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, on Monday we looked at the beast’s slave scaring past!

These days, there are plenty of failing newspapers so hard up for cash that they can barely afford the nails to board up their doors. Shrinking page counts, reduced dimensions and an inability to successfully monetize online content have all contributed to the imminent downfall of the publishing industry. Luckily, I have a solution.

During the first years of the 20th century, Maryland journalists George Rhoderick and Ralph Wolf watched their home paper, The Middletown Valley Register, take a financial nosedive. (Reading some archived online content, it’s not hard to see why. The June, 7 1895 edition, for example, contained this urgent bulletin: “Mr. William E. LIGHTER and wife of near Funkstown, Washington county, were
visiting relatives in this place on Sunday and Monday last.”) Surely the men were familiar with the area’s olden day whisperings of a heptaphobic dragon, and perhaps they’d also heard about the rash of so-called “devil” sightings that had swept New Jersey just three years prior. Either way, looking back at their subsequent actions, it’s hard to tell whether the men saw their plan as a wild gambit aimed at the paper’s salvation, or just a merry cryptozoological jape intended to see the publication off with an inhuman scream. Either way, when they published the first erroneous account of a local Snallygaster sighting, it became immediately clear that, despite the dour mood in the accounting department, someone was still reading the Register.

The 1909 Snallygaster hoax was a carefully orchestrated affair that began with a printed letter of warning written by a fretful Ohio man who had witnessed a big bastard dragon monster storming towards Maryland. After peeing all of his clothes, including a headdress he inherited from an Apache ancestor, he thoughtfully decided to warn the soon-to-be-dragon-stricken state’s inhabitants. (I know the first thing I consider when I see an inhuman monstrosity is its probable destination based on the approximate direction of its homicidal rampage.) Predictably, the next report came out of the Old Line State itself and featured testimony from a rurally based kiln operator who saw the horrific winged beast taking a well-deserved nap that ended with a drowsy banshee scream and a quicksilver ascent into the darkening sky.

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…
Having laid out their bait, Rhoderick and Wolf urged readers to take a deep breath, stay calm and, of course, report every man-eating monster encounter directly to the Middletown Valley Register. And Sightings poured in.

The paper, for its part, dutifully published the accounts and occasionally sweetened the pot with a bit of fallacious bloodshed and ovipositing; soon it seemed that the creature was sucking blood, carrying children off into the freezing skies and squirting out humungous eggs that, thankfully, resisted all attempts at incubation. The entire affair is an incredible example of how a single story, no matter how fantastical, can, once absorbed into the general consciousness, come to flying, screeching, cattle-shredding life. When is a bird not a bird? In 1909, when it’s a Snallygaster.

Locals actually believed that they saw the creature silhouetted against the sky and gliding onward to its next blood-smeared atrocity.

When rumors began circulating that the nearby Smithsonian Institute had placed a $100,000 bounty on the dragon’s head, wings, body and, in the event of tentacles, also tentacles, I’m sure Rhoderick and Wolf had a good laugh; when self-appointed demon hunting mercenaries laid siege to the surrounding forests, riling up the townsfolk and blanketing the woods in garbage and amateur campfires, the men’s smiles may have dropped a little bit; when Teddy Roosevelt, President of the United States, announced that he was considering postponing an African safari in favor of a Marylandian one, complete with designs to fell the mighty Snallygaster, one can easily imagine Rhoderick turning to Wolf (or vise a versa), tugging at his collar and whispering “ix nay on the allygaster say.” After all, subscriptions were up and circulation had improved. The Snallygaster had outlived its usefulness.

The first modern era of the Snallygaster came to a fitting close, complete with an epic battle. According to the pages of the unimpeachable Middletown Valley Register, three brave Marylanders engaged the beast in an hour-long fight that ended in triumph as the badly wounded creature retreated into the darkness, never to be heard from again.

At least, that was Rhoderick’s and Wolf’s plan. But neither of them had counted on prohibition, which would find illegal moonshine stills cropping up throughout the Blue Ridge Mountains… stills that hissed and screeched and, occasionally, exploded.

You might tell a kid that booming thunder is just the angels bowling. Marylanders might tell a Federal Prohibition Agent that booming moonshine stills are just the Snallygaster.

But now I’m just rambling. That solution to the publishing industry’s current predicament? Edible paper. But it has to taste really good. I mean, if you’re going to shell out a dollar for the turkey edition of the New York Times, that sh*t better taste like Thanksgiving.

Friday: How the wets recruited a monster

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.”