Snallygaster

The Snallygaster is a winged monster of western Maryland folklore, usually pictured as half bird and half reptile, with an enormous wingspan and grasping tentacles. It belongs to a very specific landscape: the Middletown Valley, South Mountain and the Catoctin ridge in Frederick County, and Sugarloaf Mountain on the Montgomery County line. Its origin is traditionally placed in February 1909, in a series of reports printed by the Middletown Valley Register, but no copy of that series has been digitised and no newspaper indexed in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America uses the word before 1932. The outbreak that can be read in full ran through November and December 1932, when the Montgomery County Sentinel of Rockville described hunting parties around Sugarloaf Mountain in openly comic articles whose fear was aimed squarely at Black neighbourhoods. The name is often explained as a corruption of the German schnelle Geister, quick spirits, an etymology recorded as a local belief in a 1940 state guide rather than established by any linguist. The much-repeated claims that the Smithsonian Institution offered a reward for the body and that Theodore Roosevelt considered hunting it are not supported by any contemporary source we could find.

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. We set out to read those articles. We could not. The Middletown Valley Register is not in any digitised newspaper archive we were able to reach, and — this is the part that matters — the word does not appear anywhere in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America before 1932, across every spelling we could think of (snallygaster, snalligaster, snarlygaster, snallygoster, snally gaster). We also went page by page through the Catoctin Clarion, a Frederick County weekly published about twenty kilometres from Middletown, for all seven issues digitised between 28 January and 11 March 1909. Six to seven pages an issue, and not one line about a monster. What we can read, in full, is the outbreak of November and December 1932 — and it is not what the modern legend describes. 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. 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 famous date survives here as a memory, printed by people who plainly expected their readers to recall 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. The 2 December 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". Every printed snallygaster story we read from the 1930s does this. It was written by white-run papers, for white readers, about the fright of their Black neighbours. 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, told its readers the same thing 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".

Be clear about one thing first: there is no Snallygaster museum, no marked trail, no annual festival and no visitor centre. We checked the Frederick County tourism board's own listings and found nothing under the name. What there is, is a very specific landscape and an archive you can read from your sofa. Sugarloaf Mountain — the lair. The 1932 Sentinel put the sleeping monster in a cave "on top of the Sugar Loaf mountain", and that mountain is open to the public. It is private land owned and run by Stronghold, Inc., a non-profit set up in 1946 by Gordon Strong, at 7901 Comus Road, Dickerson, MD 20842 (tel. 301-874-2024). The park is open 8.00 a.m. until sunset, but the entrance gate closes at 4.00 p.m. all year, so arrive early. There is no entrance fee; Stronghold asks for a voluntary donation of $5 or more. Park only in the designated areas — roadside parking is prohibited and towing runs to about $325 — keep dogs leashed, and carry your rubbish out, as there are no bins. Dickerson, at the foot of the mountain, is where the ten hunters of 2 December 1932 set out and, more sheepishly, returned. Rockville, Montgomery County. The courthouse lawn where a motorist supposedly drove over a two-foot wall on 15 December 1932 is still there, at the corner of Montgomery Avenue and the old Frederick road, in Rockville Town Center — a short walk from the Rockville Metro station on the Red Line. The Middletown Valley, Burkittsville and South Mountain. This is where the story is supposed to start. Middletown sits on US 40 Alternate between Frederick and Boonsboro; Burkittsville, at the foot of South Mountain, is the village the 1940 state guide names; 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. It is a very small place with almost no parking and it has been overrun by film tourism since The Blair Witch Project — treat it as somebody's home rather than an attraction. Catoctin Mountain Park (National Park Service) covers the ridge the creature was said to fly along. The visitor centre is at 6602 Foxville Road, Thurmont, MD 21788; the park is open all year, dawn to dusk, and the visitor centre 9.00 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., closed on New Year's Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Visitor-centre parking fills on busy weekends; there are overflow areas at Thurmont Vista, Hog Rock and the Chestnut Picnic Area. The best "visit" is free and online. Every newspaper page quoted in this file is public and readable at full resolution in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America. Start with the Montgomery County Sentinel of 2 December 1932, page 8, and 15 December 1932, page 1, then search the word yourself and watch how the results begin in 1932 and never before. For the paper that is not there — the Middletown Valley Register of February 1909 — you would have to consult the original microfilm in Frederick County itself. We could not confirm remotely which library or archive holds it, and it is the one piece of this story we cannot put in front of you.