The Dwayyo and others

Linda Godfrey has received this account via her website:

This sighting occurred in late fall of 1976 in Frederick Co. MD near the town of Thurmont. My friend had picked me up at my house and we had gone into town with plans to meet some other friends to drink some beers at a local pub. Since our friends had not yet arrived we decided to take a short drive up Rt. 77 to a field where it was common to observe deer feeding at night.

The field was on the edge of the woods which bordered the areas of the Cunningham Falls State Park and the Catoctin Mt. National Park. We drove off the main road onto a small private access road which led up to the field. Upon arriving we drove the car to a point where the headlights illuminated the area but to our disappointment no deer were to be seen. After spending several minutes there we turned the car around and slowly headed back down the small road from where we had entered.

Suddenly from the left side of the road a large creature, running on two legs, bounded and leaped across the road and disappeared into the brush on the other side. It passed directly in front of us not more than 30 feet away. My first reaction was shock and amazement but I quickly controlled my surprise and decided not to say anything to see if my friend would react and allow me to better determine what had just happened. Immediately he exclaimed “WHAT WAS THAT MAN!!!” In a calm but excited voice I replied “Tell me what you saw”, tell me what you saw!”

We both began to describe to each other the strange sight which had just passed before our eyes. Here I wish to add something that is hard to explain except to those who have had a similar experience. When one sees something that is totally unlike anything one has seen before it is actually hard to put into words or even cognitively recognize what that thing is or what you have seen. It is hard to get a point of reference for something unlike anything you have seen before. Thus we spent the next couple of minutes trying to calm down and decide just what it was we had seen. Needless to say we were both nervous and a little shaken from the experience and decided to continue directly back to town.

Both of us had a good look at the creature. It was likely at least 6 ft tall but inclined forward since it was moving quickly. Its head was fairly large and similar to the profile of a wolf. The body was covered in brown or brindle colored fur but the lower half had a striped pattern of noticeable darker and lighter banding. The forelegs (or arms) were slimmer and held out in front as it moved. The back legs were very muscled and thick similar to perhaps a kangaroo.

I do not recall the tail of the animal although my opinion is that it did have one. It moved in a leaping bounding motion and crossed the distance of the road in front of us in two or three leaps. It was very fast and athletic and was obviously trying to get away quickly. This was not a hominoid type creature; it did not have the characteristics of an ape. It was much more similar to a wolf or ferocious dog however it was definitely moving upright and appeared to be adapted for that type of mobility. I was particularly impressed by the size and strength of the back legs, the stripes on the lower half of the body and the canine-wolf-like head.

After we calmed down my friend and I talked about whether or not we should report what we had seen but we decided not to. I mentioned to him that years previously in the mid sixties there had been reports published in the local paper the Frederick News-Post of some hunters who had reported a similar creature in the Frederick Co. area. At that time they called the creature a “duwayo” (I am not sure the spelling is correct). Because of this we decided this is what we had seen.

That evening we told our friends the story but they weren’t too inclined to believe us unless they could see it for themselves and we were definitely not interested in going back to the area that evening. Since that time I have moved away from the area and have had only a few opportunities to see my friend who shared this experience with me. Every time we’ve met however he always asks me if I remember the night we saw the duwayo.

Mark Chorvinsky and Mark Opsasnick report that there was a sighting of "a large hairy creature running on two legs" made from the Cunningham Falls area where the above sighting took place by park rangers in 1978. And in the 1890s, a local farmer reported seeing a doglike creature 9 feet tall at Camp Greentop, only a bit northwest of this sighting off Manahan Road.

The Duwayo the witness mentions (Dwayyo or Wago) was first reported from Carroll County in 1944. It was reported to have uttered frightful screams and to have left footprints. The creature really became infamous on November 27, 1965 when it was seen by a John Becker at the Gambrill State Park further south along the South Mountain northwest of Frederick. However, no trace of a 'John Becker' could be found (the picture above is a depiction of this creature).

A woman in Ellerton, north of Myerstown, reported hearing screaming or crying sounds and another woman in Jefferson, along the southern reaches of South Mountain, said that she had seen a calf-sized dog chasing cows. University of Maryland students laughably claimed to have encountered the Dwayyo on campus there, and that it originated from the Amazon jungle.

(A 2006 article by Craig Heinselman records a similarly-described creature to the Dwayyo and more specifically to the Shookstown sighting described below from Nevada, where it is called the Whoahaw or Wahhoo. It also likens it to the "bearwolf" of Wisconsin.)

The Gambrill State Park near Shookstown was also the site of the sighting in 1966, by a 'Jim A.' of a screaming creature the size of a deer, dark brown in color. The shaggy-haired creature had a triangular head and pointed ears and chin and back slowly away from the witness. Its legs, he said, "stuck out from the side of the trunk of the body making its movements appear almost spider-like as it backed away."

In just the last post I mentioned the sightings of a "gorilla" further north along the South Mountain in Adams County, Pennsylvania. Some sightings of that creature described it as a kangaroo. That monster made a gurgling noise when it was heard.

Also from this area, stories of werewolves circulated around near Mt. Holly in Cumberland County, as described in Matt Lake's Weird Pennsylvania. In the early 1970s, someone giving his name only as "Skywalker" claimed to have seen a man-sized ape-like creature run across the road in the northern Adams County hills (it is notable that though discussed in connection with the werewolf legends, nothing in the description indicates a Bray Road-type animal).

There are also the sightings of the Dorlan Devil, a leaping kangaroo-type reported from Chester County and the Brandywine Valley. Traditions of the Red Dog Fox, a werefox, exist further south along the Brandywine near Wilmington, Delaware and a sighting of a kangaroo was reported from the nearby town of Concord.

The South Mountain area, of course, is also home to reports of a black dog called the Snarly Yow, described in an article I wrote for Mysterious Britain & Ireland.

Of barking deer and climbing groundhogs

First, there's a nifty video on YouTube of a barking roe deer. I've also found recordings of white-tailed deer, the ubiquitous Pennsylvania species, making similar noises.

And over on Marcus Schneck's blog, there's a post indicating that groundhogs can climb trees, though they must do so very rarely.

The leaping monsters of the Brandywine Valley

On January 21, 1932 James McCandless, walking near the town of Eagle in Chester County, Pennsylvania, saw a "hideous form, half-man, half-beast, on all fours, and covered with dirt or hair". A short time later, two employees of a nursery near Dorlan reported that they were frightened by a monstrous leaping thing, "neither man nor beast", which approached them. A McCandless and a hunting party canvassed the Dorlan area but found no sign of the creature - nary a track, nor any sign of exactly where it came from, or went.

I cannot tell whether the McCandless sighting, recounted by Loren Coleman in Mysterious America, and the Dorlan sightings, from Ghost Stories of Chester County by Charles Adams III refer to two separate incidents or one. But as Coleman notes that others reported sighting the creature before McCandless organized the hunting party, I have assumed the were different ones.

The "Dorlan Devil", as it was known, vanished for a few years before reappearing to be witnessed by Cydney Ladley, a Downingtown man who was travelling to Milford Mills. Ladley reported that the creature was similar to "an oversized kangaroo with long black hair and eyes like red saucers" and a passenger in his car confirmed his sighting. Ladley reported that the animal leaped across the road in a single bound and vanished into some marshland. Like McCandless, Ladley organized a party to search for the beast but came up empty-handed. The site of Ladley's sighting is now submerged beneath the waters of Marsh Creek Lake.

(The red eyes are a typical feature of Pennsylvania Bigfoot reports, and a high degree of agility is also reported on occasion. The Bigfoot seen at Latrobe, in Westmoreland County near Pittsburgh, in August of 1973 was reported to take enormous leaps.)

But these were not the only sightings of leaping monstrosities in Chester County and surrounding areas. On February 15, 1939, Sylvester Scott reported seeing a creature which leapt like a deer and made horrible wailing sounds from nearby Coatesville, and another wailing creature haunted the Sheep's Hill neighborhood near Pottstown, in Montgomery County ("Montie the Monster" may have been a black panther) in November, 1945. The Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society recorded that eerie screams, assumed to be those of a Bigfoot, were heard near Schwenksville in the 1990s. As Schwenksville is near Pottstown, perhaps they weren't.

In the southern portions of Chester County, near the Delaware state line, a dense forest called the Devil's Woods in urban legend stretches off of Cossart Road. Behind the typical urban legend standbys of Satanic ritual, inbreeding and phantom pick-up trucks are traditions of humanoid creatures haunting the woods - possibly yet another link in the riddle of the leaping monstrosities of the Brandywine Valley.

The Coatesville Creature

Loren Coleman reported on Cryptomundo on an old account of something near Coatesville, Pennsylvania - from the Lebanon Daily News, February 15, 1939:

A mysterious animal - described by witnesses as having a small head, a neck a foot long, the jumping ability of a deer and a scream like that of two cats - was reported prowling through Chester county woods today.

There were some who received the reports with skepticism, but Sylvester Scott, 31-year-old farmer, vowed he saw the what-is-it and three times had heard its eerie wail echoing over the countryside. Others said they had been “gunning” for it.

Scott declared the creature appeared one day in a field where he was spreading fertilizer.

“It stood two or two and a half feet off the ground,” he said. “It was colored like a deer in front, with white on the flanks. It had paws, remember, and not hoofs.

“It jumped just like a deer, about two feet up in the air. It had a very small head on the end of its neck, which was a foot long anyway. It was a fast runner, all right. It ran away from my dogs - beagles - and they didn’t seem to want to follow. Neither did I.”

One hunter said he thought it was a charmois [chamois], while others declared it might be some sort of a African Springbok.

“It screams only at night,” said Scott. “Once I fired my shotgun at the place where the noise was coming from, but it got away. Others have heard its wail, which does not seem to come directly from the monster itself, but issues in an unearthly scream all around you.”

The periodical Doubt (the account is repeated in Pursuit) places a "monster described as a cross between a giraffe, a dog and a deer, that wails like a woman" in Coatesville in February, 1946. Whether it is an error in transcription of this account or whether it is a separate one, I don't know.

Montie the Monster

In November of 1945, residents of Pottstown, Pennsylvania reported sightings of a bizarre creature in the Sheep's Hill area. The monster was dubbed Montie. The beast raided hen houses, and frightened children with his growls: it supposedly "cried like a baby", by one account. Others attribute screams, barks, wails and hyena-like laughs to the creature. Although likewise described physically in many ways, most seemed to agree that it was black with a long tail. This appearance, along with the sounds it made, make it likely to have been one of the typically-seen black cougars.