History & local legend
The Broad Top Snake belongs to the wooded coalfields of Huntingdon County. Local accounts describe a serpent eighteen to twenty feet long, with yellow markings around its eyes and neck. The story reaches back to a lumberjack who supposedly sat on a fallen log to eat lunch, only to feel his seat begin moving beneath him.
Motorists supplied a similar surprise: what looked like a branch across the road would move away after their wheels passed over it. Strip miners reported an unusually large snake on the mountain in the 1950s. By October 1974, the tale had attracted a video crew and a Tyrone Daily Herald article by Ron Morgan. Morgan returned to the subject decades later in the railway journal Timber Transfer.
Sources
- Huntingdon County History, Stories and Legends of Huntingdon County, lumberjack, road crossings, markings and strip miners
- Ron Morgan, Snake Haunting Broad Top Area Draws Video Cameras, Tyrone Daily Herald, October 30, 1974
- Friends of the East Broad Top, Timber Transfer index, Ron Morgan’s The Broad Top Snake Story, 2024
- Keystone Marker Trust, Broad Top Mountain, borough reference coordinates
- National Park Service, Historic American Buildings Survey, Rockhill Iron and Coal Company towns on the eastern slope of Broad Top Mountain
