Gargoyles: Stone Guardians, Rain Gutters, and the Ones That Move

Look up, next time you pass an old church in the rain, and you will see the whole joke: the monster on the parapet is spitting on you. That is its job. Every gargoyle, strictly speaking, is a drainpipe.

The word comes from the French gargouille, meaning throat or gullet, the same root that gives us gargle. Medieval masons carved long-necked figures that threw rainwater clear of the walls, because water running down a limestone facade eats the mortar and streaks the stone. The monsters that merely sit and glare, with no waterworks inside, are properly called grotesques, though almost nobody outside architecture school bothers with the distinction. Both kinds crowd the great Gothic churches of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, and both raise the obvious question of why the house of God is decorated with demons.

The dragon of Rouen and other explanations

Folklore has a tidy answer, and it is worth stating plainly that it is folklore. In the legend of La Gargouille, a dragon terrorizes the country around Rouen until the seventh-century bishop Romanus subdues it; the beast is burned, but its fire-hardened head and neck will not burn, so they are mounted on the church wall as a warning. Medieval churchmen offered their own theories: the carvings frightened evil away, or reminded an illiterate congregation that damnation waits outside the church while salvation lives inside. Bernard of Clairvaux, in the twelfth century, complained about the fashion for carved monsters, which at least proves the fashion was real and controversial in its own day. Gargoyles also belong to a wider family of uncanny church carving, alongside the foliage-faced Green Man and the frankly startling sheela-na-gig figures, none of which the official theology ever fully explains.

The most famous gargoyles are Victorian

Here is the detail that surprises people: the brooding chimeras of Notre-Dame de Paris, the ones on every postcard, are not medieval. They were designed in the 1840s and 1850s by the restoration architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, who rebuilt the derelict cathedral and populated its gallery with fifty-odd new creatures, including the pensive horned figure known as the Stryge. They are Gothic Revival fan fiction, executed so well that they became the template for every cartoon gargoyle since. The medieval originals had mostly eroded or been torn down; rain is patient.

The ones that reportedly move

Then there are the sightings. Reports of living gargoyles, winged, gray-skinned, crouching figures seen on rooftops or roadsides at night, surface periodically and get filed by cryptid researchers next to Mothman. In 2018 residents of Barceloneta, Puerto Rico, made international news describing a gargola, a winged gray creature blamed for animal deaths, and police logged the complaints even if zoology never produced the animal. The sober toolkit covers most cases: large owls and herons at bad angles, pareidolia doing its reliable work on shadow and stone, and the simple fact that a statue seen twice from two positions appears to have moved. What the toolkit covers less well is the occasional witness who watched one, in decent light, for longer than a startle lasts, and went to the police anyway, knowing exactly how the report would sound.

Several such accounts have been submitted by our readers and sit below this page, awaiting your verdict of True, Fake or Not sure. The stone ones, at least, will hold still while you decide.