| The Pennsylvania Ouroboros Category: Haunting (Zooform) From: Whitney and Bullock, p. 192-193 Where: Pennsylvania, “16 miles west of Johnstown, in Somerset Co., Jenner township, at the Cross roads” When: 1880s onwards Who: Numerous people in Somerset County, including Joe Boyer, Joe Leverson, and Jeremiah Mowery, a preacher How close to source: Whitney and Bullock collected the story from William Johnson, a primary witness Phenomena: When William Johnson was a boy in this area of Pennsylvania, the local schoolhouse stood in the middle of a field, in such an out-of-the-way location (even for a country school) that “much time was lost for all the pupils” merely walking there each morning. When Johnson was about sixteen (circa 1886), a new building was erected at the crossroads at Jenner. No sooner was the building completed, however, than a terrifying entity manifested itself: “Every month in the dark of the moon, an immense snake would appear. While its head and tail seemed to be hidden under the school-house, its long scaly body, over a foot in diameter, was laid across all public highways leading to the place. He [Johnson] said they often had evenings at the school-house, and spelling schools and the like, and had to get over the serpent before entering the house.” [Whitney and Bullock, 193] Johnson said the scales on the creature were “sharp” rather than slick, and that if anyone touched it in stepping over, he or she would “stick” to it and get thrown to the ground. Not everybody could see the thing, but everyone could feel it, and even those blind to it would be thrown down if they stepped on it. The creature was so long its body ran across several people’s properties. One such landowner, a man named Frame, became so frightened that he sold his holdings and moved away. The purchaser, Joe Leverson, raised a large family on the “snake” property with no problems. The local children lost their fear of it as well. Occasionally local men who had bolstered their courage with drink would attack the serpent with fence stakes or other weapons, to no avail, “though the stake would be broken to pieces.” Oddities: No one ever saw this bizarre apparition’s head or tail-tip. It seemed to be a single, endless loop of serpentine body. Its immense size – the implication is that it must have been a mile or more long – calls to mind the colossal serpent Jormungandr from Norse mythology, which encircled the world in its coils. Ending: Johnson moved away from the area at age thirty. The “snake” still appeared at that time, around the turn of the twentieth century. Legend: According to William Johnson, “an old gray-haired man who walked with a staff” opposed the building of the new school, saying the crossroads were haunted. This is as close to a local legend as we get. Explanation: No one Johnson knew had any explanation for the entity, either. (I tried hard not to write “They could make neither head nor tail of it.” I’m wondering now how old that phrase is – perhaps it evolved from encounters such as this?) Comments: An old drawing of a dragonlike creature with a long neck and tail can be found in T. H. White’s translation of The Bestiary. Both neck and tail terminate in small, doglike heads, and the front head holds the tail-head in its jaws. The text explains: “This is called an AMPHIVENA (Amphisbena) because it has two heads . . . With one head holding the other, it can bowl along in either direction like a hoop.” This medieval monster sounds like the ancestor of the good old American Hoop Snake, a fabulous reptile that bites the end of its tail and rolls after its prey like a loose bicycle tire. The Bestiary in turn lifted its information from older sources like Physiologus and Pliny. (In an odd echo of the trouble people had in crossing the Pennsylvania entity, Pliny reported of the Amphisbena that “a pregnant woman will miscarry if she steps over it.” [White, 177]) These legendary creatures, along with the aforementioned Jormungandr, are all permutations of the Worm Ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth, a universal symbol of wholeness, totality, and the cycles of nature. Yet it seems such things can be more than legends or symbols. We might take a science-fictional turn and suggest that the Pennsylvania Ouroboros was a multi-dimensional being. Such a creature could project part of its body into our universe while the rest of it remained in a higher spatial dimension. Or we could draw upon occult lore. The trouble people had in merely stepping over the Ouroboros, along with its circular outline, remind one of the “magic circle” used for protecting oneself or caging a spirit. Also, the spirit power of serpents in general is an ancient and universal belief. Perhaps in some primordial time the two were one: the Magic Circle personified as a huge curled snake, protecting or imprisoning what lay within its coils. A sign like that would warn me away, certainly. White, Terence H. Bestiary: A Book of Beasts (New York: Capricorn Books, 1960 [1954]). Whitney, Annie Weston, and Caroline Canfield Bullock, “Folk-Lore from Maryland,” in Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, Volume 18, 1925. | 
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