Giwoggle

The Giwoggle belongs to a particular kind of Pennsylvania lore: a creature that someone sends rather than one that simply lives in the woods. In the stories of Keating Township, in the hill country of Clinton County, the Giwoggle was a sort of artificial werewolf that a witch could conjure to harass a neighbor who had offended her. Tellers placed the tales in the mid-1800s, in the farm country of West Keating Township, in the part of north-central Pennsylvania now promoted as the Pennsylvania Wilds.

The beast was described as a wolf-shaped animal about six feet tall that walked upright. Its front feet were said to be bird claws and its back feet horse hooves, a combination that left tracks no tracker could follow. Its victims were mostly farmers, and its mischief was petty rather than murderous: trampled crops, damaged tools and strange prints around the barn. The stories were passed down in the Confer family; according to the Pennsylvania Wilds tourism site, Belle Confer told them to her grandchildren, and her grandson George Rhone later wrote them down for the Keystone Folklore Quarterly (usually dated to 1956).

Many of the Giwoggle tales also feature Loop Hill Ike, a figure based on a real man, Isaac Gaines (1837–1915), the grandson of an escaped slave from Virginia who married into the Confer family. In the stories Ike works as a freelance spell-breaker: he reverses a witch’s curse for a frightened farmer and, if that fails, burns her cabin. Gaines is buried in a cemetery in neighboring Clearfield County.

The legend broke out of the hollows in 1909, when strange tracks and rooftop creatures were reported in Lock Haven during the Jersey Devil panic and local newspapers wondered whether the Giwoggle was responsible. In July 2011 the Clinton County commissioners made it the county’s official monster. Drivers on the Clearfield–Clinton border still trade stories of “bipedal wolves” by the road.

A six-foot wolf-like animal standing on its hind legs, with bird claws in front and horse hooves behind so that its tracks confuse hunters. It is usually silent and mischievous rather than violent.

The farms, creek valleys and ridges of Keating Township, Clinton County, and the nearby Clearfield County line in north-central Pennsylvania; in the stories, always near the home of whoever offended the witch who sent it.

The Giwoggle is a well-preserved example of north-central Pennsylvania witch-lore, kept alive first by family storytelling and then by a folklore journal. It is now a local mascot and a regular entry in Pennsylvania Wilds tourism and newspaper writing on the region’s creatures, alongside the Squonk and the Jersey Devil visitors of 1909. Isaac Gaines, the real man behind Loop Hill Ike, appears in the tales as the hero who sets matters right.