Pennsylvania Cryptids: Monsters and Legends of the Keystone State

The Squonk: Pennsylvania's Miserable Monster

Some monsters roar. Some attack livestock. Pennsylvania gave the world one that cries itself to death.

The Squonk is described as so ashamed of its appearance that it hides among dark hemlocks, wandering at twilight while leaving a trail of tears behind it. Its skin fits badly. Warts and moles cover its body. When cornered, the creature has one final escape available: it dissolves completely into tears.

That famous description can be traced to William T. Cox's 1910 book Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, an extraordinary collection of exaggerated creatures associated with logging-camp storytelling.

Cox says the Squonk was found in Pennsylvania's hemlock forests, but the most important geographic detail is often missed. His only named Squonk encounter takes place near Mont Alto in Franklin County.

In the story, a man named J. P. Wentling supposedly imitates the creature's cries well enough to coax one into a sack. While carrying it home, he suddenly feels the load become lighter. He opens the sack.

Nothing remains but liquid.

None of that makes the Squonk less interesting. It makes it more interesting. The creature is a surviving piece of America's lumberwoods imagination, a monster built not around terror but embarrassment, misery, and one of the strangest escape mechanisms in folklore.

From the Cryptid Archives Bring Pennsylvania's saddest monster home with the framed 11×14 Squonk art print →

The Albatwitch: From Camp Prank to Cryptid

Along the Susquehanna River near Chickies Rock, Lancaster County has embraced a creature that today sounds almost like a miniature Bigfoot.

Modern Albatwitch lore usually describes a small, hairy humanoid that moves through trees and has a troublesome relationship with apples. Some versions say it steals fruit from picnickers before throwing apple cores back at them. Its name is frequently explained as Pennsylvania Dutch for "apple snitch."

But follow the Albatwitch backward through the newspapers and a very different creature appears.

On August 24, 1920, the Lancaster New Era reported that boys from the Lancaster YMCA held an "albatwitch" hunt during a corn bake at Williamson Park. Four boys took turns holding a bag while the others supposedly tried to drive the elusive animal into it. One boy thought he had seen the creature, only for his discovery to turn out to be a hole in the bag.

Six years later, the joke was still alive. A July 1926 camp report described two boys being left to hold a bag and break stones while everyone else supposedly rounded up the creature. Another report that August described more than forty boys searching for an Albatwitch at dusk.

The early newspapers do not describe a four-foot hairy ape, glowing eyes, tree climbing, apple theft, or apple-core throwing. What they document is an impossible hunt, much like sending inexperienced campers into the darkness after a snipe.

Somewhere between the camp prank and the modern cryptid, the impossible quarry acquired fur, eyes, trees, apples, and a permanent body.

The Giwoggle: A Monster Made by Witchcraft

The Giwoggle feels as though someone assembled a creature from whatever animal parts were left on the table.

Its body is usually described as wolf-like. Its feet can include bird claws and horse hooves. The tracks it leaves behind may contradict the shape of the animal that supposedly made them.

That is because the Giwoggle was never really presented as an undiscovered species.

It belongs to the folklore of Clinton County and survives most clearly through George E. Rhone's article "The Giwoggle," published in the Keystone Folklore Quarterly in 1963. Rhone connected the stories to his grandmother, Belle Confer, who had reportedly told them to her grandchildren decades earlier.

Within the tradition, the creature was associated with witchcraft. It could be summoned or constructed through supernatural means, which helps explain its impossible anatomy.

Trying to decide whether a Giwoggle was secretly a bear or wolf misses the point. It belongs with America's regional folklore monsters, creatures built to live in stories rather than zoological field guides.

Clinton County eventually made that relationship official, recognizing the Giwoggle as the county monster in 2011.

A creature once kept alive by family storytelling had become part of the county's public identity.

The Potter County Nondescript: A Monster Forms in Real Time

On April 21, 1897, readers of The Potter Enterprise encountered the beginning of one of Pennsylvania's strangest newspaper monster stories.

Under the local column "Sweden Valley Intelligence," the correspondent reported that a fisherman had supposedly been run out of Nelson Run by some kind of wild animal.

The description was already dramatic.

The creature reportedly stood upright on its hind feet, struck its breast with its forepaws, made a noise compared to the roll of many drums, and screamed like a panther. The fisherman escaped with the help of a nearby horse.

But buried inside the report is one sentence that changes how the story should be read.

"I cannot find the unlucky man."

The newspaper correspondent had not located the fisherman himself. The first report was already secondhand.

The writer nevertheless offered an explanation. Some animals had reportedly escaped from a menagerie the previous fall, and the correspondent wondered whether the creature might be an African gorilla. Readers planning to fish in the area were advised to go armed.

One week later, on April 28, the story grew much larger.

The same column reported that William Butler had encountered the creature near Sunken Branch. According to the story, Butler first saw it eating what appeared to be a groundhog. When he approached, the animal reportedly rose onto its hind legs, beat its breast, and produced another tremendous sound.

This time the paper supplied far more anatomy. Upright, the creature was estimated at about six feet tall. It was hairy around the head and was said to possess tusks six or seven inches long. During the encounter it allegedly made an enormous leap, estimated at roughly twenty-five to thirty-five feet.

And now the monster had a name.

The newspaper referred to it as the Potter County nondescript.

The rival Potter Democrat later mocked the affair, meaning skepticism was part of the story almost from the beginning.

That is what makes the Potter County Nondescript so valuable. We are not looking backward through generations of folklore. We can watch a Pennsylvania monster take shape on the printed page.

The Susquehanna Seal: The Other Pennsylvania Monster of 1897

The Potter County Nondescript was not even Pennsylvania's only newspaper monster that year.

On February 27, 1897, a story in the Daily Democrat described something enormous lurking in the West Branch of the Susquehanna River.

It has since acquired several names, including the Kettle Creek Monster, the West Branch Dugong, and the best of them all, the Susquehanna Seal.

The surviving description is frustratingly vague.

The creature was described as a marine animal or sea monster and was compared in bulk to an ox or hippopotamus. It reportedly remained mostly beneath the water, where its movements were said to churn the river into foam.

Later retellings give the creature additional traits and proposed identities, but the early material does not provide a detailed anatomy.

That absence is part of the appeal.

Imagine rafting the West Branch in the lumber era, deep water beneath you, forest rising along the banks, and something enormous moving underneath the raft without ever giving you a clear look at its body.

The monster does not need a long neck or flippers. The river itself does most of the work.

For more Pennsylvania water-monster lore, explore the Lake Monsters and Sea Serpents collection.

Pennsylvania Bigfoot and the Extraordinary 1973 Wave

Bigfoot is not uniquely Pennsylvanian. What happened in Pennsylvania during 1973, however, deserves its own place in Bigfoot history.

Reports of large, hairy humanoid figures surged through western Pennsylvania during the summer and autumn, particularly across counties including Westmoreland, Fayette, Allegheny, Beaver, Washington, Somerset, and Indiana.

Witnesses described variations on the familiar pattern: tall figures covered in hair, strong odors, reflective or luminous-looking eyes, strange vocalizations, and occasional tracks.

Researcher Stan Gordon later said his organization logged more than one hundred creature reports involving roughly 250 witnesses during the 1973 wave. That number comes from Gordon's own investigative files, so it should be treated as his tally rather than an independent census.

Even without treating the number as a census, the concentration of reports is what makes the period remarkable.

And then the story becomes stranger.

Some of the Pennsylvania creature reports occurred during a broader period of UFO activity. Gordon's files include cases in which hairy humanoids, luminous objects, and other high-strangeness elements appeared within the same reports.

That does not demonstrate a connection between Bigfoot and UFOs. It demonstrates something more historically interesting: in 1973 western Pennsylvania became a place where several different strands of American paranormal culture collided at once.

One reported incident involved a pale or white-haired humanoid with unusual eyes seen in connection with a luminous object. Other reports described more conventionally dark-haired figures.

That distinction is worth preserving because modern summaries sometimes collapse Pennsylvania's various "white Bigfoot" traditions into a single creature. They are not necessarily the same story.

Pennsylvania's 1973 wave is also why a state cryptid guide should do more than simply say "Bigfoot has been seen here." The episode is one of the most distinctive chapters in the state's modern monster history.

Explore the larger phenomenon in our Bigfoot guide and our guide to Appalachian Cryptids.

The Giant Birds of Pennsylvania's Black Forest

In the mountains of north-central Pennsylvania, the monster stories do not all come out of the woods. Some pass over them.

During the early 1970s, reports circulated from the Black Forest region describing birds that appeared impossibly large. Potter, Clinton, Lycoming, Cameron, Tioga, and Elk counties all became associated with the tradition.

Some witnesses estimated wingspans far beyond those of familiar Pennsylvania birds.

The reports eventually became closely associated with the word Thunderbird.

That name needs care.

Indigenous Thunderbird traditions are religious and cultural traditions belonging to specific peoples. Modern sightings of extraordinarily large birds in Pennsylvania should not simply be treated as zoological sightings of those spiritual beings.

For that reason, "giant bird" is often the better description for the Pennsylvania reports themselves.

A January 1971 column in the Lock Haven Express forms part of the newspaper trail, while later Pennsylvania writer Robert Lyman collected numerous stories from the region.

Could familiar birds explain some sightings?

Very possibly. Pennsylvania has large raptors and vultures, and wingspan estimates made without reliable scale can become surprisingly inaccurate. Distance against an open sky is notoriously difficult to judge.

But that explanation does not erase the folklore that followed. Something about enormous dark wings crossing mountain valleys has proven difficult for Pennsylvania to forget.

For more on the wider tradition, see our guide to Thunderbirds and other Winged Cryptids.

Raystown Ray: How a Modern Lake Monster Is Born

Raystown Lake looks like it should have a monster.

Long coves disappear into wooded hills. Deep water hides flooded landscapes beneath the surface. Boats can cross broad stretches of lake with almost nothing nearby to provide scale.

And somewhere in all that water, according to local legend, swims Raystown Ray.

Modern descriptions usually imagine Ray as a large aquatic animal, sometimes serpentine, sometimes compared to a prehistoric reptile. Stories frequently claim sightings extending back to 1948 or 1962.

There is an important complication.

The current Raystown Lake did not yet exist in its present form.

There was, however, an earlier Raystown reservoir. The first dam was completed in the early twentieth century, creating a much smaller body of water. The modern Army Corps project dramatically enlarged the reservoir during construction completed in the early 1970s.

So the old dates are not impossible. Someone could have seen something in a Raystown reservoir before the modern lake existed.

The harder question is whether anyone actually recorded those famous 1948 and 1962 monster stories at the time. So far, the trail is elusive.

Then 2006 arrives, and Raystown Ray suddenly becomes much easier to see.

A retrospectively submitted account places an encounter in the 1990s. Then, in 2006, Raystown Ray emerged into full public view through a Huntingdon County Visitors Bureau publicity campaign, alleged photographs, witness submissions, merchandise, and later television coverage.

That does not prove someone invented every earlier story in 2006.

It does give Raystown Ray one of the most fascinating origin problems in American cryptid folklore.

Instead of weakening the story, that question gives us a rare chance to watch a modern monster tradition take shape.

Other Pennsylvania Monster Legends

The Suscon Screamer

Drive the lonely roads around Suscon in northeastern Pennsylvania and you may encounter a legend that refuses to keep the same face.

The Suscon Screamer has been described as a ghostly woman, a victim of tragedy, an escaped patient, a strange animal, a Bigfoot-like creature, or simply an unexplained scream coming from the darkness.

That instability is probably the most revealing thing about it.

The Screamer behaves less like a consistently described cryptid and more like a classic roadside legend, changing as it moves from storyteller to storyteller. A firm published trail reaches at least the 1990s, although versions of the story may be older.

The Broad Top Snake

By 1974, the giant snake of Pennsylvania's Broad Top region was already being described as something far beyond any native serpent.

That October, reporter Ron Morgan brought the story to the Tyrone Daily Herald in an article titled "Snake Haunting Broad Top Area Draws Video Cameras." The paper sensationally framed the creature as a forty-foot reptile, a snake so enormous that the legend had begun attracting outside attention and video cameras.

Morgan's article also preserved stories that residents said went back decades. Nick Kolinchak recalled an encounter from 1927. Ollie Dorsey remembered one from 1936. Donald Mohr placed another sighting in 1959.

The descriptions varied, but at least one portrayed the snake as slate-gray to dark gray with distinctive yellow markings around the neck and eyes.

A forty-foot snake would be extraordinary anywhere, let alone in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

The older encounters survive through recollections recorded later rather than newspaper stories published at the time. But by 1974, one thing is clear: Broad Top already had a giant-snake legend, complete with named witnesses, an unusual description, and a creature supposedly large enough to turn an ordinary trip through the mountains into something unforgettable.

Bessie on Pennsylvania's Lake Erie Shore

Bessie, the legendary Lake Erie Monster, belongs to the entire lake rather than Pennsylvania alone.

The tradition is most strongly associated with Ohio's western Lake Erie waters, but Pennsylvania's shoreline around Erie and Presque Isle places the state inside Bessie's larger geographic territory. A reported Presque Isle encounter from the 1990s is sometimes included in modern sighting lists.

So Bessie belongs here with an asterisk: a shared Great Lakes monster rather than a creature born specifically in Pennsylvania.

Where Pennsylvania's Monster Stories Gather

Put these legends on a map and Pennsylvania's monster geography begins to make sense.

The Pennsylvania Wilds and Black Forest hold the Potter Nondescript and many of the state's giant-bird stories. This is historic lumber country, a landscape of long ridges, deep valleys, isolated roads, and forest.

The Susquehanna corridor gives us the Albatwitch farther south and the Susquehanna Seal around the West Branch. Rivers were highways long before modern roads, carrying workers, travelers, stories, and strange sightings with them.

South-central Pennsylvania is tied to the Squonk's earliest named encounter near Mont Alto and to Raystown Lake farther north and west.

Southwestern Pennsylvania produced the extraordinary Bigfoot reporting wave of 1973, especially around the Chestnut Ridge region and neighboring counties.

Northwestern Pennsylvania brings the state into the wider Lake Erie monster tradition through Bessie.

What emerges is not simply a map of wilderness.

Pennsylvania's monsters follow working landscapes: logging camps, river channels, mining country, mountain roads, reservoirs, bridges, picnic grounds, and places where people moved through the darkness long before anyone thought to call the creatures they encountered "cryptids."

Folklore, Sightings, and the Stories Between Them

Pennsylvania's monsters did not all enter the world the same way. The Squonk came through lumberwoods folklore. The Albatwitch emerges from an impossible-hunt prank. The Potter Nondescript grows before our eyes in newspaper columns. Bigfoot arrives through modern witness reports. Raystown Ray blurs the boundary between lake-monster tradition and twenty-first-century tourism.

That is what makes the state so interesting. Pennsylvania did not simply accumulate monsters. It kept finding new ways to create them, reshape them, and pass them on.