Loch Morar monster Morag sightings uncovered

Early accounts of the Loch Ness Monster’s lesser-known cousin have been uncovered by researchers.

Morag is a mysterious creature said to inhabit the depths of Loch Morar, in the Lochaber area of the Highlands.

Alexander Carmichael, a prolific gatherer of folklore at the turn of the last century, gathered stories about her from people living near the loch.

His scripts have been uncovered by the Carmichael Watson project at the University of Edinburgh library.

The writings, thought to date from 1902, paint a conflicting view of Morag.

On the one hand, she is presented as a mermaid-like character with flowing hair, while another description paints her as a grim reaper whose sighting was viewed as a death omen.

Dr Donald Stewart, a senior researcher on the project, discovered the texts while leafing through a “mad mixture” of folklore collected by Carmichael over 50 years.

“We were so pleased when we found them, it was just totally unexpected,” he said.

In the first text, Carmichael states: “Morag is always seen before a death and before a drowning.”

A second text reads: “There is a creature in Loch Morar and she is called Morag. She is never seen save when one of the hereditary people of the place dies.

“The last time she was seen was when Aeneas Macdonnell died in 1898.

“The Morag is peculiar to Loch Morar. She is seen in broad daylight and by many persons, including church persons.

“She appears in a black heap or ball slowing and deliberately rising in the water and moving along like a boat water-logged.

“The Morag is much disliked and is called by many uncomplimentary terms.”

A final description, penned by Carmichael at a later date, retains Morag’s association with death but sees her take on more human characteristics.

‘Great distress’

He wrote: “Like the other water deities, she is half-human, half-fish. The lower portions of her body is in the form of a grilse and the upper in the form of a small woman of highly developed breasts with long flowing yellow hair falling down her snow white back and breast.

“She is represented as being fair, beautiful and very timid and never seen save when one of the Morar family dies or when the clan falls in battle.

“Then she is seen rushing about with great speed and is heard wailing in great distress, bemoaning and weeping the loss of the House of Morar laid desolate.

“The Morag has often brought out of their houses at night the people living along the shores of the lake and in the neighbourhood of her haunts, causing much anxiety to the men and much sore weeping to the women.”

Carmichael, who became a figurehead for the celtic artistic movement, originally wrote the texts in Gaelic.

He is thought to have spent only a couple of days in the area of Morar and did not claim to see Morag for himself. His main source of information about the monster appears to be a local named Ewan MacDougall.

The first text was unearthed by Dr Stewart in 2011 and he later happened upon the other two.

Speaking about the findings for the first time, he said: “Clearly, there’s something going on in Loch Morar, whatever it is.

“People make sense of it in different ways, depending on who sees it, what they’re feeling at the time and how the story comes down from tradition afterwards.

“I think the texts are pretty exciting. They give us a window back to how people saw this monster well over 100 years ago. They’re the first reported sightings that we have.

“It shows that there were other monsters vying for popularity and Nessie happened to win out in the end. But there were a lot more of them out there.”

More recent sightings have depicted Morag - whose home is only about 70 miles from Loch Ness - as a humped serpent-like creature similar to the more famous Nessie.

The first recorded sighting of Morag was in 1887, while in 1948 nine people in a boat claimed to have seen a 20ft-long creature in the loch.

In 1969, two men claimed to have accidentally hit the creature in their boat. Morag is said to have disappeared after one of the men hit it with an oar while his companion opened fire with a rifle.

Loch Morar is the deepest freshwater body in the British Isles, with a maximum depth of 310m (1,017ft).

Source Credit(s): BBC © 2013 bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-21574832 

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Loch Ness Understood

Loch Ness investigator Tony Harmsworth, author of Loch Ness Understood (formerly Nessie and Me) makes book available online for free reading - 360 pages of research on Loch Ness with more than 200 illustrations and photographs.

As a child he was so influenced by the space serpent encountered by British science fiction hero Dan Dare in The Eagle comic in 1959, that a life-long fascination developed with the Loch Ness monster mystery and subsequently, his childhood collection of newspaper accounts, pictures and reported sightings transformed into 25 years of writing the Loch Ness Understood project that combines an autobiography with the story of the hunt for the monster of Loch Ness.

Today, Tony is one of the foremost authorities on the mystery at Loch Ness and has conceived, designed, created and co-founded the Official Loch Ness Monster Exhibition Centre. He also was administrative coordinator of Operation Deepscan during 1986/7 and was Bursar of Fort Augustus Abbey on Loch Ness where he designed and wrote the highly acclaimed Fort Augustus Abbey Heritage Centre and also the Loch Ness Story Diorama.

Tony has given me permission to provide a link on Cryptid Chronicles to the book directly for anyone interested in reading his research and thoughts, though the conversion from paperback to online viewing is not complete, he is updating chapters as he has time.

The book has been a major project for him and is now published with LuLu in the UK, Amazon in the USA including Nook and Kindle.

Click here to start reading the book

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE – PREHISTORY

Interviewing Eye Witnesses

Scotland’s Prehistory

Childhood Visits

CHAPTER TWO – FOLKLORE

The Absent-Minded Researcher

Celtic Origins

From School To Business

CHAPTER THREE – INVERNESS TO LOCHEND

 Protecting The President’s Son

From Inverness To Lochend

Exploring The Highlands

CHAPTER FOUR – CASTLES ALDOURIE TO URQUHART

Girl Friday

Castles Aldourie To Urquhart

First Encounter With Dinsdale

CHAPTER FIVE – FROM URQUHART TO FORT AUGUSTUS

The Obsessed Mr Shine

Castle Urquhart To Fort Augustus

The Move To The Highlands

CHAPTER SIX – COMPLETING THE CIRCUIT

Late Night Nessie Shows

Completing The Circuit

Conceiving The Exhibition

CHAPTER SEVEN – NESSIE’S ORIGINS

Drunken Antics

Nessie’s Origins

Staging The Exhibition

CHAPTER EIGHT – LAND SIGHTINGS AND FOOTPRINTS

Flipping Incredible

Land Sightings And Footprints

Discovering The Project

CHAPTER NINE – THE NESSIE ICON

The Power of Dom Perignon

The Nessie Icon

Cruel Betrayal

CHAPTER TEN – THE CLASSIC PHOTOGRAPHS

His Monster’s Voice

The Classic Photographs

Developing The Exhibition

CHAPTER ELEVEN – THE DINSDALE FILM

Papa Flash

The Dinsdale Film

Nessie Hunt

CHAPTER TWELVE – SURFACE OBSERVATION VIGIL

The Media Monster

Surface Observation Vigil

Monster Centres At War

CHAPTER THIRTEEN – AMERICAN SONAR INVESTIGATION

Vive La Difference

American Sonar Investigation

VIPS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN – MONSTERS EVERYWHERE

The Incredible Sinking Car

Monsters Everywhere

The Exodus From Genesis

CHAPTER FIFTEEN – NESSIE’S COUSIN CENTRE STAGE

Party Time

Nessie’s Cousin takes Centre Stage

Missing The Bus

CHAPTER SIXTEEN – 24 HOUR SONAR PATROLS

“Seeing” The Morar Monster

Twenty-Four Hour Sonar Patrols

Macbeth And The Benedictines

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN – 40 STRONG SONAR CONTACTS

Fanaticism And Violence

Forty Strong Sonar Contacts

Rescuing The Abbey

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – CAUSES FOR ERRORS

The Wogan Show

Causes For Errors

Monastic Heritage

CHAPTER NINETEEN – THE DAY I SAW NESSIE

Monstrous Monks

The Day I Saw Nessie

Intrigue In The Cloisters

CHAPTER TWENTY – OPERATION DEEPSCAN

Plumbing The Depths

Operation Deepscan

No Peace For The Wicked

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE – THE CLUE IN THE FOOD CHAIN

Abbots, Popes And Priors

The Clue In The Food Chain

More Awards But No Money

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO – THE REAL NESSIE

Father Flat-Out

Will The Real Nessie Please Stand Up?

A Stroke Of Luck

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE CONCLUSIONS

Conclusions

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

END NOTES

Tony notes that “I have deliberately not provided links to each of those chapters as the story can only be understood fully by reading from beginning to end. Each chapter is linked to from the previous one so I suggest you keep the page you are reading as a favourite so that you can pick up there next time. It will take me some time to upload all of this material to the website. If you wan to cheat and get to the Nessie evidence pro and con, then buy the book!” 

Tony will also be a speaker at the Loch Ness Monster Symposium April 2013 in the city of Edinburgh. The event will be sponsored by Kraken Rum and will be run under the umbrella of the Edinburgh International Science Festival which runs from the 23rd March to the 7th April.

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Pinatubo Monster - A Volcano Lake Serpent?

In 2002, reports came out of the Philippines from Filipino villagers which told of five “huge, black creatures” swimming in the Tikis River, near the former mining village of Buhawen, scaring the  Aeta families, who claimed that the large serpent-like creatures were making life dreadful for the locals.

The very first sighting of a Pinatubo Monster was the previous November when a young boy playing in the river noticed what he initially thought were logs floating in the water. Once he approached it to play with it, the serpent-like creature showed its true form, which caught the boy by surprise and thus, he gave out a loud shriek. This scream attracted other Aetas but when they got to the boy, the creature had swam away, bothered by the screaming.
 
But in January 12, 2003 there were a multitude of eyewitness accounts of seeing the serpent-like creature in the river basin.

Filipino villagers then appealed for scientists to help explain the large unidentified creatures seen in the Tikis river. Five of the mysterious black creatures have been spotted in the river in Bhawen since November. This baffled the Aeta tribe who live there because there is no account of such creatures in their oral history.

Dubbed the Pinatubo Monsters, they are believed to be 7ft long and 3ft wide. Children have been ordered not to bathe in the river and fishing has also been banned in case the creatures are dangerous. They have never been seen in full form, but the elongated outlines could be seen when the wind blows over the river and ripples are made in the water. They never produced any sound at daytime or night.

Joel Serrano, a village councilman, told The Philippine Daily Inquirer: “We don’t know if they are fishes or snakes or eels because they never show their heads or tails.” He is also worried what effect the ban on fishing will have on the village, adding: “Frogs are our only source of protein.”Villager Alfredo Banos said: “The children are afraid. When they come here to view those creatures, they wonder what those things really are. We don’t have answers to their questions.”

The strange creatures were also seen swimming in the river below Labuan, which is enclosed by tall, thick bushes. Since the monsters’ heads and tails were not seen, no one could venture what these locally named “Pinatubo Monsters” could be.

The call of the councilmen was answered by the Bureau of Fisheries & Aquatic Resources (BFAR) regional director, Remedios Ongtangco. Ongtangco chose 43 year-old Nelson Bien — who had already rescued the residents of Luzon’s Nueva Ecija province from an extraordinary 12-foot long eel — for the job.

Bien, who served as the chief of the fisheries resources management division of the BFAR in Central Luzon, arrived in Labuan less than a week later.  Upon his arrival, the community’s tribal leaders immediately escorted the scientist to the Tikis River. After a cursory glance through a pair of binoculars, through which, according to most reports, he saw nothing, Bien wasted no time in concluding that — based soley upon the Aetas’ accounts — the phenomenon in question was most likely a school of the relatively common fish known as tilapia, who had probably congregated in groups of 500 or more.

The accounts all seem to end on this note, giving skeptics yet another excuse to practice their patented condescending smirk, but only a blithering fool would assume that an entire community — who have for generations lived on the banks of the Tikis and whose primary sources of nourishment came from the River — would confuse a school of relatively small (not to mention well known) pan fish for a quintet of 7-foot long, 3-feet wide, inky black, serpentine creatures.

Some researchers have suggested that the creatures may be a mutation spawned by the massive mercury levels said to be in the river. Whatever the origin of these beasts actually turns out to be, the fact remains that the Aeta villagers continue to fear the serpentine monsters of the Tikis River.

Interestingly enough, Lake Pinatubo was formed after Mount Pinatubo erupted on June 15, 1991. Mount Pinatubo being located near the boundaries of Pampanga, Tarlac and Zambales provinces in the Philippines offer a summit crater lake that is the deepest lake in the country at 800 m (2,600 ft) deep.

Did the eruption have anything to do with the reports of huge, serpent-like creatures seen after it’s wake, or does the fact that they were seen near a former mining village where mercury levels could be so high as to have created a mutation be relevant?

On September 24, 2008, Destination Truth aired an episode where Josh Gates and company searched for the Pinatubo Monster and discovered that changes in the river and lake may have changed the schooling habits and ecology for any creatures in the lake.

Whatever these creatures are, it has been made clear by the Aeta that these animals are unlike any eel, fish or snake that they are familiar with, and as far as we know, no other scientists have since volunteered to go further investigate.

Source Credit(s): unknown-creatures.com/pinatubo-monster.html, ananova.com/news/story/sm_494687.html, americanmonsters.com/site/2009/12/pinatubo-monsters-philippine-islands, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Pinatubo

Pinatubo Monsters illustration © 2012, Syfy, Destination Truth

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Please post your comments!

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If anyone has more information about the Pinatubo Lake Monsters, please contact me, I’d love to hear from you. If you enjoyed this article please comment, Like ❤ and share! Thank you!

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Hunting the (other) loch monster in Morar, Scotland

MORAG IS A LOCH MONSTER with a terrible publicist. Although slightly famous in Scotland, tales of Morag have not spilled into coloring books or Hollywood films. A bit of a sensation in the late sixties, the beast’s home of Loch Morar has shied away from publicizing sightings and remains quite disinterested in a tourist trade that involves humped aquatic creatures.

The case for a monster in Morar, though, is compelling and arguably stronger than discussion of what might be living in neighboring Loch Ness. After Loch Ness, Loch Morar is the best known.

For starters, Loch Morar is the deepest body of fresh water in Europe, reaching depths of over 1,000 feet, beating it’s better known rival by 200 feet,  located just seventy miles away. Unlike the peat stained waters of Loch Ness, Morar’s waters are very clear. Morar never freezes and despite being a deep-sided glacial lake it’s waters comparatively productive.

It is largely uninhabited, flanked by a road that only covers one quarter of its perimeter — this allows for hardly any traffic around the lake, which would explain the lack of tourist sightings.

More importantly, it is the setting for sightings as sensational as any that have come out of Nessietown.

Tales of a monster have permeated the Morar area for centuries. Sightings of the creature, dubbed Morag by the locals, go as far back as the mid 1700’s when residents of the region began referring to the undulating humps, which they saw slipping in and out of the water, as funeral boats. Sightings of these humps were considered by those who lived in this pre industrialized environment to be the ominous warning of death.

According to early stories, “Mhorag” was the spirit of the loch, only appearing in the form of a mermaid when a member of the Gilles clan was about to kick. Later, tales spun of a waterhorse (or “kelpie”) that would lure riders onto its back, then drown them and snack on their remains.

If you’re laughing, you probably weren’t born in the 1700s, when it was completely reasonable to treat most of these tales as fact.

The Golden Age

Nearly eighty years after the first reported sighting in Loch Ness, the creature has started to lose its appeal, out-imagined by Pixar and the like. The romance of a loch monster just might be dead and buried, even if the animal is still alive and swimming.

Still, I wanted to find out if what I’d been hearing was true; if another loch was a more likely candidate for some kind of beastie than the infamous one near Inverness. I went straight to Scotland’s loch monster expert, Adrienne Shine, in hopes of learning a bit more before I set off to Morar myself.

Nobody would know better than Shine, who began his own Morar investigation in 1974. He was sparked by the loch’s most famous account, which made papers around the world. Says Shine:

It was the encounter in 1969 that aroused my interest. I thought if Loch Ness wasn’t the only place where there were these traditions, perhaps there’s more chance of it being real.

He hired a rowboat and drifted at night with a powerful light fixed to a camera, in hopes of repeating the encounter. After this turned up nothing but a false sighting in the form of a rock (“It taught me not to believe the evidence of my own eyes.”), Shine decided to head below water. By 1975 he was manning missions into the depths of a loch in a homemade submersible, during what he calls “the underwater phase of my work.”

Shine is difficult to pin when asked the ultimate question about what’s out there, mostly because he has no definitive evidence either way. He says,”I have no one theory because many animals and physical effects have contributed to sightings.” When asked about his favorite explanation, he offers:

I am accused of the Shine Theory. The occasional migration of sturgeon into fresh water might have started the water horses tradition.

While many argue that such a fish couldn’t live in these lochs, it is quite arguable that no fish has ever looked like a horse more than a sturgeon.

Shine is honest about why he first started hunting the now-famous beast, seeing it first as “a soft option for fame and glory.”

Thirty-five years later, it has become much more than this to him. He’s manned countless expeditions in Loch Ness, most famously with 1987’s Operation Deepscan, during which dozens of sonar-armed boats scanned and mapped the whole of Loch Ness. It proved inconclusive.

If a man like Shine couldn’t find a monster, how would I? There was one thing that Shine said that kept me going.

Wherever these traditions seem to come to the surface now, there’s always a perception that they’re copying Loch Ness.

It was his way of saying that Morar had been written off as a copycat. Could Morar just be a place that had been overlooked? Digging a little deeper into the history of the area, it seemed entirely possible.

Morar and the Monster

I’d been reading The Search For Morag, a history of all known accounts of the monster. Hardly a bestseller, I’d had to order this discontinued title from a collector’s shop and paid dearly for it. Written by two members of The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau expedition to Loch Morar in 1972, the hardback documents everything known about Morar, recalling over 100 years of sightings and probing that ultimate question.

The book doesn’t disappoint, recounting sightings that were, in the words of one subject, “beyond explanation or definition”. Reports generally describe a humped, “eel-like or snake-like” creature, with “black and shiny” skin. It is generally seen on sunny and calm days, when the waters are less choppy and Scotland’s rain isn’t pissing down.

The most famous sighting — the one that grabbed Shine’s attention in August 1969 — involved two local men, Duncan McDonell and William Simpson. In the account, they were on their way back from a fishing trip at the north end of the loch. It was just after 9 p.m. The sun had gone down, but there was still plenty of light.  Hearing a splash behind them, McDonell, who was at the wheel, turned to determine its cause. To his astonishment, it turned out to be a creature coming directly toward them, at a speed later estimated to be between 20 and 30 mph. They describe a creature that accidentally ran into their boat while breaching the surface. Their initial fear was that it might capsize the boat. After attempting to fend it off with an oar, Simpson fired his rifle in the animal’s direction. He fired a single shot at the beast; it seemed unaffected by the blast and slowly moved away and submerged out of site. He claims,

“I then watched it slowly sink away and that was the last I’ve seen of it.”

The whole thing would have been easy to write off were there not scores of other sightings before and after.

Morar is exactly the same as Campbell described it in 1972. The town is comprised of a hotel, a train platform and about ten houses.

The Morar Hotel is one of those terrifying old white houses, the kind with squeaky floors, a mysterious staff, and wall-to-wall carpet. I was given an umbrella at check-in and warned that rain came when it pleased, and often.

I made my way down to the water under careful directions from the hotel (“Turn left at the house with the satellite that’s pointed towards God.”) and took a look. It was ominous, moody and unfathomably quiet. The skies had gone dark and threatened to spill buckets. Nothing living moved on or around the lake. The opposing shore was at least a mile away and not one boat could be seen on the water. The loch was desolate.

The water had a wake that day, mostly because of the coming and going weather. I could see quite easily why there were so many false sightings in these parts — every rock or wave looked like something. One of the most common monster mistakes has been the misinterpretation of a boat wake. I could see why — a number of them caught my eye, tricking me too.

Rocks make a deceptive wake.

The rain finally started to fall as I tried my best to walk the path around the loch. It would have been impossible to circle in one day, so my plan was to make it halfway around, about another hour out from where the road ended.

In the course of six hours I saw three people, seven cars, and about ten houses. There just wasn’t much life on the loch, other than the occasional lamb or sheep.

My eyes remained on the water. It wasn’t so much that I was hoping to spot a giant serpent but more that the loch had some kind of draw, a quiet power that demanded attention. There was no doubt in my mind that if there is ever to be something discovered, it could be found here, rather than in a populated place like Loch Ness.

Half a day later, I was back at the hotel, sans monster story and waterlogged.

But Is There Something?

Nobody would talk to me.

I’d been warned about this from a few people but it was surprisingly true — the town has zero interest in kicking up a story and attracting tourists. It would seem that the fame of the 1969 sighting was enough of a taste for everyone.

I did speak with one woman who wished to remain anonymous. She said that the area was largely run by one of the older families and that they wanted nothing more than for the world to leave them (and their sheep) alone.

The mandate was that if you spoke, there’d be hell to pay. She herself has seen something in the water but brushed it off as quick as it was out of her mouth. “It was probably nothing.”

The sightings in The Search For Morag are all that really remains of the hunt in this loch and may serve as the end of any formal investigation. But they’re still compelling to this day.

There is the story of John MacVarish, barman at the Morar Hotel, had a sighting on August 27 1968:

“I saw this thing coming. I thought it was a man standing in a boat but as it got nearer I saw it was something coming out of the water. I tried to get up close to it with the outboard out of the water and what I saw was a long neck five or six feet out of the water with a small head on it, dark in colour, coming quite slowly down the loch. When I got to about 300 yards of it, it turned off into the deep and just settled down slowly into the loch out of sight. The neck was about one and a half feet in diameter and tapered up to between ten inches and a foot. I never saw any features, no eyes or anything like that. It was a snake like head, very small compared to the size of the neck-flattish, a flat type of head. It seemed to have very smooth skin but at 300 yards it’s difficult to tell. It was very dark, nearly black. It was 10am, dead calm, no wind, brilliant sunshine. I saw it for about ten minuets travling very slowly: it didn’t alter its angle to the water. It looked as if it was paddling itself along. There was very little movement from the water, just a small streak from the neck. I couldn’t really see what was propelling it but I think it was something at the sides rather than behind it.”

And Charles Fishburne:

“It passed within thirty-fifty yards to port…three large, black hump-shaped objects moving quickly through the water.”

Or Kate MacKinnon:

“It was rather like a huge eel…the neck was about one foot in diameter and was black in color.”

What is Morag , the Lake Morar creature?

While there is no doubt that Loch Morar possesses an adequate food supply to support a population of large animals, it is unclear exactly what the creature might be. The majority of sightings describe a creature bearing an undeniable resemblance to the long extinct plesiosaur, but if such animals where to have survived they would have had to adapt to far colder water temperatures than their ancestors are thought to have been able to handle. Biologist Roy P. Mackal has suggested that Morag, the Loch Ness Monster and the other so called monster sighted around Scotland are zeuglodons, a primitive snake like whale believed to have gone extinct over 20 million years ago. Other theories which have been put forth to explain Morag sightings include sharks, seals, eels and even mats of vegetation.

Morar lies in a glacially deepened valley on Inverness-shire’s west coast. Twelve thousand year ago, as the ice retreated, sea water is believed to have invaded the lake, bringing with it an abundance of marine life. Even after the sea water retreated, for a few thousand years the sea animals now in the loch may have had fairly ready access to their oceanic home, because the loch level and the low-tide level were only one-third then what they are today. The sea level at high tide would have been within a few feet of the loch level.

A member of the Centre for Fortean Zoology that participated in the 2005 Loch Morar Expedition has put forth his suspicion that it is a giant sterile eel. The theory is that the common eels swims out to the Sargasso Sea to breed then die. The baby eels follow scent trails back to their ancestral fresh waters homes and the cycle begins again. Sometimes, however a mutation occurs and the eel is sterile. These stay in fresh water and keep on growing. Known as eunuch eels no one knows how old they get or how big. In February 2004 two Canadian tourists came upon a 25-foot eel floating in the shallows of Loch Ness. At first they thought it was dead but when it began to move they beat a hasty retreat. In the 1980s a 20-foot eel was reported in the Birmingham Ship Canal. Another 20 foot eel was supposedly caught in the cooling system in some aluminum works in Dores in the 1990s.

One theory suggests that these rare, naturally occurring, mutations may now be on the increase due to pollution. PCBs and Beta Blocker chemicals have long been implicated in causing sterility in fish. Could they be causing more eunuch eels in the deep lakes of Scotland?

Regaurdless if Morag is a eunuch eel, a prehistoric relic or an evolved new species yet to be officially categorised, Loch Morar does have an adequate food supply to support a population of large animals.

Even if somehow some animal escaped extinction and made its home in this huge lake, with its huge size and deep water, it may take a long time to be able to find any substantial proof of the existence of the Morag.

All of the credible tales have to make you wonder if there is something out there and, if so, what it might be. There’s plenty of exploring left to be done in these waters and plenty of stories to be fished out.

If you’re interested in trying your hand then you couldn’t find a better place than Loch Morar. Just turn left at the satellite aimed towards God and keep walking.

Sources: matadornetwork.com/trips/hunting-the-other-loch-monster-in-morar-scotland, unknownexplorers.com/morag.php, cfz.org.uk/expeditions/morag/morag.htm

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Pressie the Lake Superior Sea Serpent

Lake Superior or Gitchigumi (meaning Great Water or Great Lake) is a fresh water lake. It is 1,333 feet deep in places , with an average water temperature of 34 degrees F and is 350 miles long and up to 160 miles wide in parts. The lake is almost an inland sea. It is said to house a lake serpent, Pressie, named after the Presque Isle River where one of the best sightings occurred .


Mouth of the Presque Isle River at Lake Superior

The native indigenous people called the serpent Mishipishu and it is seen in pictographs at various shoreline sites, either as a spiky cat-like creature or as a serpent. Modern sightings cite a serpent type creature up to 75 feet long with a horse-like head on a longish neck and a bilobate (whale-type) tail, and described as dark green to black in colour. The reported sightings go back centuries, here is a selection of the most well known:

In September 1894, about halfway between Whitefish Point and Copper Harbor, Michigan, the crews of two steamers observed a strange creature undulating along in the twilight, its back protruding 6 to 8 feet out of the water.

In July 1895, three members of a steamer crew observed a “hideous creature” off Whitefish Point which seemed at times to be deliberately pacing their ship. They claimed it had a 15 foot neck and a jaw a foot wide.

In 1897 near Duluth (MN), a Detroit man fell overboard when his yacht struck a rock. He was then attacked by a huge serpent which he said tried to constrict him in the manner of a large snake. His three shipmates also saw the beast.

In the 1930’s, a serpent, swimming along at about 9 miles per hour, was observed by two fisherman at Pictured Rocks, Munising, Michigan. The animal created a strong wake as it passed the shore.

In the 1960’s, a family watched a huge animal, alternately showing humps and stretching out straight, swim upriver past the North coast of Sugar Island Neither head nor tail was visible and they said it resembled a log when stretched out straight.

Memorial Day weekend in 1977, North of Ironwood , hiker Randy Braun snapped a photo of something which he suspects was a giant serpent swimming in the waters of the lake near the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. Braun said it undulated in the water like a serpent. The snapshot he took of the beast shows a blurry object in the water. (Top Photo) The photo indicates a serpent like creature with a horse-like head on a long neck and an undefined tail.



Randy Braun’s sketch

In the summer of 1981 in Munising, four children and teenagers, all siblings, observed a serpent showing 3-5 humps rising 1-2 feet out of the water (the slower it went the higher the humps). As it came within about 20 yards of the private beach, one of the children ran away crying and the animal headed away showing lower humps.

In the middle 1990’s, during the summer, fishermen watched in horror as a large aquatic animal pulled a wading buck deer under (leaving only it’s severed head) near Point Iroquois, Michigan.

All the photographic evidence is as usual grainy or blurry , but that is par for the course and lets face it, anyone’s hand would shake if they thought they saw a monster. So could it be a giant eel? It seems the most likely or a giant water snake. A sturgeon, the usual explanation seems less likely given the descriptions. What we need is a video or a carcass to turn up. Certainly in a lake that big there are plenty of places to hide!

Here is Randy Braun’s written account of the incident with other information:

Lake Superior Monster

“On Memorial Day Weekend in 1977 I was camping at Presque Isle campground north of Ironwood, Michigan, with a friend. I don’t remember if it was Saturday or Sunday but it was a beautiful morning and Lake Superior was like glass. Visibility was remarkable when looking out across the Lake, and distant land was visible. There’s a trail that leads east from the campground which crosses the Presque Isle River that I was navigating, however, the bugs were unbearable, and I headed north towards the lake hoping that walking along the beach would be more comfortable.

When I reached the tree line there was the beach but about one hundred feet below me. The slope leading to the beach was close to a 45 degree angle with short dead trees protruding from the moss covered rock, and come to find out also very slippery. It still amazes me to this day how I was able to control my slide and with a full backpack. I sheared off some of the scrub trees on the way down. Then again I was young and experienced having had extensive background in forestry and working in Idaho and Montana. I was twenty-six years old then and now I am fourty-eight. The beach was maybe thirty feet from the waters edge to the the slippery slope and as I continued to walk east sometimes no beach at all. Instead there was water with tangled lake debris amid dead standing trees. The water was knee deep to waist deep but difficult to get through, and as I think about it I’m glad “it” wasn’t lurking in there. After crossing through a couple of these beach barriers it was clear beach as far east as I could see, and I stopped by a 3’x3’ boulder, sat, and began to east lunch.

When I looked straight out to open water I saw two very distinct dark bumps which seemed to be separated by just a few feet. First, one bump would go underwater then the next bump would do the same, but only after the first one surfaced. I had a 20x spotting scope with me and couldn’t quite make out what they were. Then they began to move east and to my left, one bump going under and then the other, but one bump always stayed on top of the water while the other submerged.

It became frightfully apparent to me that this object was close to one thousand feet out and as it gained speed I realized there was a third smaller bump, and that the object was undulating. It moved very rapidly “VERY RAPIDLY” to the east and quartered towards and nearly up to the shore. The now obviously living thing stopped maybe several hundred feet from me and began moving and weaving around large boulders that were in the water, and directly towards me. IT WAS BIG and resembled an anaconda with the girth of a Volkswagen. Don’t laugh it wasn’t funny.

There was no where to go for me because of the slippery slope and the water barriers so I jumped behind the boulder and grabbed by 35mm Yashica. As it moved towards me it slowed down considerably but was making a noticeable wake. It was strangely quiet while it snaked towards me and stopped dead in the water, right in front of me. IT WAS BIG! I steadied my camera on top of the rock and fired one picture but was afraid to move after that. The thing sat there for about thirty seconds with its huge horse shaped head and large dark left eye staring at me. On the nose was a visible catfish type whisker, maybe two feet in length and wiggling.

I don’t talk to many people about it and have the original negative which I used to make an 8x10. The picture is high quality and every-thing plus more makes it quite a conversational piece. Incidentally a Doctor Reines from the State University of New York in Plattsburgh, New York has an 8x10 I’ve sent some twenty years ago. The picture is copyrighted so he didn’t pursue purchasing the photo, at least that’s what I think. At the time of the incident I lived in northern Illinois but now ironically I live in Michigan and only several miles from Lake Superior.

Two summers ago and not far from where I live, now, recreational fisherman observed a large something bite a buck deer in half while it was wading in the water near Sault Ste. Marie. An Indian friend of mine has the newspaper article.

May I also add that seeing these creatures is in Indian legend. Legend has it that Indians observed the creature do the same thing I did, and legend further adds that when it stops in the water sometime gulls mistake it for a log and land on its nose. You can guess what happened to the gull.

Furthermore and finally, people disappear near Presque Isle River occasionally and are never found. It’s attributed to the undertow (???). I don’t swim in any deep water lake anymore and occasionally have nightmares of being consumed by the thing I saw.”

Sources: cryptozoo-oscity.blogspot.com/2009/07/pressie-lake-superior-serpent.html, monstertracker.com/article/lake-superior-monster

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Nessie On Land

In one of the first sightings of the creature out of the water, Arthur Grant was riding his motorbike back to his house in 1934, when he nearly ran into a creature crossing the road. In the light of the moon he could see a long necked animal with a small head, thick body and a long tapering tail. The creature seemed to be moving by the aid of flippers protruding from its body and allegedly was carrying a sheep in it’s mouth. The creature went back down to the loch, and disappeared into the water and out of his sight.

Concerning Loch Ness Monster Land Sightings, there are an aspect of these cases which turns up now and again and is best exemplified by the one case ascribed to the late monster hunter, Ted Holiday in 1962.  We take up the story in his own words from his book, “The Great Orm of Loch Ness” (p.11 1st Ed).

The “Orm” was Holiday’s own name for Nessie. The maps below shows the houses of Inverfarigaig and the circle is where I think Ted Holiday’s beach was (I take “beyond Inverfarigaig” to mean west towards the shore and not south on the road).

Though it may not be the only candidate it certainly is out of the way of the main road and looks hard to get to. Some may think the locals were pulling Ted’s leg but whatever you think of this story, it stands to reason that if the Loch Ness Monster takes to land then it is going to leave evidence of its journey.

Therein lies an opportunity for research, albeit a very rare one. But what is the opportunity and how does one know they are looking at it? Several of our cases mention forensic evidence of the creature’s fleeting appearance on land. The Margaret Munro case mentions a large depression being found on the beach by her employers when they went to investigate her claims. The E.H. Bright case mentions a three toed foot impression being left by the creature and the Alastair Erskine-Murray case involves a large depression the size of a “bull walrus”. Meanwhile, the story of Alec Muir has our witnesses following a trail through the undergrowth to a a bubbling loch surface. We also have the case from the 1970s involving teenagers camping and hearing strange noises outside their tent at night which revealed crushed vegetation around them in the morning.

After Arthur Grant’s famous encounter in January 1934, H.F. Hay (a fellow of the Zoological Society of Scotland) visited the spot with Grant and claimed to have seen evidence of body and appendage marks on the beach. The Grant case had the misfortune to have the yet to be discredited “hunter” Marmaduke Wetherell getting involved. There is a photograph of him and Arthur Grant examining wool or something similar attached to bushes. On the subject of tracks, Wetherell is associated with the infamous “Nessie footprints” found on a beach between Foyers and Fort Augustus in December 1933 (picture below). The footprints were declared by him to be genuine but the Natural History Museum examined a plaster cast and decided it to be the right foot of a hippopotamus! Wetherell and the Daily Mail investigation folded shortly after and Wetherell apparently vowed revenge (which seemed to imply the Mail was in on the act but had made Wetherell take the bullet alone). Years later in the Surgeon’s Photo expose by Alastair Boyd and David Martin, it turned out that Wetherell had owned a silver hippo foot cast made into an ashtray.

So much for fake tracks but what about the genuine articles? There are three ways the Loch Ness Monster could leave evidence of its terrestrial lumberings, the first are ground depressions left by its body, the second is fecal material (i.e. droppings) and the third is organic material. We will look at each in turn.

Depressions can be any marks in the ground left by the creature. The problem is what do they look like and how rare are they? Primarily we are looking for main body marks and secondarily appendages due to their lighter and smaller impressions. In that light, we are looking for either oval, concave impressions and possibly gully like impressions for more serpentine morphology. The “canvas” of such impressions is important and indeed we should regard such depressions as rare given the shoreline features of Loch Ness. We can class the types of potential ground as:

• Heavy and light shingle
• Sand
• Grass
• Bracken type undergrowth

As far as my investigations went, the typical shoreline will consist of some feet of shingle or sand beach followed by level or slightly rising grass or undergrowth which is itself terminated by road or rockface. In fact, because of the roads, the combined  beach-vegetation strip may not be very wide at all and may only be a few feet across. The problems with depressions left by large creatures weighing one tonne or more becomes apparent on closer examination. With grass and heavier undergrowth, there is a time limit on depressions as the vegetation’s resilience will spring back to close the gap. In other words, after days or even hours, one may not be aware that anything huge passed that way. The only exception is undergrowth snapped and killed by the sheer weight. Note that the type of undergrowth we are talking about would perhaps be less than two feet high, a large creature with a low centre of gravity and limbs designed primarily for moving underwater is not going to be a great negotiator of typical Loch Ness shoreline.

The problem with shingle is that heavier shingle will not be sufficiently moved to produce anything noticeable. Referring to the Margaret Munro case, her employers noticed the depression in the ground after hearing her story but if she had said nothing and they went for a walk on the beach later, would they have noticed the depression and attached any significance to it? Lighter shingle (i.e. stones less than a few centimetres) and sand offer the best hope of an out of the ordinary depression which would have a long time limit to it (until it is broken up by waves, humans, animals). As it turns out such beaches are not common at Loch Ness but this at least helps focus ones attention on where to look. Sand beaches are the least common compared to shingle but would offer the best hope of tracks being left which have some detail to them. Clearly, the bigger the stones get, the more detail is lost.

By way of example, I came across some curious marks on the shingle beach at a spot on the south side of the loch recently. The photographs below shows a kind of 20 foot long arrow head shaped arrangement of shallow trenches converging at a bush. A comparison photo of the beach further down is shown last.

Now I would normally just say that wave action was depositing lighter shingle on top of heavier but I would then expect all lines to be parallel, so to my uninformed mind, something else was at play to produce these marks. It was also unclear to me how far the water could forcefully progress up the beach as the loch level rises with rainfall and stormy weather. Now I am not saying that this was produced by a serpentine like creature writhing on the beach, I am rather saying that coming across depressions on the beach needs some thought applied to it rather than jumping to conclusions. An examination of the depressions did not reveal any further clues but it would be interesting to visit the marks in a few months time to see if they have been eroded away by natural and artificial means (I saw a group of canoeists dragging their canoes onto shore at that time though I felt the marks were not made by lightweight canoes).

Moving onto fecal material, it is clear that if Nessie eats then Nessie defecates. As with Bigfoot hunters, finding such material could prove to be decisive in the Loch Ness Monster hunt as DNA material from intestinal cells could be obtained, but what exactly does one look for (or smell for)? What do Nessie faeces look like? Does she even do her “business” on land? Pertinent questions I am sure have raced through your mind many a time! One would normally give a dung heap a body swerve, but a Nessie one? It’s worth its weight in gold!

Assuming faeces do end up on land, they will be even rarer than the actual land excursions themselves. But unlike the creature, they do not go back in the water. If the dung is slurry like (as it is with animals such as sharks), then it will be absorbed into the ground and the thin layer of solids will eventually be washed away by some typical Scottish rain or dry and flake off.  Nevertheless, if people actually look for these things, there may be a chance of finding one.

If it is more solid, the chances of discovery heighten. In fact, one would have presumed a large pile of solid Nessie faeces would have been pretty noticeable after 79 years unless people are mistaking them for livestock dung! My bet is that Nessie faeces are more slurry than solid (and I managed to type that while eating my lunch).

Looking for depressions, faeces and skin fragments - the theory is simple enough but the practise may not be. There is approximately 85,000 metres of shoreline along Loch Ness. The beach and vegetation may extend out 2m to 10m and more from water to road or rock. Using an average of 6m gives us an initial surface coverage of about half a million square metres. That is about equivalent to the area of 100 American football fields and very inaccessible in parts. Some parts are very difficult to access such as beyond Foyers to Fort Augustus and Urquhart Bay northwards due to no road access or sheer height. These stretches alone take out a third of the available shoreline so we have more like 57,000 metres.

However, thousands of tourists access the shoreline every year (albeit for very short periods of time and not to look for faeces and skin). What are the chances of something being found? If one creature takes to the available shoreline (340,000 sq m) every month at random at night then one depression of say 6 sq m is made. Assume also the depression erodes away within that month. Now one trained and dedicated person actively searching this shoreline full time for one month would find the depression (assuming the creature does not land on the beach he has just surveyed!). However, such a person does not exist and so we are down to a mix of tourists, locals and monster hunters.

Take Steve Feltham as an example. He is a dedicated monster hunter who lives on the beach at Dores. Assume he surveys 200m of his shoreline every morning for a month. The odds of our creature landing on his stretch in any given month is about 285 to 1 against (57000 / 200). In other words, it would take 285 months to happen or 24 years. Steve has only been there 20 years so perhaps his time has not yet come!

Now take 10,000 tourists over one month parking their cars randomly along the loch and going down to the shore to spend a few minutes taking pictures. Their survey area is much shorter as their focus is on the loch ahead of them but let us assume 5m either side of them (i.e. 10m). However, their coverage is greater than our lone person due to their dispersal around the loch but in practise they tend to focus on key areas such as the location of parking laybys. So their coverage is not 10,000 * 10m but something less than that, I would say less than 5% given how far apart laybys are. That gives them a maximum coverage of 5,000m which suggests the odds of a Nessie depression being near a tourist is no better than 11 to 1 against. That suggests it would take at least a year for a tourist to be within eye shot of a Nessie landing spot. Thereafter other factors dictate:

• the individual’s powers of observation to notice the depression as being noteworthy
• the quality of the depression given the sand/shingle/bracken factor
• the odds that the tourist will realise the depression has Nessie significance
• the odds that this event will get reported and be investigated

Of course, one can play around with the numbers and come to some other conclusion, but I hope I have put across the idea that it is not a given that something will be easily discovered or even make it into the public domain.

During the heady days of Loch Ness Monster expeditions in the 1960s and 1970s, I think it is fair to say that searching for land markings and other traces was not high up on the agenda. In fact, I am not even sure it featured at all. Given that those water based searches did not produce the final evidence, what have we got to lose by moving the search onto the shore?

Admittedly, the resources required to do this are large and so I do not expect any large scale effort in these more sceptical times. Indeed, even finding a “plesiosaur-shaped” depression may just elicit explanations that range from natural formations to someone digging it out. The marks I found myself could almost be a test case in that regard, natural, human, what? Going back to Ted Holiday’s crushed bracken, we can never be quite sure when it comes to these slightly less than obvious intrusions on the loch shoreline. The prize may ultimately lie in what is found in the immediate vicinity.

However, I hope I have added a useful task to the list of those dedicated and occasional Loch Ness Monster hunters who still make their way to the loch looking for that decisive piece of evidence.

Posted by Glasgow Boy June 2, 2012 lochnessmystery.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/nessie-on-land-making-impression.html

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NEVER BOTHER A BEITHER!

When is an eel not just an eel? When it is a mysterious Scottish snake, or the Loch Ness monster, or a bottled sea serpent, or a giant blue worm from India, or…

An Excerpt from The Beasts that Hide from Man (Chapter 10 “Slithery Surprises”) by Karl P.N. Shuker

Monstrous eels far greater in size than any officially recorded by science have been offered at one time or another as a favoured identity for a wide range of cryptozoological creatures still awaiting formal discovery. Take, for instance, the beither.

One of Britain’s lesser-known mystery beasts, the beither is said to resemble a giant water snake, and reputedly inhabits the dark caves and waters of the Scottish Highlands’ more remote, secluded areas. A correspondent in the English magazine Athene recalled meeting a fisherman near Inverness in 1975 who claimed that he and four others had once seen a beithir lying coiled in shallow water close to the edge of a deep gorge near Beaufort Castle, eventually vanishing from sight. They estimated it to have been “a good three paces or more” long, i.e. nine to ten feet.

Equally intriguing is the testimony of a Strathmore gamekeeper who alleged that his wife’s parents had spied beithirs moving on land during the 1930s at Loch a’ Mhuillidh, near Glen Strathfarrar and the mountain of Squrr na Lapaich. Could these elongate enigmas be over-sized (or over-estimated) specimens of the grass snake Natrix natrix, a species equally at home on land in the water? Or is it possible that they are unusually large eels, whose abilities to migrate considerable distances overland are well known?

Any contemplation of mysterious water beasts in Scotland leads inevitably to Nessie - the famously elusive monster of Loch Ness. And this too has been provisionally idenitifed by some zoological authorities, notably the late Dr. Maurice Burton, as a giant eel, possibly up to 30 feet in total length.  Normally, of course, the common European eel Anguilla anguilla does not exceed five to six feet, and the conger eel Conger conger seldom exceeds nine to ten feet.

Nevertheless, ichthyological researchers have revealed that growth in eels is more rapid in confined bodies of water (such as a loch), in water that is not subjected to seasonal temperature changes (a condition met with in the deeper portions of a deep lake, like Loch Ness), and is not uniform (some specimens grow much faster than others belonging to the same species).

Collectively, therefore, these factors support the possibility that abnormally large eels do indeed exist in Loch Ness. Also of significance is the fact that eels will sometimes swim on their side at or near the water surface, yielding the familiar humped profile described by Nessie eyewitnesses, and a 20-foot or 30-foot eel could certainly produce the sizeable wakes and other water disturbances often reported for this most celebrated of all aquatic monsters.

Even so, independent sightings of the beast seen in its entirely, i.e. on land, have repeatedly featured a creature possessing distinctive flipper-shaped limbs, a well-delineated neck, a burly body, and a long tail. This description is far removed indeed from that of any eel, but is strikingly reminiscent of a supposedly long-extinct type of aquatic reptile known as a plesiosaur - which remains the most popular identity among cryptozoologists for the Loch Ness monster. Yet even if Nessie is a plesiosaur, there is no reason why Loch Ness could not also harbour some extra-large eels. After all, any loch that can boast a volume of roughly 263 billion cubic feet must surely have room enough for more than one monster!

Immense landlocked eels supposedly inhabit a number of deep pools in the Mascarene island of Reunion, near Mauritius. In a letter to The Field (February 10, 1934) Courtenay Bennett recalled seeing in the 1890s a dead specimen that had been caught in one such pool, the Mara à Poule d’Eaux, and from which “steaks as thick as a man’s thigh were cut.”

Some cryptozoologists believe that certain extremely elongate sea monsters sporadically reported over the years may comprise a hitherto-undiscovered species of gigantic eel. Indeed, it has even been given a name, the super-eel - and for many years, scientists were convinced that a young super-eel had actually been captured and preserved.

The curious case of the bottled-sea serpent began on January 31, 1930, when the Danish research vessel Dana caught a truly extraordinary juvenile eel (leptocephalus) at a depth of about 900 feet, south of the Cape of Good Hope. What made this specimen so astonishing was its size. In contrast to the common eel’s leptocephalus, which is no more than three inches long (even the conger eel’s is only four inches long) this colossal leptocephalus measured six feet, one a half inches!

Bearing in mind that during its metamorphosis from leptocephalus to adult, the common eel becomes 18 times longer (and the conger eel can become as much as 30 times longer), bemused ichthyologists estimated that the still-unknown adult version of the mysterious species could be anything between 108 and 180 feet long! A vertible super-eel in every sense. Accordingly this highly significant leptocephalus was duly preserved in alcohol, and is now housed within Copenhagen University’s Zoologicial Museum. Meanwhile, the zoological world anxiously awaited the capture of an adult super-eel.

Alas, it was not to be. In 1970, Miami University ichthyologist Dr. David G. Smith conclusively identified the giant leptocephalus’s species as a spiny eel or notacanthid. Despite their name, spiny eels are not true eels; moreover, unlike true eels, which undergo most of their growth during metamorphosis, spiny eels
undergo most of theirs prior to metamorphosis. Consequently, had it lived and transformed into an adult, the six-foot-long Dana leptophalus would not have greatly increased in size-thus sweeping aside earlier speculations that it could have become a 100-foot-plus monster adult eel.

Having said that, it is by no means impossible that a gigantic species of true eel does indeed await formal scientific discovery; the ocean depths are far too immense for even the most conservative opinion to dismiss such a prospect out of hand. At present, however, there is only tantalizing anecdotal evidence for the existence of such creatures.

And what can be said about the giant worm-like eels (or eel-like worms?) with vivid blue bodies that reputedly lurk amid the dank riverbed ooze of the Ganges? This, at least, is what Aelian, Ctesias, Solinus and a number of other celebrated scholars from the ancient world once claimed. According to Solinus, these amazing creatures were 30 feet long, but their dimensions grew ever greater with repeated re-tellings by subsequent writers until they eventually attained sufficient stature to emerge from their muddy hideaways at night and devour unwary camels and cattle! Not suprisingly, this incredible species of eel has never been brought to scientific attention - a classic example, presumably, of the one that got away!

Credit to Karl P.N. Shuker, The Beasts that Hide from Man

For more intriguing tales of mysterious, mythical and extraordinary animals, read The Beasts That Hide from Man: Seeking the World’s Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl P.N. Shuker

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