The Snallygaster

German-American folklore, told as exactly that

The snallygaster is the dragon of Frederick County, Maryland, at home on South Mountain, around Braddock Heights and in the Middletown Valley, though in time its range spread across central Maryland and into West Virginia and the Washington area. Its name is usually traced to the German schneller Geist, quick ghost, brought by the German immigrants who settled the county from the 1730s along with old-country belief in dragons in the mountains. In the early tellings it was half bird and half reptile, with a metallic beak full of razor teeth and sometimes octopus-like tentacles, swooping silently out of the sky to carry off its victims and suck their blood. Seven-pointed stars painted on local barns were said to keep it away.

The snallygaster that people remember was born in print. In early 1909 tracks in the snow set off the Jersey Devil craze in New Jersey, and within a month the Middletown Valley Register ran a story about a man named Bill Gifferson, seized on his way home by a winged creature that slashed his jugular with its beak, drained his blood and dumped his body in a ravine. Through February and March came reports of a beast with enormous wings, a long pointed bill, claws like steel hooks and an eye in the centre of its forehead, screeching like a locomotive whistle. It laid an egg the size of a barrel, picked up a railway worker by his suspenders and told one man that it had not had a good drink since it was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga. The Smithsonian was said to have offered a reward for its hide, and Theodore Roosevelt to have thought of postponing his African safari to hunt it. In July a last dispatch had it erupt from its lair and fly off to Virginia. The editor, George C. Rhoderick, and the reporter Ralph S. Wolfe had invented it to sell papers.

The joke had a darker side. On 12 February 1909 the Register printed a story claiming the creature attacked only Black people, and it has been suggested the legend was revived to frighten freed African Americans; the local historian Dwight Hutchinson thinks the Old National Pike nearby made it a scare tactic for outsiders.

It refused to die. In December 1932 the Register reported that a snallygaster, drawn by the fumes, had drowned in a 2,500-gallon vat of moonshine, and its bones were dynamited. Middletowners shrugged at flying saucers in 1947 because they had had snallygasters since 1909. Today it lends its name to a Washington beer festival and a Frederick rye, and Sarah Cooper's travelling American Snallygaster Museum keeps the clippings.