Appalachian Folklore & Myths
On the Maryland side of the Appalachians, where South Mountain rises above the Middletown and Hagerstown valleys, people still swap stories about a flying creature with metal claws, a beak like a saw blade, and a taste for blood. The Snallygaster shows up in trail lore along the Maryland section of the Appalachian Trail, in Frederick County tourism copy, and at an entire museum devoted to its legend.
Unlike many cryptids, this one has a thick documentary record. In 1909 and again in the early 1930s, local newspapers in Frederick and Montgomery counties ran elaborate stories about a “winged bovalopus” and “Snallygaster” that supposedly stalked the ridges and hollows of western Maryland. Those stories were not just spooky filler. They played directly into Jim Crow era fears, using a made up Appalachian monster to threaten Black residents and punish them for political choices.
Today, historians and folklorists treat the Snallygaster as part mountain myth, part media hoax, and part weapon of racist politics. The legend we inherit sits right at the intersection of Appalachian frontier lore, immigrant storytelling, and the long history of trying to control communities through fear.
Schneller Geist on the Maryland frontier
Frederick County’s Snallygaster is usually traced back to German speaking settlers who pushed into the Blue Ridge and South Mountain country in the eighteenth century. Preservation Maryland notes that reports of “a strange beast prowling the woods of Frederick County” appear in local tradition as early as the 1730s and that those settlers sometimes called it a Schneller Geist, or “quick ghost.”
In that telling, Schneller Geist was a nameless terror in the hills, something that could swoop down without warning and carry off livestock or travelers. Later writers linked that figure to Pennsylvania Dutch ideas about “quick spirits” that knock things over, blow open doors, or scatter papers. Appalachian History, a regional folklore site, points out that by the time twentieth century writers tried to reconstruct the legend, the name itself had become tangled, passing through Pennsylvania dialect as Schnelle Geist or “Schnellegeister” before it finally emerged on the page as “Snallygaster.”
Recent work from the Maryland Historical Trust is more cautious. Dr. Brenna Spray notes that while the name echoes German phrases for “quick spirit,” there is no clear evidence of a specific monster called Schneller Geist in surviving German or early Maryland records. Instead, the Snallygaster looks like a later invention that borrowed bits and pieces from older European stories such as the Wild Hunt and from the anxieties of frontier farmers watching the woods at night.
What does survive on the landscape are signs of everyday beliefs about protection. Families in the region painted seven pointed stars and other hex signs on barns, a practice linked to Pennsylvania Dutch efforts to ward off witchcraft and misfortune. The same communities buried shoes, bottles, and small charms under thresholds and hearths, tiny pieces of ritual meant to keep harmful forces outside.
By the time the Snallygaster gained a name and a recognizable shape in print, it grew out of this older mix of European folklore, Appalachian isolation, and a lived sense that the hills above the fields were full of unseen power.
“The Colored People Are in Great Danger”
The Snallygaster stepped firmly into the historical record in February 1909, when the Middletown Valley Register in Frederick County launched a front page series that would run for several weeks. The first long article carried the headline “The Colored People Are in Great Danger. Monster Go-Devil or Winged Bovalopus in This Section of Maryland,” and described a one eyed, winged beast with steel claws and a thirst for blood hunting the foothills around South Mountain.
That first story claimed the creature had attacked a Black man named Bill Gifferson, sucked his blood, and dropped his body on a hillside. Soon, the Register reported, the Smithsonian Institution had posted a reward and President Theodore Roosevelt was considering joining the hunt. Later installments moved the monster around the county. One story insisted that Emmitsburg residents saw it eating a coal bin empty and then spitting fire. Another described the beast snatching livestock or swooping close enough to singe a man’s hair.
Preservation Maryland notes that a letter from Ohio writer Thomas Chalmers Harbaugh, printed in the Register on February 19, 1909, claimed he had seen a “gigantic monster” flying toward Maryland, putting an accomplished storyteller directly behind at least part of the hoax.
The racial politics sat right on the surface. One early article, later quoted by All That’s Interesting, insisted that the “vampire devils” of the valley “only attack colored people,” and went on to specify that it seemed to prefer Black men to Black women.
A follow up piece described the monster as an “omen of ill for colored voters who deserted the Republican party in the Presidential election,” making the message even plainer. The paper was using the guise of a mountain monster to warn Black citizens that crossing local white political expectations could have deadly consequences.
Jim Crow on the mountain
Those stories landed in a Maryland that had abolished slavery but never fully committed to Black equality. Early twentieth century state politics were dominated by white Democrats who openly described Black voters as “ignorant” and insisted that the political destiny of Maryland belonged to whites.
In that climate, a newspaper series about a monster that hunted only Black people was not simply a flight of fancy. It was a way of enforcing racial boundaries under cover of folklore. The Maryland Historical Trust frames the 1909 Snallygaster craze as a calculated newspaper hoax that “introduced a deeply racialized twist,” turning an invented beast into a tool of Jim Crow era intimidation.
Later coverage went even further, tracing the creature’s supposed origins to Africa’s Senegambia region and repeating stereotypes about Black “superstition.” The WETA Boundary Stones project, which has reconstructed the hoax in detail, shows how the Register and other local papers used the Snallygaster as a stand in for all sorts of political and social fears, especially around Black mobility, voting, and party loyalty.
Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, in its 2024 cryptids feature, takes the same view. It describes the Snallygaster as a dragon like, half bird, half reptile creature whose legend originated in German immigrant communities but “eventually took on an unfortunate racial element,” with news stories from the early 1900s through the 1970s portraying it as preying on people of color or punishing Black voters who dared to change parties.
In other words, this was a monster made to order for a state stuck between North and South, with one foot in the Appalachian hills and another in the political culture of Jim Crow.
Sleeping Snallygasters and New Deal politics
The legend returned in the early 1930s, right as the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal were reshaping American politics. In November 1932, the Middletown Valley Register reported that the original Snallygaster’s hatchling was now terrorizing the countryside, complete with retractable tentacles and the power to change its size and color.
A companion piece in the Montgomery County Sentinel carried the headline “Sleeping Snallygaster Snores Serenely in Sugar Loaf Sunday; Seven Snares Set.” The Library of Congress later flagged that story as the earliest “Snallygaster” hit in its Chronicling America newspaper database.
Some of the 1932 coverage played the monster for laughs. The Baltimore Evening Sun ran an image of a spotted dinosaur like creature wearing water wings and riding a bicycle, a parody passed off as a “photograph.” But even the jokes came with political barbs. One article cursed the beast to scream “Balance the Budget!” forever, mocking Republican critics of Roosevelt’s deficit spending.
The racial edge did not disappear. The Boundary Stones piece notes that the Register again highlighted Black fear and that a letter writer questioned whether the series was intended to “scare a certain class of people for some hidden reason.” The Montgomery County Sentinel, a Democratic paper, observed that the Snallygaster supposedly appeared after elections in which Black voters backed Democrats, suggesting that the monster itself had become shorthand for white anxiety over the shifting Black vote.
At the same time, the story grew stranger and more global. Later Sentinel pieces claimed that African Americans in the Dickerson area were buying scrap iron to fashion homemade armor against the creature, that the beast had fled to Brazilian swamps in fear of the New Deal’s Blue Eagle symbol, and even that Benito Mussolini had gathered “forty to fifty Snallygasters” for use in Ethiopia.
The absurdity did not erase the harm. As Trevor Blank and David Puglia later argued in Maryland Legends: Folklore from the Old Line State, the Snallygaster stories relied on the institutional authority of the press to manipulate people and were “ultimately manipulative and self serving,” especially for Black communities who bore the brunt of the joke.
Moonshiners, stills, and South Mountain nights
If the 1909 and 1932 newspaper series made the Snallygaster famous, they were not the only hands shaping the story. Appalachian History’s treatment of the legend, drawing on earlier folklore collections, emphasizes that moonshiners operating on South Mountain during Prohibition found the monster useful. When explosions boomed in the woods or metal tanks groaned in the dark, it was easier to blame the noise on a flying beast than admit that someone was cooking illegal liquor.
The Maryland Historical Trust notes that Prohibition era distillers “used the stories of the Snallygaster to scare away revenue agents and explain the eerie sounds of their stills.” In this setting, fear worked in two directions. Newspapers used the creature to threaten Black residents and warn them against political independence. Those same tales could be flipped around by poor white and Black farmers who wanted a supernatural cover story to keep federal officers and curious outsiders away from their operations.
Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources completes the circle by suggesting that the original sightings probably had much more ordinary roots. A great blue heron lifting off from a foggy creek, a crane gliding overhead with a fish in its beak, or even a large bird startled into making loud, unsettling calls could, in the right conditions, look and sound like a flying monster to someone already primed by local newspaper headlines.
In this way, the Maryland Snallygaster sits in a familiar Appalachian pattern. Strange sounds in the holler become a haint. A federal agent glimpsed on a ridge becomes a man hunting the monster. A jolt of fear at night turns into a story that gets retold on porches and at store counters long after the stills and newsboys are gone.
From hoax to heritage
For a legend born in hoax articles, the Snallygaster has had a long afterlife. Patrick Boyton’s book Snallygaster: The Lost Legend of Frederick County pulled together many of the surviving clippings and oral accounts, giving the monster its first full length local history. Later collections by Timothy Cannon, Nancy Whitmore, Ed Okonowicz, and others placed the creature firmly within the region’s ghost and monster lore.
Atlas Obscura’s 2020s essay on the Snallygaster, which has helped introduce the legend to a national audience, leans into its hybrid nature: part imported German name, part Appalachian dragon, part racist scare tactic, and part reclaimed pop culture mascot.
The Maryland Historical Trust treats the story as a piece of “intangible cultural heritage,” as important to preserve and interrogate as any courthouse or battlefield. Its 2025 “Snallygaster and the Shadows of Fear” post argues that the creature was “molded by the anxieties of settlers on the Appalachian frontier,” blending European worries about witches and spirits with local tensions over slavery, race, and the wild land just beyond the cleared fields.
On the ground, that heritage has become very literal. The American Snallygaster Museum in Libertytown collects original clippings, illustrations, and memorabilia. Murals in central Maryland towns depict a cartoonish flying beast soaring over Main Street. A popular craft beer and food festival in Washington, D.C., borrows the monster’s name. Tourism blogs like Visit Frederick’s “freakiest folklore” feature highlight the Snallygaster as one of the region’s signature Appalachian legends, with an eye both toward Halloween visitors and toward the deeper history of race and fear the story carries.
Reading the Snallygaster as Appalachian history
The Snallygaster sits on maps as a Maryland cryptid, but it belongs to a broader Appalachian world. The Middletown Valley Register’s circulation area stretches along the eastern ramparts of the Blue Ridge. South Mountain now carries the Appalachian Trail. Rural Black communities around Sugarloaf and Rockville lived with much the same mixture of economic precarity, racial terror, and political bargaining that Black communities elsewhere in the mountains faced.
Read against that backdrop, the monster becomes a kind of mirror.
At one level, it reflects the long history of German and Swiss immigrants who saw the wooded ridges as places of both opportunity and danger, brought their own stories of wild hunts and quick spirits, and decorated barns with stars and symbols to keep harm away.
At another level, it shows how white editors in a small Appalachian valley could exploit those fears, dress them up in the language of cryptids and frontier adventure, and then aim them squarely at Black neighbors whose votes and bodies they wanted to control.
Finally, in its modern form, the Snallygaster reminds us that legends can be reclaimed and reinterpreted. The same story that once threatened Black voters in Frederick County now appears on museum walls, beer labels, and park displays where public historians insist on telling the whole story, including the parts about Jim Crow politics and Prohibition era moonshiners.
For Appalachian historians, the Snallygaster is a reminder that the mountains are full of paper ghosts as well as oral ones. Sometimes the most revealing haint in the story is not the monster itself but the editor who decided which fears were worth printing.
Sources and further reading
Middletown Valley Register, “The Colored People Are in Great Danger. Monster Go-Devil or Winged Bovalopus in This Section of Maryland,” February 12, 1909; “The Great Go-Devil Was Seen in Ohio. T. C. Harbaugh Saw It Sailing Toward Maryland,” February 19, 1909; “Emmitsburg Saw the Great Snallygaster. It Ate a Coal Bin Empty Then Spit Fire,” March 5, 1909. Surviving clippings available via Frederick County Public Libraries and the American Snallygaster Museum. Boundary Stones+1
Montgomery County Sentinel, “Sleeping Snallygaster Snores Serenely in Sugar Loaf Sunday; Seven Snares Set,” December 2, 1932, and related Snallygaster pieces through the mid 1930s, accessible through the Library of Congress Chronicling America database and cited in the LOC’s American cryptids feature. Boundary Stones+1
“The Snallygaster and the Shadows of Fear: How Folklore Controlled Maryland’s Imagination,” Our History, Our Heritage blog, Maryland Historical Trust, October 31, 2025, which synthesizes the newspaper hoaxes, frontier folklore, and material culture such as barn stars and ritual objects. Our History, Our Heritage
“The Maryland Snallygaster: Devil of Racist Politics,” Boundary Stones, WETA, December 4, 2024, a detailed public history essay that traces the 1909 and 1930s newspaper coverage, Jim Crow voter suppression, and the political uses of the monster in western Maryland and beyond. Boundary Stones
“Meet Maryland’s Cryptids and the Wildlife That May Have Inspired Them,” Maryland Department of Natural Resources News, October 4, 2024, which summarizes the Snallygaster legend’s German immigrant roots, explains its racialized newspaper uses, and points to likely natural inspirations such as herons and cranes. Maryland News
“It’s the Snallygaster,” AppalachianHistory.net, November 5, 2018, for a regional overview that ties the creature into Appalachian folklore, Prohibition era moonshining on South Mountain, and earlier sources like Cannon and Whitmore’s Ghosts and Legends of Frederick County. Appalachian History
“The Snallygaster, Maryland’s Monstrous Reptile Bird,” All That’s Interesting, September 17, 2025, which reproduces portions of the 1909 Register text, situates the hoax alongside the Jersey Devil coverage, and emphasizes the intentional targeting of Black communities and Black voters. All That’s Interesting
Patrick Boyton, Snallygaster: The Lost Legend of Frederick County (2011); Trevor J. Blank and David J. Puglia, Maryland Legends: Folklore from the Old Line State (2014); Timothy L. Cannon and Nancy F. Whitmore, Ghosts and Legends of Frederick County (1979); and Ed Okonowicz, Monsters of Maryland (2012) and Haunted Maryland (2007), for book length treatments of the Snallygaster and its place in Maryland and Appalachian folklore. Our History, Our Heritage+1