Before it was a newspaper sensation, the Snallygaster was a nursery threat with a German accent. The families who settled the Middletown Valley of western Maryland carried their monsters over with them from the Rhineland and the Pennsylvania Dutch country. One of those was the schnelle geeschter, the quick spirits, half-heard in the dark air between the barn and the house. Parents warned that it came down without a sound and carried off the children who wandered too far or told too many lies. They painted seven-pointed stars on their barns to turn it away. For a hundred years it stayed exactly that size: a thing you used to get a child indoors before dark.

Then, in the winter of 1909, a country newspaper made it enormous. The Middletown Valley Register was staring down a dead news season, and its men decided to fill the empty columns with a monster. What they printed was a creature no folklore had ever described. It was a beast the size of an outbuilding, with a single burning eye in the middle of its forehead and a beak of hammered metal. It had leathery wings that threw a shadow across a whole field, and long arms like an octopus that hung down to snatch. It screamed, they wrote, like a locomotive coming through a cut, and it drank the blood of whatever it caught. They gave it the old name, Snallygaster, and they ran it as the gospel truth.

The story did what a good story does in a small place with a long winter. It grew. Fresh sightings arrived by the week, each paper trying to out-print the last. The thing had laid an egg the size of a barrel. It had snatched a man off a road and thought better of him and dropped him. It was seen over a dozen towns in a single season. The reports climbed the ladder of respectability until, so the papers swore, they reached the Smithsonian Institution, which was said to have offered to mount the hide, and President Roosevelt himself, who was said to be weighing whether to put off an African safari and come shoot it instead. None of that happened. All of it sold papers. For a few months an entire valley agreed to be frightened together, which is its own kind of fun.

The Snallygaster got a second act, and a fittingly ridiculous death. In 1932, deep in Prohibition, the papers raised it again over the hills near Frog Hollow, and then reported its end. The beast had blundered into a two-thousand-gallon vat of fermenting moonshine mash, been overcome by the fumes, and drowned in bootleg liquor. Federal agents, the account went, turned up to destroy the illegal still and dynamited the whole business, monster and all. It may be the only cryptid on record undone by the combined efforts of its own thirst and the Bureau of Prohibition.

Strip away the ink and the Snallygaster is a clean lesson in how a monster is really made: not stumbled on in the woods but built at a desk, one lurid detail at a time, by men who knew exactly what their readers wanted to believe. And it left an heir. The same hills would hand up a rival decades later, a wolf-thing called the Dwayyo, said to be the Snallygaster’s natural enemy and born the very same way, out of a newspaper with space to fill. Keep a seven-pointed star over your door if it comforts you. But the truth is that this one was never really in the sky. It was on the front page, and it could fly exactly as far as the paper could carry it.