The area was settled by German immigrants beginning in the 1730s. Early accounts describe the community being terrorized by a monster called a Schneller Geist, meaning "quick ghost" in German. The earliest incarnations mixed the half-bird features of a siren with the nightmarish features of demons and ghouls. The snallygaster was described as half-reptile, half-bird with a metallic beak lined with razor-sharp teeth, occasionally with octopus-like tentacles. It swoops silently from the sky to pick up and carry off its victims. The earliest stories claim that this monster sucked the blood of its victims. Seven-pointed stars, which reputedly kept the snallygaster at bay, can still be seen painted on local barns.
Newspaper accounts throughout February and March 1909 describe encounters between local residents and a beast with "enormous wings, a long pointed bill, claws like steel hooks, and an eye in the center of its forehead." It was described as making screeches "like a locomotive whistle." A great deal of publicity surrounded this string of appearances, with the Smithsonian Institution offering a reward for the hide. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt reportedly considered postponing an African safari to personally hunt the beast. It was later revealed that these reports were part of a hoax perpetrated by Middletown Valley Register editor George C. Rhoderick and reporter Ralph S. Wolfe in an attempt to increase readership. The descriptions they invented borrowed themes from existing German folklore, including dragon-like creatures who snatched children and livestock, and also appeared to invoke descriptions of the Jersey Devil, which had been spotted mere weeks earlier. used the snallygaster to examine U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy On June 22, 1953, Whittaker Chambers used the snallygaster to examine U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy in his essay "Is Academic Freedom in Danger?" :
It was a trick of fate in a low comedy mood that Senator McCarthy should first have bounded into public view dragging the unlikely and protesting person of Mr. Lattimore to share with him a historic spotlight so grateful to the one and so acutely unwanted by the other. It was a trick of fate that, in the case of each, has led to some serious confusions. For it led to the translation of Senator McCarthy into the symbol of a national snallygaster, instead of one of the two things that he obviously is: an instinctive politician of a kind fairly common in our history, in which case the uproar he inspires is a phenomenon much more arresting than the senator; or a politician of a kind wholly new in our history, in which case he merits the most cautious and coldblooded appraisal.
21st century
In 2008, author Patrick Boytoionnbout published a history of the snallygaster, entitled Snallygaster: the Lost Legend of Frederick County. The Snallygaster appears in the 2018 Bethesda game Fallout 76. The Snallygaster is a Blended Whiskey produced by Dragon Distillery of Frederick, MD and released in 2018.
Legacy
In 2011, an annual beer festival called "Snallygaster" started in Washington, DC. In 2012, a hard/punk rock music group called "The Snallygasters" formed in the Baltimore, Maryland, area. The 2017 edition of J. K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them incorporated the Snallygaster into her Harry Potter universe. It is described as a part-bird, part-reptile relative of the Occamy, with serrated steel fangs and a bulletproof hide, and has gained some Muggle attention due to its natural curiosity.
