-minded man," said that he too had heard a strange voice in the reptile house. And then Mr. Ditmars told Snyder that he "had dreamed that the big boa and the West African crocodile had held an animated conversation." And when the sensible people start feeling nervous, Snyder thought, that's when it's time to put on the Sherlock Holmes hat.

But who was going to play Sherlock Holmes? Another zoo resident, as it turned out. Charley Snyder had a "lady friend" who was a fortune teller, and he told her all about the strange goings-on at the Bronx Zoo. He wouldn't tell the New York Times (or anyone) what she said, because he was pledged to secrecy. In fact, he really didn't like people knowing about his fortune-telling lady friend. But (Snyder said) she mentioned something about "a dark cloud" over the reptile house which gave the building a "disturbed aureole" (by which she meant an aura, which usually pertains to something surrounding a living body). She said that Snyder would get help from a "little one" with a "pompadour, a wizened fact and whiskers."

Snyder thought that she must mean the new saki, which had recently arrived from Peru. "Gee," Snyder recalled thinking, "How is that long-tailed monkey going to help solve the mystery?" Snyder said he wanted the saki to use its psychic abilities to help, but the saki was scared of the iguana. The saki fled to his own cage and refused to go near the reptile house even after Snyder relocated the iguana.

On the next attempt to get the saki to do some detecting, it managed to "upset a box of toads" which was going to be the snakes' dinner.  The saki then ripped up Toomey's trousers. Finally, in a panic, the poor saki blundered into  the last place he wanted to be - the iguana's cage - and got so upset that "he has not yet recovered."

At last, though, keepers Toomey and Deckert solved the mystery when they were spraying water on some salamanders in boxes of moss. They heard the whistle up close and were terribly frightened. The noise was coming from one of the smaller boxes. Deckert found the culprit: a single, tiny narrow-mouth frog from Trinidad which "had escaped the nightly roll call" since it was no bigger than a postage stamp. The water spray had excited the little frog and this is what made him whistle. "That frog sang every morning because it was glad to see us," said Charley Snyder - and so ended a ghost story with an uncharacteristically happy ending.

Source: "Singing Frog Made Bronx Zoo Shudder," New York Times, Sept. 13, 1915, p. 14.

The Bronx Zoo in 1911 from NYPL Digital Gallery.
The picture of the saki, French ca 1830, is from NYPL Digital Gallery also. And the narrow-mouthed frog photo is from Wikipedia.