Squonk
Hunters track it by the wet trail it leaves and lose it the second they get a hand on it.
Lacrimacorpus dissolvens
The Squonk is a creature reported in the hemlock forests of northern Pennsylvania and the Allegheny Plateau. Witnesses describe a low, thick-bodied animal with loose warty skin and a constant weeping that carries a long way on still nights.
Its defining trait is dissolution. When cornered, handled, or badly startled, the Squonk collapses into tears and bubbles and leaves nothing behind. The first written record appears in William T. Cox's Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, published in 1910, though accounts circulated in Pennsylvania timber camps well before that.
The Bureau classifies the Squonk as harmless. The file stays open because people keep hearing it.
Is the Squonk Real?
ProvenanceThe written record begins in 1910 with William T. Cox. The oral record begins earlier, in the Pennsylvania timber camps, passed between men who spent months at a stretch in hemlock country and had reason to know what those woods sound like at night.
Cox's book is a field guide to fearsome critters, and fearsome critters are a tradition with a joke inside them. A new hand gets handed a sack and sent out after something. Folklorists have compared a Squonk hunt to a snipe hunt, and they are not wrong to.
The Bureau's position is narrower. The joke explains why the story got told at every camp in Pennsylvania. It does not explain why men who were in on the joke still would not walk certain ravines after dark, and it does not explain the accounts that keep arriving from the same hemlock stands more than a century after the last camp closed. The file is open on the strength of the second thing, not the first.
Why Does the Squonk Cry?
Behavioral BasisThe standard answer, and the one Cox recorded, is shame. Its skin does not fit. It is covered in warts and moles, the animal knows it, and it weeps because it cannot stand being what it is.
The Bureau notes that this is an explanation for the crying that comes from people, not from the animal. What can actually be observed is that the crying is constant, that it does not vary with weather or season, and that it slows in cold.
There is a second reading worth logging. The tears are the trail that gets it found, and the tears are also what it becomes when it is caught. The same fluid does both jobs. Whether that is design, accident, or the Bureau reading too much into a wet track is not something this file can settle.
Squonkapalooza: The Squonk Festival in Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Public InterestJohnstown holds an annual Squonk festival at the Bottle Works Ethnic Arts Center in Cambria County. The 2026 event, the fourth, ran on August 1 and drew several thousand people. It is free, it is all ages, and the organizers built it around the premise of cheering the animal up. There is a compliment contest. There is a burger.
The Bureau has no position on whether this helps.
What the Bureau does note is that Johnstown sits in the Laurel Highlands, on the southern end of the range, and that reported encounters in Cambria and Somerset Counties have increased across the four years the festival has run. More people in the woods looking for a thing will produce more reports of that thing. The Bureau logs the correlation and declines to explain it.
Case Sections
Accounts agree on the skin before they agree on anything else. It hangs loose, too big for the animal underneath, and it is covered in warts and moles. Witnesses reach for different comparisons. Some say a pig. Some say a wet dog wearing the wrong hide. A Cameron County account settles on a hog that has been left out in the rain since spring. Its size runs small. Most reports put it somewhere between a beagle and a full-grown boar, low to the ground and heavier at the shoulder than it looks. The legs are short. Cox's record describes yellow, crooked tusks, though not every witness sees them, and several describe a mouth they would not call a mouth at all. The eyes are the part people fix on. They run constantly. The face is wet in every account the Bureau holds, in every weather, in every season. Later collectors added details Cox did not have, including webbing on the left foot only. The Bureau has no field confirmation of the webbing and logs it as secondhand. Movement is slow and reluctant. It does not startle and bolt so much as sag and turn away.
The Squonk cries. Yes, tears. That is the whole of what it does that anyone can watch for long. It moves at twilight and again just before dawn, and it stays under cover the rest of the time. The weeping does not stop while it moves. This makes it the easiest animal in these woods to find and the hardest to keep. A tracker who knows what to look for can follow the wet line through leaf litter for a mile or better. The trail does not dry the way rain does. It stays dark and it stays salty. Dogs will work it and then sit down and refuse to go on. Cold, still, moonlit nights are best. The tears come slower in the cold and the animal is unwilling to move. Older accounts hold it will not cross lit water, because it will not risk the reflection. It answers a voice that sounds like its own. This is the only reliable method of drawing one in, and it produced the Bureau's single best-documented encounter. A person who can imitate the crying can bring a Squonk out of cover and, in more than one account, can lead it a considerable distance. Then comes the part that closes every file. Cornered, handled, bagged, or badly frightened, the Squonk dissolves. Witnesses report the weight going out of the sack first, then the sound stopping, and then nothing but tears and a little foam on top of the water. There is no struggle. There is no body. Nobody has produced one, and the Bureau does not expect anybody to.
Hemlock. Old stands where the crowns close overhead and the ground stays damp through August, across the Allegheny Plateau and down through the Laurel Highlands. The Squonk wants dark and it wants wet, and second-growth hardwood gives it neither. This is a problem for the animal and it shows in the record. Pennsylvania's hemlock was cut hard for tanbark and lumber through the late 1800s and into the 1900s, and the reports thinned out with the trees. What is left is patchy. Ravine bottoms the saws could not reach. State forest tracts that grew back thick. Damp glens where fog sits until midmorning and nobody has a reason to walk. The reports still come from those places and nowhere else.
No feeding behavior documented. Nobody has watched one eat. The Bureau notes that the reports come from ground where salamanders, grubs, and soft mast are plentiful, and leaves it there.
Declassified Briefings
The Squonk is a creature of Pennsylvania's hemlock forests, first recorded in print in 1910. It is a low, heavy-bodied animal with loose skin covered in warts and moles, and it weeps continuously. When cornered or captured it dissolves into tears and bubbles and leaves no remains. The Bureau classifies it as harmless.
Northern and north-central Pennsylvania, in the old hemlock stands of the Allegheny Plateau, with a southern range running through the Laurel Highlands. Potter, Cameron, and Elk Counties produce the oldest accounts. Cambria and Somerset Counties account for most recent reports. The animal has never been reliably reported outside Pennsylvania.
No. The Bureau holds no record of a Squonk injuring anyone. The danger runs the other way. Every documented attempt to catch one has destroyed it. If you find a Squonk, the Bureau's recommendation is to sit still and let it be.
Witness Accounts
“You want one, go out on a frost night with a moon. Not a wind. Sit under the hemlock and listen for it. When you hear it, don't go at it straight. Go slow and quiet and let it come to you if it will. Take a sack. Don't take a dog. The dogs won't work it past a certain point. And don't count the thing yours till you've had it out in the light. Boys have come back with a wet sack and a story and got laughed at all winter for it. Some of them were lying. Some of them weren't.”
“I could do the sound. That was the whole of it. I sat out past dark and made the noise, and after a while it made the noise back, and then it came, and it kept coming, and I did not have to work at it after that. It followed me the way a dog follows. I had it in the sack and it was heavy and it was crying the whole way, and I remember thinking I would have to figure out what to do with it once I got home. The load lightened. I want to be plain that I noticed and did not stop. Then the crying quit. I set the sack down and opened it and there was water in the bottom and a little foam on top of the water, and that was all. I've been asked whether I was sorry. I was carrying it home in a bag.”
“We drive up for the dark sky two or three times a year, my husband and I. Late October, cold, no wind, with a clear sky and the moon in view. We were packing the scope back into the car around one in the morning and I heard somebody crying down the slope. I want to be clear that I thought it was a person. I called out. I called out three times. It stopped when I called and started again when I stopped, and it was never any closer and never any farther. It just held that distance. My husband went for the light and I told him not to. I just wanted to get out of there. We drove out. I've been back since. I don't get out of the car after midnight anymore, and I don't call out.”
Rev. 08/1972
Department of Unexplained Phenomena
Field Supply Drop
Appalachian Cryptid Decal
Item No. BFC-001
