Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Monday we heard about Snallygaster’s slave scaring history and Wednesday it saved the newspaper industry.

Prohibition was a drag. And not just because all the legal booze had been flushed down congress’ toilet. While destitute souses gave up their livers to searing shots of fuel-ready methyl alcohol, white-collared sots hired like-minded chemists to re-nature chemically denatured alcohol into an unforgivably potent, though non-toxic-ish, liquor (the “girly drinks” of the modern college campus have roots in this era as the alcohol was so potent that upper class juiceheads turned to all nature of seltzers, tonic waters, juices and citrus to sand the edges off their cocktails), and the government, desperate to stay one step ahead of the socialite-employed Dr. Feelgoods, pursued increasingly elaborate denaturing schemes, involving the addition of powerful toxins, including cyanide, to large shipments of industrial alcohol. Poor drinkers were often permanently blinded or killed by low-quality, high-proof poisons while the wealthy, egged on by the once-passive activity’s newfound lawlessness, descended into new levels of decadence. Despite the controversial ratification of the eighteenth amendment, alcoholism in America was at an all time high.

Meanwhile, rural moonshine stills began pumping out a steady supply of corn whiskey and pure grain alcohol. The wilds of Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains were host to a cast of lone shiners, well-connected bootleggers and industrious drunks, all of them firing up (with varying degrees of success) illegal stills. Along with the clangs, hisses and host of acrid odors inherent to the production of moonshine, there were explosions and fires and bloody conflicts between smugglers. With Federal prohibition agents inevitably Toucan Samming their way through cities and towns, hot on the pungent trail of speakeasies, stills and saloons, the shiners had cause to be nervous. Fortunately, they also had an historical ace up their collective, sour mash-stained sleeve: The Snallygaster.

We’ve already made one tenuous connection between Maryland’s beaked and feathered reptilian antagonist and Jersey’s own nefarious Devil (the suspiciously coincidental timing of the Middle Town Valley Register’s hoax), and, lo, here’s a another: The Jersey Devil myth was supposedly perpetuated by the loose cadre of runaway slaves, criminals and, yes, even moonshiners, who had turned the monster’s supposed stomping grounds into their own lawless, pastoral Xanadu. The more terrified folks were to enter the aptly named Barons, the less likely it was that the community of scoff laws would be discovered, hassled or caught. The Snallygaster, too, served this general fearful purpose, but the recruitment of this particular insidious cryptid was, by several measures, far more ingenious than the Piney’s spooky whisperings.
The Snallygaster as bootlegger sentry had three things going for it:

Find out what they are… AFTER THE JUMP1.) During the days of Rhoderick’s and Wolf’s Register con, witnesses of the Snallygaster imbued the beast with a vast, sometimes conflicting, array of physical characteristics. Like its grotesque appearance, which capitulated between avian, mammalian, reptilian and Lovecraftian, its horrible vocalizations occupied an impressive swath of descriptive terrain. The available palate of roars, hisses, shrieks and yells that tumbled from the Snallygaster’s hideous larynx could easily account for the cornucopic din of both functioning and malfunctioning stills. As a bonus, some of Rhoderick’s and Wolf’s more florid accounts of the creature’s attacks included fire breathing and the discovery of charred human corpses – an easy explanation for the echoing explosions from poorly run stills, and the immolated shiners sometimes left smoldering in the aftermath.

2.) The Middletown Valley Register functioned as the shiner’s journalistic constituent. Aside from the paper’s archives, which chronicled the entire saga of the Snallygaster’s past rampage, beginning with its commute from Ohio and concluding in an open-ended, sequel-ready battle royale, the shiners also counted on the paper (which remained in operation in a large part because of the Snallygaster) to pick up the new “sightings” and run with them. They were not disappointed. As rumors of the Snallygaster’s return spread out across the state, the Middle Valley Register picked up exactly where it left off, penning sensationalist paeans to the terror-cum-mascot of the Old Line State.

3.) The bootlegger’s drunken clients served as even better potential monster witnesses than the fear-addled townsfolk of the original Snallygaster hullabaloo. Who better to succumb to the suggested hallucination of a man-eating dragon than a speakeasy’s worth of delirious, whiskey-blanched sots?

Whether it was fear of the Snallygaster, stupid luck or the persistent presence of bigger fish in larger distilling vats that kept the Blue Ridge Mountain moonshine business strong and largely unraided is a mystery… as is the extent to which the Middle Town Valley Register worked directly with the bootleggers to re-perpetuate the legend of Maryland’s dragon. Whether active participants or passive observers, the paper once again afforded the Snallygaster tale an epic ending – just weeks before the repeal of prohibition, the Register ran an article, complete with a conveniently blurry photograph, detailing the death of the Snallygaster – screaming and flailing in a vat full of sour mash that later exploded, atomizing both the unrealized liquor and its intrepid protector.

More than that, though, the alleged conflagration symbolized the imminent demise of the failed, and largely reviled, eighteenth amendment.

Twitter this