Snakes alive, folks! Beware of serpents in the lakes
If you are near a Madison lake this Halloween and see someone dressed
as a serpent, be careful. Dozens of residents have reported seeing the
real thing in every Madison lake except Wingra.
Charles F. Brown, former
director of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, collected stories
about the critters.
He wrote that strange creatures in Lake Mendota were
reported as early as the 1860s, though older Indian legends make reference
to "wak tcexi", long-tailed beasts that supposedly lived off the eastern
shore of the lake, near what is today the Mendota Mental Health Institution.
The first real monster flap occurred in 1892, when creatures were
reported in Lakes Mendota and Monona. W.J. Park, however, came forward at
the time and said that he and his wife had seen the creature on Lake
Mendota in the 1860s.
On Oct. 17, 1892, a 35-foot serpent-like creature
was reportedly sighted by 12 men sailing on Lake Mendota. A similar
sighting was reported on Aug. 22, 1899.
In early autumn of 1917, a man
fishing for perch off Picnic Point saw "a large snake-like head, with large
jaws and blazing eyes, emerge from the deep water not more than 100 feet
away."
The alleged sighting was followed by reports that the creature
overturned canoes, chased sailboats, uprooted piers and frightened
swimmers. Then the sightings quickly subsided. Brown theorized that the
creature had made its way to Lake Waubesa.
The first sightings in Lake
Waubesa were made "several summers" after the 1917 Mendota reports. The
first to spot the alleged creature was an Illinois tourist, who described
it as dark green and measuring between 60 and 70 feet long.
At the same
time, Lake Kegonsa residents were reporting sightings of a similar
creature.
"Existing accounts of him are rather confused," wrote Brown.
"He seems to have been of a more vengeful and destructive nature than those
of the other lakes."
Residents near Lake Monona first reported seeing a
monster on July 21, 1892, near the south shore. Darwin Boehmer said the
35-foot long creature did not wriggle from side-to-side as a snake would,
but that it undulated with an up-and-down motion. The head, he said,
resembled that of a dogfish. Madisonian John Schott said that it was
shaped like the bottom of a boat, except twice as long. It was reported
again on Sept. 26 and Oct. 7, 1892, and on June 11, 1897, when Eugene Heath
fired two shots at it.
Was it all a hoax? Or could the creatures have
been fresh-water eels, killed off as Madison polluted the lakes? Brown
wasn't entirely sure, since there was some physical evidence to back up the
sightings.
In 1917, Brown wrote, a University of Wisconsin student
walking on the north shore of Picnic Point found a large, thick object that
resembled a fish scale. He could not identify it, nor could a UW professor
who examined it.
Later, some even more substantial evidence came to
light.
"Some huge vertebrae, which years later clogged the pipes of the
sandpump then dredging the lake off Olbrich Park shore, were supposed to be
from the skeleton of (a) sea serpent," Brown wrote.
Not that he took the
stories entirely seriously.
"A resort lake without a sea serpent was
behind the times," he wrote.Vampires to Big Foot Seen
Besides Madison's alleged lake monsters, Wisconsin residents have reported many,
many other strange creatures.
The Vampire of Mineral Point - Sighted in
early April of 1981 by police officer John Pepper. Pepper saw the 6-foot-5
Dracula-like figure lurking in a cemetery. He gave chase but gave up when
the stranger jumped over a four-foot barbed wire fence. Police searched
for the man, fearing he was mentally ill, but not a real vampire.
Bigfoot
- One night in July, 1964, Delevan resident Dennis Fewless allegedly saw a
hairy seven or eight-foot tall creature run across Wisconsin 89 and leap a
five-foot barbed wire fence.
Similar sightings were reported near
Freemont, Wis., in 1968.
Mystery Kangaroos - Kangaroos are not monsters,
but they are certainly out of place when bounding through fields near
Waukesha. Sightings of a kangaroo were made there in 1978 on April 5, 12,
13, 16, 23 and 24 by 12 various witnesses, including William J. Busch, a
social worker at a Waukesha County school. A sighting was also made in Eau
Claire County on May 21 of the same year.
Busch described the alleged
kangaroo as three-feet tall with a "slightly odd-shaped" head, small front
legs and long black feet.
A blurry Poloroid photo was taken of the
creature on the 24th by two anonymous Menominee Falls men.
Crocodiles -
As if kangaroos weren't enough, enigma researcher Loren Coleman has found
newspaper stories reporting Wisconsin sightings of alligators or
crocodiles. In February 1892, one was reportedly seen on the bank of the
Rock River, near Janesville. The Milwaukee Journal reported a similar
sighting on July 9, 1971, in Pewaukee Lake.
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