The Legend of the Fairbury Snagglemaw

By Fr. Scott Archer

In the dense, shadowed woodland areas surrounding Fairbury, Illinois, there are whispers—quiet, fearful tales passed from generation to generation. They speak of the Fairbury Snagglemaw, a creature of nightmares with a body like a hunched wolf, covered in coarse gray hair, and a face eerily like an opossum twisted in permanent hunger. Two massive, curved fangs, honed sharply as ancient blades, jut downward from its upper jaw.

The first recorded sighting of this creature was in 1838, when a trembling Silas Thorne staggered out of the woods along Indian Creek at dawn, his eyes wild with terror—swearing he’d glimpsed a great beast with enormous fangs gleaming in the moonlight.

The calendar turned, marking a year since the incident, when a trapper named Elijah Griggs vanished without a trace in the same area. All that remained was his shattered rifle and deep gouges in the bark of a black oak tree—claw marks unlike any animal known to man. But the Fairbury Snagglemaw’s story runs deeper than the records of the town’s first European settlers.

The Kickapoo Indians, who lived just four miles south of modern Fairbury from 1828 to 1830, warned of a spirit beast that prowled through the trees from after dusk to just before dawn, swift as wind, with a scream that froze the blood. It was this relentless terror, stalking their nights and stealing their peace, that finally drove the Kickapoo to abandon the area and seek safety elsewhere.

They called it—the Gray Hunger—and said it fed not only on flesh, but on the fear of those who heard it breathing outside their wigwams.

Sightings have occurred from days of yore to the present, and uneasy farmers and rural residents continue to report strange disappearances of livestock and mangled deer with gaping wounds. Some say if you're walking in or near the woodland areas after eventide and—suddenly—the nocturnal world falls into silence, run—because that silence means the Fairbury Snagglemaw is near.