The 1932 Snallygaster Revival and the Frog Hollow Moonshine Still

February 1909. The Middletown Valley Register told its readers of a winged monster loose in the Middletown Valley, the Snallygaster. Historians later credited the tale to the paper's editor, George C. Rhoderick, and reporter Ralph S. Wolfe, who wanted more readers. Twenty-three years passed. Then, in late 1932, it came back.

On 2 December 1932 the Montgomery County Sentinel in Rockville made the claim plainly. In the previous two weeks, "two score" residents of Washington, Frederick and upper Montgomery counties had seen the beast. It had "a spread of at least 30 feet, reaching out his tentacles like some prehistoric inhabitant of the Miocene age." The paper called it "the Snallygaster, or winged Vovalopus." Other headlines spelled it Bovalopus.

The Sentinel's headline told the rest. "Sleeping Snallygaster Snores Serenely In Sugar Loaf Sunday; Seven Snares Set."

Only one witness has a name. Charles Main, a Middletown ice cream maker, was driving home from Frederick early one morning. "He said its wing spread appeared to be between 12 and 14 feet." At times it threw out long streamers like the arms of an octopus, then drew them in again. One source dates his sighting to November 1932. Another places it in 1923.

The monster did not last. On 1 December the Evening Sun announced "John Barleycorn Ends Career Of Snallygaster." Drawn by the fumes of a 2,500-gallon moonshine vat in the mountains, the creature was overcome. It fell in and drowned.

The details shifted with every telling. In one, lye added to speed the mash ate the flesh, and agents blew up the still with 500 lb of dynamite, skeleton and all. In another, boiling moonshine dissolved it and two Prohibition agents dynamited the bones. Most placed the still at Frog Hollow in Washington County. One version moved it to a Baltimore County farm.

The Hagerstown Morning Herald ran a photo of three Prohibition agents beside a retouched flying dragon. Its headline was telling. "Bovalopus dies by same hand that caused existence."

Frederick's The News offered a different ending. "Snallygaster Captured: Huge Owl Is Shot Down." Others saw moonshiners at work, using the legend to scare off revenue agents and explain the noises from their stills.

Historians now point to something uglier: a Library of Congress blog notes the story was "appropriated by bad actors with political motivations and used as a tool for suppressing the votes of Black Marylanders." The Baltimore Banner quotes a 1932 article claiming the monster "will not harm a white person, but lives mainly on colored men." The revival came as Black voters moved toward Roosevelt in the November 1932 election. A reader, R. Austin Stine, wrote to the editor to object. Author Susan Fair put it simply: "The real monster in America is racism."

The Snallygaster endures in books like Maryland Legends and Weird Maryland, a Washington beer festival, a museum in Libertytown and the game Fallout 76. In 1953 Whittaker Chambers called Senator McCarthy "the symbol of a national snallygaster." Its 1932 return shows how a newspaper joke could be turned to darker work.