Tales of the Dwayyo — a large beast with snarling fangs and a big, bushy tail — appear to have surfaced in Western Maryland around November 1965.

Newspaper reports at the time said a man named Jack Becker fought the beast in the backyard of his home along Fern Rock Road in Frederick County. More stories then emerged in news reports, including of a woman who heard a Dwayyo in the mountains near her home and one man who told police he had a baby Dwayyo in his basement.

But there are just a few problems.

There’s no Fern Rock Road in Frederick, and state police were never able to identify a man named John Becker, according to archival newspaper reports.

And when city police arrived to investigate reports of the basement-dwelling Dwayyo, the homeowner told police there must have been a prank call, according to those archived reports. He reportedly said he never called police and, of course, there was no beast in his basement.

The Dwayyo is one of Maryland’s local cryptids, animals claimed to exist for which there is no proof of existence, and it joins the ranks of infamous beasts including the Snallygaster or Chessie, the local version of the Loch Ness Monster.

Susan Fair, an author and retired librarian who has written about local cryptids, said exact roots of the Dwayyo story — and even the creature’s name — were sparse. As far as she could tell, Fair said, the cryptid’s first recorded appearance was when “John Becker” reported the monster to the newspaper.

A legend is born

Even though news reports from the ‘60s cast doubt on the existence of a Dwayyo, that didn’t stop a group of Frederick Community College students from organizing a hunt for the beast. It drew between 50 and 100 sign-ups, according to the archival newspaper reports.

But when the time came for folks to gather for the hunt, nobody showed, journalist George May wrote the day after the hunt, Dec. 10, 1965. Someone told May that a group of boys were seen driving around in a pickup truck “some with helmets and waving machetes” on a street downtown.

On that same day, May reported that someone applied through the county government for a pet license for a dog. The $1 license was made out to a “John Becker,” and came with a question mark under “breed of dog” and the name was “Dwayyo.”

“Now if only someone could catch the elusive Dwayyo,” May wrote, ending his article.

After that, reports in the Frederick newspapers referencing the Dwayyo and John Becker stopped appearing.

It could have all been a prank, Fair said. The ‘60s were a more prank-friendly era, she said, in terms of people calling newspapers or even police with joke stories. One person who spoke to the Frederick News at the time said they thought Becker “must have been hitting the bottle more than anything else,” and another said whoever called in the story about the Dwayyo had been “getting into the holiday ‘spirits’ a little too soon.”

At some point, the Dwayyo gained a reputation for being the Snallygaster’s fiercest rival. Other sources claimed a Dwayyo is what would hatch from an egg laid by a Snallygaster, Fair said. The rivalry could be connected to a man in 1965 telling a reporter that Dwayyo stories reminded him of Snallygaster stories.

“It kind of gets lumped together and taken as fact,” Fair said.

Talk of the Dwayyo could have been part of larger trends of people discussing dog-like cryptids around the country, or even Bigfoot-like creatures, Fair said.

“Dogmen are always like nasty and confrontational, in cryptid lore,” she said.

Though the Dwayyo was reportedly aggressive, Fair said, there’s no indication it has a “sinister” background — unlike the Snallygaster, which has racist roots.

And if the two beasts really are rivals, then, “it sort of makes the Dwayyo the good guy,” Fair said.