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If the Loch Ness Monster is the most famous such creature in the world, the earliest detailed reports of fearsome freshwater serpents in Europe come from Switzerland, in the 15th and 16th centuries. Vaguer accounts, such as that from Alsace in 1304, also exist. There are legends of lake monsters in the New World and the Antipodes that are probably far older, but these were not recorded until Europeans arrived there. And some later (and still current) American lake-monster traditions were almost certainly imported by settlers from Scandinavia, Germany and other haunts of these elusive animals. If animals they are.

Fortean literature is littered with accounts of sightings and encounters, of greater or lesser reliability, and it’s not our purpose to produce even a fraction of a catalogue here. Janet and Colin Bord’s Alien Animals (Panther 1985) contains what is still an excellent summary of the variety of lake-based creatures seen over the years from Siberia to California. [1] For the argument pursued here, there is an even more valuable chapter summarising the range of speculations on their possible nature – and that of most mysterious animals now parked, awaiting explanation, under the general heading of ‘cryptids’.


SOME LITTLE LOCAL DIFFICULTIES
For those taking the view that the long list of accounts of weird creatures in and around the world’s lakes represents a record of actual animals, the fortean naturalist faces no shortage of attendant problems to solve. What, for instance, is Nessie – often regarded as some kind of relic plesiosaur – supposed to eat? If a reptile, how does it cope with the loch’s cold waters? How do the huge creatures reported from tiny, shallow loughs in Conne­mara manage to stay hidden for most of the time, and how do they elude all attempts to trap or detect them? Why are there no carcases or even skeletons to be found? Why is there no evidence of eggs or spawn or other breeding activity? These and related questions were explored by Adrian Shine nearly three decades ago. The problems remain unresolved. [2]

Such hard, but hardly unreasonable, questions and their glaring lack of answers are at least contiguous to the hard-line scept­ical view of the phenomenon – namely, if these animals are so distinctively unlike even the rarest and most elusive, but indub­itably real species of the established taxonomies, they probably don’t exist. Once more our old friends misperception, hallucinat­ion and hoax materialise from stage left, gliding and grinning, rattling their faintly luminous bones, their tattery black cloaks flapping, as befits such creatures of the night. There is some justice in the reasoning, and on occasion this desiccated trio has no doubt had its wicked way, but as usual the argument doesn’t go far enough. As we shall see.

On a considerably less material level, there abounds a host of paranormalist ‘explanations’ for the appearance and sometimes bizarre behaviour of lake monsters. In terms of everyday logic, these don’t get us very far, since most of them account for one unknown by calling on another, with all the difficulties of underlying, unexamined assumptions (and sturdy disregard of Occam’s Razor) that that entails. We shall not mock just yet, however, for buried in these quasi-explanations there may be a clue to what is really going on in lake-monster accounts.

Janet and Colin Bord (op. cit. p172) draw attention to something many lake monsters have in common with other ‘alien’ animals: their oft-reported incompleteness, which suggests to the authors that they may in some sense be spectral. “It should be noted,” they write, “that the whole of a water monster is rarely seen, but… it is always possible to say that the rest of it was hidden by the water. We cannot know whether this is the case, or whether the beast has only partially materialised.”

If they are materialisations, the Bords point out, they are not ‘ghosts’ in any conventional sense, since they resemble no dead or extinct creature that we would recognise. So, perhaps, they are tulpoid creatures, concentrations of communal ideas of what a lake monster ‘ought to’ look like, that manifest as independent entities. But how many of us, we wonder, think a lake monster ‘ought to’ look like a cross between a serpent and a horse, as is so often reported? The Bords also survey the notions that lake monsters and other cryptids are teleportations from elsewhere, holograms, or just possibly the product of black-magic conjurations. All or any of these manifestations may feed off ‘earth energies’, electromagnetic forces, or even the human libido. Then again, they may be what cryptozoologists say they are: real creatures as yet unrecognised by science.


NEITHER HERE NOR THERE
Muddying the waters (so to speak) yet further, lake monsters are protean: Nessie “varies from sighting to sighting. Sometimes several humps are seen; and sometimes it resembles an upturned boat”. (One witness even thought the creature, which he had spotted crossing a road, resembled a camel.) Another account suggests that Nessie conn­ects to a mythical or magical realm. The precise number of stones in some megalithic circles is said to be uncountable. So with Nessie: “In 1933, Mr WU Goodbody… saw the monster and tried to count its humps. His daughters tried too, but they could never make their totals agree, or stay the same.”

The part-real, part-unreal, slightly tricksterish nature of the monsters is reflected too in their invulnerability to gunfire. Provocatively, the Bords link this to an intuition commonly mentioned by witnesses that what they are seeing is somehow intrinsically evil, inducing “a mixture of wonder, fear and repulsion” in the words of legendary fortean Doc Shiels. Others have described lake monsters as “creepy”, “horrible”, “an abomination”, and “obscene”. Local people, familiar with folk wisdom concerning the monsters, recognise this diabolical tendency too, as the Earl of Malmesbury noted when recording his ghillie John Stuart’s sighting. The Earl, in the best traditions of the landed gentry, remarked that he “wished he could get a shot at it”, to which the ghillie responded: “Perhaps your Lordship’s gun would misfire.” The implication, one feels, is that it might blow up in his lordship’s well-tended aristocratic face.

So – the more recherché of the Bords’ speculations apart, and from which for all one knows they might want to distance themselves today – we can discern in these traditions a sense, or an image, of lake monsters that strongly suggests that the cryptozoologists are looking in the wrong place in their quest to find flesh-and-blood animals of an exotic nature. A more fruitful approach than taking witness accounts of a “strange phenomenon” at face value might be to look at the history of accounts of that phenomenon, and see if it tells us anything.

Such a study, we are pleased to report, has been carried out. Michel Meurger’s Lake Monster Traditions, with contributions from Claude Gagnon, was published in 1988 by none other than Fortean Tomes. It is perhaps the most incisive account of lake monsters yet to see print. Ever since, as with many another genuinely useful and original contribution to fortean thought, interested parties have mostly politely acknowledged its existence, but carefully disregarded its argument. [3] Here is an attempt to redress the balance. We hope M. Meurger will forgive the inevitable simplification of his thesis because of the space we have available; and will forgive our account for being coloured – if, we hope, not inaccurately – by our own inferences and understanding.


THE MYTHICAL LANDSCAPE
That certain natural environments are laden with unbidden assoc­iations is still (just) apparent even to the modern mechan­ised, electronified and reified sensibility. This sense of other­worldliness in the air and in the fields is surely what draws trippers to Wiltshire each summer in the hope of seeing a crop circle or two and the certainty of being impressed by Stonehenge, Avebury, the whispering downs and their sleeping barrows – resting-places of long-forgotten heroes – and the knowledge that leys criss-cross the wild-seeming landscape, and that strange things still occur in this half-alien emptiness.

Imagine, then, a world in which there is no division, no portal to be broached, between the stiffness of a flint in the soil and the spirit that inhabits it. One still gets some inkling of this living world in the mediæval ballads, in which the greenwood is a fearful place, a domain where treacherous færies hide and old gods lurk in their sacred groves, as well as bears and bandits. In such a cosmos, nothing is insignificant, because everything is alive and therefore intertwined in an ecology of meaning. Even past and future intermingle. Comets, storms, floods, eclipses, the flight of an owl, are portents or punishments. Dark, isolated, and seemingly bottomless lakes are, a priori and ipso facto, what we would now call haunted. Without noticing its significance, the Bords (citing Peter Costello) note than in “an old epic poem relating the deeds of an Irish dragon slayer named Finn” (Finn Mac Cumaill; the ‘poem’ is presumably from the epic Fenian prose cycle) “a number of lake monsters… are named and referred to as phantoms”.

In his survey, whose scope, erudition and fieldwork leaves one somewhat short of breath, M. Meurger observes that the earliest accounts of lake monsters don’t identify these ‘creatures’ as biological beings, but as phantoms. They are vague and frightening, emerging (like færies and goblins) from places that instinctively, not rationally, one knows lead to and from otherworlds and underworlds, and so must harbour potential horrors. Thus it is not surprising that the early lake-monster legends feature entities that may choose to manifest as horse/dragon hybrids, giant fishes, huge logs, enormous golden rings, hideous many-headed pigs, horned serpents, or even (as occasionally with the Elbst of Lake Selisberg in Switzerland) as a flaming haystack. Nor should it be an astonishment that when they do appear, they are followed by drought, death, war, or pestilence. At its most extreme, the lake-monster tradition suggests that the emergence of the beast is a sign of imminent Apocalypse and the Day of Judgement.

M. Meurger shows how the slow evolution of the lake monster from undefined, dangerous protean presence to crypto­zoological mystery – and beyond, to mechanical, metal, unidentified sub­marine object – shadows the evolution of Western thinking about the natural world. The magically immaterial entity becomes, by the early Renaissance, an object of some sort, with a corporeal reality, concerning which witness statements may be taken and evidence pondered. The ‘object’ and the ‘facts’ are part of the real world, where sticks and stones break bones; on another level, the uncontrollable mystery remains a threat, an unpredictable intrusion of the wild into the security of civilisation. The emerg­ence of the Enlightenment, and its high ideal of a world entirely explicable to pure reason (given facts enough, and time) and amenable to urbane and rational administration, saw lake monsters dismissed as our moth-eaten acquaintances misperception, hallucination and hoax – although their unruly nature (proof of superstition, the ubiquity of irrationalism, the gullibility of simple-minded ‘natives’) if anything gained in menace.

Somewhat over a century later, a still-unresolved reaction from the enforced calm of the Enlightenment not only found distinguished physicists nodding sagely at stunts pulled in séance rooms, but cryptozoologists sifting ‘data’ and mounting expeditions on what amounted to hearsay evidence. Then, as now. As M. Meurger makes clear, the scientists (particularly sceptical naturalists who reduce dragons to pterodactyls and mermen to monk seals) and the cryptozoologists unwittingly occupy common ground in their faith in objective, demonstrable facts – alias ‘real animals’. “Cryptozoologists believe in a hidden Nature; sceptics reduce the question to a misinterpreted Nature,” as he puts it. We assume that those he calls “occultists” – who “conjure up a transcendental Nature” – are those willing to entertain the more outré hypotheses outlined by the Bords and summarised above; rather like those earnest scientists at Victorian séances.


IN A MAGIC LAND
Looking to folklore for a better handle on the lake-monster enigma, M. Meurger observes that the alleged ‘creatures’ appear in what he dubs ‘mythical landscapes’. In other words, the context of lake monster sightings follows a certain pattern, indicating that they form part of an ‘authorised myth’ that give the individual reports a particular authenticity. The parallel with the above-mentioned complex of belief, expectation, folklore and topography of Wiltshire is stark and barely needs emphasis. The lake-monster’s mythical landscape, found all over the world, embraces in its complete form the following motifs: a bottomless, or at least immeasurably deep, and impenetrably dark, lake; this connects via underground channels with nearby lakes or the sea; reports of luminous phenomena; caverns above or below the waterline for the monster’s lair; currents, eddies and whirlpools associated with the monster’s presence; a tendency to sudden and violent changes in the weather (which would help to explain the resident monsters’ portentous tendencies); and about it hang tales of divers, fishermen, and others, including animals, swall­owed up by the waters, never to be seen again, dead or alive.

In such a milieu, says M. Meurger, it is not that specific sightings of anomalous animals create the legend; rather, the individual witness accounts confirm the perceived strangeness of the place – its potential to create legend – as well as the legend itself. He clearly suspects that many of the characteristics of monster-haunted lakes have been imported, and applied or presumed, by immigrant communities, both in the New World and in Scotland (Old World, but long since colonised by Scandinavians, splinters of whose language remain alive and well even outside Celtic-speaking areas, as they do in north-east England). This is plaus­ible, but leaves the problem of what generates the individual witness accounts.

There are naturalistic explanations: actual logs, standing waves, very large fish. Some early and some modern ‘sightings’ may be visionary experiences, engendered perhaps by such nat­ural phenomena and/or perhaps by the reputation of the place. We don’t quibble with any of that, but it does seem to us that M. Meurger underestimates the power even in the present day of particular locations to induce a sense of the otherworldly, the misshapen, of lingering evil. We know someone who visited bleak Wastwater (in England’s Lake District) and felt it to be stuffed with the dead. This desolate ‘lake’ is a man-made reservoir; it has no age-old mythology attached to it. [4] Within a decade of this intuitive sense of dread being voiced, corpses, one a murder victim dumped before our acquaintance visited, were fished from its waters. We have no objection in following M. Meurger’s suggest­ion that it is out of such intuitions of discomfort (especially when confirmed!) that the dominant mythology is sanctioned and fortified. Our essential point, though, is that it is in the particular location and the individual apprehension that these things begin and are maintained, at least as much through general prior acquaintance with local lore.

Patrick Harpur spurns the need for prior knowledge of the local tradition (which he ironically calls ‘ideology’) more abruptly and on different grounds. “Lake monsters seem to be truly archetypal,” he writes (op. cit. p137), “less culturally based, as it were, than geographically based – certain lakes appear to contain the ‘autonomous phenomena’ which Meurger rejects. These are… autonomous daimons – archetypal images – which rise up out of the world-soul, briefly embodied by the lake.” Apart from joining the long queue of those who’d explain one oddity by means of another dubious concept, Mr Harpur seems here to be confusing (as M. Meurger overlooks) the particular and the general.

And besides: where, in Mr Harpur’s scheme, do the mystery submarines, elegantly predicted by M. Meurger’s hypothesis, fit?


PHANTOMS OF STEEL
M. Meurger makes a good case for our collective view of lake monsters altering with cultural shifts in the consensus view of reality. Over a much shorter span of time, ufologists have noticed a similar pattern in their own phenomenology, which they call “cultural tracking”. In neither case does this help us pin down the nature of the phenomenon itself, if indeed there is one that could be called in any sense ‘objective’. As we’ve suggested, this may in any case be the wrong direction in which to look for an answer to the problem at hand. In lake-monster lore, we do see cultural tracking popping up in some instances, sometimes contemporan­eously with the reported (or rumoured) monster, sometimes in hindsight.

Loch Ness is not the most interesting instance of this happen­ing, but it is suggestive. In 1970, there appeared a Sherlock Holmes movie (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, dir. Billy Wilder) that ‘explained’ the incumbent monster as a disguise for a small submarine, crewed by dwarves. At the back of our minds these ‘diminutive people’ are indelibly associated with elves, færies, goblins… the whole humanoid population of otherworldly realms. So despite the film’s materialist bias, it retains a delicate link to the magical realm. Some years later, someone came out of their bit of woodwork to proclaim that the famous ‘surgeon’s photograph’ of Nessie taken in 1934 was a hoax (what a surprise) involving a model submarine. Myth becomes monster becomes machine. And remains myth.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. We live in a machine age. We should expect this kind of shift in the imagery of a legend. Perhaps the most intriguing instance of this cultural/phenomeno­logical entanglement has occurred at Lake Pend Oreille in northern Idaho, where lake-monster stories began to surface in about 1944, which just happens to be about when the US Navy established a training base there for would-be submariners. After World War II, the US Navy maintained a secret(ive) establishment at the lake to research ways and means of making submarines silent when submerged. Most of this involved large scale models (up to 30m long), which in their enthusiasm would occasionally fly out of the water to heights of 12m or more – giving rise to rumours that nuclear missiles were being test-launched from the placid waters. Local twitchiness became endemic.

Patrick Huyghe, an inveterate and incurable digger-and-poker after anomalies and indubitably an honest reporter, heard stories of monsters in Pend Oreille, knew about the research establishment, and wondered if the US Navy had not set off such tales to cover its clandestine activities in the lake. [5] Reasonable hypo­thesis, but Mr Huyghe found little to substantiate it. One (perhaps founding) monster story had its origins in a newspaper hoax. In M. Meurger’s treatise, we’re told (p289ff) that lake-monster stories at Pend Oreille go back no further than 1944. This might substantiate the rumours discussed by Mr Huyghe, but matters are murkier than that. For M. Meurger found that by the 1980s the lake had acquired almost all the characteristics of the lake monster’s mythical landscape: bottomless depths (in fact the depth of the lake was known), a channel to a neighbouring lake, fishermen’s tales of a huge uncatchable resident fish, mysterious whirlpools – and so on. M. Meurger gives no indication that any of this is based on cultural transmission. Is this kind of thing hard-wired into our brains? If so, the lake-monster story is set to run and run.




Notes
1 For those interested in more up-to-date literature on lake-monster sightings, the following should be useful: John Kirck: In the domain of the lake monsters, Key Porter, 1998; Loren Coleman & Patrick Huyghe: The field guide to lake monsters, sea serpents and other myst­ery denizens of the deep, Jeremy P Tarcher/Penguin, 2003; and Benjamin Bradford & Joe Nickell: Lake monster mysteries, University Press of Kentucky, 2006.

2 Adrian Shine: “A very strange fish”, The Unexplained, Orbis, 1980, pp241–5. After surveying the possible candidate phyla, the article indicates that from an ecological point of view Nessie ought to be a fish, although the creature’s reported morphology would contradict that. Mr Shine concludes: “If it is an amphibian, how did it invade the loch in the first place? If a reptile, how does it cope with the cold? If a mammal, how does it remain so elusive? And if it is a fish, it is indeed a very strange fish.”

3 An honourable exception is Patrick Harpur, in Daimonic Reality (Viking Arkana, 1994; see p131ff). Mr Harpur’s quibbles with M. Meurger tend to veer into quasi-mystical assertions derived from taking Jung’s writings more seriously than they deserve; at other times they seem to stem from inattention to what M. Meurger is actually telling us.  But see below.

4 It is interesting that – so far as we know – the natural lakes of the region, such as Coniston and Windermere, have no monster traditions. They are infested daily by sailors (some crewing quite hefty yachts), water-skiers, swimmers, fishermen, day-trippers (what the Welsh would call groclau), and the occasional candidate for a water speed record, and edged by sizeable towns. Seen from the right places, they are spectacularly beautiful and, despite the inhospitable mountains ringing them, far from creepy. As unlike Wastwater or the isolated Connemara loughs as one could imagine, in fact. Which may be relevant…

5 Patrick Huyghe: “Deep Secrets”, The Anomalist No 5 (Summer 1997), pp8–27.