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Earthquakes and Panthers (Oh My!)

Photo credit: justanimals.files.wordpress.comThe blogosphere, that imaginary space between the stratosphere and the Dark Side of The Moon, produced two strange tales last week about wild animals and future acts of god in our corner of the Lower Hudson Valley.

The mysterious wild animal known as the Piermont Panther has reappeared. It was first seen on the TrackinCats.com Website as early as 3/18 followed by the  Journal News in April,  a June sighting in the New Yorker and most recently on the Rockland Lifestyle blog. Despite the April 1 dateline, Journal News writer Ben Rubin insisted this was *not* an April Fool’s prank.

The Talk Of The Town column in The New Yorker on June 8th placed the Big Cat in Sneeden’s Landing and included two poems about the cat-no-one-can-catch.

But we’re about more than just panther prose. Last week Nyack made the future psychic seismic news, too.

Florida, NY Psychic Cyndee Pawliczek told the Times-Herald Record in Middletown a “serious earthquakes will strike Pearl River and West Nyack in a decade.”  Pawliczek hosts the “Psychic Moments” on local cable and WTBQ radio in Warwick where she channels the energy of the universe and communicates with the dead.

Could Psychic Cyndee be right? “We are not on a fault line, although a minor fault line passes 20 or so miles north and west of us,” says West Nyack blogger and Science Fiction Writer Keith P. Graham. “We get earthquakes in the fault line of about 3.5 to 4 every few years. The people near it says that it sounds like a heavy truck going by, if they hear it at all.”

Last August, ScienceNow Daily News quoted the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory saying we were due for an earthquake, noting 383 sesmic events going back to 1677. (NyackNewsAndViews is on record suggesting “The Village Under The Hudson” as the working title for the made for TV movie).

Psychic Cyndee isn’t the first to predict local devastation and ultimately be wrong. Prophet Lee J. Spangler predicted the world would end in Nyack on Sunday, Dec. 27, 1908.  According to an account in the New York Times, his faithful followers  — all women dressed in white robes — walked to the Nyack train station shortly after dawn to meet a party of Saints who were expected to arrive on the early morning train. The saintless train came and went and shortly thereafter the prophet slipped quietly out of town.

If only Walter Chronkite were here to wrap this up with a bellowing “that’s the way it is.”
Eh, “was.”
Maybe, “will be?”

See also: LoHud Blogs, 7/28


Nyack People & Places, a weekly series that features photos and profiles of citizens and scenes near Nyack, NY, is sponsored by Sun River Health.


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