Devil in the Skies, Stars on the Barns: The Snallygaster, Hex Signs, and Barn Stars

My first introduction to barn stars, hex signs, and the legendary monster called the Snallygaster came from viewing the popular television show Mountain Monsters.During the episode, members of the AIMS team (Appalachian Investigators of Mysterious Sightings) travel to Preston County, West Virginia, to investigate reports of Snallygaster sightings.John "Trapper" Tice, the defunct leader of the group, says "You see them stars on barns?Now you see them all over West Virginia.You know what they're for?They're to keep the damn Snallygaster away" (Mountain Monsters, 2014).The scholarly literature, however, does not unilaterally corroborate this statement.This popular conflation of a supernatural being, the Snallygaster, and barn stars, alternatively known as hex signs, is part of a long and ongoing scholarly debate.The Snallygaster is a legendary monster that exists in the folklore of the Mid-Atlantic and Appalachian regions of the United States.For the purpose of this article, a legendary monster can be defined as "a strange, frightening, or unusual human or creature, real or imaginary, believed or not believed, that is, at the time of the telling, purported but not scientifically verified to exist in our world" (Puglia 2022: 16).The Snallygaster has been described as a chimerical being with the head and body of a reptile and the wings and talons of a bird.A pastiche of many folkloric forms and behaviors, the draconic monster's first appearance in popular discourse came in 1909 in an article from the Middletown Valley Register in Maryland.However, Trevor J. Blank and David J. Puglia assert that Snallygaster reports were from their inception a hoax (2014: 91).Mountain Monsters explicitly connects the Snallygaster to "stars on barns."In Pennsylvania, there is a tradition among the Pennsylvania Dutch of decorating barns with stars, which are known as barn stars.Like the Snallygaster, barn stars also have a