Beware The Owls’ Herald

by Matt Shadbolt

Herald Square, New York (1897)

Brooklyn. 6 months later. 1985.

Built on the convergence of Broadway, 34th street, and 6th Avenue, today Herald Square is one of the busiest intersections in New York. It’s where holiday parades culminate, and where cinematic Christmas miracles have been said to happen. But as with all things in Manhattan, the ever-changing present is built upon a frequently torn-down past as the city constantly reinvents itself towards the future. The places and faces change, but often the names of an indifferent intersection remain. Once the site of the New York Herald newspaper, one of the most widely read broadsheets in the country, the original building was torn down in 1921, and the paper ceased publication in 1924 after an illustrious, if often scandalous 89-year run.

Like many New York newspapers, it had been a family business, founded by James Gordon Bennett Sr. and passed down to his son, James Gordon Bennett Jr. During the Civil War, Bennett Sr. had been a vocal advocate of southern secession, frequently used racist language, attacked Lincoln for attempting to hold the Union together, and supported local anti-war rallies. His tenure saw the expansion of traditional news reporting to include sports, murders, and sex scandals, and in many ways birthed what would become today’s modern American media, fueled by a constant diet of opinion and partisanship.

James Gordon Bennett Sr. (1870)

If Bennett Sr. was a polarizing figure, his son was even more so. A playboy who enjoyed a lifestyle of yachts, mansions, private railroad cars, and everything alcohol could offer in a good night out, including a fondness for driving his carriage through the streets at full speed while naked. Educated in France and obsessed with owls, he would often keep live birds in his office, marked the newspaper’s masthead with them, and decorated the architecture of the paper’s premises with their statues. But an expensive lifestyle also fueled commercial expansion, with The New York Herald moving into its beautiful new Stanford White-designed building in 1908. In 1906, White was shot and killed at the nearby Madison Square Theater by Harry Kendall Thaw. In front of a large audience during a musical theater performance, Thaw claimed White was having an affair with his chorus girl partner, Evelyn Nesbit.

But in New York, when you tear down a building, you always leave its ghosts. All that remains of The Herald is the name of the square, and a curious monument to its existence. At night, the monument cuts an ominous figure, and high atop the never-sleeping city, are the clock, and two remaining stone owls from White’s original building. If you look carefully, you can see that their eyes pulse with a piercing green glow. On the back of the monument is a permanently sealed door, with a masonic symbol and the French words La nuite porte conseil. Sometimes translated as “let’s sleep on it” or “the night brings advice,” it’s a curious key to a long shut case.

James Gordon Bennett Jr. (1905)

The more observant will notice that the owls’ eyes don’t pulse in sync. Nor do they pulse evenly. Their source of power is itself a mystery, still pulsing through blackouts and hurricanes in recent years. Cryptographers have tried modern ciphers to make sense of the owls’ signals, but with little success. No one knows how to open the mysterious back door.

That is, until we found something. We’d trained a camera on both owls, and using modern methods to interpret the data, created a database by which we could translate the pulses not just through the night, but how they changed with the seasons and the weather. Our results were astonishing. After months of data harvesting, a pattern emerged. A pattern in French. A pattern deciphered as l'éditeur se trouve dans. The publisher lies within. The night truly had brought advice. It had unlocked what might be inside the monument itself. Bennett Jr.’s obsession with owls didn’t stop with his death. He had planned to build a 200-feet high owl-shaped mausoleum in Washington Heights, again designed by Stanford White, in which his coffin would hang, allowing visitors to walk around it as they ascended to the top to enjoy the stunning view of downtown. This project was unrealized with White’s untimely death.

White’s proposed owl mausoleum for James Gordon Bennett Jr. (Unrealized, Washington Heights, 1903)

But how to get in? The masonic symbol on the back door, depicting the French inscription, an owl resting on a crescent moon, and five stars, offered the promise of formula, but without resolution. The nocturnal owls had indeed brought forth advice about the monument’s contents, while still obfuscating access. We searched again for numerical clues. Only two of the original twenty six owls remained on the monument. There were five stars on the door’s symbol. Three air vents towards the bottom of the door. A sunken handle with no lock still further offered little assistance. What might the code look like? Again we turned to our data to help us, but this time Bennett had beaten even the math. We turned to more esoteric ideas. We visited the back door again and again at night, avoiding the square’s security, using thermal imaging, and looking for any sign of access. Nothing. We wanted in, but it never occurred to us that something inside may want out.

We’d been focused on the handle, but in our desperation turned our thoughts to the stars. And that’s when it happened. If you look at a historical star chart for Bennett Jr.’s birthday, May 10th, 1841, a Monday, you’ll see five stars in the exact same alignment around Venus as depicted on the back door’s symbol. And the phase Venus is depicted in is known as the Athena alignment. It wasn’t a moon, it was a planet. And not just any planet. A planet with a phase named after a god associated with owls. But the frequency of such an occurrence was rare. When would it happen again? And what might happen if we were there? We consulted the star charts again, and found that the specific phase would return on November 5th, 1984 at 10pm. 11.5.84.10pm. Also a Monday. And a perfect anagram of 5.10.1841, Bennett’s birthday. 3 months away. We waited.

A photographic diagram of the Athena phase in Venus, found in James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s wallet upon his death in 1918.

We had long suspected the five stars on the back door’s symbol meant something. That they might, indeed, even be buttons in the absence of a handle. Five stars. That’s when we went back to the owls. November owls atop Manhattan rooftops are a specific breed. Snowy owls, named because of their white plumage and seasonality. Snowy has five letters. Transposed numerically based on alphabetical sequence that’s 19.14.15.23.25. Total them together and you get 96, the year in which Bennett took over as head of the paper after his father’s death. Total them individually as single digits and you get 1+9=0, 1+4=5, 1+5=6, 2+3=5 and 2+5=7. 05657. The zip code where Bennett supposedly died in Vermont. November 5th approached, and we had a variety of things we planned to try once 10pm came around. No stars in the Manhattan sky of course because of the air pollution, so we were relying solely upon our mathematical and astronomical calculations.

The evening of Monday, November 5th, 1984, was a noticeably quiet one for Midtown Manhattan. It was as if the city had prematurely emptied, and by 9pm all that was left was the periodic rumble of empty subway cars beneath our feet. Light snow began to fall. We waited. 9.59pm. Was anything going to happen? Were our calculations anywhere near the truth? Was our evidence just coincidence?

10pm. The subway rumbled again. But this time that wasn’t the subway. At least not this subway. It was something else. The symbols on the door, struck by the distant light of a Venusian crescent, illuminated a set of numerical keys on each of the stars. Five keys. We entered what we’d all agreed to be our best guess. 05657. Nothing. The clouds passed. Our years of investigation were over.

Through the biting wind, an owl called out in the distance. Then two owls. The door, shut for decades, purposefully, slowly creaked open. A tall figure emerged from the shadows, and strode out into the city’s snowy half-light. In the briefest of moments we saw him, we knew it was Bennett Jr.

”What news of Stanford?”

Terrified, we fled. Our investigations and the owls both fell silent. Forever.

View a video of Beware the Owls’ Herald.

By day, Matt Shadbolt is Head of Core Product Experiences for NBC News Group, where he leads the digital teams responsible for the NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, Today Show, E! Entertainment, and Telemundo brands. He previously worked at The New York Times. By night, Matt is an undergraduate at The University of Pennsylvania, majoring in ancient religious cultures and globalization. With a passion for historical fiction, Matt also runs an emerging generative artificial intelligence creative lab and a growing creative writing practice. Originally from the U.K., Matt lives in New Jersey with his family, where he enjoys video games, sushi, collecting vinyl records, Mini Coopers, Star Wars, cheering on the Cleveland Browns, and hearing his daughter laugh. He can be found at www.matthewshadbolt.com.