Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Broad Top Snake of Pennsylvania: Mining Roads, Mountain Memory, and Giant Serpent Lore
High on the Broad Top plateau in south central Pennsylvania, where coal towns, wooded ridges, and old mining roads meet, local tradition has long made room for something larger and stranger than the region’s documented industrial past. The Broad Top Snake, sometimes described as a giant dark serpent with yellow markings, belongs to that layer of mountain memory where local storytelling, road lore, and regional identity blur together. Broad Top itself spans parts of Huntingdon, Bedford, and Fulton counties, and the preservation groups that keep its history alive still frame the region as a distinct mountain coal field with its own traditions and stories.
What makes the Broad Top Snake especially interesting is not that it can be proven as zoological fact, but that it can be traced as folklore. The strongest online evidence I could verify does not clearly carry the Broad Top legend all the way back into nineteenth century print under that exact name. Instead, the clearest traceable printed Broad Top thread begins in the 1970s, when local newspapers and local-history writers treated the giant snake as a recognizable regional story. That matters because it lets us separate what can be documented from what was likely carried by oral retelling long before it reached print.
What the Printed Record Actually Shows
The first strong, directly traceable Broad Top newspaper item I could verify online is a clipping from the Tyrone Daily Herald dated October 30, 1974. In the indexed record, Ron Morgan’s piece appears under the headline “Snake Haunting Broad Top Area Draws Video Cameras,” and the clipping snippet also preserves the phrase “‘Forty-Foot’ Reptile,” showing that by the mid 1970s the story had already developed into a sensational local legend rather than a passing one line sighting. Even in fragmentary form, that clipping is important because it anchors the Broad Top Snake in a specific date, publication, and local reporting context.
Only a few years later, the legend had moved from newspaper attention into local-history print. George M. Eberhart’s bibliographic entry for Pennsylvania giant-snake traditions cites Jon Baughman and Ron Morgan’s Tales of the Broad Topfrom 1977 and Jon Baughman’s Strange and Amazing Stories of Raystown Country from 1987. A Friends of the East Broad Top index also confirms that Ron Morgan later returned to the subject in “The Broad Top Snake Story,” published in Timber Transfer in 2024. Taken together, those references show a durable line of transmission from 1974 newspaper coverage, to late twentieth century local books, to a twenty first century historical treatment by one of the same regional writers.
That continuity is worth stressing. Broad Top has produced many local historians, but Baughman and Morgan were not casual outsiders dropping in to collect spooky tales. Later Friends of the East Broad Top material describes Baughman as the longtime owner and publisher of the Broad Top Bulletin beginning in 1973, while Ron Morgan is presented as a longtime Broad Top historian whose work has focused on railroads, mining towns, and the history of Bedford and Huntingdon County communities. That does not prove the snake existed, of course, but it does mean the story’s main printed custodians were deeply rooted in the region they were writing about.
The Story People Remember
The modern local summary that has helped preserve the legend most visibly online comes from the Huntingdon County history site’s page on county stories and legends. There the Broad Top Snake appears in a form that feels older than the page itself. A lumberjack sits down on what he thinks is a log, only to realize the “log” is alive and moving. The same summary says local people described an 18 to 20 foot snake with yellow markings around its neck and eyes, and it adds that travelers reported hitting what seemed to be logs in the road only to watch them slither away. The page also places sightings among strip miners in the 1950s.
Those details are important even if they cannot all be independently dated. The moving-log story is the sort of compact, memorable scene that helps a legend survive for generations. It is easy to tell, easy to repeat, and tightly tied to Broad Top’s occupational landscape of lumbering, road travel, and mine work. The 1950s strip miner detail also matters because it places the serpent not in some abstract wilderness but in the working industrial mountain of local memory, the same Broad Top shaped by coal, machinery, trucks, and blasted ridges. The legend survives because it sounds like something told by people who knew the mountain as laboring ground, not merely as scenery.
Broad Top and Pennsylvania’s Wider Giant-Snake Tradition
The Broad Top Snake also belongs to a wider Pennsylvania tradition of giant or “devil” snakes. Eberhart’s survey of cryptozoological traditions places Pennsylvania sightings in places including Broad Top Mountains and Gettysburg, and his entry on the “Devil snake” describes a creature usually said to be 15 to 20 feet long, black or dark gray, sometimes marked with yellow, and associated with forests, mountains, and rocky places in southern Pennsylvania and northern Maryland. He also lists the Broad Top books by Baughman and Morgan alongside earlier Gettysburg materials, treating them as part of the same broader folklore stream.
That broader context matters because the older Pennsylvania giant-snake material most easily verified online is usually tied to Gettysburg rather than directly to Broad Top. Secondary works and later references preserve traditions about a large snake associated with Round Top and Devil’s Den, and one widely repeated Gettysburg item from 1932 recalled that a fifteen foot “blacksnake” had been known in the neighborhood for over a quarter century. Whether every detail of those stories can be confirmed today is less important than the pattern they reveal. In Pennsylvania folklore, giant serpents were already attached to rugged, rocky, ominous landscapes well before the Broad Top legend was preserved in modern local-history print.
So the Broad Top Snake should not be treated as an isolated oddity. It fits into a regional habit of storytelling in which unusual ridges, boulder fields, mining districts, and rough mountain roads collect oversized serpent tales. In that sense the Broad Top version may be understood as a local chapter in a much larger Pennsylvania mountain folklore tradition, one that lets a specific place borrow some of the atmosphere of older “devil snake” stories while still making the creature distinctly its own.
Why the Legend Endures
Part of the Broad Top Snake’s endurance comes from scale. Broad Top is a place large enough, wooded enough, and historically remote enough to feel capable of hiding something. Part of it also comes from industrial afterlife. Abandoned mines, rough roads, dark cuts through the mountain, and fading company-town memory all encourage legends that feel half historical and half supernatural. When a region is already marked by vanished collieries and old rail grades, a giant serpent does not sound completely out of place. It sounds like one more survival from a harder, older landscape.
Another reason the story lasts is that it sits on the line between folklore and local boosterism. By the twenty first century, the Broad Top Snake had become part of the Raystown region’s marketable weirdness, appearing in tourism and heritage storytelling alongside other regional legends. That does not make the story false, but it does show how legends evolve. What may once have circulated as warning, campfire yarn, or miner’s road tale can later become part of how a place presents itself to visitors and newcomers.
Still, the best way to understand the Broad Top Snake is not as failed science but as successful folklore. The legend tells us that Broad Top people remembered their mountain as a place of size, danger, and surprise. It tells us that oral stories remained alive long enough to enter local newspapers in 1974, local history books in 1977 and 1987, and still more historical writing in 2024. Whether there was ever a giant serpent on Broad Top matters less, historically, than the fact that generations of people thought the mountain was the kind of place where such a thing could be seen. That is what gives the Broad Top Snake its staying power in Pennsylvania folklore.
Sources & Further Reading
Ron Morgan, “Snake Haunting Broad Top Area Draws Video Cameras,” Tyrone Daily Herald, October 30, 1974. https://www.newspapers.com/article/41257501/broad_top_snake/
Baughman, Jon, and Ron Morgan. Tales of the Broad Top: Mountain House Hotel, a Famous Resort. Vol. 1. Broad Top City, PA: Baughman, 1977. https://books.google.com/books/about/Tales_of_the_Broad_Top_Mountain_house_ho.html?id=k1Je0QEACAAJ
Baughman, Jon. Strange and Amazing Stories of Raystown Country. Saxton, PA: Broad Top Bulletin, 1987. https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Jon-Baughman/dp/B0006EOPKG
Gardner, James H. The Broad Top Coal Field of Huntingdon, Bedford and Fulton Counties. Harrisburg, PA: Wm. Stanley Ray, State Printer, 1913. https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/pageol/id/51491/
Huntingdon County History & Heritage Roundtable. “Stories and Legends of Huntingdon County.” Includes “The legend of The Giant Snake of Broad Top.” https://huntingdoncountyhistory.com/stories.html
Morgan, Ron. “The Broad Top Snake Story.” Timber Transfer 36 (2024). https://store.febt.org/index.php?cPath=71&main_page=product_info&products_id=831
Eberhart, George M. Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002. https://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/46979/1/George%20M.%20Eberhart.pdf
Wilson, Patty A. Monsters of Pennsylvania: Mysterious Creatures in the Keystone State. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2010. https://books.google.com/books/about/Monsters_of_Pennsylvania.html?id=4B4zqlCz-GIC
Wilson, Patty A. Monsters of Pennsylvania: Mysterious Creatures in the Keystone State. Updated ed. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2023. https://books.google.com/books/about/Monsters_of_Pennsylvania.html?id=aQHFEAAAQBAJ
Arment, Chad. “Giant Snakes in Pennsylvania.” North American BioFortean Review 2, no. 3 (December 2000): 36–43. https://www.ufomagazines.com/north-american-biofortean-review-north-american-biofortean-review-issue-05/
Adelman, Garry E., and Timothy H. Smith. Devil’s Den: A History and Guide. Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 1997. https://www.gettysburgdaily.com/devils-den-part-5-licensed-battlefield-guides-garry-adelman-and-tim-smith/
Author Note: This article follows the Broad Top Snake through the strongest traceable newspaper, local-history, and folklore sources I could verify. Like many Appalachian legends, its importance lies not in proof alone, but in the way local memory kept the story alive.