Folklore has a funny way of following us through life. It begins when we are children, with stories told by parents and grandparents. The tales are meant to entertain us, frighten us or simply make the world around us a little more interesting. Monsters under the bed. Ghosts in old houses and mysterious places where something supposedly happened long ago.

As we grow older, the stories change. The monsters become rumors. The ghosts become local legends. A strange event becomes a mystery that nobody can quite explain. Some stories are forgotten. Others survive because someone keeps telling them. 

Think about the stories we carried with us growing up: King Arthur and Robin Hood, the Pied Piper and the Headless Horseman. We heard about Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. Some are so familiar they hardly feel like folklore anymore. Others belong to a particular town, a particular road or a particular patch of woods. Maybe it’s a ghost that supposedly still walks an old battlefield, a mysterious creature seen along a country road or a lost treasure hidden somewhere in the mountains.

That is how folklore works. It grows from the stories people tell about the places they know, the things they have seen and the things they cannot explain. Sometimes there is a little truth buried beneath the telling. Sometimes there isn’t. And sometimes, even as adults, we enjoy not knowing which is which. Pennsylvania is full of those stories.

They don’t have to be famous to survive. Sometimes all it takes is a name, a rumor or an unexplained event that someone remembers well enough to tell the next person. Give a place a name like Rattlesnake Hill, for example, and it almost seems as though a story ought to come with it.

This one does.

Today, Rattlesnake Hill Road winds through Douglass Township in Berks County, near Boyertown and Pine Forge. The name is still on the map, but Rattlesnake Hill looked very different in the nineteenth century, when it was also the name of a small community.

Rattlesnake Hill also appears in historical records from Montgomery County, in the same general area where I live on Game Farm Road. That helps explain some of the confusion surrounding the story today. What may look like two different places on a modern map was once part of a much more connected world, where roads, farms and communities didn’t necessarily care much about the county line.

An early map of the area even shows Rattlesnake Hill in connection with the farm of Joseph and Faltimer, offering a glimpse of how the place was identified long before today’s roads and property lines gave us a different way of looking at it. 

In January 1879, the Reading Eagle described Rattlesnake Hill as a village of just 23 houses. It was a place where people lived and worked, gathered together, went on fox hunts and celebrated. The newspaper also mentioned card games and the illegal sale and consumption of liquor, giving a glimpse of a community that was apparently a little more lively than its quiet name might suggest. And, like any community, it had its stories. One of them would eventually become the legend most closely associated with Rattlesnake Hill.

On January 29, 1895, the Daily Ledger of Pottstown published an account it called “Schwenk’s Bear.” The story concerned Emmanuel Schwenk, an old shoemaker who lived near Pluck ’Em Inn in Berks County and was described as a resident of Rattlesnake Hill. 

Schwenk was apparently walking home from Pottstown one Saturday night when he reached what the newspaper called the “lonesome heights” of Rattlesnake Hill. Somewhere behind him came a sound.

Pat, pat, pat…

When Schwenk turned around, he saw a large black bear following close behind. And it wasn’t simply a bear. According to the newspaper, the animal was dragging a chain. 

Schwenk was a noted hunter, but on this particular walk he had made the unfortunate decision to leave his gun at home. He did, however, have something else with him: a pocketful of pretzels he had picked up in Pottstown. 

Those pretzels suddenly became very important. 

Schwenk dropped a few on the road. The bear stopped to eat them, giving him enough time to run ahead. But the animal caught up again, so Schwenk dropped more pretzels. Once again, the bear stopped. Once again, Schwenk ran. 

The strange chase continued until, according to the account, the bear finally turned toward the Schuylkill River and left Schwenk alone. Somehow, he made it home safely. 

The next day, Schwenk and a group of other Rattlesnake Hill residents went looking for the animal. This time he had his gun, but apparently no pretzels. The search came up empty. 

Schwenk believed the bear had crossed the river toward the Chestnut Hill area of Chester County and belonged to someone living there. He even suggested that the animal might have killed its keeper. 

Whether any of that was true is impossible to know. What we do know is that the story was being told in 1895, and the newspaper clearly enjoyed the telling. The account was filled with humor, including the suggestion that Schwenk might have been better off taking a wagon the next time he traveled home from Pottstown and keeping a sober head. 

In other words, this wasn’t some mysterious story that surfaced a hundred years later. People were talking about it when it happened, and the newspaper was already having a little fun with it.

And that, in a way, is folklore.

The word itself is relatively young. In 1846, English writer and antiquarian William John Thoms proposed the term in a letter to the journal The Athenaeum. He was looking for a way to describe the customs, beliefs, stories, songs, sayings and traditions passed down among ordinary people.

The word was new. The traditions were not.

Folklore doesn’t have to be ancient, either. It can begin with something that happened yesterday, as long as the story is picked up and passed along. A story is told, someone else remembers it, another version appears, and before long it belongs to more than just the person who first told it. By then, it has taken on a life of its own.

That’s the interesting part. Folklore isn’t a recording. It’s a living thing.

Details disappear. New ones get added. A frightening story becomes a little more frightening. A funny story gets funnier. A real person becomes larger than life. Eventually, the original event can become almost unrecognizable.

That’s one reason folklorists study these stories. They’re not simply trying to figure out whether a particular legend is true. The story itself can tell us something about the people who told it — what they feared, what they valued, what they found funny and how they understood the world around them. 

By the late nineteenth century, folklore was beginning to be studied as an academic field. The American Folklore Society was founded in 1888, only a few decades after Thoms introduced the word. By then, scholars were recognizing that the traditions of ordinary people were worth preserving. 

But Rattlesnake Hill didn’t need scholars to make its stories meaningful. The people who lived there were already doing that. They had their community, their roads, their neighbors and their gatherings. They had the stories that belonged to the place. And eventually, they had a bear. Or at least, they had the story of one. 

Emmanuel Schwenk remained part of the Rattlesnake Hill community for decades after that newspaper account. Later accounts place his birth in 1832 and his death on June 1, 1915, at his home on Rattlesnake Hill. By then, the bear story had been around for twenty years.

More than a century later, Rattlesnake Hill appeared in modern collections of regional folklore under the name “The Beast of Rattlesnake Hill.” Somewhere along the way, the bear had changed. What began as a newspaper account of a man encountering a supposedly chained black bear had become something larger, stranger and more memorable. The bear had become a beast. And that’s the transformation that makes folklore so fascinating.

Eventually, generations who never knew Emanuel Schwenk, never walked the road he walked and never saw the hills as he did, inherited a piece of his night. Maybe the story was exaggerated. Maybe the newspaper had a little fun with it. Maybe every version that followed added something new. We may never know. But none of that changes what happened afterward. People remembered the story. They told it. And eventually, it became part of the identity of the place.

A story printed in a newspaper in 1895 is still being told more than a century later. Rattlesnake Hill is still there. The road is still there. The stories are still there, too. Perhaps that’s why old places can feel different once you know what has been said about them. The landscape may look perfectly ordinary in daylight, but somewhere beneath the roads, the houses and the trees are all the things people have carried forward — the memories, the warnings, the jokes, the mysteries and the stories that refused to disappear.

Maybe that’s all folklore ever really asks of us. Not necessarily to believe. Just to listen. Because somewhere along the road from Pottstown to Rattlesnake Hill, Emanuel Schwenk encountered a bear. Or at least, that’s the story. And after all these years, someone is still telling it.

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Want to hear more Pennsylvania folklore?

The stories don’t stop here. The Pennsylvania History & Folklore YouTube channel explores the legends, mysteries, characters and traditions that have helped shape the stories we tell about this state. If Pennsylvania folklore is your kind of thing, there are plenty more stories waiting to be discovered.