For centuries, the people of Frederick County, Maryland and the surrounding area have supposedly been terrorized by a fiendish creature called the Snallygaster — but the real history behind these reports is even more chilling than the monster itself.
In February 1909, around a month after the first newspaper reports about the Jersey Devil were published, the Maryland-based Middletown Valley Register wrote a story about a local who’d encountered a terrifying creature known as the Snallygaster.
Said to have “enormous wings, a long pointed bill, claws like steel hooks, and an eye in the center of its forehead,” the creature soon sparked a local media frenzy, with dozens of other accounts flooding into local papers. Descriptions of the creature varied, making it hard to know exactly what it was supposed to look like. Most commonly, it was said to be part bird, part reptile, with massive wings and a thirst for blood.
Unlike other better-known cryptids, the story of the Snallygaster never spread very far. Perhaps people who had heard about the Jersey Devil just a month earlier immediately recognized the Snallygaster as a hoax. Or perhaps there was another reason.
Those initial reports of Snallygaster sightings carried a certain political undertone that wasn’t present in other cryptid stories.
The first Register report just so happened to go out on February 12 – the same day that the NAACP was formed – and it carried the title “The Colored People Are in Great Danger.” The article went on to say, “This vampire-devil only attacks colored people… It is seldom seen during the day, feeding at night only, and the strange part is that it seems to prefer colored men to colored women, though it attacks the latter at times.”
Middletown Valley RegisterA local newspaper report about the alleged Snallygaster encounters.
Another report at the time called it “an omen of ill for colored voters who deserted the Republican party in the Presidential election.”
The purpose of the Snallygaster was explicit: It was meant to discourage Black residents from pursuing political activity and representation – and even scare them away from going out at night. In fact, the entire Snallygaster affair was acutely indicative of the larger political and racial tensions of the time.
Though Maryland had not supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, it had still permitted slavery and been somewhat sympathetic to the Southern cause.
More importantly, Maryland was still run by a pro-white Democratic Party that had, just six years earlier, proclaimed that “the political destinies of Maryland should be shaped and controlled by the white people of the State” and said that the Black vote was “ignorant, corrupt, the blind instrument of unscrupulous and selfish leaders.”
So, while the Snallygaster had much in common with its contemporary cryptid from nearby New Jersey, the overt political and racist messaging surrounding it cast a much darker shadow over what was otherwise a frivolous monster story.
Today, Maryland has largely reclaimed the legend and celebrates it as part of the state’s history, but it’s not difficult to see why the Snallygaster never garnered the same broad cultural appeal as Bigfoot or the Jersey Devil.
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