Hoop Snake (also horn snake, stinging snake)

Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Cryptids, Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The hoop snake takes its own tail in its mouth, rolls after its victim like a wheel, and strikes with a hard horny sting in its tail whose poison kills anything with blood or bark.
Role in Mythos: It is the great tall-tale serpent of the American backcountry, the snake that outruns a man on a slope and is told to every newcomer who will sit still for it.
Relation to Humans: In the stories it pursues people rather than fleeing them, which is precisely backwards for a snake and precisely the point. The standard defence is to put a tree between yourself and the roll and let the sting go into the wood.

It comes down the hill the wrong way. Not the long muscular S of a snake crossing leaf litter, but a wheel, a dark hoop about the width of a barrel head, ticking over stones and dry oak leaves with a papery clatter and picking up speed on the slope. The tail is in the mouth. The sting points forward out of the ring like a spoke fitted the wrong way round, and it is aimed at whatever the snake was looking at when it decided to start rolling.

For two and a half centuries that hoop has been coming down American hillsides after people who were, by their own account, only just fast enough.

The first man to write it down was a Scottish traveller called John Ferdinand Smyth, who published his account of the American backcountry in 1784. He was staying at the Sawra Towns on the Dan River in North Carolina when a boy came in to say he had killed a horn snake. Smyth wanted very badly to see one and walked out with him to the spot. There was nothing there. The boy explained that the snake could not have been quite dead after all, had recovered enough to crawl off, and had hidden itself somewhere among the leaves. Every other person in the settlement, Smyth wrote, avowed with the greatest confidence that they had seen such snakes, though very seldom.

What he got instead of a body was a description, and it is still the best one anybody has. The creature resembles a black snake, but thicker, shorter, and browner. It never bites its adversary. Its weapon is in the tail, a sting of hard, horny substance, in shape and appearance very much like a cock’s spur, and it strikes with this when the victim least expects it. If the point penetrates the skin, the death is sudden and certain. The snake can crawl on its belly like any other serpent when it has nowhere in particular to be, but when it is in eager pursuit of prey it throws itself into a circle, running rapidly round, advancing like a hoop, the tail arising and pointing forward inside the ring so that it is always in position to strike. From this, Smyth noted, the animals take their name.

Fifteen years later Isaac Weld came through the same country and filed the whole business under nonsense. Believe every snake story told here, he warned his readers, and you must believe in the whip snake that flogs cattle through the woods until they drop, and in the hoop snake, which fixes its tail firmly in a certain cavity inside of its mouth and then rolls forward like a hoop with such wonderful velocity that neither man nor beast can possibly escape from its devouring jaws. Weld had decided the tales were a test of a traveller’s credulity. He declined to pass.

The snake kept rolling anyway. In June 1809 a Vermont newspaper reprinted a report of a hoop snake, or as some call it a horn snake, lately killed near Newton: a reptile that coils itself into a hoop and rolls with such swiftness that it can drive its horn a considerable distance into a tree, and the poison is so violent that the tree dies. The tree is the detail that grew. When Timothy Flint wrote up the western states in 1828 he listed the hoop snake among the deliberate exaggerations that the wags of the day had circulated about Ohio, alongside springs of brandy and flax that bore little pieces of cloth on the stem: a snake so malignant that when its sting punctured the bark of a green tree, the leaves went sere and the tree died where it stood. Flint knew exactly what he was looking at. The hoop snake was never really a belief. It was a frontier joke with a straight face on it, aimed at greenhorns, Europeans, and anyone who could not yet tell the fertility of the new country from its fables.

That is what it has remained. It rolled into the lumber camps and the cowboy yarns, it turned up in the printed tall tales that grew around Pecos Bill long after Smyth was dead, and it emigrated. Australian recruits at Kapooka were still passing on hoop snake stories alongside drop bear stories in the 1970s, which is the same joke wearing a different hat.

No snake can do this. A serpent’s spine is built to flex from side to side, not to lock into a rigid ring and take the load of rolling, and no snake anywhere carries venom in its tail.

But the hoop snake has a parent, and it lives in the swamps where the stories are thickest. The eastern mud snake, Farancia abacura, is a large, glossy, blue-black animal of the southeastern wetlands, barred underneath in red and black, with a short blunt head and a tail that ends in a sharp, spine-like scale. It uses that spine. Hunting the big aquatic salamanders that make up almost its entire diet, it coils around them and presses the hard tail point into their bodies to pin and manipulate them, and it will do the same, harmlessly, to a hand that picks it up. It breaks no skin. It carries no venom. It has been called the stinging snake and the horn snake for as long as people have been naming snakes in the American South, and it rests in a loose, rounded coil. A hard prickle against the palm, a snake shaped like a wheel lying in the mud, and a story you already half believe are enough to do the rest.

Raymond Ditmars, who ran the reptile house at the Bronx Zoo for four decades, is said to have put ten thousand dollars in trust at a New York bank for the first person who could produce a hoop snake. Nobody ever collected it.

What the creature can do was settled long ago by the people telling it. It rolls faster than a man can run, at least on a slope; it needs no warning and gives none; and its sting kills anything with blood in it and anything with bark. Its limitations are the limitations of a wheel, and every version of the story knows them. A hoop must commit. It goes where it was pointed and it cannot swerve, which is why the remedy in every telling is the same: get something solid between yourself and it, a tree, a gatepost, a fence rail, and let the sting bury itself in wood. The wood swells, the leaves brown, the tree dies. You walk home. And a rolling snake needs a hill. On the flat bottomland it has to unhook its tail and crawl like everything else, and that is the moment the story quietly lets you go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hoop snake?

The hoop snake is a mythical American serpent that grasps its tail in its mouth, rolls after its victim like a wheel, and strikes with a hard horny sting in the end of its tail. It belongs to the tall-tale tradition of the backcountry and the lumber camps rather than to any real natural history, and it has never been accepted as a real animal.

Where does the hoop snake legend come from?

The earliest written account is by the Scottish traveller John Ferdinand Smyth, who recorded it at the Sawra Towns on the Dan River in North Carolina and published it in 1784. He called it the horn snake and described its cock’s-spur sting and its rolling gait. By 1828 Timothy Flint was listing the hoop snake among the deliberate exaggerations that frontier storytellers circulated to bewilder newcomers to Ohio.

How do you escape a hoop snake?

According to the folklore, you put something solid between yourself and it. Because a rolling hoop cannot swerve, the snake drives its sting into a tree, a gatepost or a fence rail instead of into you, and the poison is said to kill the tree instead. In many versions the hoop snake also needs a slope to roll down, so flat ground is safe.

Is the hoop snake based on a real snake?

The likeliest candidate is the eastern mud snake, Farancia abacura, a harmless southeastern species long known as the stinging snake or horn snake. It has a sharp spine-like scale at the tip of its tail, which it presses into the salamanders it preys on and will press against a hand that holds it, and it lies in a loose rounded coil. It has no venom and cannot roll.