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The Snallygaster appears to have been invented by the staff of a small newspaper to terrorize and control Black people in the early 1900s.

The racist roots of Maryland's mythical Snallygaster cryptid - The Baltimore Banner The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. 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(Yifan Luo for The Baltimore Banner)The Snallygaster is not just a cute cryptid from Western Maryland, but a reminder of the region’s racismThe Snallygaster flies over the mountains of Western Maryland, flexing talons as strong as steel hooks. Wriggling tentacles spring from its mouth and a single eye rotates in its forehead.But the beast’s physical characteristics are far less disturbing than its backstory.The Snallygaster is a cryptid — a mythological beast akin to the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot or West Virginia’s Mothman — that has inspired an ice cream flavor at South Mountain Creamery in Middletown, a miniature traveling museum and a massive beer and musical festival scheduled for Saturday in Washington, D.C.Sarah Cooper, who brings her American Snallygaster Museum to cryptid conferences, recites the creature’s most common origin story: German immigrants fretted about the “schneller geist” or “quick spirit,” whose name was corrupted into “Snallygaster.”The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.“People reported seeing a one-eyed dragon with Lovecraftian tentacles coming out of its mouth scooping up and eating their chickens,” said Cooper, a traveling nurse who enjoys the kitschy punk aesthetic of the Snallygaster and the company of other cryptid lovers.Sarah Cooper, who runs the American Snallygaster Museum, at the Van Meter Visitor Festival in Van Meter, Iowa, in 2023. (Courtesy of Sarah Cooper)But Susan Fair, author of “Mysteries & Lore of Western Maryland: Snallygasters, Dogmen, and other Mountain Tales,” discovered a darker history behind the mythological monster.Fair, a retired librarian, dug through historical newspapers to find original accounts of the Snallygaster. And what she found was truly horrifying: The Snallygaster appears to have been invented by the staff of a small Western Maryland newspaper to terrorize and control Black people in the early 1900s.Video: Julie Scharper explains the origins of the Snallygaster“The Colored People Are in Great Danger,” proclaims the headline of the first story about the Snallygaster, published in the Middletown Valley Register in 1909. A subheadline clarifies that the monster only attacks Black men.The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.“We look for a considerable scare among the colored people of this section, for the terrible beast that has been causing so much alarm in New Jersey is undoubtedly headed this way,” the article begins.The article appeared following a raft of reports in Northern newspapers about the creature commonly called the New Jersey Devil. The staff of the Middletown Valley Register capitalized on these stories to scare people of color in the area.The article reports that the beast, also known as the bovalopus, killed a man named Bill Gifferson, after swooping him up from a country road and “piercing his jugular vein with its needle-like bill ... while it gently fanned him with its wings.”Fair grew convinced that the Snallygaster was invented by the newspaper staff when she read the seminal work on Western Maryland folklore, “South Mountain Magic,” originally published in 1882 by Madeleine Dahlgren. The book recounts many myths and legends, but makes no mention of the Snallygaster.Fair also discovered that after the first flurry of coverage of the Snallygaster in 1909, the stories died down for two decades.The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.A headline from the Montgomery County Sentinel on Dec. 2, 1932, discusses the Snallygaster. (Montgomery County Sentinel via Library of Congress)The Valley Register staff revived the legend in 1932 with an article headlined, “Strange Monster Mystifies and Alarms People Living in South Mountain Section.”The article states that the Snallygaster “will not harm a white person, but lives mainly on colored men.” Then it continues with an implied threat against Black people who vote for Democrats.“One man who claims to have seen the monster a few days ago stated ... the beast was an omen of ill for colored voters who deserted the Republican party in the Presidential election and voted for Roosevelt,” it states.The article was so flagrant that a reader chided the editors for publishing it.“Anything that may have the affect of creating fear in the heart of any man, be he white or black, in my humble opinion should be condemned,” wrote a R. Austin Stine in a letter to the editor.The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.Other Maryland newspapers, including The Baltimore Sun and The Evening Sun, published their own accounts of the Snallygaster. And a few weeks later, one rival paper, The Hagerstown Morning Herald, killed it off.“Bovalopus dies by same hand that caused existence,” the headline proclaimed. The beast drowned in a vat of moonshine in a mountain still, the paper reported, embellishing the story with a photo of three real Prohibition agents and a crudely edited flying dragon.Within a few decades, the Snallygaster was relegated to the annals of quaint folklore. The name was bestowed to a prize-winning racing sloop and the beast appeared in roundups of local mythology. The Snallygaster has gotten a boost in recent years from a resurgence of interest in cryptids.But to Fair, the Snallygaster carries an important warning. It is not the beast that is terrifying, but the sentiment behind it.“The real monster in America is racism,” she said. Julie [email protected] Scharper is an enterprise reporter for The Baltimore Banner. Her work ranges from investigations into allegations of sexual harassment and abuse to light-hearted features. Baltimore Magazine awarded Scharper a Best in Baltimore in 2023 for her series exposing a toxic work culture within the Maryland Park Service. More from Julie ScharperIs your kid coughing? Walking pneumonia surging in MarylandOct 21, 2024These Maryland women were accused of witchcraft. Their crime? Having power.Oct 15, 2024 Comments Welcome to The Banner's subscriber-only commenting community. Please review our community guidelines. 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