Land-based cryptids live along the edges of the human world. They inhabit the liminal spaces, the places where humans seldom go. The forests of North America. The moors and fells of the British Isles. The high peaks and valleys of the Himalayas. The jungles of Southeast Asia. The wilds of Tasmania, and the Australian Outback. Mostly they exist in the imagination of the humans who live near them or go out hunting them. Once in a great while, they turn out to be real.
There are cryptids in the water, too—maybe even more numerous than on land. I’ll get to sea monsters in a while; in this chapter of the Bestiary I’ll be looking at cryptids who inhabit lakes and rivers. They’re all over the world, on every continent but (as far as I can find) Antarctica.
Different creatures live in different bodies of water, but they fall into a few distinct types. There are the ones that look like fish. Others—and those are numerous—are long and narrow and supple like serpents. And some are long-necked and thick-bodied, with flippers, like prehistoric plesiosaurs.
What most of them have in common is size. No minnows in that lot. Generally they’re on the large side. Many are huge. Ten, twenty, thirty feet long or more. They’re genuine monsters, at least as far as length and girth are concerned.
They are not often aggressive. If they swamp a boat, it’s as likely that the boat got in their way as that they deliberately attacked it. For the most part, they don’t want conflict with humans.
That’s true of most cryptids, actually. The ones like the chupacabra and the Black Beast of Exmoor that attack and mutilate livestock seldom turn on humans. If they’re predators, their prey tends to be wild game or, if and when they’re available, domestic animals.
Mostly they’re just there in the water. Some, like the queen of them all, the Loch Ness Monster—or Nessie as she’s known to her fans—are huge draws for the tourists. People come from all over to try to get a glimpse, to the great benefit of the local economy.
The main question always is, is this cryptid real? Or is it something more mundane? Is it a log in the water, an odd curl of wave, a misidentified fish or aquatic animal? Has human imagination and fondness for story transformed the ordinary into the legendary?
Let’s come down to the water and see what we can find. I’ll be looking at Nessie, of course—how not?—and Champ and the Bunyip and the Mokele-Mbembe, too.
Do you have a favorite lake or river monster? A local legend or bit of folklore? A particular water cryptid that you’d like me to look into? Let me know in comments, and we’ll see what we can see.
I was very intrigued by a news report about researchers encountering a sea-creature with paddle-like limbs… until I saw the word “isopod.” Ah, well.
I grew up 20 minutes from Lake Lanier, which is famous for being “haunted,” but it’s shocking there’s no cryptid reports about it!
Not really a cryptid, but something that gives hope to cryptid hunters, the coelacanth
That’s on my list, fear not. It’s an icon of cryptozoology.
The dobhar-chu, or King Otter, was sighted back in 2003. Reportedly.
There’s a whole host of lake monsters in Canada. Mostly of the plesiosaur type, I think. It would be neat to see what’s common between them.
Peter Costello’s In Search of Lake Monsters is a useful compendium – it concentrates on the Loch Ness Monster but covers a lot of other lake cryptids all over the world. It was published in 1974 but I believe that there’s an updated edition.
Thank you! I found the 2015 edition in ebook (instant gratification, no waiting).
The only cryptid that seems fairly reasonable to me has been the Lake Iliamna monster, mainly because a lot of people seem to agree that it is a whopping big sturgeon.
Yes, that makes sense to me. Sturgeon are huge and they look downright alien.
Not to mention the beast that terrorizes Redwood Cove, California, the Terrible Churnadryne! (As reported by Eleanor Cameron, in 1959.)
Lake Champlain is supposed to have “Champ,” which is a somewhat recent “rebranding” based on various reports dating back to the 18th century through recent times of some vaguely large and ferocious-looking aquatic creature(s), which many believe were probably reports of oversize gar or sturgeon. In my own experience as one who as a kid went to sleepaway camp for six years near Lake Champlain in the 1960’s, we never heard any of those stories then, which one would think, if they were ‘real,’ would have been prime campfire-tale fodder.
It’s almost as if the tourist industry created its own monster, isn’t it?
There are, of course, songs about that. Dr. Jane Robinson has two: “Nessie, Come Up” [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4BxFk5YHWs&t=1350s , lyrics – https://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/nessie-come-up.html ] and “We Can’t Find (The Creature In Loch Ness” [ https://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/nessie-come-up.html , lyrics under the video].
The third link here is a duplicate of the second.
And an aside to the mods: someone really needs to look at the code whereby links are inserted into comments – the resulting formatting is severely borked. It’s more serious on my desktop system – Firefox under Windows – where the link as posted runs beyond the intended block of text and nearly always causes a line break, and the text that’s underlined often isn’t actually clickable. But even on my mobile – Samsung Internet – we get the actual Web address in the clear following the label text, not the label text with the actual link address hidden “underneath” it.