Water-horses are much closer to vampires or werewolves than to any modern cryptid (figure 4.3). “When killed, the water-horse proved to be nothing but turf and a soft mass like jelly-fish,” explained an article about the mythical beasts of Scotland, just weeks before the dawn of the Nessie legend. “It could be shot only with a silver bullet, excellent proof of its supernatural character.”11 Even more vampire-like, water-horses can take human form: “In such form he very often goes courting a young woman, with the entirely unromantic object of eating her.”12
Supernatural creatures with no true physical form, water-horses can be identified with modern cryptids only by badly distorting Scottish folklore. They do not act like or resemble Nessie in any meaningful respect. Moreover, they are part of global folklore and have no unique association with Loch Ness. Water-horses are said to lurk in most of the bodies of water in Scotland, including Loch Lomond, Loch Glass, Loch Awe, Loch Rannoch,13 Loch Cauldsheils, Loch Hourn, Loch Basibol,14 Loch na Mna (on the island of Raasay),15 Loch Garbet Beag, Loch Garten, and Loch Pityoulish.16 Nor are they restricted to the United Kingdom. According to folklorist Michel Meurger, water-horses “are very widespread: the British Isles, Scandinavia, Siberian Russia, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Southern Slavic countries.”17 Water-horses were even found in the New World. In 1535, while exploring a tributary to the Saint Lawrence, Jacques Cartier heard that “within this river are some fish shaped like horses, which at night take to the land and by day to the sea, as we are told by our savages.”18
Hoaxes and Mistakes
The tradition of lake monster and sea serpent hoaxes also long predates the modern Nessie legend. One notable example occurred in upstate New York in 1904—an elaborate hoax involving a carved wooden monster submerged in Lake George by pulleys. (In 1934, the elderly hoaxer revealed the trick and expressed his opinion that Nessie was a similar prank.)19 Indeed, it seems that monster hoaxing even occurred at Loch Ness in particular, several decades before Nessie. In 1868, a “bottle-nosed whale about six feet long” was found on the banks of Loch Ness. This “monster” caused quite a stir, drawing “large crowds of country people” before it was identified. The Inverness Courier concluded that the cetacean “had, of course, been caught at sea, and had been cast adrift in the waters of Loch Ness by some waggish crew” as a prank. “The ruse,” said the newspaper, “was eminently successful.”20 (Adrian Shine, head of the respected Loch Ness and Morar Project, describes this story as “the earliest reference we’ve found to something more than the Water Horse of legend.”21 Similar hoaxes have occurred in more recent times: a dead elephant seal was dumped in Loch Ness in 1972 and dead conger eels in 2001.)22
Likewise, the history of water monster misidentification is long and well documented, throughout the world and at Loch Ness in particular. In 1852, as reported in the Inverness Courier, an armed mob prepared to battle a “sea serpent” at Loch Ness—literally with pitchforks!
One day last week, while Lochness lay in a perfect state of calm, without a ripple on its surface, the inhabitants of Lochend were suddenly thrown into a state of excitement by the appearance of two large bodies steadily moving on the loch, and making for the north side from the opposite shore of Aldourie. Every man, woman and child turned out to be witness to the extraordinary spectacle. Many were the conjectures as to what species of creation these animals could belong; some thought it was the sea serpent coiling along the surface, and others a couple of whales or large seals. As the uncanny objects approached the shore various weapons were prepared for the onslaught. The men were armed with hatchets … the young lads with scythes, and the women principally with pitchforks. One fierce-looking amazon, wielding a tremendous flail about her head, commenced to flagellate a hillock by way of practice. At last a venerable patriarch … set to fetch an old [rifle] … took aim, and was just on the eve of firing when suddenly he dashed the gun to the ground.23
The man cried out in shock at what he took to be supernatural waterhorses,24 but the shock was short-lived. The creatures were “not actually the much dreaded ‘kelpies,’” the newspaper continued, but perfectly ordinary, well-known animals. In fact, “they proved to be a valuable pair of ponies … indulging themselves with a dip in the cooling waters of Lochness.” (Remarkably, the animals had swum “fully a mile” across the lake.)
This case brings two salient facts into sharp focus. First, it is possible for people to mistake ordinary animals for mysterious monsters—even crowds of people and even in broad daylight. Second, neither this group of locals nor the Inverness Courier gave any hint of an ongoing tradition of monsters in the loch. (All the explanations proposed in the story—sea serpent, whales, seals, and kelpies—are generic. None are specific to Loch Ness.)
Dressed with folklore and mischief, the Loch Ness stage had been prepared for decades—centuries—without any star to step on it. But in the 1930s, all that was to change.
A SERIES OF SIGHTINGS
“Three Young Anglers”
This brings us to a small news story from 1930 that may (depending on your point of view) be considered the first modern Loch Ness monster case. According to the Northern Chronicle, “three young anglers”25 had a strange experience while fishing for trout on Loch Ness, as described by Ian Milne, one of the men:
About 8:15 o’clock we heard a terrible noise on the water, and looking around we saw, about 600 yards distant, a great commotion with spray flying everywhere. Then the fish—or whatever it was—started coming toward us, and when it was about 300 yards away it turned to the right and went into the Holly Bush Bay above Dores and disappeared in the depths. During its rush it caused a wave about 2½ feet high, and we could see a wriggling motion, but that was all, the wash hiding it from view. The wash, however, was sufficient to cause our boat to rock violently. We have no idea what it was, but we are quite positive it could not have been a salmon.26
This story is in many ways a bit of a dud. The witnesses did not actually see a monster, and the story died in the news very quickly. (Interestingly, the newspaper also claimed to have spoken with an unnamed “keeper who dwells on the shores of the loch” who “some years ago saw … the fish—or whatever it was—coming along the centre of the loch, and afterwards stated that it was dark in color and like an upturned angling boat, and quite as big.” Little was made of this alleged sighting, which was not recorded at the time it occurred.)27
But the “three young anglers” story is noteworthy in other ways. It is one of the vanishingly few reports of anything like a Loch Ness monster recorded before 1933. It also is one of the first to use (even if offhand) the term “monster” in relation to Loch Ness. In a skeptical letter to the Inverness Courier, someone going under the name Piscator paraphrased Milne’s account as describing “a wave 2½ feet high caused by some unknown monster that, presumably, inhabits Loch Ness.”28 Retelling the tale in a small item two months later, the Kokomo Tribune claimed, “People in the vicinity of Loch Ness, in Scotland, are much mystified over reports of a monster having taken up its abode in the lake.”29
“Strange Spectacle on Loch Ness”
The “three young anglers” case of 1930 failed to ignite a popular monster legend. But it was remembered by at least one person: a small-town, part-time reporter named Alex Campbell.
Then, in 1933, Campbell heard that his friends Aldie30 and John Mackay (proprietors of the Drumnadrochit Hotel)31 had spotted something in the water while driving along the shore of Loch Ness. Campbell wrote the story for the Inverness Courier, which ran it under the headline “Strange Spectacle on Loch Ness: What Was It?”
Loch Ness has for generations been credited with being the home of a fear-some-looking monster, but, somehow or other, the “water kelpie,” as this legendary creature is called, has always been regarded as a myth, if not a joke. Now, however, comes the news that the beast has been seen once more, for, on Friday of last week, a well-known businessman, who lives in Inverness, and his wife (a University graduate), when motor
ing along the north shore of the loch … were startled to see a tremendous upheaval on the loch, which previously had been as calm as the proverbial millpond. The lady was the first to notice the disturbance, which occurred fully three-quarters of a mile from the shore, and it was her sudden cries to stop that drew her husband’s attention to the water. There, the creature disported itself, rolling and plunging for fully a minute, its body resembling that of a whale, and the water cascading and churning like a simmering cauldron. Soon, however, it disappeared in a boiling mass of foam.32
Presto: Loch Ness was home to a “fearsome-looking monster” and suddenly had been “for generations”!
Campbell’s story was a bit on the sensational side. The Mackays clarified their sighting later that year when they spoke with Rupert Gould. First, Aldie was the only one who saw any kind of object or animal; her husband saw only splashing. The article’s “tremendous upheaval” was perhaps a little exaggerated: Aldie “thought at first that it was caused by two ducks fighting” (although she decided, “on reflection,” that the splashing was “far too extensive to be caused this way”). When she finally saw the cause of the splashing, it was not one body “resembling that of a whale,” but two dark humps in the distance. The two humps had a total length (she estimated) of about 20 feet.33 (If accurate, this would make each hump about the size of a seal. Because Loch Ness is connected to the North Sea by both a river and a canal, seals play an important role in Nessie debates to this day—as we will see.)
Campbell was quick to tie the Mackays’ sighting to the “three young anglers” case from three years earlier. In the original version of that story, the three fishermen did not see the cause of the splashing and had “no idea what it was”; in Campbell’s revisionist retelling, they saw “an unknown creature, whose bulk, movements, and the amount of water displaced at once suggested that it was either a very large seal, a porpoise, or, indeed, the monster itself!” This was pure embellishment by Campbell. The newspaper account from 1930 contains no hint that the three fishermen suggested a seal, porpoise, or monster as an explanation for the spray or the wave.
In any event, the news of the Mackays’ sighting (unimpressive even with the help of Campbell’s purple prose) was met with considerable skepticism. In a response to the Inverness Courier, steamship captain John Macdonald expressed exasperation with the Mackays’ amateur description of a tremendous upheaval on the loch. “I am afraid,” he wrote, “that it was their imagination that was stirred, and that the spectacle is not an extraordinary one.” During fifty years of navigating the loch (“no fewer than 20,000 trips up and down Loch Ness”), Macdonald had become familiar with an ordinary occurrence that very closely matched the Mackays’ description: “sporting salmon in lively mood, who, by their leaping out of the water, and racing about, created a great commotion in the calm waters, and certainly looked strange and perhaps fearsome when viewed some distance from the scene.” Proposed within days, this very plausible explanation for the Mackay case—by most accounts, the original Loch Ness monster sighting—was an event that the steamship captain had “seen many hundred times.”34
The Mackays’ sighting was a weak case by any reasonable standard, but this small, faltering spark would soon flare into perhaps the greatest monster mystery of modern times. Why did the notion of a monster in Loch Ness come to catch the public imagination in 1933, when the “three young anglers” case of 1930 did not? The Mackays’ modest story and George Spicer’s much more spectacular sighting, which would soon follow it, had something going for them that the “three young anglers” story had not: the release of one of the biggest blockbuster monster films in Hollywood history.
King Kong
Between the Great Depression and the rise of Nazi Germany, media audiences were ready for a diverting popular mystery. The centuries-old folklore traditions of water-horses and sea serpents had the potential to supply such a mystery, but something more was needed—a catalyst.
Hollywood supplied the perfect catalyst at the perfect time: the gigantic, long-necked water monster depicted in King Kong (and again in Son of Kong, later in 1933). I am not the first researcher to draw a connection between Nessie and King Kong. For example, Dick Raynor suggests a link, noting that, as a result of the film, the “entire western world was gripped by monster fever” in early 1933.35 Ronald Binns agrees that “it is probably no coincidence that the Loch Ness monster was discovered at the very moment that King Kong … was released across Scotland in 1933.”36 But I think that a stronger relationship between the film and the myth can be asserted than has usually been argued in the past: in essence, that King Kong directly inspired the Loch Ness monster.
There is no question that the birth of Nessie correlates closely in time with the release of the film. King Kong opened in London on April 10, 1933, just four days before Aldie Mackay’s sighting of the “disturbance” in Loch Ness.37 The film was an instant box-office smash: “Thousands are being turned away from Kong,” reported the Daily Express from Trafalgar Square. Those who did make it into the packed theaters came out “white and breathing heavily.” It was a sensation—a monster thriller so real and so terrifying that moviegoers cried out in their seats.38
As the notion of a “fearsome-looking monster” at Loch Ness began to quietly percolate, the Scotsman marveled at King Kong’s success in “giving the impression that its monsters have newly emerged from the primaeval slime.” Most important, the film created a viscerally believable illusion of “prehistoric monsters in contact with modern conditions.”39
These two correlated factors—the sighting by the Mackays and the release of King Kong—soon inspired the most influential Nessie report of all time.
“The Nearest Approach to a Dragon or Prehistoric Animal”
A very few vague sightings followed the Mackays’ story over the summer of 1933, but those first small embers of popular belief were fading. And then, in August, the legend suddenly burst into incandescence—and the influence of King Kong became unmistakable.
On August 4, the Inverness Courier published an astonishing letter from a Londoner named George Spicer. He had, he said, recently spotted a strange creature while driving along the shore of Loch Ness with his wife. His description of their spectacular sighting in broad daylight changed the legend forever: “I saw the nearest approach to a dragon or prehistoric animal that I have ever seen in my life. It crossed my road about fifty yards ahead and appeared to be carrying a small lamb or animal of some kind. It seemed to have a long neck which moved up and down, in the manner of a scenic railway, and the body was fairly big, with a high back.”40
This account, essentially describing a dinosaur strolling across a road in modern Scotland, was (according to one respected Nessie researcher) “so extraordinary it taxed the imagination of even the most confirmed believers.”41 Yet the influence of the Spicer case simply cannot be overstated. As Adrian Shine explains, “There were no records of long neck sightings before the Spicers’ encounter on land made the first connection to plesiosaurs.”42
Figure 4.4 The water monster in a scene from King Kong. (Redrawn by Daniel Loxton)
Whereas the few previous witnesses had reported mere splashes or humps in the water, Spicer claimed a close-up view of a long-necked creature that could have been lifted right off of King Kong’s Skull Island. And that, I believe, is exactly what happened.
Among the most memorable scenes in King Kong is a night attack by a long-necked water monster. As crewmen from the Venture raft tensely across a fog-shrouded lake in pursuit of the abducted heroine, something sinister stirs in the water. A dark, swan-like neck arcs out of the water and then slides back out of sight. The men peer through the dense fog, when suddenly the looming neck attacks out of the darkness. The raft is overturned, spilling the men into the lake. In a series of dramatic shots, the huge, plesiosaur-like animal plucks men out of the water and kills them. This creature—with its rounded back, arched neck, and small head—is essentially identical to the plesio
saur-like popular Nessie that would grow out of Spicer’s story (figure 4.4). As the remaining Venture crewmen scramble to the seeming safety of the shore, they learn a terrible truth: the creature is not an aquatic plesiosaur, but a Diplodocus-like sauropod! The monster pursues the men onto land—and, at this point, Spicer’s sighting snaps sharply into focus.
In both his description and his sketch, Spicer almost exactly re-created this scene from King Kong. Spicer’s creature crossed the road from left to right, just as the Diplodocus on land crosses the movie screen (figure 4.5). As Spicer’s beast “crossed the road, we could see a very long neck which moved rapidly up and down in curves … the body then came into view”;43 for its part, the somewhat implausibly writhing neck of the film’s dinosaur enters first, followed by its huge body. The movie’s creature gives the impression of having gray, elephant-like skin; Spicer’s creature had gray skin, “like a dirty elephant or a rhinoceros.”44 The 30-foot Loch Ness beast is of roughly similar size to the movie monster: “When it was broadside on it took up all the road…. It was big enough to have upset our car…. I estimated the creature’s length to be about 25–30 feet.”45
Figure 4.5 The “prehistoric animal” as described by George Spicer. (Illustration by Rupert Gould, under Spicer’s direction; redrawn by Daniel Loxton from Rupert T. Gould, The Loch Ness Monster [1934; repr., Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1976])
A few other diagnostic details make the case especially compelling. In the shots from the movie, the sauropod’s feet are not visible. (For ease of animation, they are shielded from view by bushes and enshrouding fog.) Likewise, in Spicer’s version, “We did not see any feet.” Especially striking is the profile that the two creatures have in common. The film’s Diplodocus is shown with its tail curved out of view around the far side of its body. According to Spicer’s description of his monster, “I think its tail was curved round the other side from our view.”46
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