Great Salt Lake, located in the northern part of the state of Utah USA. The lake is the largest remnant of Lake Bonneville, a pluvial lake which covered much of western Utah
in prehistoric times. Fish live in the freshwater marshes and inlets
around the area , but no fish species can survive in the lake's salty
water. The high salinity of the lake makes it uninhabitable for all but a
few species, including brine shrimp, brine flies, and several forms of
algae. The migratory birds feed on the flies. The present lake is about
75 miles long and 35 miles wide, with a maximum depth of 33 feet (11
metres) .
Early explorers thought the lake was an inland extension of the Pacific Ocean
through an underground tunnel , or that a river connected the lake to
the ocean. The indigenous people told early settlers that the lake was
inhabited by a terrible monster with an enormous head.
In the 1840s, a certain Brother Bainbridge reported seeing a monster with a dolphin-like body in the lake near Antelope Island.
The Corinne Reporter stated that in 1870 many cattle belonging to the LDS Church had disappeared from Antelope Island where the church kept its herd. The Reporter suggested that some people thought a subterranean cavern connected Bear Lake and the Great Salt Lake, and that a migratory Bear Lake Monster was responsible for the disappearance of the cattle.
Then in 1877 The Corinne Record published the report of a monster located off Monument Point on the northern shores of the Great Salt Lake.
The newspaper claimed that salt boilers working the night shift for
Barnes & Co. had seen something terrifying. They claimed to have
seen a large monster with a body like a crocodile and a horse’s head in
the lake. J.H. McNeil of Kelton, Box Elder County was with many other
Barnes and Co. Salt Works employees when they heard noises from the
lake and looked up to see:"A huge mass of hide and fin rapidly approaching, and when within a few yards of the shore it raised its enormous head and uttered a terrible bellow ... (It was) a great animal like a crocodile or alligator ... but much larger ... It must have been seventy-five feet long, but its head was not like an alligator's -- it was more like a horse's."
The men ran to the mountains and didn't come back down until daylight. They were horrified when they returned to see large rocks turned over and the ground badly torn up along the trail taken by the monster. The editor of the Record vouched for the correspondent as 'a man whose veracity cannot be impeached.' .
A Provo newspaper in 1890 reported a pod of whales had been spotted swimming in the
Great Salt Lake.
They were supposedly offspring of a pair of young whales planted there
15 years earlier. (whether they could have survived in such highly
saline water is debateable)
There are reports of lake creatures from several Utah lakes including Bear lake :
However I have my doubts about anything surviving in the high salinity of Salt Lake but it could of course been just passing through on it’s way through the wetlands to another lake. The Utah
lakes stories all arose at a similar time which people put down to a
media hoaxes , but that does not explain more recent sightings on some
of the lakes. What do you think Salty monster or hoax?
An article about mythical monsters in The Dead Sea , another high saline body of water :
Int. J. Salt Lake Res. 1(2) (1992) 1-8. The Dead Sea monster. Arie Nissenbaum
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