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 chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town. Wednesday we learned how one man created his own lake monster sham.

Maybe it’s because we’re at a century’s distance with only selective research sources left to go by, but I feel like there’s respectable, genteel nobility behind both the Hodag hoax and the Lake George Monster prank. I say this in light of the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco, which mirrored modern film and record promotion campaigns far more than it did the homegrown ingenuity of yesteryear’s cryptid shenanigans. At the same token, it’s difficult, in the case of the Sasquatch carcass thimblerig, to figure out exactly where the wild dream logic and delightful homespun madness ended and where the frustrating dishonesty and grubby-handed cash pawing began.

It’s easy to point fingers at Carmine Thomas Biscardi, the Las Vegas promoter and notorious Bigfoot hoaxer, who teamed up with the two Georgia pranksters after they had already set their small-scale practical joke in motion… easy because he’s obviously guilty, and by far the least sympathetic party involved. In 2005, Biscardi went on Coast to Coast AM to brag about a live Bigfoot specimen that everybody could watch and enjoy via live webcam feed… for a subscription fee of $14. The surprise here isn’t that there wasn’t actually a captive Sasquatch pacing circles in front of the camera lens, but rather that there was nothing pacing anything anywhere; Biscardi didn’t even try to fake a spectacle. After announcing that there was never a live specimen and claiming that he, too, had been ripped off by the people in possession of the non-existent Bigfoot, Biscardi took the webcam money and ran. (To his dubious credit, he did refund all post-prank-revelation subscription orders.) The refusal to present even the drunkest of vagrants in the nattiest of Gorilla Grodd costumes clearly crosses the line between hoax and scam.

So after Biscardi jumped on the bandwagon-cum-Yeti-hearse of the Georgian sheriff’s deputy and his used car salesman buddy, it was really tempting to cite him as the reason that the hoax felt less like a harmless, misguided jape than a carefully orchestrated deception. After all, Biscardi’s the one who called down the media frenzy, and who organized the ridiculous live press conference, and who, at the outset, before pictures of the so-called corpse were released on the Internet, charged folks $2 a pop for cadaver photos. On the other hand, Biscardi didn’t start the hoax. He didn’t author the boys’ tale of hiking through the woods and finding the 7’ 7” fur-covered body amid a gathering of three similar living creatures. He even joined up after the first YouTube video was filmed. Biscardi is just a savvy, opportunistic mooch, the crooked conductor of a runaway train built by Deputy Matthew Whiton and Rick Dyer.

Get the rest of the story AFTER THE JUMP…
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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 chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town.

The Lake George Monster never saved a town. It didn’t herald a tourism boom or lure swarms of industrialists to the shores of Hague Bay. It doesn’t funky chicken around the sidelines of any public school basketball courts. And Lake George isn’t known as “Home of the Lake George Monster,” but rather as “Gateway to the Adirondacks.” Credit where credit is due, though, the Lake George Monster is probably the most extreme point (short of boat murder) to which a friendly fishing contest has ever escalated.
In 1904, Harry Watrous, a professional painter, made a bet with his friend, Colonel William Mann, the editor of an infamous gossip rag, over who could reel in a larger trout. And so it began. The men fished on the lake, often in sight of each other, each one determined to fish better, harder, faster than the other. In retrospect, that Mann decided to cheat shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

The paper the Colonel edited, “Town Topics,” once a respectable arts and leisure magazine, had, under Mann, become an inky mire of high society gossip and scandal-mongering. Mann’s ploy to avoid libel charges? Print standard, sometimes even complimentary, articles about known New York society members on the front of a page, then, on the flip side, directly lined up with the corresponding fluff pieces, run scandalous news about the same individuals, sans identification. Anyone who knew how to read the paper – and anyone who was anyone did – could easily match the public figures to the defaming rumors. “Town Topics,” of course, stayed in business by collecting bribes from guilty parties who wished to keep their faux pas private. Still, when Watrous finally identified the hulking monster of a trout that Mann casually held up from inside his own fishing craft, and later, in a ridiculous display of bravado, exhibited in his house, as a sculpted and painted hunk of wood, he swore revenge.

Like the Rhinelander Hodag, the Lake George Monster began life as a chunk of wood (specifically, a cedar log). Using bits of glass, metal and wood, Watrous affixed eyes, ears and a toothy snout to the 10-foot-long log, which he then painted in alternating yellow and black stripes. Also, white teeth, red mouth, red nostrils, and blue (yes, blue) ears. (Later, Watrous would repeatedly refer to his creation as a “Hippogriff”- the mythical offspring of a griffin and a mare, and noble companion to the Boy Who Lived – but I’m not seeing it.) He rowed out to an area of the lake frequented by his friend and nemesis, and rigged up the creature to a simple pulley system – a 100-foot-rope anchored to a rock on the shore.

Then he waited.

MUCH MORE… AFTER THE JUMP

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I can only go so many consecutive weeks ascribing deep cultural significance to the folkloric capers of cryptozoological second stringers before I start getting a bit antsy. Sure, it’s interesting to think about that aspect of the human condition that abets our collective addiction to narrative and ordered fictions by sticking its fingers in its ears and humming away every time Bigfoot or Nessie or fear Liath is heartily debunked… to think about the way we happily allow stories to fool us. But what are stories? They’re motiveless, elusory things.

If you can identify authorship, though, you can find the meat and bone and beating heart behind the ghostly, transient words. Demystifying? Yeah. But there are more than enough legends packed with mystique. The Jersey Devil. Black dogs. Bloody Mary. One reason they’re so effective, evocative and widespread is that, though they’re myths, they’re dressed in the guise of collective knowledge. Unsourcable, voiceless echoes resounding through time
But what about a fiction that has an identifiable and outspoken (some might even say over-spoken) author? A story that’s obviously invented – that everyone knows is invented – but that’s embraced anyway. What about the story of the Rhinelander Hodag?

When rifles, hunting dogs and poison-filled water guns all failed to fell the fearsome Hodag, Eugene Shepard and his posse of Wisconsinite lumberjacks were forced to resort to sticks of dynamite, which they bravely lobbed at the slavering beast. The Hodag was 200 odd pounds of flame-spewing, black-furred muscle and lizard skin, complete with various spikes, claws and horns. The ever-quotable Shepard described the animal as smelling like “a combination of buzzard meat and skunk perfume.” Even as the creature’s crispy remains were triumphantly carted back to Rhinelander to be put on display, Shepard was bemoaning his inability to capture the Hodag alive.

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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 chronicle the Rougarou. Monday we looked at the origin story, Wednesday we explored the byzantine rules that come along with the curse.

We’ve heard almost too many stories of white colonists co-opting and literalizing indigenous folklore. Starting with Lake Champlain’s Champ and moving westward, plenty of the classic American lake monster tales started when some eager fishermen heard about, or saw a native drawing of, a serpentine lake spirit and took it as a warning of tangible aquatic horror. Aboriginal bunyip legends found British interlopers tramping through the Australian brush, rifles raised and taxidermists on call. More recently, American Indian Skinwalker legends were dumped into the boiling, paranoid slurry of UFOs, portals, cryptoeverythingology and government conspiracy theories. So it’s kinda nice to know that the Rougarou legend cross-pollinated in the opposite direction.
The Rugaru of Chippewa and Ojibwa legend isn’t the wolf-headed antagonist that bullied the French, nor does it adhere to that monster’s seasonal schedule or incomprehensible 101-day statute of limitations. So what is it? That, my buddies, is a source of some contention. While scholars know for a fact that the word “Rugaru” isn’t derived from any Native American language – meaning it’s almost certainly a bastardized version of either the Cajun term “Rougarou” or the French “Loup Garou” – it’s not entirely clear as to how various tribes and groups applied the word to their established mythologies.

It’s clear that the native Rugaru was a mysterious hairy humanoid who lived out in the forest. Some researchers suggest that tribes began using the term “Rugaru” in relation to their already-extant Sasquatch equivalents (not actually Sasquatch, but rather a physically similar entity with the same Type B personality). And that makes sense. If you aren’t Catholic, haven’t been raised in constant aural proximity to European werewolf stories and can already account for your own packed pantheon of culturally loaded monstrosities, it jibes that, when French traders start going off about some sort of animal guy hiding out in the wilderness, your mind turns immediately to the one animal guy hiding out in the wilderness that you’re already hip to. In this way, this native Rugaru is loosely comparable to our modern Bigfoot – a lumbering mascot for the enduring connection between nature and man, and an animal that couldn’t give two bunyips whether or not you eat a cheeseburger on Good Friday.

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I’m going to shimmy out to the end of a limb and guess that most of you aren’t chomping your nails to the quick in fearful expectation of Lent 2011 and its supernatural enforcer, the Rougarou. Maybe it’s because you aren’t Catholic, you don’t live in Louisiana or you own an elephant gun. Maybe it’s because you are the Rougarou (in which case, stop Googling yourself). The point is, a monster that’s only on duty for 1/11 of the year and only kills people of one religion in one state doesn’t have the scare potential of, say, Bloody Mary, who only requires a mirror and mood lighting.

Fortunately, as Cajun culture began expanding to include not only those of Acadian decent, but also miscellaneous immigrants who fully embraced the local lifestyle, the Rougarou legend expanded as well, metastasizing into an equal opportunity nightmare.

Many believe the Rougarou to be a transfigured human, cursed or infected, double-crossed in a deal with the devil or otherwise debased by some catch-all evil contagion. Louisiana’s Caribbean population even threw some voodoo witch doctor malpractice into the mix. Aside from the standard threat to children –eat your greens, take your bath, go to bed or get Rougaroued – the most prevalent of these stories holds that a person, once transformed into the wolf-headed monster, hungers for human meat treats and stalks the bayous and swamps. In some versions, he seeks out victims and attacks without mercy; in others, he hides in the shadows, travels by night and invests all his energy in resisting the urge to draw blood.
Additionally, there’s a 101-day clause that appears consistently throughout these stories, though the specifics of it differ.

A few of the rules to Rougarou-ship AFTER THE JUMP…

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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 chronicle the Rougarou. Come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

The Protestants have always seemed happy with limiting the fate of sinners to eternal suffering in a big torture cave filled with fire and basically every type of snake. Leave it to the Catholics to throw an Earth-dwelling, flesh-eating mutant into the mix.

The French emigrates of the Cajun community had it pretty lousy even before the bloodthirsty, wolf-headed Rougarou shambled out of the swamps all parched and grumpy. A cultural casualty of the French and Indian War, the Cajuns (then known as Acadians, Acadia being the ye olde moniker for the eastern coast of Canada and northern tip of Maine) were ousted by the British. Some were returned to sender on French-bound ships, while others found themselves scurrying southward in search of a replacement home. French-speaking and accustomed to a maritime lifestyle, the Canada-forsaken exiles headed southward through the states, wending their way to the coast of Louisiana, where they could comfortably re-settle along the waters of the Gulf, in a region owned and operated by the French government. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the wandering Acadians, France had recently signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which, among other things, ceded control and ownership of Louisiana to the Spanish government. Sácre bleu!

Fortunately, both the newly empowered Spaniards and the hang-dog former French Canadians were fervent Roman Catholics, and got along well enough that the Cajuns were allowed to hang out and roll how they rolled. After the Revolutionary War (in which many land-snatching-limey-despising Acadians fought with gusto), thousands of Cajuns returned to New Orleans and Southern Louisiana, some arriving haggard and powder-stained from the battlefront, and others showing up nauseous and gaunt after government-authorized emigrations from France. Resettled and reunited, the former Acadians started a new life amid the swamps, bayous and prairies of Louisiana, where, every spring, the Rougarou lifts his nose and sniffs the air, canvassing the ether for the acrid hint of sin. Upon finding it, he narrows his eyes and bounds onward toward the smell, goaded onward by the promise of struggling, guilty meat, and the colorful warning mess it will leave on the ground.

Click AFTER THE JUMP to find out how even you could become a Rougarou!
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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 chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast. Wednesday, we investigated claims that it is the missing link.

Fear Liath and Science.

After writing that tantalizing gem of a teaser for today’s column, I looked at it for a moment and considered whether I should maybe put some qualifying quotation marks around the word science. And I decided not to. The concepts to be discussed herein are definitive scientific realities… it just happens that we’re going to talk about them as they relate to a 7-foot-tall man-ape descended from the wood spirits of ancient Europe.

Plenty of yella-bellied hikers and goose-pimpled mountaineers have attributed Mount Ben Macdui’s pervasive atmosphere of dread to the mystical aura of the mysterious Greyman; lots of Cryptozoologists blame Fear Liath, too. But not because it has magical fright-throwing abilities. It turns out that, apparently, all Sasquatches, from Bigfoot to Wampas, use powerful pheromones to elude capture by preemptively instilling panic in their would-be pursuers. That’s right. Fear Liath squats down and blows out a mess of chemical fear that drifts through the mist and infects human trespassers.
I can follow this line of thought. Sure, it’s scribbled and erratic and leads off the paper and onto the nice tablecloth, but I can follow it. A threatened aphid, for instance, will blast out a haze of alarm pheromones, thereby, warning any nearby companions to flee the scene. Frightened termites and bees can also pinch off a cloud of fear, though, in their case, it usually psyches up the chest-bumping former half of the fight-or-flight instinct. Likewise, dogs, bears, et al, have all been shown to deploy and perceive an intraspecies “scent of fear” – “intra” being the key prefix here. Based on all existing scientific evidence, the pheromones of any given species are detectable only to members of that species, meaning that even if all the mist clinging to Ben Macdui were one massive pheromone cloud squirted out by cowardly Fear Liath, it wouldn’t elicit even the slightest of pant pees in area humans. Furthermore, considering the termites and bees, if humans were affected, it’s just as likely that they’d pick up a giant rock and charge hulk style toward the jelly-spined source of the panic fog. (Although, if the pheromone did work correctly, Scarecrow would be poaching the hell out of these things.)

Much more scientific justification for the Fear Liath AFTER THE JUMP… (more…)

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 chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast.

Wudewas. Wodwos. Wodewoses. Woodwoses. Variants of the word are as numerous as the trees in the forests inhabited by the feral possessors of these ancient names. The wild men. The tidiest accounts of Scotland’s Fear Liath would have you believe that the giant grey creature’s closest relative is Bigfoot – that noble missing link who hides deep within America’s dwindling native woods, and in whom hides lost vestiges of man… scattered dust from genetic corners that were sanded down into curves during the civilizing renovation of the primal human spirit, the process itself an exciting necessity of the social evolution that created both the modern world and the most basic, aching nostalgia found therein. This nostalgia takes the form of a chromosomal muscle memory, a scuffed shoebox, brimming with relics, tucked beneath the bed of the collective id.

It’s more than just the bare carnal reasoning of the reptilian brain – the eat, kill or screw impulse that any cynical 16-year-old can tell you is as alive today in the forests of laminate boardroom furnishings as it was millennia ago amid the dark tangles of forgotten jungles. No. This is about an understanding of place, an unselfconscious symbiosis between man and topography, man and biology. The unvoiceable knowledge that, if dropped in the woods – any woods – one could navigate the soil, elude danger, secure shelter, procure food and still find time to gaze up in wonderment at the twinkling panorama of space.

It’s also probably an illusion. After all, humans still have these senses and abilities. Modern man has just repurposed them for urban environs, so that if dropped in a city – any city – one could navigate pavement, listen for sirens, and recognize chain hotel logos and the trademark color schemes of a half-dozen burger chains.

Get the rest of the story… AFTER THE JUMP

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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 chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. Come back Monday and Wednesday for the rest of the story.

Leave it to Scotland’s Fear Liath to meet any (or all!) of your horrifying cryptozoological encounter needs. A sudden sense of creeping psychic dread followed by inexplicable panic and unprovoked activation of your fight-or-flight response? Leave it to the Liath! A more traditional, rampage-style assault, up to and including wild pursuit of a moving car? He’s on it! Or maybe a subtler, mysterious encounter – a huge, lumbering figure glanced through the fog… a giant footprint in the mud… a stolen picanic basket? Greyman’s got it!

“What is the Fear Liath?” you ask.

Some folks refer to it as Scotland’s Bigfoot, and in some ways that’s accurate. Hiker’s who have seen the Fear Liath (also known as “The Greyman”) have described it as a burly giant with a strikingly inhuman face and a head-to-toe coating of thick, ash-colored fur. What makes the Fear Liath a taxonomical oddity, however, is the effect it’s said to have over people in its vicinity. Supposedly, travelers of the Cairngorm Mountains, and especially visitors to Ben Macdui, the range’s highest peak and suspected site of the Greyman’s lair, have experienced bizarre sensations of terror that come out of nowhere and, often, send the suddenly stricken mountaineers screaming into the mist.
John Norman Collie, an experienced British mountaineer famous for performing pioneering climbing feats in the Himalayas and the Canadian Rockies, authored the most famous account of this strange phenomenon.

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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 pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Wednesday we look at how the legend survived the digital age.

Babysitter. Killer. Telephone. We’ve taken a neatly assembled story and plucked off the buttons, ripped the stitching and unloaded fistfuls of stuffing. Might as well see it the rest of the way through. Parents. Children. Let’s add them to this strewn mess of analog technology, gender stereotyping, Aquarian culture wars and artificial maternity.

I had briefly mentioned that, in many versions of the Babysitter and the Stranger Upstairs, at least one of the sitter’s employers is a doctor. In almost every version, the parents, doctorate holding or not, are wealthy. On the surface, this seems a mere plot device – the teenaged kid-herding neophyte is lured into the job by the promise of healthy dividends while, at the same time, the couple’s sizeable home fulfills certain narrative logistics. In other words, it would be difficult for the killer to call the babysitter from inside a single-phone apartment, or sneak unnoticed through a ranch-style house. And that makes enough sense. But let’s say we take a moment to get cynical:
Even if we accept many folklorists’ assertions that, when deconstructed, this urban legend takes on gender oppression and warns girls away from fast-tracking themselves toward some sort of patriarchically enforced homemakership and oppressive motherhood – that it’s a GRRL power ballad played in the key of independent womanhood – we need to consider the story’s intended demographic. After all, “gala-bound rich couple seeking responsible teen for one-night babysitting job $$$” rarely bypass the nearby middle-class McMansions and make a beeline for the barrio. Likewise, many blue collar families comprise two working parents who are beholden to shift work, and older children who are busy enough looking after each other, or working themselves. (Obviously, these are gross generalizations, but remember, we’re applying them to a story in which the main characters are Rich Couple, Attractive Teenage Girl, Sleeping Children, and Anonymous, Motivationless Killer.)

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…
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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 pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Come back Friday for the conclusion.

I don’t know how the story of the intercourse-interloping hook murderer plays out these days – the inset latch that adorns most modern car doors doesn’t seem especially conducive to bloody-hook dangling. Likewise, “hitchhiker” is a distinctly 20th century identifier. Vanishing or not, a trail-schlepping wayfarer with a hopefully extended thumb would confound even the hippest wagoneer or pony express messenger. So that whole police- or phone company-traced call coming from inside the house thing? Nothing to worry about, right? The legend is quarantined in the 1960s, a primitive ape of a horror story, thwacking an analog phone receiver against a monolithic switchboard to the swelling soundtrack of a droning dial tone.

Well, no. Not exactly.

It’s true that the initial story was rooted firmly in the days of land lines and ancient analog phone hook-ups, when a few patient taps to the receiver button could make intra-house Jerky Boying possible, but unlike the aforementioned door handles, which made it increasingly difficult for murderers to lose their deadly prostheses to inadvertent chastity warnings (though probably much easier for murderers to simply click open the door and bury their tines into the writhing flanks of the intertwining lovers), technology kept pace with the psychos. Despite the death of the veritable Cro-Magnon phones of the (club) swinging 60s, in-house murderers were quickly afforded new means of telephonic harassment in the form of multi-line phone systems (note that in many versions of the babysitter v. homicidal stranger story, one of said babysitter’s employers is a doctor, a fact that lends veracity to the presence of a second phone line in the house). Then, of course, everyone got cell phones, which put every babysitter (not to mention every babysitter-employing landline-reliant household) just ten digits away from the hungry fingers of the merciless sadist upstairs. Give it a few months and the stab-happy psychotics will be Skypeing their victims from portable media devices.

Do the evolution… AFTER THE JUMP

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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 pity the poor Babysitter, check back Wednesday and Friday for more.

“We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!” Not exactly a shocking twist these days. Let’s face it: the elements that make urban legends so compellingly repeatable and readymade for national ubiquity (not to mention fun) – bloodshed, panic, sexual disaster, embarrassment and grotesque coincidence – are the same things that make them so falsifiable. Only so many people’s cousin can have the same friend who got a cheek full of spider eggs, a candy apple full of razors or a snizz full of frozen hotdog before folks start wising up. The legends manage to live on because each new generation of kids represent blank slates upon which someone’s gonna scratch out a Pepsi and Pop Rocks death equation or caricature a hook-handed killer. At the same time, these legends undergo the inevitable cultural makeovers required to ensure that they neither outstay their welcomes nor develop unsightly anachronisms.

So even if the call isn’t coming from inside the house… even if there aren’t even any calls because, clearly, the babysat children’s parents, wherever they me be, are available via portable media devices… the babysitter suffers.

So we have the cash-hungry high schooler whose babysitting experience is repeatedly disrupted by the eerie presence of a life-sized clown doll that, from one fearful glance to the next, seems to slightly shift its position; when she finally calls the parents to ask if she can toss a blanket over it, they have no idea what she’s talking about. Of course, by then it’s too late.

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP… (more…)

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 JUMP (more…)

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…
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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.

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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 Tooth Fairy, Monday he questioned why we value baby teeth to begin with. Wednesday we delved into the bloody origins of the legend.

On the barest cultural level, if you strip away the membranous wings, packed wallet and any over-eager pseudo-anthropological interpretations, all the tooth fairy really amounts to is the narrative spoonful of sugar that helps the inevitable biological medicine – specifically, the terrifying reality that all of one’s teeth are about to loosen and drop out – go down. Quite simply, kids are less apt to be scared by the unique and uncomfortable process of losing their teeth if that process comes with its own smiling, magical (and accordingly wealthy) benefactor. On a literal level, if you strip away the glittery trappings, all the tooth fairy really amounts to is an otherworldly home invader with a cryptic agenda and a free pass into a nation’s worth of children’s bedrooms.

Fittingly, one of the primary talents of the horror genre is processing sugar back into bitter, bitter medicine by exploiting the darker side of pleasurable activities and joyful traditions. Sex, parties and road trips frequently serve as typical set-ups for mounting bloodbaths. More to the point, Santa Claus, another breaking-and-entering denizen of popular folklore, has repeatedly been portrayed standing on the woodsman’s side of a bloodied axe. Is it really all that surprising that the tooth fairy has, likewise, been depicted as a nefarious trafficker of living nightmares?

Given the conclusions we’ve arrived at thus far, “Every legend has its dark side.” seems like a more than fitting tagline for a horror movie about the tooth fairy. My two favorite things about the so-taglined 2003 horror film “Darkness Falls” are the adorable Emma Caulfield (for anyone aware of my Buffy obsession, this requires no explanation), and the fact that the ending credits had to be extended to 11 minutes in order to pad out the film’s meager 75-minute runtime. My least favorite things are all the aspects of the film that are actually relevant to this post. Basically, a disfigured woman who, because she gave out coins to children who lost their teeth, was known as the “Tooth Fairy,” is wrongly accused of child murder and blah blah blah. Now, when a kid loses a tooth, her ghost shows up and kills them. Likewise, the 2006 straight-to-video “The Tooth Fairy” centers on a witch who murders children for their teeth. (It might be the ghost of the witch. I can’t honestly say that I care.) Additionally, “Hellboy II:The Golden Army” and Graham Joyce’s novel “The Tooth Fairy” both explore the darker ramifications of this magical nighttime marauder. (Apparently there’s also an episode of “All in the Family” where Archie Bunker refers to an effeminate dentist as the “tooth fairy.”)

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