Wolf Pond, I later found out, is technically a lake located in Dauphin County near Elizabethville. Often overlooked by those searching for a place to hike or simply to enjoy nature, the lake is relatively small compared to the countless other watery biomes that dot the state. Nestled between the trees and foliage, this tranquil location would seem to be the perfect local for various wildlife like deer and possibly something unknown.
The only known report of what has been
dubbed the Wolf Pond Monster appears in Myths and Legends of Our Own Land by
Charles M. Skinner in 1896. The encounter in many ways mirrors and echoes a
variety of encounters with other unknown creatures and makes it an interesting
companion piece for several similar encounters. The report has often been under
looked by researchers but bears some interesting hallmarks that need, I feel,
to be brought up.
The events of September 1887 was
undoubtedly never forgotten for one particular Fisherman out on Wolf Pond that
bright day. The Fisherman, whether to enjoy nature or to string up his dinner,
was out on his boat, biding his time and casting his line when all of a sudden
he noticed a disturbance on the water. Whether he approached this writhing form
or whether it breached near the startled man's boat is unclear, but his
reaction to seeing this strange form was accounted for. Reaching down, he
grabbed his pole and proceeded to strike the unknown creature. The creature, in
an attempt to stop its attacker, proceeded in capsizing the Fisherman's boat.
In a scene reminiscent of Jaws, the man and beast were on the same
playing field, and clearly, the creature had the advantage. Certainly, the
Fisherman had thought this would have been his last day on earth. It was in
this terrifying moment that the Fisherman got a good look at the creature; he
saw that its body coiled like a serpent that was black in color and was thirty
feet long, it had yellow rings or bands that went around its massive form and
its green head was long and pointed like that of a pike's. Yet the creature, whether simply of a
forgiving nature or that the capsizing was an accident not even intending for
this aquatic interaction, continued on its path, diving deeper into the
darkness of Wolf Pond. The creature never returned, and the Fisherman scrambled
undoubtedly as quickly as he could back to shore. He proceeded to tell others
of his encounter, yet that was the end of the Wolf Pond Monster, at least that
we know of.
In Michael Newton's the Encyclopedia of
Cryptozoology there is a reference in the creature's entry to multiple
residents witnessing this aquatic enigma as opposed to just the singular
unnamed Fisherman. If this is the case, there could be scads of encounters that
have yet to be written down or some which have been written in diaries or in
the personal tales of those near the region just waiting to be finally added to
the legend and history of the Wolf Pond Monster.
The Wolf Pond Monster case, while
initially collected in a book on myths and folklore, bears a lot of
similarities to what others have seen in Pennsylvania, namely giant snakes.
Pennsylvania has countless legends and stories of giant snakes, by far the most
famous being the Broad Top Serpent of Bedford and Huntingdon Counties, a giant
serpent often described in a variety of sources as black as a stovepipe and
about the same length as what was seen in Wolf Pond. In Patty A. Wilson's Monsters of
Pennsylvania: Mysterious Creatures in the Keystone State, she covers the
Broad Top Serpent extensively but also discusses another giant snake encounter
that supposedly occurred and unlike the fate of the Fisherman in the Wolf Pond
case, this one ended fatefully.
An encounter entitled in the book Monsters
of Pennsylvania called the "Death of Maggie May" describes an
elderly woman named Maggie May being constricted to death by a giant black
snake in 1939. The attack occurred when Maggie May had sat down by a tree to
rest; she had awoken to find herself wrapped by the large black snake and was
discovered by several girls as she tried to break free of the snake's bonds.
The girls rushing into the town for help came back to find the old woman
unconscious on the ground, still being engulfed by the snake. The men who arrived
on the scene could not remove the snake without hitting and hacking away at the
beast. When they finally removed it from the old woman, the snake measured in
its pieces approximately fifteen feet in length and four to five inches wide.
Maggie May died several days after her encounter with the giant black serpent.
Another possibility is, of course, the
idea of an escaped species from a zoo, circus, or private collection. Often
rooted in folklore to explain why many cryptids are seen, these examples do
have some semblance of truth. In Florida, currently, there are countless
invasive species from rhesus monkeys to pythons that were intentionally
released into the swamps by careless individuals, and many of these released
animals have a stable to unstable breeding population. We know and accept that
these cases occur and during the 1800s, owning exotics was reasonably common,
so it is not outside the realm of possibility that a green anaconda or
something similar escaped into the wooded areas of PA and happened to show up
in Wolf's Pond that fateful September only to later die when winter came.
Several accounts of these black serpents
are reported throughout the hills and hollows of the state. While Broad Top's
slithering Squamata is by far the most famous, a close follower would have to
be the Devil's Den Serpent of Gettysburg. This serpent is seen near the
so-called Devil's Den, which some researchers believe possibly gained its name
not from some native reference or some bloodshed moment from the Civil War but
named after this creature's frequent visitations. In Chad Arment's exquisite
tome on giant serpent accounts Boss Snakes, he discussed one such
account of the reptilian resident. In April of 1833, at an area known as the Round
Top, a large snake about fifteen to twenty feet in length and black in color.
The witnesses claimed that the beast was graying in color due to age and that
it was big enough for it to easily devour their pet dog. Several members of the
witness's family also claimed to of seen the beast, and the native supposedly
had called the serpent the "heap big snake".
While the idea of an exotic specimen seems
most likely in these cases, it honestly cannot explain the amount of reports
that are seen all throughout the state. While most of the encounters do occur
on land, the descriptions of almost all serpentine cryptids of PA do bear an
extremely strong resemblance to the Wolf Pond Monster, namely its color, size,
and form. The only difference really being the greenish head and yellow bands,
which could be due to a sexually dimorphic feature.
Our planet, at one point, was home to
giant snakes. The Titanoboa was a gigantic species that at one point lived on
this planet. Interestingly, the species based on the specimens that we have
found fossilized in Columbia reached lengths of approximately 40ft. This is
surprisingly only a mere ten feet from the specimens that have been seen on
Broad Top mountain and Wolf Pond. The Titanoboa existed during the Cretaceous
period and is to this day the largest species known to this point. Is it
possible that a few of this species survived and, over time, evolve or adapted
to live in the hills of Pennsylvania? It is possible, but at the same time, the
leap and survival of such a creature of that size would be extremely difficult,
let alone how and why this species would have slithered its way up to the
keystone state, and of course, many a skeptic would point out the lack of
fossil evidence that appears in the record.
While giant snakes seem to be the most
commonly reported and similarly connected creature that appears like the Wolf
Pond Monster, Michael Newton, in his book Strange Pennsylvania Monsters also
offers this less mysterious possibility to what was seen by the Fisherman in
1887. The creature's head, which differs in color from the body, is described
as pike like, and the author proposes that the creature could have been simply
either an over-embellished pike or, in my own additional thought on the
possibility, a giant-sized pike. While the original source's description does
seem to lean more towards something serpentine, a pike would match some of the
features described. Yet the size is something that is almost doubled that what
a known pike could reach.
The giant fish hypothesis is not a new
rationale for lake monsters. Loch Ness, Lake Champlain, and Flathead Lake have
all been thought to possibly be a massive variation of fish of some kind or
another, usually an eel. In Lake Iliamna in Alaska, however, their lake
monsters are described as giant fish. So, it is not out of the water for the
Wolf Pond Monster to be a giant species, either unknown or even possibly known
pike. If it is the latter, it could also explain why there has not been a known
sighting in over one hundred and thirty tears. What was observed in 1887 was
simply a giant specimen of a known species that grew out of isolation or to fit
the environment and simply died.
While the Wolf Pond Monster is an account that is exceptionally brief, it is an important case in regard to Pennsylvania history, Lake monster research, and those who research cryptid reptiles. This case, while over one hundred and thirty years old, is often included but overlooked because of how brief it is compared to more famous cases like Nessie, Champ, or the Broad Top Serpent, yet its relation to other accounts in Pennsylvania and lake serpent accounts, in general, makes me think that it certainly deserves to be more known than the blurbs usually included. The Wolf Pond Monster might still be there swimming in the lake or basking on the shore, but these reports might go uncatalogued because of the lack of acknowledgment. It is with this that I hope that maybe there is more to this account than what was sighted in 1887 and that perhaps something like it is still swimming in the murky lake of Wolf Pond.
Species/Potential Species: Reptile most likely a Squamata
Location: Wolf Pond, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania
Year: 1887
Works Cited:
Arment, Chad. Boss Snakes: Stories and Sightings of Giant Snakes in North America. Coachwhip Publications. 2008
Coleman, Loren. Mysterious America. Paraview Pocket Books. 2001
Guy Gugliotta, "How Titanoboa, the 40-Foot-Long Snake, Was Found" Smithsonian Magazine. April 2020. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-titanoboa-the-40-foot-long-snake-was-found-115791429/ Accessed. December 8, 2020.
Newton, Michael. Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology. McFarland and Company. 2005
---. Strange Pennsylvania Monsters. Schiffer Publishing. 2012.
Skinner, Charles M. Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. Bibliobazaar. 1896
Wilson, Patty A. Monsters of Pennsylvania: Mysterious Creatures in the Keystone State. Stackpole Books. 2010.
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