The Monster of Lake Tahoe

 Origins of Tessie 

Lake Tahoe is a large freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains California. It is said to be 1,645 ft (501 metres) deep and about 35 Kilometres( almost 22 miles) in length

Stories of a creature in the lake were told by the   Washoe and Paiute Tribes.The indigenous people held the large creature in high regard. Sightings of something strange in the lake have emerged in more recent times. It has been nicknamed Tessie. Witnesses describe Tessie as being between 10 and 80 feet long, having a large, serpentine body "as wide as a barrel," and ranging from jet black to green. Its skin is usually described as smooth.

In the 1950s, two off-duty police officers out on the lake reported seeing a large, black hump rise from the water going the same speed as their  boat, over 60 mph .

In winter of 1979 off the dock at Homewood,three witnesses who remain anonymous claimed to see Tessie. Described as about as big around as a telephone pole and 30'-60' in length.. It was diving up and splashing down with its head/neck? into the school of fish, which were leaping out of the water ahead of it.

In the 1980s, two fishermen reported seeing a 15-foot-long (4.6 m) serpent pass underneath the surface of the water, near Cave Rock.

Several weeks after, two divers reported finding an underwater cave, and a creature shot out, leaving the silt stirred. Where the creature had been, there were two large fin-prints.

In June 1982 a pair of off-duty Reno policemen saw Tessie. Officers Kris Beebe and Jerry Jones were water-skiing in the lake in June 1982, when they saw a smooth, black thing about 18 to 30 feet long slithering along the surface. The object looked similar to the top of a Volkswagen Bug. One officer who was in the water at the time said it came up right next to him. He didn’t look twice to find out what it was as he scrambled out of the water and back into the boat.Those two officers were shaken by their encounter but when  they told people they were scoffed at. They later moved away and never have talked about what they saw in the lake again.

Reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 12, 1984 two women had seen the Lake Tahoe creature  a month earlier. Tahoe City residents Patsy McKay and Diane Stavarakas were hiking above the west shore when they spotted the creature swimming in the lake.

McKay said the beast was about 17 feet long. She watched it closely and saw it surface three times “like a little submarine.” Her companion said that the creature had a humped back, and seemed to surface in a whale-like, lethargic manner.  She was also sure that it wasn’t a diver, a log, or a large ripple.

Mickey Daniels, the local owner of the charter fishing boat Big Mack II, along with others aboard his boat, witnessed a creature creating a wake the size of a boat. Another Tahoe local resident Mike Conway, witnessed something strange  swimming in the lake the mid-80s while doing a shoot for a TV commercial.

In the late 1990s, a kayaking instructor reported seeing what looked like a green two-person kayak flip over and sink. When he approached the area in a speedboat, there were no traces of the kayak, and none of his students had reported flipping over . 

In 2004, an off-duty bartender on the Tahoe Queen took a picture of a black hump in the water, which he claims is the top of the creature's head.

Reported in the Tahoe Daily Tribune on April 29, 2005, Tessie was spotted by a Sacramento couple. They saw "a solid shape in the water with five humps along its back." The sighting occurred off Tahoe Park beach, next to Sunnyside.

In 2006 a family vacationing near Tahoe saw a large, black, creature appearing similar to a sturgeon with an upturned white nose near Lake Tahoe's dark shore. However the creature moved up-and-down instead of side-to-side like a reptile. 

Some say Tahoe Tessie is a massive sturgeon or, possibly a huge  freshwater eel. Others believe it is something more prehistoric.That further begs the question where did the creature come from? It may well have been swept into the lake by  tsunami and trapped thousands of years ago. 

Several thousand years ago, according to Richard Schweickert, a retired University of Nevada, Reno geology professor, the lake experienced just such an event.

While a specific date is hard to pinpoint, it is estimated that a tsunami struck after an earthquake in the basin about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.They found massive vertical canyons, some as deep as 200 feet, carved into the sidewall such as in Rubicon Point.

“A mass amount of water had to have been thrown out onto the shores that poured back in carving the sidewalls,” said Schweickert. “Extremely large volumes of water were pouring into the sides of the lake.”

The largest number of deep sidewall canyons is near Tahoe Keys in South Lake Tahoe.

Enormous waves may have reached the upper Truckee River Canyon before pouring back into the lake. Some countryside areas were flattened. Sediment and glacial deposits swept into the lake.

Extracts from this source:

https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/tsunami-at-lake-tahoe-researcher-says-it-could-happen-again-video/

Whitewood Lake Monster

 

Whitewood Lake, near the village of Nobber in Ireland, is popular for fishing .It  has depths in excess of 10m (30 feet) on the eastern shoreline.

In 1972 a strange creature was sighted by Dennis Barnes of Doncaster while fishing .'It was raining,' he said at the time, 'but in the area which joins the part of the lake from the River Dee, I saw something turn in the water'.He then witnessed what  appeared to be a Conger eel rise from the water.'It resembled a smaller version of what has been photographed on a number of occasions in Loch Ness,' Mr Barnes claimed. 'The part protruding from the water seemed to be about nine inches high and two foot long and was dark brown and green. It resembled an eel and although it was near to my bait it didn't bite.About 10 seconds later something frightened my son Peter out of the water where he was standing. If it was the same creature it traversed about 100 yards of water in 10 seconds.If it was an eel, he said it must have weighed up to 60lbs

About 12 years earlier, three local fisherman, Paddy O'Brien of Robertstown, Patrick Finnegan,  and David McDowell of Boynagh were reported to have seen something similar in the lake.

In 1981 there was a new sighting by local man Denis Naulty He was fishing on the lake and saw a large black creature with a head like a swan or a goose.

"On Wednesday night I saw it from 9 pm to 9.05 pm,I got a fair view of it from about 70 yards range. It seemed to be about seven feet long, has a neck of about three feet in length, has a head like a goose and seems to be black or grey in colour. It is about three feet in diameter. Bit like a big black sow"

Years earlier another local man Bert Onions saw a long object in the same lake, but he did not report it at the time due to fear of ridicule. Denis wrote to the Department of Fisheries asking for them to send a team of divers to prove the Whitewood Lake monster exists. This didn’t happen but as the water is black with poor visibility they may not have been able to search the lake.

 In 1982 some visitors from England reported seeing something in the lake but refused to be identified.They said it was about seven feet long ,head like goose and  bluish in colour.

Since then there appears to have been no other sightings. Explanations vary from a large otter or a huge eel. It is possible that some creature came up the River Dee and got into the lake but it remains a mystery.

Unicorns were real.

 

Legendary Unicorns

A Unicorn is often envisaged as an animal looking like a horse with a single horn on its forehead. The unicorn was seen  in early Mesopotamian artworks and mentioned in the ancient myths of India and China. A passage  in Ancient Greek literature by the historian Ctesias spoke of  a single-horned animal .He  described it as the size of a horse, with a white body, blue eyes, and on its forehead was a long horn coloured red at the pointed tip, black in the middle, and white at the base.There was a  cave painting found in the Hall of the Bulls at the Paleolithic Lascaux Cave showing a single horned creature. In 1866, Vasily Radlov heard  a legend among the Yakuts of Siberia of a “huge black bull” killed by a single spear. The beast was said to have a single horn so large that it had to be transported by sled. It was thought to be a myth until  fossils  came to light in Siberia.

“Elasmotherium, also known as the Giant Rhinoceros or the Giant Siberian Unicorn, is an extinct “species of rhino that lived in the Eurasian area in the Late Pliocene and Pleistocene eras. They have been documented from 2.6 million years ago, but the most recent fossils come from around 29,000 years ago. The best known of this species, the E. sibiricum , was the size of a mammoth, covered in hair, and is thought to have had a large horn protruding from its forehead, hence the title “Siberian Unicorn”. According to early estimated descriptions, the beast stood around 2 meters (6.56 ft.) tall, 4.5 meters (14.76 ft.) long, and weighted an impressive 4 tonnes.

In March 2016, a beautifully preserved skull was found in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan proving that the animal lived until the Pleistocene era, some 29,000 years ago, instead of the previously held belief that they had died out 350,000 years ago. Based on the size and condition of the skull, it has been suggested that it was a very old male, but it is uncertain how the beast died”

Source:

https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/last-siberian-unicorns-what-happened-mammoth-sized-one-horned-beasts-legend-021239?fbclid=IwAR0hZA3qA9ZA-1n__rUUZwXCNGNP0pT71rS2CRx8wXoxvSXCUhA1dWrcZ_Y

Ancient humans and these unicorns existed at the same time and these ancient unicorns were probably hunted for food.The legends may be a bit fanciful but uni-horned animals did exist and were horse like but covered in fur .There is often some truth in legends and myths and cryptozoologists can often find them useful.If ever you are told to disregard old stories, remember the unicorn.

The Coosa River Alabama Mystery Creature

 

Coosa River Monster

The Coosa River is a tributary of the Alabama River in the states of Alabama and Georgia USA. The river is about 280 miles (450 km) long and around 90% of the Coosa River's length is located in Alabama.The Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee peoples, who lived along the Coosa River before they were driven west, told stories of seeing monstrous serpents and other creatures in the river.The stories became real in the 1800s when several people reported seeing something huge in the river.

The first official report was a letter in 1816. The letter stated that a number of Saint Clair County settlers near Ten Islands had killed a sea monster that appeared ill and found half on the shore and half in the water. When they open up the creature  it had recently eaten a human ,his canoe, a deer, a bow with arrows and a rifle. The beast itself was not described in any detail.That wasn’t the end of the story and sightings of another creature were reported in 1817 and 1818.Then the monster appeared again when a Mrs. Martin, who lived near Foster, told of how terrified she was in 1862 when she saw  what looked like  a monster in the river. In the same year, Judge Lemuel Standifer was out  in a rowboat near Rome, when suddenly there was a noise sounding like rolling thunder  behind him. When he turned, Standifer saw what he thought was a serpentine head about 40 yards away, slowly sinking beneath the water’s surface.

Then in June 1877, a local newspaper reported that Mr. M. L. Foster of Etowah County, a respected citizen, had seen a “Sea Monster of the Coosa” in the vicinity of Ball Play Creek. Foster was setting out bank hooks for fishing  near the mouth of the creek when his attention was diverted to what looked like a man, standing in a slow drifting boat alongside the opposite bank. Foster decided to cross the river to greet the man .Then to Fosters  amazement,as he got even  closer to  the figure  he found that he was looking at some sort of monster.This was the report in the local newspaper:

...As he approached sufficiently near to see it distinctly, to his horror it proved to be a living monster or serpent, with head and neck erect, extending out of the water some three or four feet, its head resembling a horses head, large glaring eyes, and a mouth distended, showing a tongue of fiery red. The monster or serpent exhibited no signs of fear, but glared directly at him as it passed, and unprepared as he was, he thought discretion the better part of valor, and beat a hasty retreat to the opposite bank from which he watched it moving along like a man in a boat, showing now and then portions of its back until it reached a point opposite Thornton’s log yard, where it gave a plunge and disappeared from sight. Mr. Foster is an entirely trustworthy and reliable gentleman, well known in his community, and intelligent, and his statements may be relied upon. That he saw some monster there is no doubt in his own mind, but the improbability of the story has caused him to be very reticent about any statement he made on the subject.

 

A Captain J.M. Elliott reported seeing a mysterious leviathan drifting along the river  near Rome the same year 1877. Green Rasbury told of seeing a strange black creature near the mouth of Wills Creek, where the creature splashed from one bank of the Coosa to the other. John Burgess reported that he spotted a similar creature in the same locality.Each person reported it was  large, 15 to 20 feet long ,serpent-like, covered with scales and with  large fins.On June 25, a party of raftsmen saw the creature when it appeared two miles below Gadsden., Alabama. It approached the raft and the men threw sticks at it to scare it away. The men said it had a white belly and large knots on its back. A young man on the raft became so frightened that it became necessary to hold him to keep him aboard.Local newspapers admonished parents to keep their children away from the Coosa that year.Then the reports stopped and the monster seems to have disappeared.

 In June 1882 ,a news reporter who had spent an afternoon in a rowboat on the  Coosa, said he saw before his eyes a huge black mass, resembling a monster, rising slowly from the depths. He discovered on getting closer that the sea monster was only “a great mass of leaves and weeds” evidently thrown up from the bottom of the river by the accumulation of gases beneath the mass. He claimed it was the explanation for the monster. However the mass could not move under its own violation as the creature had been reported as seen to do.

There have been reports when the Neely-Henry Dam was under construction at Ohatchee, divers surfaced with stories about giant catfish as large as a man swimming on the bottom of the Coosa River. Riverboat captains reported seeing giant fish in the Coosa River in Etowah County. Could the monster have simply been a giant fish? In 2015 Aaron Churchwell, of Rome, landed a record-setting flathead catfish that weighed 46-lbs., 6.4-ozs. on Sept. 16^th  fishing on the Coosa River. So Giant fish are not unknown. The description given by all those who reported the monster sounds more like a snake than a fish. It remains a mystery.

Happy New Year

 By now most people in the world will have passed into 2021.I wish you all the very best this year can give you. There is hope and by summer many of us may be able to get back to something approaching normal life.Once people are able to travel again there will be more cryptid sightings reported and may be new species discovered. Until then take care and keep safe .(posts will resume in a day or two.)