Squonk

The squonk is not a sighting, it is a signed joke — and the signatures are the interesting part. Its entire life fits on page 31 of Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (Washington, 1910), a mock field guide by William T. Cox, a professional forester, with plates by Coert Du Bois and Latin names supplied by George B. Sudworth, the US Forest Service's own dendrologist: Lacrimacorpus dissolvens, tear-body-dissolving. Cox says the beast is common in the hemlock forests of Pennsylvania, weeps constantly, can be tracked by its tear-stained trail, and may dissolve itself in tears when cornered. He then names the victim of the story: J. P. Wentling, who bagged one near Mont Alto and found nothing in the sack but tears and bubbles. Wentling was real — assistant director of the state forestry school at Mont Alto in 1908 — which makes the entry an in-joke among foresters rather than folklore. From Cox it passed to Tryon in 1939, to Botkin in 1944, to Borges in 1957 and to Genesis in 1976.

The squonk has a paper trail, and it is exactly one page long. The page is number thirty-one of a book printed in Washington, D.C., in 1910. The book is Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts, by William T. Cox, illustrated by Coert Du Bois, printed by Judd & Detweiler. The entry reads, in full: "The range of the squonk is very limited. Few people outside of Pennsylvania have ever heard of the quaint beast, which is said to be fairly common in the hemlock forests of that State. The squonk is of a very retiring disposition, generally traveling about at twilight and dusk. Because of its misfitting skin, which is covered with warts and moles, it is always unhappy; in fact it is said, by people who are best able to judge, to be the most morbid of beasts. Hunters who are good at tracking are able to follow a squonk by its tear-stained trail, for the animal weeps constantly. When cornered and escape seems impossible, or when surprised and frightened, it may even dissolve itself in tears." That is the whole animal. Everything written about the squonk since is a gloss on those five sentences. What the derivative accounts leave out is who signed them. Cox was a professional forester: at the time of the book he was a Forest Service man based in Washington, and the job he is now remembered for did not yet exist — the Minnesota legislature created the post of State Forester in 1911, and Cox took it up effective 1 May of that year, going on to become the state's first Commissioner of Conservation. Coert Du Bois, who drew the plates, had joined the Forest Service in 1900 and later left forestry altogether for the consular service, ending up as United States consul in Naples and Port Said and consul general at Batavia. And the Latin names — the part that makes the book look like a field guide — were supplied by a third federal employee. Cox's acknowledgment says so: "To Mr. George B. Sudworth, dendrologist of the Forest Service, also I am indebted for his kind assistance in classifying the animals." Lacrimacorpus dissolvens — "tear-body, dissolving" — was coined by the man whose day job was naming American trees. The same paragraph thanks "numerous friends among lumbermen and foresters throughout the country and in Canada for furnishing important scientific 'facts' concerning these creatures" — with the quotation marks around facts printed in the original. The volume is dedicated "to the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo", the real fraternal society of the North American lumber trade, and Cox signs it with his membership number, 19949. So the squonk is a professional joke, and the man it was played on can be named. Cox continues: "Mr. J. P. Wentling, formerly of Pennsylvania, but now at St. Anthony Park, Minnesota, had a disappointing experience with a squonk near Mont Alto. He made a clever capture by mimicking the squonk and inducing it to hop into a sack, in which he was carrying it home, when suddenly the burden lightened and the weeping ceased. Wentling unslung the sack and looked in. There was nothing but tears and bubbles." J. P. Wentling was John Philip Wentling, and he was not a name invented for a punchline. The Proceedings of the First Convention of Pennsylvania Foresters, held at Harrisburg in March 1908, print the staff of the State Forest Academy at Mont Alto: Robert S. Conklin, Commissioner of Forestry, Director in Chief; George H. Wirt, Director; "J. P. Wentling, Assistant Director", above the foresters of the classes of 1906 and 1907. Wentling was the deputy head of the Commonwealth's forestry school at Mont Alto — the school whose grounds are the hemlock woods in the story. By 1910 he had moved to St. Anthony Park, the Saint Paul neighbourhood built around the University of Minnesota's agricultural campus, where he became associate professor of forestry and co-wrote The Farm Woodlot (Macmillan, 1914) with Edward G. Cheyney. Read with that in hand, the entry stops being folklore and becomes an in-joke with a forwarding address. Cox names a colleague, gives his old posting and his new one, and has him lose a squonk in the woods behind the school he used to run. Mont Alto in those years was not a backwater: the state park there, established in 1902, is the oldest surviving state park in Pennsylvania; the academy's first class had graduated in 1906, and it included Ralph Elwood Brock, believed to be the first African American trained as a forester in the United States. Mira Lloyd Dock, who sat on the State Forestry Reservation Commission listed on the same page of the 1908 proceedings, had been instrumental in launching the school. The rest of the squonk's life is transmission, and it can be dated. Henry H. Tryon's Fearsome Critters (Idlewild Press, 1939), illustrated by Margaret R. Tryon, gives it page 49 and keeps Sudworth's authorship in the taxonomist's abbreviation — "Lacrimacorpus dissolvens Sudw." — while adding a straight-faced evolutionary backstory: the squonk once lived on high plains, was driven into swamp country, grew webbing "only on the submerged left feet", could therefore swim only in circles, and drowned in thousands. Tryon also supplied the reason for the weeping that everyone now repeats: the animal stays in its hemlocks on moonlit nights for fear "that it may catch a glimpse of itself in some moonlit pool". B. A. Botkin reprinted Cox's text verbatim, Wentling and all, in A Treasury of American Folklore (Crown, 1944), which is how the squonk entered the American folklore canon. The Spanish-language squonk comes from one book. Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero included it in the Manual de zoología fantástica (1957), later expanded as El libro de los seres imaginarios (1967), translating Cox almost sentence by sentence and citing him openly: "William T. Cox. Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods. Washington, 1910." Their version carries one memorable slip. English hemlock is both the conifer Tsuga and the poisonous herb; Borges chose the herb, so the Pennsylvania hemlock forest became "los cicutales de aquel Estado" and the dark hemlock boughs became "los oscuros arbustos de cicuta" — bushes of poison hemlock. Mont Alto became "Monte Alto". Every Spanish retelling that puts the squonk among cicuta is downstream of that page. The last leap was musical. "Squonk", written by Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, opened side one of Genesis's A Trick of the Tail (1976), the first album after Peter Gabriel left. It was the song the band used to audition his replacements; when a candidate could not manage it in the right key, the drummer asked for a go, sang it, and became the singer. That is how a forester's practical joke from Mont Alto ended up as the song that made Phil Collins the voice of Genesis.

There is nothing to see, and pretending otherwise would be doing to you what Cox did to Wentling. What Mont Alto has is the setting of the joke, and that is worth the drive. Mont Alto State Park sits in south-eastern Franklin County, on PA 233 at Mont Alto, PA 17237, inside Michaux State Forest. Established in 1902, it is the oldest state park still operating in Pennsylvania. It is open every day of the year from sunrise to sunset, day-use areas close at dusk, and it is administered from Caledonia State Park (101 Pine Grove Road, Fayetteville, PA 17222; telephone 717-352-2161). Coming from US 30, the Lincoln Highway, it is seven miles south on PA 233 from Caledonia, or one mile north of the town of Mont Alto. The park's own published coordinates are 39.83897, -77.53735; the nearest hospital is Chambersburg Hospital, 112 North Seventh Street, Chambersburg. In the borough itself is the Penn State Mont Alto campus, which is the old Pennsylvania State Forest Academy — the school that graduated its first foresters in 1906 and where J. P. Wentling was assistant director when the 1908 convention proceedings were printed. If the squonk has an address, that is it: a state forestry school with hemlock woods behind it, staffed by the men who invented the animal. The other place the squonk really lives is a digitised book. The 1910 first edition, Du Bois's plate included, is free to read at the Internet Archive; Tryon's 1939 Fearsome Critters has been transcribed page by page online. Reading the original entry takes ninety seconds and is the only genuine encounter available. For company, there is Squonkapalooza, a free all-ages cryptid festival at Bottle Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, built around the squonk and the folklore of Appalachia. Checked on 14 August 2026, its own site announces the fifth edition for 7 August 2027. One honest warning that has nothing to do with cryptozoology. The eastern hemlock is Pennsylvania's state tree and the squonk's supposed habitat, and it is in trouble: the hemlock woolly adelgid and the hemlock elongate scale, two invasive insects, feed on the trees and eventually kill them. If you want to see the hemlock stands the joke was set in, they are still there — but they are a conservation story now, and that is a better reason to walk them than any weeping animal.