The Glawackus of Glastonbury, Connecticut

January 1939. Glastonbury, Connecticut. The Hartford Courant and the Hartford Times began to report a strange animal in the town's woods. The Courant's first account said it "looked like a dog, yet resembled a cat somewhat." It was "giving blood curdling yells at night." And "dogs that have chased the animal into the woods have been clawed and some did not return." On Matson Hill one dog "dragged its torn body home last night, lay down by the woodpile and expired."

Rhoda Herrick, a hunter from Hartford, saw it on the New London Turnpike at Ten Curves, near the Marlborough line. It was a late Wednesday afternoon. "It was a dark, tawny color. It was about three feet long and two feet tall with a cat-like head." A Hartford man named Bonvouloir came closer still. He raised a double-barrelled shotgun. One barrel missed. The other misfired. "I'm positive it was a black, powerful beast," he said.

On Hebron Avenue, George Hutchinson's goat went missing. He blamed the Glawackus. The Courant wrote of a "small mountain lion or a large wild cat." In August the paper reached back to November 1938. Charles G. Strickland, a Manchester farmer, had been wheeling his bicycle up Bush Hill. Something stalked him. It was so dark that he couldn't see it. At the top he "hastily mounted his wheel and rode like one possessed. After him came a blood-curdling scream."

A dozen hunters, four state game wardens and a reporter covered about eight miles of the Buckingham section. Half of them succeeded only in getting lost. They came home "convinced that they had been hunting something but they didn't know what." Charles Allshouse, the Hartford County game warden, led a posse and suggested a mountain lion. On one late January weekend about 200 hunters searched. The hunts spread across northwestern Connecticut and into the Berkshires. The town offered a $5 bounty, dead or alive.

The name has been credited to Frank King, assistant state editor at the Courant. Glastonbury, plus wacky, plus "-us." Lowell Thomas told his radio audience it came from a "Connecticut scientist." The Courant played it partly as a joke from the start. On 24 January 1939 local businesses ran Glawackus ads. The Glastonbury Rifle Club put up a Glawackus target. House Bill 812 proposed making Glastonbury a "sanctuary for the Glawackus and other unknown forms of wildlife." It apparently did not pass.

Not every track was honest. Shirley Williams Homes later said her father, James Rufus Williams, strapped fake prints to his feet and walked through light snow. Men with shotguns turned up at the family's door.

On 23 April 1939 the New England Spelunkers Club "cornered the Glawackus" in Bashful Lady Cave in Salisbury. Roger Johnson "entered first with a borrowed pistol." Clay Perry admitted the hunt was invented. The creature was made from a ladies' fur muffler. It went on show at the Pittsfield YMCA's mini World's Fair.

Plaster casts of the tracks were judged to be from a bobcat. Others proposed a mountain lion, a Canada lynx, a large black dog, or a fisher, rare in Connecticut in 1939, whose screams fit the reports.

Once the war began in September 1939, the Glawackus was almost forgotten. Almost. There was a sighting on Hebron Avenue in August 1940. Reports came from around Granby in the 1950s. In Deep River in 1966, the First Selectman said it stood as tall as a man on its hind legs. In 2023 Hartford Athletic unveiled a Glawackus mascot named Dillon. There are no photos of the creature itself. Only the stories, and the screams.