On an unrelentingly hot day in August, I drove out to the borderlands between Maryland and Pennsylvania to see a museum that does not yet exist, devoted to a creature that never has. Sarah Cooper’s day job is as a travel ER nurse, but in her spare time she travels to various festivals and conventions with her collection, what she calls the American Snallygaster Museum—her goal being to open up a permanent site devoted to Western Maryland’s strange cryptid. The Snallygaster is difficult to define—a baffling mixture of body parts…
