Compliment Protocol for Encounters With a Squonk

You will hear it a long time before you decide what to do about it.

On a cold still night in hemlock country the sound of crying will reach you from a quarter mile out, and the first thing nearly every witness reports is that they thought it was a person. They call out. That is the reflex, and the Bureau does not fault anyone for it. The crying stops while you are speaking. It starts again when you go quiet. It does not come closer and it does not move off. It holds its distance and waits to find out what you are.

That pause is the Squonk deciding. Every documented encounter that reaches it turns on it.

The Bureau holds forty-one reports on this file that reached the pause, and eleven in which the witness said something afterward. Those eleven are the entire evidence base for what follows. It is a small sample and the Bureau states that plainly. It is also the only sample anyone has, and the pattern inside it is consistent enough that the Bureau is releasing guidance rather than waiting for more.

The full case file can be viewed on the Squonk page.

Bureau File Summary

Designation

Squonk (Lacrimacorpus dissolvens)

Primary Range

Hemlock stands of the Allegheny Plateau and Laurel Highlands, Pennsylvania

Danger Level

Low

First Documented

1910

File Status

Open

Key Behavioral Flags

Continuous vocalization, fixed-distance holding, responsive to human speech, dissolves under capture stress, avoid direct light

What the Field Reports Show: It Is Listening

The Squonk answers a voice that sounds like its own. That much has been in the record since 1910 and it is the basis of the only reliable method of drawing one out of cover. What the more recent reports add is narrower and more useful: it also responds to a voice that does not sound like its own. It stops crying when spoken to. Every account that reached the pause describes this.

The Bureau reads this as attention rather than fear. A frightened Squonk dissolves. A Squonk that stops crying and holds position is doing something else, and whatever it is, it involves waiting for the next thing you say.

What You Say Changes How Long It Stays

Of the eleven reports in which the witness spoke, seven led with the animal's appearance. All seven ended inside a minute. In four of those the crying resumed and moved off. In three it stopped entirely and the witness found nothing when they went looking.

The four remaining reports have something in common that the Bureau did not expect to find. In each of them the witness said something that was not about how the animal looked. One thanked it for the trail. One apologized for the light. One, a woman in Elk County who had been sitting with a broken ankle for two hours waiting on her son, simply talked to it about nothing in particular for the better part of twenty minutes.

All four report the animal holding position for the duration. Two report it moving closer. The Elk County account is the longest sustained observation in the Bureau's possession and it was achieved by a person who was not trying to observe anything.

Praise Delivered Wrong Is Worse Than Silence

This is the finding the Bureau wants public.

Three of the seven failed attempts were kind in intent. The witnesses were not taunting the animal. Two of them were trying to reassure it. The phrasing in both cases named the thing it was denying, and both encounters ended faster than the ones where the witness said nothing at all.

The Bureau's read is that the Squonk does not parse intent. It parses subject. Any sentence about its appearance is a sentence about its appearance, and the animal has been listening to those for a hundred and twenty years.

Why Pennsylvania Hemlock

The Squonk wants dark and it wants damp, and Pennsylvania used to be nothing but. The old hemlock stood thick enough on the Allegheny Plateau that the ground under it never fully dried, and the animal's whole way of living assumes that kind of cover.

Then the state cut it. Tanbark and lumber, hard and fast, through the last decades of the 1800s and into the 1900s, and when the hemlock went the reports went with it. What is left is fragments. Ravine bottoms too steep to log. State forest tracts that grew back. Damp glens where fog holds until midmorning because nothing up top lets the sun through.

The animal did not follow the camps west. It stayed where the trees stayed. That is why the sighting map looks the way it does, and it is why a creature that cannot be approached is nonetheless found in more or less predictable places. It has nowhere else to be.

Morale Intervention Conducted in Johnstown, Pennsylvania

On August 1, 2026, the fourth annual Squonk festival was held at the Bottle Works Ethnic Arts Center in Cambria County. Organizers expected between three and four thousand people. The event was free, all ages, and organized around the stated goal of cheering the animal up. It included amplified music, a costume contest, and a competition in which participants delivered compliments to the Squonk.

The Bureau notes the following without prejudice to anyone's intentions.

Johnstown sits at the southern end of the range. The event is loud, and the Squonk is an animal that holds a fixed distance from a single human voice and dissolves when startled. Reports out of Cambria and Somerset Counties rise during festival week and fall off for roughly three weeks afterward. The Bureau does not know whether that reflects displacement, increased observer volume, or both, and it will not pretend otherwise on the strength of four years of data.

What the Bureau will say is this. The compliment contest is, as far as the Bureau is aware, the largest field trial of the protocol below currently in existence. It is being conducted annually by several thousand people who do not know they are running one, in a county at the edge of the animal's range, with no controls and no recordkeeping.

The Bureau would like the recordkeeping.

Bureau Recommendation

If you encounter a Squonk, the objective is that it be there tomorrow. Everything below serves that.

1. Stop where you are. Do not close the distance. Twenty yards is not too far. The animal has already located you.
2. Speak at the volume you would use across a kitchen table. It hears you. Raising your voice does not help it hear you and does something else instead.
3. Do not compliment the skin. The Bureau puts this first among the prohibitions because it is first among the failures. Seven attempts on record led with appearance. Seven attempts on record ended inside a minute.
4. Do not negate. "You're not as bad as they say" is a sentence about how bad they say it is. "You're not ugly" is a sentence about ugly. The animal takes the subject, not the verb.
5. If you offer praise, keep it away from appearance. Thank it for the trail. Acknowledge its patience. Speak plainly about something else if that is what comes naturally. The four longest encounters on file all kept the subject off the animal's body.
6. Do not bring a light and do not photograph. A flash is a startle. A startle is fatal. This is not a figure of speech.
7. Do not approach and do not offer food and do not attempt contact of any kind. Every capture on record has destroyed the animal. The Bureau counts a capture attempt as a loss regardless of intent, and there is no version of this where you get to keep it.
8. Leave first. Do not wait for it to go. Several accounts note the crying still audible behind them as they walked out, holding the same distance, in the same place. The Bureau considers that the correct outcome.
9. Submit your report. Note the date, the county, the weather, what you said, and how long it stayed. The Bureau would like more than four usable observations.

On the Squonk's Reclassification as a Mascot

It is worth stating what has actually changed here, because the Bureau does not think it is a small thing.

For most of the time this animal has been in the record, the people looking for it were not looking for it in good faith. The Squonk hunt was a joke played on new hands. You gave a man a sack and sent him into the dark and went back to the fire, and the whole structure of the thing depended on the animal being ridiculous. Cox wrote it down in 1910 as a curiosity. Wentling caught one and carried it home in a bag and it came apart on the way, and the story survives because it was funny.

That is no longer the situation. People now wear this animal on their clothes. They put it on their walls. They drive to Cambria County in August to tell a creature that has never done anything to anybody that it is doing fine. The Bureau has watched several other files acquire a public and has not always considered it an improvement. This one is different, and the difference is that the affection is not aimed at what the animal can do. There is nothing to be impressed by. It has no size, no menace, and no trophy value. It is just a thing that has been miserable in the woods for a very long time, and people have decided they like it anyway.

Whether the Squonk can register any of that is not something this file can settle. It has no way of asking and neither do we.

What the Bureau can report is that sightings across the Laurel Highlands are up over four years, that the animal has been found at closer range by witnesses who spoke gently than by witnesses who did not speak at all, and that the four longest observations in the entire file were all conducted by people who were not trying to catch anything.

File status: OPEN. Monitoring: ACTIVE.

This bulletin has been approved for public release by the Bureau's Field Documentation Division. Certain witness identifying information has been redacted. Certain other information has been redacted for reasons the Bureau is not currently at liberty to disclose.