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.
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
Last reviewed September 28, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research