Snallygaster
A part-bird, part-beast monster of Maryland newspaper tall tales, said to live in a cave on Sugar Loaf Mountain.
Meaning
In March 1935 the Montgomery County Sentinel of Rockville, Maryland, reported, tongue in cheek, that the war between Bolivia and Paraguay had driven "the dreaded Snallygaster" back to its lair on Sugar Loaf Mountain, and that Senator Huey Long would take the matter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1952 a Connecticut paper recalled that the snallygaster had been "famous in Maryland some twenty years ago", and summed up the old reports: it beat its wings, rode a bicycle and uttered low cries (The East Hartford Gazette, 18 January 1952).
Origin and history
The stories were jokes from the start. The 1952 piece compared the snallygaster with a new "ornithopter" reported from Alberta: the difference, it said, was that the snallygaster was a creature and the ornithopter a machine, which could never take up the snallygaster's habit of raising moonshine stills in the north of Maryland.
Where the stories came from
Preservation Maryland dates reports of the snallygaster in Frederick County to the 1730s: 18th-century German settlers called it a Schneller Geist, a quick ghost that pounced on its prey. The 20th-century scare began on 12 February 1909, when the Middletown Valley Register printed a letter from T. C. Harbaugh of Casstown, Ohio, who said he had seen a “gigantic monster” on the loose and headed for Maryland. Harbaugh was a Middletown native and an author, and Preservation Maryland suggests he may have wanted a good story. In December 1932 the Hagerstown Morning Herald reported the snallygaster’s death: lured to a moonshine still in Frog Hollow, it was overcome by the fumes and drowned in the vat.
Read next
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- The same shape in Animal symbolismBee symbolismIn ancient Egypt bees were said to come from the tears of the sun god Re. English folk custom tells the bees when someone in the family dies; Napoleon chose the bee as an imperial emblem, and Manchester and Utah use the bee and the beehive for industry.
See also
Kraken, Sea serpent, Loch Ness Monster, Champ (Lake Champlain monster), Bigfoot (Sasquatch), Yeti (Abominable Snowman).
Sources
- Montgomery County Sentinel (Rockville, Md.), 7 March 1935, Montgomery County Sentinel, 7 March 1935, page 1, Library of Congress, Chronicling America, page 1
- The East Hartford Gazette (East Hartford, Conn.), 18 January 1952, The East Hartford Gazette, 18 January 1952, page 6, Library of Congress, Chronicling America, page 6
- Haunted Maryland: The Monsters Lurking in Frederick County (Preservation Maryland, 2019), 31 October 2019, Preservation Maryland
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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