The Horned Skulls of Pennsylvania: What Was Really Found at Sayre?

Some archaeological mysteries begin with an artifact.

Others begin with a newspaper story.

The strange tale of the horned skulls of Sayre, Pennsylvania, appears to have begun with a little of both.

According to the story repeated for more than a century, archaeologists excavating ancient burials along the Susquehanna River uncovered the remains of unusually large people. Some were supposedly seven feet tall or more.

But their height wasn’t the strangest feature.

At least one burial reportedly contained a skull associated with what witnesses described as horns.

Later versions became considerably more fantastic. The horns supposedly grew directly from the skulls. Dozens of enormous skeletons were discovered. The remains represented an unknown race that had inhabited Pennsylvania centuries before European settlement.

Then the bones disappeared.

It sounds like classic archaeological folklore.

And portions of it almost certainly are.

But unlike many Internet legends, this story has an inconvenient quality that makes it difficult to dismiss completely.

There really was an excavation.

There really were human remains.

There really were reports of unusually large skeletons.

And someone really did stand beside an opened grave and announce:

There are horns over his head.

The Excavation at Sayre

Modern versions frequently date the discovery to the 1880s.

That appears to be incorrect.

The important excavation occurred in 1916, when archaeologists associated with the Susquehanna River Expedition investigated sites in the region around Sayre and Athens, Pennsylvania.

Among those associated with the work were archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead, Alanson B. Skinner of the Museum of the American Indian, and Pennsylvania historian George P. Donehoo.

This isn’t speculative.

Records of the 1916 Susquehanna Expedition survive, and objects collected during it remain catalogued by the National Museum of the American Indian today.

The archaeological sites themselves were genuine.

What was found there is where things become complicated.

Sixty-Eight Skeletons

On July 14, 1916, the New York Times published a sensational report concerning the excavations.

The newspaper claimed that the bones of 68 people had been uncovered at Tioga Point near Sayre and that the individuals had been buried approximately seven centuries earlier.

Even more remarkably, the report claimed the skeletons indicated people averaging approximately seven feet in height.

The story spread.

Other newspapers repeated versions of it.

Suddenly Pennsylvania appeared to have produced archaeological evidence for something Americans had been reading about for generations:

giants.

America’s Giants

Stories of enormous human skeletons were surprisingly common during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Newspapers reported eight-foot skeletons.

Nine-foot skeletons.

Enormous skulls.

Massive bones recovered from burial mounds.

Some discoveries were undoubtedly exaggerated.

Some may have involved incorrectly reconstructed skeletons or animal remains.

Others may simply have belonged to unusually tall people.

But the reports are so numerous that they became a distinct category of American archaeological folklore.

Sayre joined that tradition in 1916.

And the Susquehanna Valley already possessed a historical association with unusually tall people.

The Susquehannock

Early European observers described the Susquehannock as physically impressive.

Captain John Smith encountered representatives of the people in 1608 and famously described them as unusually large.

That doesn’t mean they were a race of giants.

European descriptions of Indigenous peoples were hardly precise anthropological measurements, and writers frequently used exaggerated language.

But those old descriptions matter because they provided fertile ground for later discoveries.

If excavators uncovered a particularly large skeleton along the Susquehanna, an old story was already waiting for it.

Perhaps the ancient accounts had been true.

Perhaps unusually tall people really had inhabited the valley.

Then came the horns.

“There Are Horns Over His Head!”

One of the most important accounts was left by local historian Louise Welles Murray, who was present during the excavations.

She later recalled workers opening a grave when one of the men suddenly exclaimed:

“There are horns over his head!”

That statement is real.

But Murray also provided an explanation.

As the grave was uncovered more carefully, the supposed horns proved to be deer antlers associated with a bundle burial. According to Murray, someone visiting the excavation heard the original exclamation, questioned a joking workman about it, and the story quickly escaped into the newspapers.

If Murray’s account is correct, we may have the origin of the entire horned-skull legend.

Notice the difference between two sentences:

There are horns over his head.

And:

There are horns growing from his head.

A century of mystery may lie between those two statements.

The Antlers

The antlers themselves shouldn’t be dismissed as unimportant simply because they apparently weren’t attached to the skull.

Quite the opposite.

If antlers had been deliberately positioned over or around a burial, they presumably meant something to the people responsible for the interment.

Were they part of a headdress?

A ceremonial object?

A symbol of status?

Something associated with hunting?

A religious symbol?

Murray reportedly said Skinner initially suggested their position might indicate chieftainship, although the precise meaning of the burial remains less spectacular, and perhaps more interesting, than the later legend.

The person in that grave wasn’t necessarily horned.

But someone apparently wanted antlers placed with the dead.

Why?

That question deserves more attention than it usually receives.

But What About the Giants?

Here the story doesn’t disappear quite as neatly.

Skinner apparently issued a correction after sensational newspaper reports began circulating.

Murray later stated that the skulls and major long bones recovered were approximately normal in size. Moorehead’s surviving records likewise do not describe the discovery of a race of seven-foot humans.

That is strong evidence against the familiar story.

But it leaves us with an interesting historical problem.

Why did contemporary newspapers report the seven-foot measurement so specifically?

Was a particularly large individual recovered and generalized into an entire population?

Were measurements misunderstood?

Did a reporter exaggerate something said casually at the excavation?

Did one newspaper publish an error that others simply repeated?

Or did early investigators themselves initially make estimates they later reconsidered?

Those aren’t supernatural questions.

They’re historical ones.

And more than a century later, reconstructing exactly what happened beside an open archaeological trench can be surprisingly difficult.

One Large Skeleton Is Not a Race of Giants

Even if a genuinely seven-foot individual was recovered, that would not establish the existence of an unknown race.

Exceptionally tall human beings have always existed.

A seven-foot skeleton would certainly have been unusual, particularly among historical populations, but it would remain entirely human.

The leap from:

an unusually large skeleton was found

to:

a forgotten race of giants inhabited ancient America

is enormous.

And there is no surviving archaeological evidence supporting the second claim.

Still, it is worth distinguishing “no race of giants” from “no unusually tall individuals were ever discovered.”

Those are not the same statement.

The Disappearing Bones

Then we encounter the part of the legend that has kept it alive.

Where are the remains?

Later versions claim the horned skulls were sent to an institution usually called the American Investigating Museum in Philadelphia.

That creates an immediate problem.

No established museum by that name appears to have existed.

Skinner was associated with the Museum of the American Indian in New York, while Philadelphia had other major archaeological institutions. Somewhere in the retelling, names and locations apparently became confused.

But human remains and artifacts really were removed during the Susquehanna expedition. Historical research into the expedition indicates that Skinner shipped artifacts and human remains to George Gustav Heye’s institution despite objections from Louise Murray, who preferred that material remain locally.

That doesn’t validate the story of missing horned skulls.

But it does make the real history more complicated than simply saying:

There were never any bones.

There were.

The question is what they actually looked like.

Where Did Everything Go?

Archaeological collections from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be frustratingly difficult to reconstruct.

Institutions merged.

Collections were transferred.

Cataloguing standards changed.

Objects were separated from their documentation.

Human remains were stored apart from artifacts.

Some material was eventually repatriated.

Other material simply became difficult to trace.

The disappearance of a particular skeleton therefore isn’t automatically sinister.

Old museums could lose track of things without requiring a conspiracy.

But neither should we pretend every specimen excavated more than a century ago can necessarily be accounted for today.

Sometimes the trail simply ends.

And when the object at the end of that trail is supposed to have possessed horns, people naturally become suspicious.

The Smithsonian Didn’t Need to Hide Giants

The Sayre story eventually acquired another familiar element.

Supposedly, museums or the Smithsonian Institution deliberately suppressed evidence of ancient giants because such discoveries contradicted accepted history.

There is no evidence demonstrating such a conspiracy.

In fact, if archaeologists had recovered genuine human skulls possessing previously unknown symmetrical bony horns, the discovery would have been scientifically extraordinary.

Publishing it would have made careers.

Scientists generally don’t become famous by hiding the most remarkable specimen they’ve ever encountered.

But mistrust grew partly because so many early newspaper stories about giant skeletons ended the same way.

Bones were found.

Experts were summoned.

The remains were shipped somewhere.

And then nobody heard about them again.

Sometimes there are perfectly mundane reasons for that.

But as folklore, it is irresistible.

Were Horned Humans Even Possible?

Humans can develop growths resembling horns.

Rare cutaneous horns can form from keratin and occasionally become surprisingly large.

Bone abnormalities and tumors can also alter the shape of the skull.

That does not mean an ancient population of naturally horned humans ever existed.

There is no reliable evidence for such a population.

But it does mean that discovering a human being with a bizarre horn-like growth would not necessarily violate biology.

Nature produces stranger things than folklore sometimes realizes.

The problem with Sayre is not whether a human being could develop something resembling a horn.

The problem is that we don’t possess an authenticated skull demonstrating that anyone there did.

The Photographs

Various photographs supposedly showing the Sayre skulls circulate online.

They should be treated cautiously.

No widely circulated image has been convincingly established as an authenticated photograph of a horned skull excavated at Sayre.

At least some images connected with giant-skeleton stories elsewhere are known manipulations or photographs stripped of their original context.

That doesn’t prove every lost photograph never existed.

It simply means an image without provenance isn’t evidence.

Old photographs acquire legends remarkably easily.

Something Happened at Murray Farm

This is the part of the story I find most intriguing.

Strip away everything we cannot establish and we are still left with a peculiar sequence of events.

In 1916, legitimate archaeologists excavated Indigenous burials near Sayre.

Numerous human remains were recovered.

Contemporary newspapers reported skeletons of extraordinary height.

At one grave, a worker genuinely exclaimed that there were horns over the deceased’s head.

Antlers really were found associated with the burial.

The sensational stories became widespread enough that people involved with the excavation later attempted to correct them.

That is considerably more substantial than a modern Internet hoax.

Something happened.

The argument is over what it meant.

Perhaps Everyone Was Telling Part of the Truth

One possibility is remarkably simple.

Perhaps several separate facts became fused.

One skeleton may have been unusually tall.

Another burial contained antlers.

Reporters heard about both.

Descriptions became confused.

Someone joked about horns growing from a skull.

Newspapers sensationalized the discoveries.

Later writers combined the accounts.

Decades passed.

Then the Internet inherited the finished product:

A cemetery containing dozens of seven-foot horned giants.

That explanation requires no conspiracy and fits much of the surviving evidence.

But because the original remains and complete documentation are not sitting neatly together for us to examine today, there will probably always be room around the edges of the story.

And perhaps that is where the horned giants will continue to live.

The Real Mystery of the Antlers

There is one aspect of the story that becomes almost forgotten because everyone wants the horns to be anatomical.

Why was someone buried with deer antlers arranged over the body?

That was apparently real.

Whatever the placement represented, it meant something.

We should be cautious about imposing modern interpretations upon an Indigenous burial whose cultural context may not be fully recoverable.

But deliberate burial practices are rarely meaningless.

The antlers belonged there for a reason.

Perhaps the genuinely mysterious question was never whether someone had horns growing from his skull.

Perhaps it was why someone placed horns beside the dead in the first place.

Archaeology Becomes Folklore

The Sayre story is a perfect example of the strange territory where archaeology and folklore overlap.

There was a real place.

A real excavation.

Real archaeologists.

Real burials.

Real human remains.

Real antlers.

Real newspaper reports of giants.

And real corrections afterward.

From those ingredients came something considerably larger:

a vanished race of enormous horned people.

We should not present that race as archaeological fact.

The surviving evidence doesn’t justify it.

But neither do we need to flatten the story until nothing interesting remains.

We weren’t standing beside Murray Farm in 1916.

We didn’t see every grave opened.

We don’t possess every specimen in exactly the condition in which it emerged from the earth.

We have reports, corrections, archaeological records and recollections, some of which fit together better than others.

That leaves uncertainty.

Not enough uncertainty to proclaim horned giants.

But enough to keep asking questions.

The Horned Skulls of Sayre

So what was found near Sayre?

Probably not a lost race of horned giants.

The strongest contemporary explanation for the “horns” is remarkably straightforward: deer antlers were discovered associated with a human burial, and a comment made during the excavation escaped into the press and grew spectacularly in the telling.

Claims that dozens of individuals averaged seven feet tall are contradicted by later accounts from people associated with the excavation and by surviving archaeological documentation.

That should be acknowledged.

But so should everything that produced the legend in the first place.

The graves were real.

The bones were real.

The antlers were real.

The newspaper reports were real.

And somewhere beside an opened grave in Pennsylvania more than a century ago, someone looked down into the earth and saw something sufficiently strange that he called to the others:

There are horns over his head.

Perhaps the explanation really was nothing more mysterious than antlers laid ceremonially beside the dead.

But the person buried beneath them knew what those antlers meant.

The people who placed them there knew.

We don’t.

And that, rather than an imaginary museum filled with hidden giants, may be the mystery worth keeping.

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Laura Wright

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