Girvan sea monster. 1953.

I haven’t done a post about a sea monster for a while and a quick check revealed to me that I hadn’t yet posted about the Girvan sea monster. I love this one, it is not often I get to post an article about a sea monster complete with a newspaper photo. Luckily some smart person took a picture of the carcass that washed up on the rocks at Girvan, West Scotland in August 1953.

Just as well they did, shortly after the townspeople, annoyed with the stench of rotting sea monster, poured oil over it and threw on a match, ruining any chance of the remains actually being identified.

A pity that instead of trying to hunt down the monsters mate, who was reportedly swimming near the coast, they didn’t try taking a photo of that too!

Girvan is also known as a town close to where the coastal cave at Bennane Head is. This cave is was said to have been the home (den of evil?) of the cannibal family in the tale of Sawney Bean.

Sea monsters AND cannibals? The parents of that town would have had no trouble making up stories to scare their children!

The Sydney Morning Herald 9 sep 1953 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article18383540

Octopus attack. 1906

The Mercury 22 Nov 1906 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12822912

Twelve thousand plus tentacles clinging onto your ship. Not a good day on the high seas.

I wonder if the two poisoned sailors were poisoned dead, or just poisoned sick?

Were large amounts of octopussies a common thing in Erquy Bay? If not this is an even more interesting event. Yeah, I know, octopussies is not a real word, but octopi and octopuses sound no better.

I tried looking for a collective noun for a group of octopus and it would appear that there isn’t really one. I think if you were on the wrong end of this small invasion in 1906 you might have gone for legion, army or horde. In my search I found someone suggesting a tangle of octopus. That works for me, I think the first word to mind when you saw a large group of octopus would be tangle.

What a great ‘one that got away’ tale for the fishermen, I doubt their day would usually involve beating off sea creatures with a hatchet. I sincerely hope one of the besieged sailors backed away from the side, up to the captain and said, ‘You’re going to need a bigger boat’.

If you know the actual term for a group of octopus please tell me!

Lake Como monster. 1946.

We have all heard of Lake Como, right? What do you think of when you hear the name? Beautiful old mansions in meticulously manicured gardens? celebrities on holiday? Ridiculously expensive real estate? This article tells me that in 1946 that there was a monster spotted there that had, excitingly, a great horn and gigantic scales. This unexpected monster was 100ft long and, after overturning fisherman’s boats, roared and disappeared.

Morning Bulletin. 22 Nov 1946.

This article from 22nd November 1946(http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article56408745) uses the word mastodom. I just love it when people come up with vaguely technical words to describe something they know nothing about (see an earlier post ’Lusus Naturae’).

If you google mastodom you had really better be interested in heavy metal. I was unable to find any giant fish under this name.

A Mastodon is an elephant-like beast that existed for millions of years until fairly recently (over 11,000 years ago) and is quite difficult to describe as a giant fish. I wonder what word the journalist was really thinking of? Were they just hoping the masses were so uneducated that they would accept any monstery sounding word?

I am sure that if an elephant appeared from the tranquil depths and tipped over my boat before disappearing I would be quite surprised but I don’t think that this is what ’Polo Giovo’ was referring to. (I think they really meant Paolo Giovio. A historian in that area who died in 1552.)

There are not enough monster sightings these days, mores the pity….. I am dying for this monster to reappear and take out a random movie star after overturning their luxury cruiser.

More sea monsters. 1926.

Haven’t had a sea monster for a while so here is an article listing quite a group. I was interested to see that the prevailing thought in 1926 was that man had already classified most of the worlds animals. I admire their self belief but I think we all know that we are still finding new critters, large and small, every year. Either way, they were sure they had never before seen creatures like the ones listed in this article.

The Florida monster was clearly well-fed, weighing 15 tonnes and containing a 400 pound octopus, a 1500 pound Blackfish and 4 hundredweight of coral (a US hundredweight is just over 45kg or 100-ish pounds).

The Bombay monster that was 25 1/2ft long and described as ‘human-faced’ with sharp teeth in a mouth that was 3ft long. Not sure about you but none of the humans I know have a 3ft mouth. This monster was still alive after 48 hours on land.

The creature found at Port Fairy was an interesting collection of body parts. Over 9ft long with a tail like a screw shaft, nose like a rhinoceros (maybe they mean horn, nose is not very exciting, just a hole out of each side of its snout) a huge toothless mouth and soft black skin.

Yarmouths one was a little boring, seal-like with a beak and porpoise tail, double row of teeth and a blowhole.

The fish in Maine was described as having a wide head and a mouth like a bag and gristle instead of bones sounds to me like a small basking shark.

Burra Record 28th Apr 1926 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article36044661

Sea monsters, again.

Haven’t had a sea monster for a few days and I thought I would put in the most well known monster of all. Here is an article suggesting that Nessie is not real and that a string of mines set in 1918 surfacing and sinking is responsible for the sightings. As for the insinuation that Nessie generally appears at the start of the tourist season and that she is letting the side down by not being seen for a while…

The Advertiser 12th June 1951-http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article45728965

Human Sea Monster.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23340836

I said in an earlier post that I love Forteana but that I am a born sceptic. I really, really do want someone to find a previously unidentified creature washed up on a remote beach proving once and for all that a sea monster /great sea snake / nessie actually exists. (I am also aware that this is not going to happen).

Until that great, yet unlikely, discovery occurs I will have to content myself with more articles about sea monsters.

This very real ’sea monster’ ensured that the young couple involved never had a romantic evening on the beach again!

(The Queenslander, 8th November 1934)

The Great Sea Snake.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article61830329

Another Sea Monster. I love them.(Gippsland times 24th Oct 1877). The use of ’the great sea snake has again turned up’ makes me wonder how many times it had already been reported.

A quick search found a few other mentions of the ‘great sea snake’, apart from yellow, they apparently also come in white and ‘black as coal tar’, but the comment that stood out the most was the earliest from The Sydney Herald (1840). They described it as ‘certain to make it’s appearance on the ocean of the press’ whenever there was little else worth reporting.

Lusus Naturae. More Sea Monsters.

Lusus Naturae. A freak, mutant or monster. A deformed or strangely marked creature.

Never heard of this word before reading this article and when I read it, for a second I thought all of my sea-monster article collecting would come to nix, with ‘sea monster’ being slang for a known creature. I was wrong. It was a word used by the captain to make it seem like he knew what he was talking about. The children thought it was seaweed, the carpenter thought it was seaweed but the captain said it was a sea monster, so sea monster it was. I love that the captain describes it as ‘the sea serpent in one of its early stages of development’. He obviously knows enough about sea monsters to recognize an adult sea serpent, it’s just the fact that this one was a juvenile that threw him off a quick identification.

I think that even a landlubber like me would be able to tell the difference between a sunfish and something described as a ’serpent’ though. I have never come across a giant sunfish anywhere but on the telly, but I have noticed that they are far from serpentine. Blobby, perhaps. Not serpenty.

(Kilmore Free Press 23rd March 1882)

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article57701751

Sea Monsters are real, aren’t they?

When I was growing up in the seventies there was a book about strange phenomena in the library of my primary school. I really, really loved that book and spent many lunchtimes reading it. It had stories about the strange appearance of Caspar Hauser, the inexplicable Green-skinned children, the (almost) unkillable Rasputin, the abandoned Mary Celeste, and many other things that anybody with a love of Forteana would instantly recognize. Although I loved the book and the stories within, I never really believed it. I realized that there were people who did and I was happy for them to believe but I was never totally convinced. I felt the same way about Sunday School and Ripley’s Believe-it-or-not too, and I sometimes I felt a bit sorry for the people who were so easily duped by obvious hoaxes. I was happy to believe in Santa though, so maybe Sunday School should have given presents.

I would love to find a copy of that old book and show it to my kids. They are very similar to the way I was when I was small, they love a good story but are very quick to tell you how made-up they think it is. That book was the thing that led me to buy my first issue of the Fortean Times years ago and I read each new issue with the same mix of enjoyment and amused disbelief I had for that old book.

In my travels through the old newspapers (trove.nla.gov.au) I am always looking out for stories of strange happenings, and when I was looking  today I was very happy to find a huge amount of stories about sea monsters. It wasn’t that long ago that people were happy to call anything strange that turned up on their beach one morning a sea monster.

This monster was my favourite today though, a sea serpent sixty feet long and seventy tonnes in weight, hairy, with spines and two heads. I wonder where the bones ended up?

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article33169570