- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
When you stand and look over Lake Erie, it doesn’t feel like a lake, but an ocean. Bright blue water stretches far into the distance; boats dot the horizon, birds swarm fishermen, people swim, sunbathe, and build sand castles under the shadow of an old lighthouse, and waves lap noisily at the shore. But it’s not the ocean. You would quickly pick up on it if you happened to teleport here. The boats aren’t built for the sea. The birds aren’t quite right. The trees are very out of place. And, most apparent, it has a very un-ocean-like smell–a scent more akin to a muddy fishtank. Yet, growing up in an otherwise landlocked state, Lake Erie might as well have been the ocean. A seemingly endless expanse, Lake Erie is the eleventh largest lake in the world. Though it is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, it is the most populated by weirdness…
For over 200 years, stories of strange creatures have plagued Lake Erie, from boat captains and fishermen, to tourists and residents. People were seeing something in the water. Or, more accurately, some things. You see, out of the hundreds of sightings and encounters in the lake, many descriptions vary. Not just in the usual way, as in slightly different or obviously misjudged sizes, or even understandably different colorations, but in pretty drastic ways. Six to seven foot, dolphin-like animals. Nearly ten foot long, burrowing, biting monsters. Gigantic, blue or black, slithering snakes. Bug-eyed, whale-like reptiles. Long-necked reptiles. Sturgeon-headed reptiles. Silver-scaled and bullet-proof copper beasts. Like I said, people have claimed to see a lot of weird things lurking here. Today, we collectively call these cryptids “Bessie.”
When you think of Bessie, you think of Lake Loch Ness’ Nessie. It was, afterall, named after her, and the two have a lot in common. Long serpentine necks, flippers, fishy, yet reptilian… very, very reminiscent of a plesiosaur. Lake and sea monsters in general are often compared to those old, prehistoric animals, no matter where they are. While it is highly unlikely that that is the case anywhere, it is even more preposterous for such a thing to happen in Lake Erie. While it’s hard to believe, the lake is pretty young. Over thousands of years, rivers crossed over and carved into the earth, glaciers rose, fell, grinded, and advanced onto the land, creating the basin we see today. Temporary Lake Eries came and went, leaving now waterless beaches behind, further south. The Lake Erie we know today is only 4,000 years old. While that is much older than me or you, it isn’t even close to as old as Plesiosaurs; they died at the end of the Cretaceous, along with three-fourths of the rest of all life on Earth 66 million years ago. They couldn’t survive in their marine habitats–it just isn’t possible that they quickly pushed into freshwater and survived this apocalypse-level catastrophe, the changing waterways, nor persisted through several ice ages, somehow eventually ending up in our Lake Erie. Whatever is in Lake Erie, it, sadly, isn’t a Plesiosaur. But, the idea of a living fossil is exciting, and has grabbed international attention, bringing flocks of cryptid tourists to the lake’s shore, hoping to catch sight of it. Bessie is somehow even more exciting than Nessie for the cryptozoologist. While Nessie is much more famous, and an older chapter in cryptozoological history, Lake Erie is ten times longer than Lake Loch Ness; there are much more places for a large creature to theoretically hide, which gives hunters much more time to be invested in looking for it, and many more excuses for why they can’t find what they’re looking for. The lake has also not been as thoroughly searched or funded as Lake Loch Ness, providing more opportunity for paid expeditions and content creation.
The popularity of Bessie has exploded and waned multiple times since its initial sighting in 1793. It peaked in the 90’s, when it also was somewhat officially given a name. A single sighting in September 1990 broke local news and sparked a wave of encounters, new and, allegedly, old. A toll-free phone line was set up to gather witness accounts and stories for a Port Clinton, Ohio newspaper, the Ottawa County Beacon. The same paper also set up a contest to name the monster, settling on South Bay Bessie, as the most recent sightings took place near Port Clinton and its Davis Besse nuclear power plant–plus, it rhymed with Nessie. The paper collected more than ten anecdotes from the Ohio area, most occurring between 1980 and 1991. Monster mania grew, and with it, ideas to capitalize on it. Most memorable, a $5,000 reward was posted by Thomas Solberg, owner of a local marina, for anyone who could catch Bessie alive. He then hung a sign up at the Huron Lagoon Marina that read, “Future Home of the Lake Erie Sea Serpent.” As I’m sure you know, while Bessie was sighted many, many more times since then, she has continued to elude capture, evading not only nets, lures, and weaponry, but photography, film, and all other devices.
Strange as Bessie and all of her sightings are, there is a reasonable explanation for all of them–and it is an endangered fish! Remember what I said about Plesiosaurs? Well… that’s sort of the sturgeon’s story. Sturgeons started appearing in the fossil record in the Late Cretaceous, which was around 145 million years ago, not too long, Earth-history-wise, after the Plesiosaurs, who came on the scene about 200 million years ago and were thriving during the Cretaceous. In fact, the two animals may have shared water from time to time. Since then, sturgeons haven’t changed too much. They are what Bessie and Plesiosaur enthusiasts are excited about–a living fossil. They look very prehistoric, too. They have tail fins similar to sharks, with the top being longer than the bottom, and an extensive, smooth, scaleless body lined with five rows of bony, plate armor called scutes.Their faces are prolonged and sharp, with thin, pointy, upward curving noses, small eyes, and whiskers, called barbels. They also can grow to incredible sizes. Lake sturgeons, the species found in Lake Erie, can weigh up to 240 lbs and grow up to seven and a quarter feet long. They also can live to be more than one hundred years old.
An incredible animal, the fishing industry decimated Lake Erie’s sturgeon population. At first, sturgeons were considered to be pest animals, as they often broke fishing gear. While many were killed to save money, soon, the tides changed, and the fish and their eggs were desired food items. In the late 1800s, 4 million lbs of fish were caught each year–a greatly unsustainable level. Hunted for their meat, their populations were sent further into decline because of pollution and the construction of flood controls, like dams. Waterways were blocked and breeding grounds destroyed, preventing new sturgeons from being born. Once so common that people used the fish to fertilize farms, feed pigs, and fuel steamboats, by the turn of the century, they were a rare sight. Slow to mature, slow to reproduce, and slow to grow, in 2026 they are still listed as endangered and are not found at the same incredible size as often as in the past, even with regulations and fishery closures in the early 20th century.
I think, without a doubt, that most of these Bessie sightings can be attributed to the sighting of a lake sturgeon–an animal under the radar to most people, so rare that it itself has become a sort of cryptid.
There are hundreds of cryptid sightings in Lake Erie. What we are seeing is probably an evolution of a story, tied to popular media and culture, much like the Loch Ness Monster’s changing descriptions, as well as several different kinds of misidentifications. I’ve debated reading them all in historical order, as a singular creature, beginning in the late 1700s and ending in the early 2000s, but the stories vary so much that it doesn’t paint very clear pictures of a figure. Lake Erie is separated into three basins (the western, central, and eastern), so I thought maybe going over them by region would be good, making three distinct figures to talk about. However, almost all sightings take place in the central basin. Since that didn’t work well either, I’ve settled on a third approach. I am a fan of lists, so for each witness account, each encounter, I have made notes that boil the information down into a few key details: size, coloration, location, body characteristics, and activity. Laying them all out, I was able to separate them into 8 different categories, or for our project, 8 theoretically unique Lake Erie cryptids that wander these waters. While most aquatic creatures have vast variability in coloration and size for maturity, and sometimes in relation to breeding, we aren’t going to take that into account when categorizing them, as it would be too complicated. We could argue and explain all of these to be related or not, or argue some and not others, but at the end of the day, we have very limited information and, for the most part, brief stories. Also, I think this way is most fun.
Over the course of the next two weeks, there will be 8 mini episodes covering Lake Erie and its monster. It’ll be sort of like a summer road trip special. We will go over every story I could find and collect, starting with the biggest cryptid and working our way down to the smallest. Some have names given to them by local papers and witnesses, others are going to be given a name by me. After their history is recounted, we will imagine what they would be like in real life, if they existed exactly as described. I’m Ballyraven, your cryptid guide. Wednesday, I’ll take you on the first of eight dives. And hopefully, this summer, you can visit the lake and take a curious dive or swim or beach-watch of your own. Who knows–maybe you’ll see one of the things we’ll be talking about, or perhaps even something new!
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