Blood-Drinking Dragon of South Mountain Stirs Anew in Podcast Retelling

SOUTH MOUNTAIN, MD. — A creature that Maryland families once guarded against with painted stars has returned to public attention. The Snallygaster, a dragon-like bird said to drink the blood of its victims, leads the latest episode of the Weird Darkness podcast, published on the second of November.

According to the episode's notes, families in the region painted seven-pointed stars on their barns to keep the beast at bay. The notes say German settlers in Maryland called the creature the Schneller Geist and described it as drinking blood through a metal beak lined with razor teeth.

The legend reached its height in 1909. The episode summary states that sightings near South Mountain filled the pages of the Middletown Valley Register that year, and that the reports drew the interest of both the Smithsonian and Theodore Roosevelt. The notes do not say what either of them concluded, and the matter is left for listeners to pursue.

The episode's own title promises a "Surprising End" to the legend, and its notes pose the questions in the manner of a coroner's inquest: whether the creature was real, where it was hiding, and why only some people ever saw it. The segment is credited to a written account by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages. The notes give no answer to those questions, and this newspaper makes none.

The Snallygaster is only the opening act. The same program, running a little over an hour, ranges through a ghost said to haunt a Birmingham, Alabama lake, the 1946 disappearance of a Bennington College student on Vermont's Long Trail, and a reported vampire in Wallasey, England. It also covers the 1920 killings at a North Dakota farm, the haunted Sallie House of Atchison, Kansas, and the death of explorer Meriwether Lewis.

Rounding out the bill are a battalion of some 3,000 Chinese soldiers said to have vanished near Nanjing in 1939, an unsolved shooting in 1866 New York, and a cross that went missing from above a couple's bed in Bothell, Washington, and later turned up broken in a load of laundry. The program also reports that a cardinal in Rome holds that an exorcism prayer read over the telephone is as effective as one performed in person.

Of the whole lot, the Snallygaster alone has the distinction of having been feared on barn doors. Whether any of its admirers still paint the stars is not stated. Listeners seeking the full account are directed to the episode and its transcript, the latter available through the show's notes.