Lake Monster Mysteries (22 page)

Ireland's Lough Ree monster, ten to thirty feet long with a large, horselike head, has been sighted occasionally in the small lake. One of the most prominent sightings occurred in 1960, when three priests claimed to have seen a snakelike creature swimming near their boat, its eyes, long nose, and ears rising out of the water.

Scotland is riddled with lochs, and Loch Ness isn't the only body of water boasting beastie sightings. Loch Morar, on the west coast, is also the site of some monster mysteries, with some sources dating the first sighting to 1887 or 1895. In 1996 a diver on an expedition to the bottom of the loch found six large bones sixty feet under the surface. This finding generated speculation that the remains were of the “Morag” creature, but the bones were later identified as belonging to deer.

Ulrich Magin, a German investigator, examined reports from continental Europe, although most of his findings are in rivers and are not, strictly speaking, lake monsters. He does mention the 1982 sighting in Poland's Lake Zeegrzynski of a twenty-foot beast sporting a “slimy black head, with rabbit-like ears.” In a 1986 article in the magazine
Fortean Times,
he discusses a monster mystery in Switzerland's Urner Lake. On August 25, 1976, a group of about sixty people near the resort town
of Brunnen saw a monster twenty to twenty-five feet long surface three times. The long-necked beast, described as looking like a dragon, was quickly dubbed “Urnie.” A German photographer snapped a photo, and the sighting was reported by newspapers worldwide. A week later, Urnie was revealed as a hoax: it was a constructed model created for a Swiss television program and had actually been in the lake for a week before being noticed.

Argentina's Nahuel Huapi is reportedly home to a giant creature described as thirty-three feet long, multihumped, and green. The beast, called “Nahuelito,” has at times been supposed to be a plesiosaur (as have Champ, Nessie, and others) or, oddly enough, possibly even a pterodactyl. One investigator suggested that some of the sightings might actually be of a large duck native to the area. These ducks have a reptilian appearance, and a photograph of one looks “for all the world like a submerged monster hump throwing up fountains of spray” (Magin 1996, 28).

Turkey's Lake Van is supposedly home to a slimy, black, fifty-foot horned beast. Reports date back only to 1995, and in 1997, a man claimed to have captured “Vanna” on videotape.

“Wenbo,” a lake creature in Tibet, was seen most notably in 1980. It is one of only a handful of lake monsters blamed for murder, reportedly responsible for the disappearance of a missing villager and a yak.

A so-called Chinese Nessie is said to exist in northeastern China's Tianchi Lake. In 2002 hundreds of tourists reported a horse-headed object with a black body in the water about thirty feet from shore. One witness said that the creature looked just like the model on display at a nearby tourist museum.

“Issie,” of Lake Ikedo-ko in Kagoshima, is one of Japan's best-known lake monsters. It is black, possibly striped, and sixteen to ninety
feet long with two humps. Issie was first photographed in 1978; in 1998 a long, dark object was videotaped in the lake.

Belief in the “Migo” monster of Lake Dakatua on New Britain, an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, was boosted in early 1994 when a Japanese television crew visited the lake in search of the creature. The team interviewed eyewitnesses, dispatched divers, and employed video and sonar equipment. These efforts paid off when videotape captured an unknown creature (or creatures) displaying unusual movements and characteristics. Several video clips were analyzed by such researchers as Karl Shuker, Darren Naish, and Ben Roesch, and despite early pronouncements that seemed to confirm a mystery creature, the scenes were later determined to be of known animals: dolphins in one case, and mating crocodiles in another.

Several of Africa's many lakes are said to contain fearsome and unknown creatures, including Lake Victoria. “Lukwata,” as the monster is sometimes called, is twenty to thirty feet long with dark, smooth skin and a distinctively round head. Lukwata is reportedly unusually aggressive (for a lake monster, anyway) and has been known to attack fishermen and boats. Other lakes in Ethiopia and Chad have their own beast, “Auli,” which is said to be sheep sized; researchers suspect that a manatee might account for some of the sightings. The mokele-mbembe is a dinosaurian monster with elephantine feet and a long, snakelike head said to inhabit some of Africa's remotest areas, especially the lakes and rivers in Cameroon and Congo. Stories have circulated that pygmies at Lake Tele killed and ate one of the creatures—a fatal mistake, since the flesh is terribly toxic. Thus, sadly (and conveniently), no eyewitnesses live to tell the tale.

Brewer, Jacqueline. 1973. Famous Fredericton frog dates back to city's founding.
Daily Gleaner
(Fredericton, N.B.), March 30.

Brief history of the Magaguadavic
. N.d. [St. George, N.B.]: Magaguadavic Watershed Management Association.

Brown, Arch. 2005. Interview by Joe Nickell.

Clayton, Jerry. 2005. Interview by Benjamin Radford.

Coleman frog. N.d. Vertical files, York Sunbury Historical Society Museum and Fredericton Public Library.

Colombo, John Robert. 1988.
Mysterious Canada: Strange sights, extraordinary events, and peculiar places
. Toronto: Doubleday Canada.

Costello, Peter. 1974.
In search of lake monsters
. New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan.

Eberhart, George. 2002.
Mysterious creatures: A guide to cryptozoology
. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO.

Encyclopaedia Britannica
. 1960. S.v. “Taxidermy.”

Gaudet, Sam. 1999. Interview by Joe Nickell, June 27.

The Guinness book of records
. 1999. N.p.: Guinness Publishing, 122.

Magin, Ulrich. 1986. A brief survey of lake monsters of continental Europe.
Fortean Times
46 (spring): 53.

———. 1996. Duck! It's a plesiosaur.
Fortean Times
92 (November): 28.

Martinez, Lionel. 1988.
Great unsolved mysteries of North America
. Secaucus, N.J.: Chartwell Books, 6–7, 12.

McKinney, Mary. N.d. Canadianecdote. Clipping from
Maclean's
. In vertical files, York Sunbury Historical Society Museum and Fredericton Public Library.

Meurger, Michel. 1986. The jabberwocks of Quebec.
Fortean Times
46 (spring): 41.

Murray, Jan. 1999. Interview by Joe Nickell, June 27.

Nickell, Joe. 1995.
Entities: Angels, spirits, demons, and other alien beings
. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 241–43.

———. 1999. The Silver Lake serpent.
Skeptical Inquirer
23, no. 2 (March–April):18–21.

Palmer, Richard. 2001. Did sea serpents once inhabit the Great Lakes?
Crooked Lake Review
120 (summer).

Phillips, Fred H. 1982. Coleman frog a fake?
Daily Gleaner
(Fredericton, N.B.), April 22.

St. George, New Brunswick, the granite town. 1999. Brochure published by town of St. George.

Sansom, E. W. 1961. Letter to J. Winslow, November 20. In vertical files, York Sunbury Historical Society Museum and Fredericton Public Library.

Walsh, Dave. 1999. A monstrous farce.
Fortean Times
117 (December): 48.

Wilson, Kelly. 1999. Interview by Joe Nickell, June 27.

Wilson, Tony. 1999. Interview by Joe Nickell, June 27.

As our investigations have made clear, the existence of lake monsters is doubtful, for a variety of reasons. We often speak of Nessie, Ogopogo, Champ, and other lake monsters as single creatures, but for some hitherto unknown species to reproduce, there must be a sizable breeding herd. This means that each lake should hold not one but perhaps a dozen or more creatures—presumably making a verifiable encounter more than ten times more likely than if there were just one individual. Loch Ness, for example, is a little more than twenty miles long; how can a dozen giant creatures share the same lake and somehow escape decades of extensive sonar searches? A floating or beached carcass should eventually be encountered; none has. Clear and convincing photos or video should exist; none do. Sightings, legends, and ambiguous photos only serve to whet the investigator's appetite for the main meal, the real proof—which never comes.

Hundreds or even thousands of lakes have been reported to hold monsters at one time or another. Even if only a small number actually do, that is still hundreds of mysterious creatures somehow managing to avoid leaving a shred of hard scientific evidence of their existence. It also seems unlikely that there would be some multimillion-year-old creature—such as the plesiosaur—in lakes that, like America's Lake Champlain, are only about ten thousand years old.

Often, the “lake monster” label is simply a catchall term for “something strange” in the water. Although many sane and sincere people report seeing lake leviathans, in all likelihood they are encountering something that they misperceive as such. We have given many examples
in this book, including otters, eels, logs, and beavers. These eyewitnesses are not foolish; they are subject to the same psychological and perceptual errors that plague all of us from time to time. And of course, there will always be a few cranks, wags, and hoaxers who muddy the truth about lake monsters.

The lure of the unexplained is powerful, especially in a shrinking world where so many life-forms have gone extinct. Like Bigfoot, lake monsters—if they exist—could provide a tangible link with the remote past, just as extraterrestrials may provide a connection with the future. For some people, apparently, imaginary creatures are better than none at all.

This wishful thinking helps explain certain cultural aspects of the lake monster phenomenon that we observed. For instance, Ben calls attention to the many similarities between two relatively nearby lakes, Lake Champlain and Lake Memphremagog, that we investigated. The two mysteries developed “almost in parallel,” he points out, with both dating back a century or more. Moreover, at each lake the respective monster's description evolved with the changing public concept of what such creatures should look like: the “sea serpent” model morphing into the more “scientific” one of a prehistoric aquatic creature (as I discussed in
chapter 2
).

In part because of Lake Champlain's larger size and greater accessibility, “Memphre is a poorer cousin to the more famous Champ,” Ben says—a “Champ Lite,” so to speak. He notes that after Sandra Mansi published her famous photo of Champ, there was an upsurge in sightings on Lake Champlain, with some interest spilling over to Lake Memphremagog. Just two years later, Barbara Malloy—like Mansi, a middle-aged Vermont woman—would make her first sighting of Memphre. Lake monster sightings almost invariably correspond with the public's interest in the creatures, suggesting a social and cultural engine (not necessarily a group of unknown beasts) behind the reports.

The idea of lake monsters has become so prevalent that they are even “seen” where they are most unlikely to exist, as is the case with at least two lakes from my native Kentucky. Cryptozoologist Roy P. Mackal's
Searching for Hidden Animals
(1980, 220) mentions Her
rington Lake and Kentucky Lake as the subjects of monster reports that may be worthy of investigation. And George Eberhart s
Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology
(2002, 682) specifically cites a fifteen-foot “prehistoric creature” that was reportedly seen several times in Herrington Lake in 1972. The problem with these reports is that both lakes are
man made
! According to
The Kentucky Encyclopedia
(Kleber 1992, 532), Herrington Lake was formed in 1925 and Kentucky Lake in 1944. How—monster promoters should be asked—can lakes of such recent vintage and construction be populated with prehistoric or exotic animals? It seems that a romantic belief in monsters may be resistant to evidence. Such is the lure of lake monster mysteries. We too have heard its siren call.

Eberhart, George. 2002.
Mysterious creatures: A guide to cryptozoology.
Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO.

Kleber, John. 1992.
The Kentucky encyclopedia.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Mackal, Roy P. 1980.
Searching for hidden animals.
New York: Doubleday.

Sifting through information on lake monsters is made somewhat difficult by sloppy scholarship. Many writers get details wrong, and reports are often contradictory. I encountered this most notably in my research of the Lake Champlain mystery. By far the most common misconception about Champ is that the creature was sighted by the person it was (indirectly) named for: explorer Samuel de Champlain.

As is often the case, consulting original sources shed light on the mystery. Michel Meurger devotes an appendix in
Lake Monster Traditions
to reprinting the full, original account and sets the record straight: “Under the magic wand of sensationalism, the simple note of an inexperienced naturalist becomes ‘rare testimony,' and the explorer becomes godfather to a monster he never saw!” (Meurger and Gagnon 1988, 270). Whether due to ignorance, poor scholarship, or mystery mongering, this misunderstanding is pervasive in the Champ literature, repeated by everyone from Joe Zarzynski to Dennis Hall to the Champ sighting signboard in Port Henry to a 1998
Discover
magazine article to Sandra Mansi herself.

Nature doesn't interpret itself; that task is left to investigators and scientists. Data and information are simply sterile observations and quantifications until they are given meaning and context by those examining the phenomena. In cryptozoology, because the evidence is
often ambiguous (photographs, footprints, sighting reports), it's especially important to let the evidence speak for itself and not read too much into it. Conjecture and assumptions are fine, but they should be firmly grounded and not simply based on other unconfirmed assumptions and conjecture. To do otherwise risks building an argument on a house of cards.