Guys. Guys guys guys guys. I just recently learned about this one cryptid, and I absolutely have to tell you all about it.

Ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary friends, I present THE SQUONK.

The squonk makes its home in the hemlock forests located in northern Pennsylvania. They are extremely ugly. Basically it’s covered in warts and a bunch of loose skin. as well as webbed toes on its left foot. But only its left foot, no other feet.

It is, in fact, so distressed by its own ugliness that it never stops crying, and can be tracked by the trail of tears that it leaves. The squonk also really doesn’t like seeing its own reflection, so it tends not to move around a lot when the moon is shining lest it see itself in a lake or pond.

The squonk is a very elusive creature, because it constantly hides. Which, same. There’s also the fact that, if it’s ever caught, it basically dissolves into a puddle of its own tears. This is what gives it it’s “scientific” name, Lacrimacorpus dissolvens, which comes from the Latin words for body, tears, and dissolve.

Like most North American cryptids, the squonk is really not that old. The first mention of it comes from a 1910 book called Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwood, written by William T Cox. It may have actually been created for a conservationist purpose: when the book was initially released, the aforementioned forests were in danger from over harvesting. A book from 1939, called simply Fearsome Critters, adds a little more information about the squonk, specifically that it migrated to Pennsylvania from the desert.

Fun fact: the band Genesis actually has a song about the squonk from their 1976 album A Trick of the Tail, creatively entitled “Squonk.”

So that, my friends, is the squonk, which somehow manages to be ridiculously sad and kind of hilarious at the same time. Admittedly, most of the humor comes from the fact that it’s called a squonk. That’s the sound an angry goose makes.