Mont Alto

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[tense music] Sometime in the first years of the 1900s, a young forester named JP Wentling walked out of the woods near Mont Alto, Pennsylvania, with a sack over his shoulder and something alive inside it.

The story was printed in 1910, and it says he'd caught the animal by imitating its crying until it came close enough to hop into the bag.

He was carrying it home when the load on his shoulder got lighter and the crying stopped.

A good tracker could follow one by its tear-stained trail because it wept constantly, and when it was cornered or surprised and frightened, it might dissolve itself in tears.

Then he gave the Wentling story with the sack and the tears and the bubbles, and that's the whole entry.

John P. Wentling was born in 1878, the same year as Cox, and he was a forester at Mont Alto in Franklin County, where Pennsylvania had opened a state forest academy in 1903 to train men to look after its cut-over land.

By the time the book came out, he'd moved to St. Anthony Park in Minnesota, where the state university had its forestry school.

So, uh, she helped guide me, um, and I changed my degree to occupational therapy.

Uh, Penn State Mont Alto had that-

Mm-hmm

... degree just kicking off at that time.

How about that Mont Alto?

Oh.

Penn State.

"Where do you wanna go? What do you wanna do?" Um, and you know, and, and she just could not quite nail it down, right? Just wasn't clear.

The Harrisburg Telegraph even ran it the next day in their local news column.

Reverend Joseph Clemens of Mont Alto wedded Mary-- Miss Mary Knapp Strong of Williamsport yesterday.

That's also where Mary's actual middle name showed up, Knapp.

It's not in any other records I've come across.

JP Wendling.

And he supposedly encountered a squonk near Mount Alto, Pennsylvania.

And Wendling apparently knew how to hunt the creature.

And he had a plan.