Thanks to commenter Raskos for pointing me toward Peter Costello’s exhaustive summary of lake monsters around the world. In Search of Lake Monsters is primarily about the queen of them all, Nessie herself, the Loch Ness Monster, but Costello puts her in a broad and sweeping context. She’s neither unique nor singular. She has relatives everywhere from other lochs in Scotland to North America to Australia to Europe and Asia and Africa.
Costello’s book was first published in 1974. A new edition appeared in 2015, with an introduction by cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, but it was only minimally updated. Costello, who had gone on to become an eminent literary scholar, professed himself satisfied with his work.
It is remarkable considering he began it as a teen and published it in his twenties. It’s meticulous, exacting, and detailed. He gives us report after report, example after example, and he’s thorough in his evaluation of his sources.
According to Costello, the legend of the monster in Loch Ness began in 1933 with a photo, a rash of sightings, and a fit of monster mania. The iconic image of the long-necked creature floating in the water was published in 1934, but was revealed many years later to have been a hoax. That revelation came twenty years after Costello’s book, and the 2015 edition doesn’t mention it.
Still, there are plenty of other photos and videos, not all of which have been debunked, and hundreds of reported sightings. Costello discusses them at length and in detail. They tend to be remarkably consistent, which might be ascribed to a kind of madness of crowds—people see what they expect to see.
But then he cites tales from other lakes in Scotland and Ireland, as well as in other countries and continents, and finds that there’s a common thread running through them all. These creatures, whatever they are, are large—anywhere from six feet to forty or fifty or more. They have long necks and small heads, sometimes with horns (or small ears), sometimes with a mane or a frill on the neck. The body emerges from the water in a series of humps, usually three, sometimes more, sometimes fewer. The animal may have flippers or fins, or short stumpy legs; it doesn’t appear to have a tail, or the tail is very short. It’s usually dark in color, grey or brown, and may have a lighter underside.
It lives in large, very deep, cold alpine lakes. Scotland and Ireland are full of them, and have a broad tradition of monsters in those lakes. There are similar stories around similar lakes through Scandinavia and into Russia, and in North America.
It’s generally benign, as cryptids tend to be. Often it’s seen at dawn or dusk, splashing in the water. Sometimes it emerges onto land, to the profound startlment of passersby. In other lakes, it may have a propensity for attacking and drowning hapless humans, but Nessie appears to be singularly unaggressive.
So what is it?
Costello digs deep into history and myth for an answer. He mentions the ancient tales of the Water Horse and the Kelpie and the Pooka. He goes back even further, in fact, to the dragons of the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, for an example of a four-legged, long-necked, mythical or semi-mythical beast.
One popular theory about Nessie is that she’s a Lazarus species, a survival from the age of the dinosaurs: a plesiosaur, an aquatic reptile. That’s not likely, he believes. Loch Ness and its ilk are just too cold to support a cold-blooded animal. (He doesn’t seem to know about the theory of warm-blooded dinosaurs.)
She may simply be a misidentification. Many of the sightings of dark humps far off down the lake may be odd waves, tricks of the light, logs or debris in the water. The accounts of the monster breaching the surface and rolling and bubbling may in fact be mats of vegetation rising up from the bottom and emitting gas bubbles.
Costello doesn’t like this one at all, and subjects it to some mockery. Vegetable mats, he splutters. They just aren’t common in the deep, cold lake, though he allows as how they might surface once in a very great while.
It’s possible the monster is a very large fish. A sturgeon would fit some of the stories—the dark, glistening body, the narrow head. But it doesn’t explain the frequent analogy to an overturned boat, or the long curving neck. It could be a gigantic eel; that would tick many of the boxes, though eels don’t have legs or flippers.
It’s possible some of the sightings may be of otters swimming in a line as they’re known to do. In fact the dark color, the humped back, and the small, tapered head is very otter-like. It could be a super-otter, he says. Even normal otters can be up to six feet long. Might there be an as yet unknown variety that runs to eight or ten feet or more?
One strong candidate in Costello’s opinion is a seal. The color is right; the shape is right. The surging, humping movement both on land and in the water is definitely right, as is the mention of fins or flippers and the multiple descriptions of a bifurcated tail or set of rear flippers.
But what about the neck? Seals aren’t known for their long necks. But suppose, says Costello, that this is a hitherto unknown species of very large, long-necked seal.
He is convinced that this is a mammal, not a fish or a reptile or an amphibian. It’s a radical theory for its time, when consensus tended toward the plesiosaur. A seal would explain most of the observed behaviors, the way of going, the rapid passage through the water. It would be simple enough for seals to find their way to this and other lochs from the sea.
The lack of physical evidence is a problem, but it’s pretty much universal with cryptids. Costello hopes some will be found, somewhere. There are all the photos and videos, and many of the eyewitnesses are people of good character and proven expertise. Costello believes, or wants to. He’s certainly done his homework.
I’ll be coming back to his work as I travel around the world on my own search for lake monsters. Meanwhile, I’m not sure I’m entirely on Team Seal, but it does explain a lot about the animal as it’s been described by witness after witness. As theories go, it’s not completely improbable.
