Squonk

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.

The squonk's only address is a sentence in William T. Cox's Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (1910), which says that J. P. Wentling "had a disappointing experience with a squonk near Mont Alto". The 1910 edition, with Coert Du Bois's plate, is on the Internet Archive, and Henry H. Tryon's 1939 entry from Fearsome Critters is transcribed at lumberwoods.org. Mont Alto State Park is on PA 233 at Mont Alto, PA 17237, in south-eastern Franklin County. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources describes it as a quiet park of 24 acres (about 10 hectares) with a pavilion, picnicking and trout fishing, and as "the oldest park still in the Pennsylvania state park system"; a 2018 fact sheet from the Pennsylvania Parks & Forests Foundation dates its establishment to 1902. The department's page, consulted on 24 September 2026, gives the hours as every day of the year from sunrise to sunset, with day-use areas closing at dusk, and refers questions about facilities to the office of Caledonia State Park, whose address, 101 Pine Grove Road, Fayetteville, PA 17222, it gives as the park's mailing address; the telephone is 717-352-2161. From US 30, the Lincoln Highway, the page gives the route as seven miles (11 km) south on PA 233 from Caledonia; from the town of Mont Alto it is one mile (1.6 km) north on the same road. It publishes the park's position as 39.83897, -77.53735, about 1.9 km east-south-east of the pin on this file, which falls in the borough of Mont Alto. The nearest hospital it names is Chambersburg Hospital, 112 North Seventh Street, Chambersburg. The borough is also home to Penn State Mont Alto, which the same fact sheet identifies as the former Pennsylvania State Forestry Academy; its first class of foresters graduated in 1906 and included Ralph Elwood Brock, believed to be the first African American trained in forestry in the United States. The proceedings of the 1908 convention of Pennsylvania foresters, printed in 1910, list the academy's staff with George H. Wirt as director and J. P. Wentling as assistant director. Squonkapalooza, a free all-ages cryptid festival at Bottle Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, celebrates the squonk and other creatures of Appalachian folklore; on 24 September 2026 its site announced the fifth edition for 7 August 2027. The eastern hemlock, the tree in whose forests Cox placed the animal, is Pennsylvania's state tree. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources calls the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive insect, "a serious threat" to it, and reports that by the end of 2023 the pest had been found in all 67 counties of the state.