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. This week we focus on the Snallygaster, come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

I’ve always loved words that carry a sense of their meaning within their phonetic pronunciations. You don’t need to know what “vile” means to infer that it probably doesn’t describe something desirable. Likewise, “mush” sounds inherently unappetizing. It’s in this spirit of efficient verbiage that I bring you the tale of the Snallygaster. I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “Snallygaster,” I’m immediately certain of two things: 1.) it’s some kind of animal; 2.) it’s totally bughouse bananas. True, my initial imagining – a flame-farting alligator with a giant snail shell – isn’t entirely accurate, but it’s no farther out than the abandoned carpet warehouse next to the ballpark.

Maryland’s Snallygaster is part bird, part reptile, sometimes tentacled and perpetually ticked off. Half-reptile, half-bird sounds evocative, until you remember that many classic folkloric dragons are just that – giant, feathered lizards with bad tempers and a wicked set of wings. Its name doesn’t represent a concerted effort to encapsulate the ferocious mutant’s hideous visage into a single descriptive, multisyllabic sobriquet, but rather a concerted, if failed, Anglican attempt to pronounce the German term “Schneller Geist,” meaning “quick spirit.” See, the mid-1700s found a rabble of German immigrants setting up shop in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Much more AFTER THE JUMP…

Along with superior beer-brewing techniques and primitive convection-driven Zoetropes featuring the first vomit fetish pornography, the German’s showed up with a variety of traditional folktales, including terrifying stories of man-eating dragons, and superstitious tales of the aforementioned Schneller Geists – unseen ghosties responsible for sudden drafts of air that extinguished candles and slammed doors shut. While it remains unclear how these two wholly separate entities got conflated into a single, ravenous monster that devoured men whole and laid eggs large enough to hatch horses (my money is on the same jumbled oral repetitions that yielded the word “Snallygaster”), the beast quickly became the most famous resident of Northern Maryland.

Pre-20th Century reports of the Snallygaster are fairly non-specific. In fact, to this day, no actual recorded 18th or 19th century sightings have been discovered. While more superstitious farmers took to drawing hex signs, such as seven-pointed stars (heptagrams represent the seven days of creation and are said to ward off evil, hence, the traditional seven-pointed sheriff’s badge) on their barns in order to deflect the ferocious creature’s unholy presence, it’s likely that many early incarnations of the Snallygaster inhabited bedtime stories designed to allow the swaying shadows on bedroom walls to append a silent, dangling “or else…” to parents’ otherwise gentle admonitions of, “stay in bed and get some sleep.”

Wikipedia briefly notes that the legend was put to more nefarious use during the 1800s, when slave owners began using tales of the wild Snallygaster in the deep, dark woods as a folklore-based fear campaign to discourage their human property from escaping. The sole source of this information, however, only further complicates the history of the tale – it appears as an interesting aside to the definition of “snollygoster” (a calculating and dishonest politician) in lexicographer Erin McKean’s book “Weird and Wonderful Words,” which also points out that the first written use of “snollygoster” actually precedes that of the suspiciously similar, and equally reprehensible “Snallygaster” by about 100 years. (If McKean’s tidbit about the legend’s relationship to slavery is true, I can’t help but imagine the type of slave owner who might employ this tactic. While the next plantation over oils up a leather strap and waits for the branding iron to heat up [this slave owner could be played by Nick Nolte], these folks are withholding dessert and wielding fierce threats of a 10-minute Time Out followed by Snallygaster story time [this would be the late John Ritter].)

What is certain is that, beginning in the early 1900s, the Snallygaster became a common topic of the Middletown Valley Register, a local Maryland paper that began reporting an increasing number of Snallygaster sightings, including giant Snallygaster eggs and frightening evidence of the creature’s fondness for hot, running blood and ability to immolate its pitiable victims.

Wednesday: What do scheming journalists, Teddy Roosevelt, creative moonshiners and the Smithsonian Institute have in common? It rhymes with “gallyfaster.”

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