Snallygaster

It belongs to a precise landscape: the Middletown Valley, South Mountain and the Catoctin ridge in Frederick County, and Sugarloaf Mountain on the Montgomery County line. It was launched on 12 February 1909 by the Valley Register, a Middletown weekly, under the headline "The Colored People Are in Great Danger"; the series is held on paper by Frederick County Public Libraries, and by 5 March 1909 it was printing the word Snallygaster. The Smithsonian reward and Theodore Roosevelt's plan to hunt it, often told as the national reaction, are part of that first article's joke. The best-documented outbreak ran through November and December 1932, when the Valley Register revived the creature and the Montgomery County Sentinel of Rockville described comic hunting parties around Sugarloaf whose fear was aimed at Black neighbourhoods. A 1940 state guide suggested the name may come from the German schnelle Geister, quick spirits.

The Snallygaster is almost always introduced with the same paragraph. In February 1909 a weekly paper in Middletown, Maryland — the Valley Register — began running reports of a winged monster over the Middletown Valley; the story swelled week by week, papers across the country reprinted it, the Smithsonian Institution offered a reward for the carcass, and Theodore Roosevelt thought about delaying his African safari to shoot it. The 1909 series is real, and it is on paper. The Valley Register is not in Chronicling America; its issues are held by Frederick County Public Libraries, in the Maryland Room of the C. Burr Artz Public Library, and Jake Seboe quoted them in December 2024 for WETA's Boundary Stones. The first piece ran on 12 February 1909 under the headline "The Colored People Are in Great Danger. Monster Go-Devil or Winged Bovalopus in This Section of Maryland". It carried an eyewitness who described "enormous wings; a long, pointed bill; four legs armed with claws like steel hooks; one eye in the center of its forehead", and it said the beast attacked only Black people. The Smithsonian and Roosevelt are in that first article, as part of the joke. On 19 February the novelist T. C. Harbaugh saw it in Ohio, sailing towards Maryland; on 5 March the headline was "Emmitsburg Saw the Great Snallygaster". Seboe names the paper's editors, George C. Rhoderick and Ralph Wolfe, and Harbaugh as the authors. The word itself is therefore in print by March 1909. In the Library of Congress's Chronicling America it does not appear before 1932, across five spellings (snallygaster, snalligaster, snarlygaster, snallygoster, snally gaster), according to a full-text query made for this file in 2026. What Chronicling America can show, in full, is the outbreak of late 1932 — and it is not what the modern legend describes. According to Seboe, it began in the Valley Register itself on 18 November 1932, when George C. Rhoderick III, son of the 1909 editor, revived the story with his uncle Charles K. Rhoderick, as the hatchling of the 1909 monster. On 2 December 1932 the Montgomery County Sentinel of Rockville gave page eight to a headline built to be read aloud: "Sleeping Snallygaster Snores Serenely In Sugar Loaf Sunday; Seven Snares Set." Under it: "Winged Bovalopus Frightens Ten, As Hunters Spy Him In His Den; Open Season On Monster Called And Countryside Is Appalled — Last Seen 23 Years Ago, Lives On Colored Men, Don't You Know." The story itself opens: "It has been 23 years since the dreaded winged monster, the 'Snallygaster,' has appeared in the Western section of Maryland." It goes on: "With a spread of at least 30 feet, reaching out his tentacles like some prehistoric inhabitant of the Miocene age, the Snallygaster, or winged Bovalopus, has been seen by two score residents of Washington, Frederick, and Upper Montgomery counties within the past two weeks." Twenty-three years back from 1932 is 1909: the Sentinel counts from the Valley Register series and takes for granted that the county remembers it. The rest of the article is a comic set piece. Ten men follow the beast over Dickerson "at a 60-mile-a-minute rate", armed "with rifles, pistols, shotguns, and oaths"; one carries a bag of "the powerful but rare 'snoozeberry', said to be the most efficacious lure for the snallygaster". At "eleven minutes and eleven seconds after eleven Sunday morning" they find it snoring in a cave on Sugarloaf Mountain, lose their nerve, forget the snoozeberries and back-track to Dickerson. Two weeks later, on 15 December 1932, the Sentinel put it on the front page: "Snallygaster Glides Over Rockville; Autoist Scales Wall on Courthouse Lawn". A motorist at the corner of Montgomery Avenue and the Frederick road "so far lost his nerve that he drove his automobile up over the 2-foot wall and darted across the courthouse lawn"; witnesses reported "a large bird, fully 6-foot in wing spread"; and "fingerprint expert Ted Vollten said yesterday that he was looking for shadow marks in the snow in the vicinity of Snake's Den". There is something in these articles that the modern retellings quietly drop. The joke has a target, and the target is Black Marylanders. It is there in the headline of 12 February 1909. The 2 December 1932 subhead says the monster "Lives On Colored Men"; the hunters withdraw only after "giving out a warning to the colored residents of the town"; the 15 December piece has the beast dive on "'The Run', Rockville's colored settlement". The Sentinel kept The Run as the monster's hunting ground for years afterwards, according to Seboe. It was written by white-run papers, for a white readership, about the fright of their Black neighbours; and the Sentinel, a Democratic paper, reported that some held the monster "appears after every election when the result shows that the colored voter cast his ballot for a Democrat". After 1932 the creature became a running gag in the county press. In August 1933 the Sentinel reported that the Snallygaster had picked a fight with the Blue Eagle, the emblem of Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration, been beaten "with a crash which could be heard as far away as the Middletown Valley" and fled towards Brazil; the paper's own review of the year filed it under August, among the tax rate and the baseball. In March 1935 the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay was said to have driven it home again, with Senator Huey Long taking the matter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It also escaped Maryland. In July 1934 the Worcester Democrat of Pocomoke City reported that Edward Lewis of Pleasant Walk, in the northern Middletown Valley, had shot a large speckled bird with a six-foot wingspan and a four-inch bill after losing chickens; neighbours wondered whether it was "the offspring of the dread Snallygaster, which appeared in this section in November, 1932". By January 1938 United Press was using the word for a panic in Mobile, Alabama; by September 1940 for a scare at Eastport, Annapolis; by January 1952 a Connecticut editor could joke that the newly announced ornithopter was "just an attempt to copy the snallygaster, which was famous in Maryland some twenty years ago", adding that the snallygaster "also had a habit of ra[z]ing moonshine stills in the North Maryland country". In August 1953 the Associated Press could describe northern Cecil County simply as Maryland's "Snallygaster" country. The name has one reasonably old written explanation. The Federal Writers' Project guide Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State (1940) places the creature in the Middletown Valley and near a Black settlement by the old Horsey distillery outside Burkittsville, at the foot of South Mountain, and offers the etymology twice — carefully hedged both times: "The name, those who have investigated the legend believe, may well have been a corruption of the German schnellegeister, meaning 'quick spirit', since that section of the State has been heavily infiltrated with German families who migrated from Pennsylvania." In January 1945 a German-language paper in Cleveland, the Siebenbürgisch-Amerikanisches Volksblatt, repeated it in the same conditional mood: the name "soll eine Verstümmelung des deutschen Wortes 'Schnelle Geister' sein" — is said to be a mangling of the German for "quick spirits".

The places the Snallygaster stories name lie in Frederick and Montgomery counties, in western Maryland, and the newspaper pages that carry the stories are free to read online. Sugarloaf Mountain. The Montgomery County Sentinel of 2 December 1932 put the sleeping monster in a cave "on top of the Sugar Loaf mountain". That mountain is private land owned and run by Stronghold, Inc., a non-profit set up in 1946 by Gordon Strong, at 7901 Comus Road, Dickerson, Maryland 20842, telephone (301) 874-2024. Stronghold gives the park hours as 8 a.m. until sunset, with the entrance gate closed at 4 p.m. year-round. There is no entrance fee; the same page asks for "a voluntary donation of $5 or more". Roadside parking is not permitted, and Stronghold puts the average cost of a tow at $325. Dogs go on a leash at all times, and the park has no bins at all, so rubbish leaves with whoever brought it. Those terms were still published on 22 September 2026. Dickerson, at the foot of the mountain, is where the ten hunters of 2 December 1932 set out from. Rockville, Montgomery County. The courthouse lawn where a motorist supposedly drove over a two-foot wall on 15 December 1932 is in Rockville Town Center, a short walk from the Rockville Metro station on the Red Line. The Middletown Valley, Burkittsville and South Mountain. Middletown sits on US 40 Alternate between Frederick and Boonsboro. Burkittsville, at the foot of South Mountain, is the village named in the 1940 state guide. A mile to the west stands the War Correspondents Memorial that the Civil War reporter George Alfred Townsend built for his colleagues, described in that same guide. Burkittsville is an incorporated town where a few hundred people live. Catoctin Mountain Park. The National Park Service ridge along which the creature was said to fly is open daily from dawn until dusk. The visitor centre is at 6602 Foxville Road, Thurmont, Maryland 21788, open 9 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. and closed on New Year's Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. When the visitor-centre lots fill, the park service points drivers to Thurmont Vista, Hog Rock or the Chestnut Picnic Area, and adds that parking along Route 77 is legal as long as the vehicle sits entirely outside the white line. Checked on 22 September 2026. The archive. The newspaper pages behind this story are public and readable at full resolution in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America, among them the Montgomery County Sentinel of 2 December 1932, page 8, and of 15 December 1932, page 1. A full-text search of the same collection for the word returns nothing earlier than December 1932. The Middletown Valley Register of February 1909 is not digitised there, and reading it means the original microfilm in Frederick County.