Infinity in Somerset: A Serpent Tale

William Johnson grew up in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and the schoolhouse he attended stood secluded in the middle of a far-flung field. This field was so difficult to access that students would often spend a decent portion of each morning just walking there. Annie Whitney and Caroline Bullock were collecting Pennsylvania and Maryland folklore for their 1925 journal article on the subject when Johnson contacted them to talk about a bizarre memory of his from when he was sixteen (which was likely to have been in 1886) - he can remember his school being haunted by a colossal, physics-defying serpent.

A Tale of a Tail

The trigger for the seemingly unique haunting was the construction of a new building on the school site in Jenner township - '16 miles west of Johnstown, in Somerset Co.' - and this new building fell on an old crossroads. An individual only described as a gray-haired old man is said to have warned the school that the crossroads on which they were choosing to build was haunted, and it seems that he was right. As soon as the building was completed, something utterly incomprehensible started to make its presence known on the premises.

Like clockwork, a gigantic serpent would appear 'in the dark of the moon' - and although its head and tail were seemingly always hidden the schoolhouse, it would lay its colossal scaly body (over a foot in diameter) over all public highways that led to the seemingly-accursed building. According to the testimony given by Johnson to Whitney and Bullock, the students often had to cross over the abhorrent reptile if they wanted to enter the house in the evenings for 'spelling schools and the like'. He described the scales on the creature as being 'sharp' as opposed to slick like those of a normal snake, and that if anyone accidentally touched it while trying to step over they would 'stick' to it before being spontaneously thrown to the ground. Apparently, not everyone had the ability to see the mysterious serpent, but everyone was affected by its presence in the same way - they would all be thrown to the ground if they stepped on it.

The haunting seemingly stretched beyond the schoolhouse, with the thing's massive body running across numerous different properties in the local area. One man by the name of Frame apparently became so terrified of the nonsensical phenomenon that he sold his holdings and moved out. Joe Leversos puchased the now-empty haunted house, and he was able to raise a large family on the property with no trouble. It wasn't that he was unaffected by it - it was just that the community had started to adapt to its presence. Joe's children had lost their fear of the mystery snake. Local men under the influence of liquid courage would sometimes pluck up enough determination to attack the entity with various objects such as fence stakes. Of course, this never actually affected the reptile, but it was the thought that counted. Johnson then proceeded to name other witnesses involved in the case - Joe Boyer and Jeremiah Mowery - the latter of whom was a preacher.

Nobody ever saw the head or tail of the reptilian apparition - with the only thing visible of it being its seemingly endless body. The implication of the story is that the creature must've been at least a mile in length. William Johnson eventually moved away from the town at the age of thirty, and the snake was still manifesting there when he left - which was roughly at the turn of the 20th century. Interestingly enough, there is a mythological creature called the Amphisbaena - a dragon-like serpent which has a head at each end, which each grab onto each other so that the creature's body is like a ceaseless loop. The particular relevance of records of such a folkloric entity is that Pliny claimed that a pregnant woman who stepped across an Amphisbaena would miscarry - showing that there are at least some historical records of belief in an endlessly-looping serpent with destructive consequences for those who stepped over it.

Source

'I Heard of That Somewhere' by Michael D. Winkle