Snallygaster

Also Known As: also Snollygaster; called the Go-Devil and the Winged Bovalopus in the 1909 and 1932 newspaper accounts; the name is usually derived from the German schneller Geist, “quick spirit”
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Cryptids, Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It flies without sound, drinks blood from the throat, screams like a locomotive whistle, and in its later appearances breathes fire and shrugs off shotgun pellets.
Role in Mythos: It was built in a newspaper office to frighten one community and sell papers to another, and it kept working for nearly thirty years.
Relation to Humans: The first printed account insisted the creature preyed on Black Marylanders and no one else, and the paper repeated that claim through two separate crazes a generation apart. Families in the Middletown Valley are said to have painted seven-pointed stars on their barns to keep it off, a protective habit that was already old in Pennsylvania German country long before anything was named a Snallygaster.

February in the Middletown Valley smells of woodsmoke and wet slate, and in 1909 it smelled of fresh newsprint as well. On the twelfth, farmers who had come into town for feed carried home a copy of the Valley Register with a banner across the front page announcing that something with wings had come down out of South Mountain and taken a man by the throat. The witness, the paper said, was named James Harding. The dead man, the paper said, was named Bill Gifferson. The thing that killed him had enormous wings, a long pointed bill, four legs armed with claws like steel hooks, one eye in the centre of its forehead, and a voice like a locomotive whistle coming through a cut.

Neither man existed. Neither did the killing. That is the first thing to understand about the Snallygaster and the last thing most retellings get around to saying.

Frederick County had been settled by German-speaking families since the 1730s, and the name that stuck to the creature carries their accent: schneller Geist, quick spirit. It is a satisfying etymology and it explains almost nothing. No German record and no early Maryland record describes a creature by that name, and the folklorist Brenna Spray, writing for the Maryland Historical Trust, puts the point plainly: the link is linguistic rather than folkloric. What the German settlers did bring was a habit of listening to the woods at night, a stock of stories about spectral hunts riding the wind, and a tradition of painting hex stars on barn siding against things that had no faces. The Snallygaster was fitted into that inheritance later, by men with a printing press.

Those men were George C. Rhoderick II and Ralph Wolfe Sr., editors of the Valley Register, working with their friend Thomas Chalmers Harbaugh, a local poet who had turned out more than six hundred and fifty dime novels and knew exactly how to build a sentence that made a reader buy the next issue. Weeks earlier, sightings of the Jersey Devil had sold newspapers across Philadelphia and south Jersey at a rate the Register could only admire. The three of them set out to grow one of their own.

What they grew was ugly. The February headline read “The Colored People Are in Great Danger,” and the story explained that the beast attacked only Black people because it was a native of Senegambia and had never acquired the taste for whites. Its hide, the paper reported, was worth a hundred thousand dollars a square foot, being the only substance that would polish the punkle shells prized by the tribes of Umbopeland. The Smithsonian wanted it alive. The federal government wanted it dead and was preparing a Gatling gun. President Roosevelt was said to be weighing whether to postpone his African safari and hunt it in Maryland instead. Punkle shells do not exist. Neither does Umbopeland. The Smithsonian never investigated and Roosevelt never spoke a word on the subject.

Not everyone was taken in. Emmanuel Myers, a Black resident of the Middletown area, told the paper that year that he was rather more worried about the Democratic amendment Go-Devil coming that autumn, meaning the Straus Amendment then being pushed to strip Black Marylanders of the vote. He had correctly identified which winged thing was actually circling.

The stories escalated weekly, as they were designed to. By March 5 the Register had four men and a sheriff’s deputy fighting the creature for ninety minutes while it breathed fire down the pike. It seized Ed Brown and was lifting him away when Bill Snider drove up, grabbed Brown by the foot and pulled until his suspenders broke and he dropped. Snider’s description of the beast, as printed, is the finest sentence the whole affair produced: it looked like a giraffe on roller-skates. Its hide was the colour of the down side of a catfish. Its snout resembled a silo, and something like melted brimstone leaked from the corners of its mouth.

Then it went quiet for twenty-three years, and came back with the next generation of the same family. In November 1932 George C. Rhoderick III revived the monster with help from his uncle Charles, reporting that the original’s hatchling was loose in the county with tentacles that retracted into its mouth and the ability to change its size, shape and colour. The politics came with it: the paper suggested the beast was an omen of ill for Black voters who had abandoned the Republicans for Franklin Roosevelt. Rival Democratic papers took the joke and swung it back. The Baltimore Evening Sun ran a doctored photograph of the thing pedalling a bicycle in a pair of waterwings, and declared it cursed to shriek “Balance the Budget!” for eternity. At least one reader, R. Austin Stine, wrote in to say that whatever the item was meant to be, frightening people on purpose was of questionable merit.

Up on South Mountain, meanwhile, moonshiners had found a use for it. Every metallic shriek and midnight explosion coming off the ridge could be laid at the creature’s feet, and revenue agents who believed even slightly were agents who did not walk far into the laurel. A monster invented to intimidate was, within a generation, sheltering a still.

It died drunk. On December 1, 1932, the Evening Sun reported that the Snallygaster had fallen into a 2,500-gallon vat of boiling mash, which dissolved its flesh clean off. Two Prohibition agents found the skeleton and destroyed it, along with the vat, using five hundred pounds of dynamite. Other papers refused to let go. The Montgomery County Sentinel kept it circling Rockville, then had it flee to the swamps of Brazil in 1933 to escape the New Deal, then had it return in 1935, then claimed Mussolini had assembled forty or fifty of them for use against the Ethiopians. In 1937 the Sentinel announced that the Snallygasters had quitted these parts, and the craze was finally allowed to end.

Its powers were always whatever the week’s copy required: silent flight, blood taken from the throat, fire, a hide that turned shot, a body that changed size and colour between paragraphs. Its weaknesses were narrower. A seven-pointed star painted on good barn siding was said to hold it off, and hot liquor finished it. But the real limit on the Snallygaster is simpler than either. It could only ever go where the paper went, and it lasted precisely as long as someone was willing to set it in type. The hex stars on those barns are still visible in Frederick County, and they were there first.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Snallygaster?

The Snallygaster is a winged half-bird, half-reptile monster from Frederick County, Maryland, described with a single eye in the centre of its forehead, a long pointed bill, hooked claws and trailing tentacles. It was said to swoop silently out of South Mountain and drink the blood of its victims. It first appeared in print in the Middletown Valley Register in February 1909.

Is the Snallygaster real?

No. The Snallygaster was invented by Valley Register editors George C. Rhoderick II and Ralph Wolfe Sr. along with the dime novelist T.C. Harbaugh, who wanted the same boost in circulation that the Jersey Devil had given Philadelphia papers weeks earlier. The first article’s details, including the victim Bill Gifferson, the Smithsonian investigation and Theodore Roosevelt’s interest, were all fabricated.

Where does the name Snallygaster come from?

The name is usually traced to the German phrase schneller Geist, meaning quick spirit, reflecting the German-speaking families who settled Frederick County from the 1730s. Research for the Maryland Historical Trust notes that the connection is linguistic rather than folkloric, since no German or early Maryland source describes an actual creature by that name.

Why is the Snallygaster story considered racist?

The first article ran under the headline “The Colored People Are in Great Danger” and claimed the creature attacked only Black people because it came from Senegambia. The paper repeated the same framing during the 1932 revival, casting the monster as an omen against Black voters who had switched to Franklin Roosevelt. The stories ran in a state where lynchings and voter-disenfranchisement campaigns were live realities.

How was the Snallygaster killed?

According to the Baltimore Evening Sun of December 1, 1932, the Snallygaster fell into a 2,500-gallon vat of boiling moonshine mash, which dissolved its flesh. Two Prohibition agents then blew up the remaining skeleton and the vat with five hundred pounds of dynamite. Other newspapers ignored the death notice and kept reporting sightings until 1937.