Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Giwoggle of Clinton County: Pennsylvania’s Witch-Made Monster
In the old stories from the north end of Clinton County, Pennsylvania, the woods did not always keep their own shape after dark. The tracks in the mud might look like a horse in one place, a bird in another, and something worse when they reached the edge of a barn. A farmer could wake to frightened cattle, ruined crops, damaged tools, and no clear sign of what had passed through the night before.
The creature blamed for such trouble was called the Giwoggle.
It belonged to the folklore of West Keating Township, a remote mountain community where stories of witches, spirits, hunters, and strange creatures clung to the ridges. The Giwoggle was not remembered as an ordinary animal. It was a thing made or summoned by witchcraft, sent against people who had offended the wrong woman on the mountain. It was part wolf, part bird, part horse, and all confusion.
The best written trail for the story leads to George E. Rhone’s article “The Giwoggle,” published in the Spring 1963 issue of Keystone Folklore Quarterly. Rhone was not inventing a new monster for modern readers. He was preserving an older Clinton County family tradition, one tied to his grandmother Belle Confer and the stories she told her grandchildren in the nineteenth century. Through that small folklore article, an oral tradition from Keating Mountain found its way into print.
George Rhone And The Old Folklore Record
The Giwoggle survives because someone wrote it down.
George E. Rhone’s 1963 article appears to be the closest thing to an original written source for the Clinton County tradition. Keystone Folklore Quarterly was the journal of the Pennsylvania Folklore Society, a publication that collected regional stories, songs, customs, beliefs, and legends from across Pennsylvania. It began in 1956 under the Keystone Folklore Quarterly name and later continued as Keystone Folklore before ceasing publication in the early 1990s.
That matters because the Giwoggle is not a creature that first appeared in a recent internet list of cryptids. Its written history runs through a mid-twentieth-century folklore journal, and the article itself pointed backward to family storytelling from the 1800s. Local historian Lou Bernard, who later helped bring the monster back into public attention, has written that he first encountered the Giwoggle in an old issue of Keystone Folklore Quarterly in the archives at Ross Library in Lock Haven.
According to that later source trail, Rhone had grown up hearing the story from Belle Confer, his grandmother. Bernard places those family stories in the 1870s. That does not necessarily mean Belle Confer created the Giwoggle. She may have inherited the tale from neighbors, kin, or older Keating Township tradition. But she is the known oral source behind the written version, and Rhone is the person who carried it from family memory into folklore print.
The result is a layered source. At its center is oral tradition. Around that is Rhone’s written record. Around that are later local-history retellings that identify the people, places, and archival path by which the story survived.
What The Giwoggle Looked Like
The Giwoggle was described as a creature assembled from several animals. Its body was wolf-like, and it could be imagined as standing upright or moving on all fours. Its front limbs ended in bird claws. Its rear feet were horse hooves. Some descriptions emphasize its dark eyes and its strange upright shape, making it look something like a humanoid wolf.
The mixed body was part of the point. The Giwoggle’s tracks confused anyone who tried to follow it. A person might see marks in the snow or mud that looked like a bird in one stretch, a horse in another, and a monster in between. The creature’s body made it difficult to tell what had really passed through the farm.
This detail gives the story some of its old mountain logic. The Giwoggle was frightening, but it was also practical in a folktale way. It was built to leave evidence and destroy evidence at the same time. The tracks proved something had been there, but they did not make sense enough to let anyone catch it.
In that way, the Giwoggle fit a world where people explained strange noises, livestock panic, broken tools, sick animals, and damaged crops through the language of witchcraft. A monster that could not be tracked was the perfect servant for a hidden enemy.
Witches, Farmers, And Petty Revenge
The Giwoggle was not usually described as a random beast roaming the woods. It had a purpose.
In the stories, a witch could conjure or summon a Giwoggle and send it against a farmer or family who had offended her. The offense could be local, personal, and small enough to belong to everyday life. In return, the punishment came at night. Crops were trampled. Livestock were frightened. Tools were broken. Sickness might spread. The farmer woke to trouble and tracks, but not to a clear culprit.
That is one of the most interesting parts of the legend. The Giwoggle was not always a bloodthirsty monster. Its work often looked more like harassment than murder. It made life miserable. It turned a farmstead into a place of unease. It attacked order, property, sleep, and confidence.
Stories like this tell us less about monsters than about community fears. In rural places, a family’s survival could depend on livestock, crops, tools, and reputation. A broken plow, a sick cow, or a ruined field was not a small matter. Folklore gave such troubles a shape. If misfortune seemed too strange, too targeted, or too repeated, the old explanation might be that someone had set a spell loose in the dark.
The Giwoggle was that spell with hooves.
Loop Hill Ike
No good monster story stays with the monster alone. Clinton County’s Giwoggle tradition also had a hero.
His name was Loop Hill Ike, and unlike the Giwoggle, he was based on a real person. His name was Isaac Gaines. Later local-history accounts identify him as a man of the Keating Mountain area, remembered in folklore as a hunter of witches, ghosts, and strange creatures. In the Giwoggle stories, he was the person desperate farmers called when they needed help.
Loop Hill Ike’s role was part folk doctor, part witch breaker, part backwoods fighter. He could deal with the supernatural, but the stories also give him a practical edge. If spells did not settle the matter, he might take up a shotgun and go directly to the source of the trouble.
That combination is what makes him feel like an Appalachian and Pennsylvania mountain folk hero. He belongs to the same storytelling world as cunning people, witch masters, ghost layers, and local men whose knowledge of the woods seemed deeper than ordinary sense. He could operate in the spiritual world and the physical one. He could answer a curse with counter-magic, but he could also answer it with fire and gunpowder.
Local historian Lou Bernard has written that Isaac Gaines was buried in Furst-McGonigal Cemetery near the Clinton and Clearfield County line. That boundary also matters to the modern life of the legend. Later reports of upright wolf-like creatures near the Clearfield-Clinton border have been folded back into the Giwoggle story by people who know the old tale. The monster that once troubled Keating Mountain has become a way to interpret newer stories of strange animals along the same wooded edge.
The 1909 Monster Panic
The Giwoggle also has a possible connection to one of the great monster panics of the early twentieth century.
In January 1909, newspapers across the Mid-Atlantic were alive with reports of the Jersey Devil, sometimes called the Leeds Devil. Strange tracks appeared in snow. Witnesses described winged creatures, hoof marks, long necks, fiery eyes, and impossible movements. The panic began in New Jersey but spread through newspaper coverage and rumor into Pennsylvania.
Clinton County and nearby communities were not untouched. A January 28, 1909 report in the Clinton Democrat carried the story of mysterious tracks associated with the Leeds Devil. Later reports from the Lock Haven area described sightings near industrial sites, rooftops, and streets. E. W. Rogers, working as a night watchman at the paper mill, reportedly saw a creature flying overhead. Charles Poorman of North Grove Street heard something on his roof and found tracks. Henry Stricker saw a strange thing near the Clinton Fire Brick Works in Mill Hall. William Callahan later reported another sighting above the paper mill.
These reports should not be treated as proof of the Giwoggle. They belong to the wider 1909 Jersey Devil panic, a moment when newspapers helped spread monster stories across a broad region. But they do show that central Pennsylvania had its own appetite for strange creature reports, and later local tradition noticed how easily the Giwoggle could be placed beside them.
If a person in Lock Haven found hooves on a roof, was that the Jersey Devil passing through Pennsylvania, or was it an older Clinton County monster stepping out of Keating Township folklore? The answer depends on whether one is reading the story as evidence or as legend. Folklore does not need to solve the case. It preserves the question.
From Family Story To Official Monster
For many years, the Giwoggle remained obscure. Some Clinton County residents had never heard of it. That is not unusual. Folklore can be intensely local, sometimes known to a few families, a few hollows, or a few old storytellers rather than to an entire county.
In the twenty-first century, the creature returned through local history work. Lou Bernard’s columns and articles helped reintroduce the Giwoggle to Clinton County readers. The monster then took on a civic life. On July 21, 2011, Clinton County commissioners declared the Giwoggle the county’s official monster.
That proclamation changed the public role of the creature. What had once been a bedtime story, a witchcraft tale, and a family memory became a county mascot of sorts. The Giwoggle could be discussed on tours, drawn in illustrations, placed on shirts, and folded into Pennsylvania Wilds tourism. It entered the modern world of regional folklore, where old monsters become part of local identity.
This does not make the older story less valuable. In fact, it shows how folklore survives. A monster may begin as a warning in the dark, then become a story in a grandmother’s house, then an article in a folklore journal, then a rediscovered archive item, then an official symbol. At each stage, it changes slightly. But the central image remains: a strange wolf-like thing with bird claws and horse hooves, sent through the mountain night by witchcraft.
Why The Giwoggle Matters
The Giwoggle is easy to treat as a funny old monster, but it deserves a more careful reading.
It belongs to a real place. West Keating Township, Keating Mountain, Lock Haven, Mill Hall, Ross Library, and the Clinton-Clearfield border are not invented settings. They are part of the historical geography that gave the legend shape. The people attached to the story, including George Rhone, Belle Confer, and Isaac Gaines, point to families and communities whose folklore rarely entered formal histories.
It also belongs to a wider tradition of Appalachian and Pennsylvania mountain belief. Stories of witches, livestock curses, strange tracks, and local conjure figures were common across rural communities. They helped people explain misfortune and gave narrative order to fear. In the Giwoggle stories, damaged crops and frightened cattle were not random. They were signs that someone had crossed a dangerous boundary with a neighbor, a witch, or the unseen forces of the mountain.
Most of all, the Giwoggle shows how fragile folklore can be. Without Rhone’s article, the creature might have remained only a fading family memory. Without Ross Library preserving the old journal, later researchers may never have found it. Without local historians and storytellers returning to the source, the Giwoggle might never have become Clinton County’s official monster.
The legend is not important because it proves a monster walked through the farms of Keating Township. It is important because it preserves the imagination of a mountain community. It carries traces of family storytelling, rural fear, witch belief, local hero making, and the modern desire to claim a strange past as part of public heritage.
Some monsters are famous because they belong to whole states. The Jersey Devil has New Jersey. Bigfoot has the continent. The Giwoggle belongs to a narrower world, and that is its strength. It is a Clinton County creature, born from Keating Mountain stories and carried forward by people who thought even the strangest local tale was worth saving.
Sources & Further Reading
Rhone, George E. “The Giwoggle.” Keystone Folklore Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Spring 1963): 44-48. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006090454
Confer, Belle. Giwoggle oral tradition, West Keating Township, Clinton County, Pennsylvania, ca. 1870s, preserved in George E. Rhone, “The Giwoggle,” Keystone Folklore Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Spring 1963): 44-48. https://pawilds.com/giwoggle-clinton-countys-monster/
Clinton County Commissioners. Certificate declaring the Giwoggle the official monster of Clinton County, Pennsylvania. July 21, 2011. Discussed in Lou Bernard, “Our Official Monster Since 2011.” https://www.lockhaven.com/news/health-and-home/2021/07/our-official-monster-since-2011/
Bernard, Lou. “The Giwoggle: Clinton County’s Official Monster.” PA Wilds, April 6, 2018. https://pawilds.com/giwoggle-clinton-countys-monster/
Bernard, Lou. “The Giwoggle: Clinton County’s Official Monster.” Lock Haven Express, October 26, 2015. https://www.lockhaven.com/news/local-news/2015/10/the-giwoggle-clinton-county-s-official-monster/
Bernard, Lou. “Our Official Monster Since 2011.” Lock Haven Express, July 17, 2021. https://www.lockhaven.com/news/health-and-home/2021/07/our-official-monster-since-2011/
Bernard, Lou. “The Jersey Devil’s Visit to the I-80 Frontier of the PA Wilds.” PA Wilds, January 28, 2020. https://pawilds.com/jersey-devil-visits-pa-wilds/
Bernard, Lou. “Ghosts of the PA Wilds: The Further Adventures of Loop Hill Ike.” PA Wilds, October 17, 2022. https://pawilds.com/ghosts-of-the-pa-wilds-the-further-adventures-of-loop-hill-ike/
Puglia, David J., ed. North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2022. https://dokumen.pub/north-american-monsters-a-contemporary-legend-casebook-9781646421602-1646421604.html
“Keystone Folklore Archives.” The Online Books Page. University of Pennsylvania. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=keystonefolk
“Keystone Folklore Quarterly.” HathiTrust Digital Library. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006090454
“Keystone Folklore Quarterly, Volumes 6-8.” Google Books. https://books.google.com/books/about/Keystone_Folklore_Quarterly.html?id=XDX5jFTl8nEC
“Keystone Folklore Quarterly, Volumes 7-8.” Google Books. https://books.google.com/books/about/Keystone_Folklore_Quarterly.html?id=nM3J8aozb64C
Susquehanna Greenway Partnership. “Susquehanna Greenway Ghouls & Legends.” Susquehanna Greenway Partnership. https://susquehannagreenway.org/news-and-stories/susquehanna-greenway-ghouls-legends/
“Creepy and One Weepy Creatures in the PA Wilds.” Williamsport Sun-Gazette, September 26, 2023. https://www.sungazette.com/uncategorized/2023/09/creepy-and-one-weepy-creatures-in-the-pa-wilds/
“Commissioners.” Clinton County, Pennsylvania. https://www.clintoncountypa.gov/government/commissioners
“Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Appalachian Regional Commission. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: The Giwoggle is one of those local monster stories that only survives because someone cared enough to preserve a family tradition. I wanted to treat it as folklore rooted in real people, real places, and Clinton County memory rather than just another internet cryptid.