Weird creatures of Maryland

"A Field Guide to the Monsters and Mystery Animals of Maryland", a Strange Magazine article by Mark Chorvinsky and Mark Opsasnick, gives a listing of many strange creature, the majority of which were one-off sightings. Some of these are given below:

Another Odenton Humanoid: Odenton in Anne Arundel County was home to a famous sighting of the Patuxent Swamp Monster in 1968, but on May 27, 1989 two children playing at a home on Brietwert Avenue saw a creature in the clearing behind the home. It was 3-4 feet tall, with a white stripe on one leg of its dark brown furred body.

Boaman: The Prince George's County News (October 27, 1971) gave an account of this creature. The half-human, half-serpent was reportedly seen slithering around alongside the Lanham-Severn Road near the Lanham Inn. This area is south-west of Lanham-Seabrook. A legend was given that a young girl was "chewed up" by the Boaman. The area of the Lanham Inn is extremely urbanized and near a railroad track.

Buggerman: The boundaries of Charles County are patrolled by a creature known as the Buggerman. It is said that he prevents local children from crossing the boundaries of the county. He is variously described as a ghost, or more interestingly as a great hair-covered black man.

Catoctin Mountain Imps: A "troop of horned and cloven demons marked all over with spots like a leopard" were seen in this South Mountain ridge by a resident of Frederick in 1883. The rather stylish demons haven't been seen since.

Cabbage Head Man: Butch Dory claimed to have seen a humanoid entity emerge from a lake on 54th Street in College Park. Dory and his friends reportedly shot at the creature to no avail.

Cow People: A number of cow-folk have been reported over the years, the first being a Victorian-era tale from Dorchester County of a wildman who ate marsh grass and suckled from cows. A bipedal cow-creature was seen near Bel Air in February 1978, and a cow woman was reported from Charles County in the 1970s. this one, though, turned out to be a hunchbacked man.

Eggheads: These creatures were seen by Dan Long in October 1973 near Westover (Somerset County). Long was in the Pocomoke Forest with some friends when he claimed that he saw a number of glowing white humanoids with large egg-shaped heads near the Perdue Farms facility. However, the entire account must be called into serious doubt as Long admits he was drinking in the woods.

Goblin Damned: These ill-described "questionable shapes" were seen several times on the railroad bridge spanning Big Seneca Creek near Clopper (Montgomery County).

Jabberwok: Not to be confused with the Jabowak described below, this reptilian humanoid was seen across Frederick County from Creagerstown to Thurmont in the 1880s.

Jabowak: This tall and horrible-faced animal prowled McMurray Street in Frederick in 1870. At one point, a dog was shot and killed as the culprit.
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The Black Dog of Warfieldsburg

According to Ann W. Whitney and Caroline C. Bullock in Folk-Lore from Maryland, in 1887 two men on horseback were near Warfieldsburg's Ore Mine Bridge, in Carroll County, saw a large black dog on the other side of a fence. The dog passed through the fence, crossed the road, passed through a fence on the other side, and disappeared from view. Whitney and Bullock record that one of the men was amazed at the dog's size - apparently, the fact that it passed through two fences wasn't worthy of his mention.

They also record that a man was told that he could see a phantom dog if he stood underneath a tree near a bridge for an hour. He did so, and sure enough, the dog appeared. He stated that the dog then followed him for a little way. This is similar to the British black dogs, which often follow travellers. Another sighting which bears a parallel to British lore was one by a man driving a wagon down the road, who said that he saw the phantasmal dog dragging a chain. Barghest of the Yorkshire Moors is reputed to engage in just such a chain-dragging activity. This is also a feature of Cadejo of Central American lore, a black hound with hooved feet.

The black dog of Warfieldsburg can supposedly only be seen by an individual once. A cracking whip near the dog will make it vanish. This theory was unsuccessfully tested in the 1920s by one witness, whose whip passed right throught the dog.

The sadly deceased Mark Chorvinsky has recorded a sighting of a phantom hound near Warfieldsburg in 1975 ("Phantom Dogs in Maryland", Strange Magazine 19). Several people driving along the road heard a thud as the car impacted a large black dog. Some of the witnesses distinctly felt the creature underneath the wheels. Yet when the car stopped, the passengers "were amazed to see the dog standing on its huge paws. The beast bared its teeth, showing an ugly red mouth, then vanished as suddenly as it had appeared."

Urban Legends of Maryland, Part I: Pigwoman

In 1814, numerous people throughout the city of London, England reported seeing a pig's head silhouetted by gaslight from within the confines of a passing carriage. At times, they even saw a piggish snout protruding from the carriage window. The legend of the Pig Lady was born, and through discussions in various newspapers, the theory was reached that it was a wealthy young woman from Manchester Square - this was none-too-complementary to the young woman in question! St. Bartholomew's Fair in London exhibited the "Pig Lady", which was actually a shaved bear in a dress.

It is tempting, however, to speculate whether the English could have imported the legends when they settled Cecil County, Maryland, because legends of the Pig Lady exist in Elkton and Rising Sun, both in that county.

The Elkton variant has it that she was a survivor of a house fire who fled into the forest, eventually taking up residence underneath Pig Lady Bridge near town. Sometimes the squeals and grunts of a pig are heard, but usually she magically makes your car stall and then she comes out and kills you with an axe. This makes her yet another of the bloodthirsty half-humans of Maryland lore, and she takes her place in the urban legend pantheon alongside Bunnyman, Boaman and Goatman.

Oh, she's also sometimes supposed to be an inbreeding Dupont, which ties the legends of the Pig Lady in with those of the Devil's Woods in Chester County, Pennsylvania. I'm not exactly sure why she's haunting a bridge in Elkton, Maryland rather than her family's estate, the Cult House, but there it is. One wonders if this helped to influence the swinish look to the monsters in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, filmed in the Devil's Woods.

The versions in Rising Sun make her a a denizen of Lover's Lane - well, sort of, as she attacks the cars of necking teenagers in the Rising Sun town dump, surely one of the most romantic spots I can think of. This Pig Lady bangs on the side of the car until the teenagers drive away in search of a spot where they can continue their amorous encounter in peace.

Or maybe she haunts another old wooden bridge. Sometimes passersby's cars will stall and they'll hear scraping sounds. Then when they finally manage to drive away they'll find the hoofprints of the Pig Lady indented on their car.

Maybe the idea of a murderous, swine-faced humanoid sounds to you like a reject from the Saw movies or something out of an Insane Clown Posse song, but the stories have been around for generations.

The Suscon Screamer

Pennsylvania has many urban legends which may be based upon cryptozoological phenomena. One of these is the legend of what is called the Suscon Screamer. The screaming thing is reputed to haunt the area around where the Susquehanna Railroad once crossed over Suscon Road south of Wilkes-Barre. The former bridge is also known among locals as the Boo-Boo Bridge or, more ominously, the Black Bridge.

Unearthly screams have been heard reverberating through the forests near the little town of Suscon for generations and some residents have even phoned the Pittston Township police to complain of the shrieks.

Some versions of the story, in traditional ghost story fashion, have it that a ghostly female haunts the area, whether it be a victim of a car crash, a love-crossed suicide, or one of the ubiquitous phantom hitch-hikers.

One of the more popular versions has it that the tiny town is haunted by a porcine swamp monster that emerged from one of the surrounding bogs. In the 1970s, the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader reported that a local hunter heard something tramping around through the trees. Through his binoculars, he saw something

...about 6' long with a long snout. It weighed about 200 pounds and was gray in color. It had webbed feet with long claws and had a huge head...the ground was clawed up as if 100 turkeys had gone through.

This sighting was actually investigated by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, although the hunter refused to take the investigators to the area due to fear of the monster. The hunter did, however, say that the creature he saw was neither bear nor coyote.

The Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society has recorded that in May of 1976, there was a sighting of a group of four 6' brown humanoids at one of the lakes south of Suscon. There were also sightings recorded from Harveyville, also in Luzerne County (1984), and also from Dickson City immediately north of Scranton, in neigboring Lackawanna County (2003).

Another popular version has it that the Screamer was actually a panther that escaped from a circus train; although the specific date of this supposed crash is unknown, older residents of Suscon still remembered it, at least as of 1995 (when Pocono Ghosts, Legends and Lore by Charles Adams III and David Seibold was published). If this identity of the Screamer were true, by this late date it would doubtless be the cat's restless phantom.