The Loch Ness Monster: Kelpie, Legend, or Giant Eel?

The Loch Ness Monster is perhaps one of the world’s most enduring mysteries. Does a giant reptile really lurk in a Scottish loch? Has it somehow survived for millennia on its own? Or is it something darker and more dangerous? It is, after all, a monster.

Its legend dates to the 7th century, although recorded sightings really begin in earnest in the 1930s. It feels somehow ancient and modern at the same time, with scientists on a quest to find evidence either way as to its existence.

While the ‘reality’ of the Loch Ness Monster is beyond my scope, the legends and the ways in which people have shared their sightings are not. Much like ghost stories, Nessie sightings echo across time. People pore over their similarities—and their differences—in search of the truth.

So let’s explore the Loch Ness Monster’s legends.

Appearances Before the 20th Century

The first ‘appearance’ of the Loch Ness Monster may date to before the Roman invasion of Britain. Scholars have found standing stones in the region that bear carvings of animals, made by the Picts. All but one of the animals are easy to recognise, with the outlier sometimes being described as a swimming elephant (Lyons 2000). There’s no way to know if this is the Loch Ness Monster that the Picts knew, but it’s certainly a fascinating carving nonetheless.

Nessie next appears in a written account in the 7th century—the first written record found so far. Here, the monster pops up in a biography of St. Columba by St. Adomnán. In the story, St. Columba encountered the monster in 565 AD while staying in the area. When he tried to cross the River Ness, he discovered some locals burying a man who’d been attacked by “some water monster” (Inverness Courier 1933b: 4).

St. Columba resolved at once to deal with the issue. He asked one of his companions to fetch the coble on the opposite bank. Once the man entered the water, the monster reappeared, apparently attracted by the disturbance in the water. The Irish saint “with his holy hand raised on high […] formed the saving sign of the cross […], invoked the name of God, and commanded the fierce monster” (Inverness Courier 1933b: 4). He ordered the monster to leave the man alone and retreat. The monster apparently displayed fear and fled – presumably into Loch Ness.

There’s a problem when using these stories.

It’s easy to seize on this as ‘evidence’, although hagiographies often include saintly miracles that couldn’t have occurred, based on our understanding of the universe and how it works. As Chris Cairney cautions, we can’t take these stories literally (2018: 380). After all, the story is closer to allegory, providing St. Columba with an opportunity to demonstrate the power of God to (up until that point) non-believing locals (Cairney 2018: 381). The ideas of kelpies and water horses end up doing the heavy lifting in the story to make St. Adomnán’s point.

There’s also a huge discrepancy between the time of the supposed event, in the 560s, and the time St. Adomnán wrote the story down, a century later.

The 1930s Boom in Sightings

Sporadic sightings occurred until 1933, when the number of sightings suddenly increased. This was no doubt due to the completion of a road alongside the loch. After all, if an area becomes more accessible, more people will naturally access it. Cairney thinks we need to separate the accounts of St Columba from the 20th-century sightings since it’s the idea of the Loch Ness Monster that begins in the 1930s (2018: 377).

In April 1933, an anonymous report appeared of a huge creature with multiple humps splashing in the waters. The following month, while Captain John Macdonald was pouring scorn on the sightings based on his fifty years’ experience sailing on the loch (Inverness Courier 1933a: 5), people still came forward with witness reports. They described “a ‘monster’ between twenty and thirty feet long with a body like that of a huge overgrown eel” (Aberdeen Press and Journal 1933: 8).

Things get interesting!

In July 1933, George Spicer reported a monster crossing the road in front of his car. It was “the nearest approach to a dragon or pre-historic animal” (Inverness Courier 1933c: 5). It apparently had a big body, and a high back, and must have been from six to eight feet in length. He also said it had a long neck—something that hadn’t appeared in reports before (Cairney 2018: 378). Spicer described it as carrying a small lamb or animal.

By October, a British circus had put up a reward of £20,000 for anyone who captured the animal.

In December 1933, William Anstruther-Gray, the MP for North Lanarkshire, asked the Secretary for Scotland in the House of Commons whether anyone would investigate the monster. You know, for science (Daily Mirror 1933: 27). Sir Murdoch MacDonald, the Inverness MP, told a reporter that, “Nobody knows what is there, but it is quite obvious that too many people have seen something for the matter to be ignored”. He did concede that the explanation might turn out to be something entirely mundane.

The First Hoax

Big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell arrived in December 1933 to find the monster, having been commissioned to do so by the Daily Mail. He found footprints on the shore and took plaster casts of them, ready to send to zoologists in London. Sadly, rather than confirming they belonged to the monster, they pointed out the prints had been made by the same object – most likely an umbrella stand made from a hippopotamus leg.

Naturally, this dampened enthusiasm for the monster. Sightings were written off as hoaxes, or something easy to explain, like an otter, a log, or even deer swimming in the loch. One newspaper noted that “[o]nce hallucination gets a start it soon becomes epidemic” (Todmorden Advertiser 1934: 6). Surprisingly, most of the sightings describe similar things – a large creature with humps, or a long neck and flippers (Lyons 2000). Many witnesses were policemen, scientists, teachers, or priests.

One report from January 1934 claimed the monster had to be at least 50 years old. The witness, Mr Browne, had stayed by the loch fifty years before, and many of those with whom he stayed reported seeing a creature in the loch. Unfortunately, Mr Browne didn’t describe what it looked like. The same article explained that a superintendent of the Marine Biological Station in Millport was convinced the Loch Ness Monster was a great grey seal (Belfast Telegraph 1934: 5).

Photographic Evidence

The famous ‘surgeon’s photograph’ appeared in 1934 in the Daily Mail, taken by physician Robert Kenneth Wilson. This was the photograph that prompted speculation that the monster was a plesiosaur. I was reminded when I first said I was doing this episode to tell people plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs. They are aquatic reptiles in the order Plesiosauria. Dinosaurs are in the order Dinosauria. So now you know.

Incidentally, this photograph was debunked as a hoax made by Wetherell in 1994. He’d mounted the head and neck from a model on a toy submarine and photographed it near the shore. You couldn’t make this stuff up (except they did, about the monster).

Explorations continued throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Further photographs have either been called into question, or dismissed as photos of ordinary things like boats or diving otters. As yet, no one has uncovered any definitive proof that the Loch Ness Monster exists. At least, not as we might think of the Monster.

What IS the Loch Ness Monster?

Plenty of people have theorised realistic explanations for the monster. But what if we view the monster as a cryptid instead of an optical illusion or overactive imagination?

Perhaps the most common idea for the monster’s identity is the plesiosaur. In these theories, the plesiosaur somehow survived the mass extinction event that wiped out a lot of life on earth, and continued living in the loch. If it’s not the exact plesiosaur, it’s somehow a descendant of those plesiosaurs that survived.

I’m not going to get into the obvious issues with that idea. The fact that scientists have found no DNA in the loch to support the theory also rather punctures the idea (BBC 2019). Though it’s worth noting they’ve found plenty of eel DNA, so no one can rule out the idea of a giant eel. An overgrown eel could certainly be considered a monster, meaning the Loch Ness Monster could be real, just not in the form we think it is.

That said, I saw a meme online that I can no longer find in which someone joked that the Loch Ness Monster was a ghost of a plesiosaur. Reader, I definitely liked that idea!

We can’t forget the kelpies

Of course, Scotland does not lack water spirits in its legends and lore. Some of the articles even referred to kelpies or water horses. As Katharine Briggs noted, kelpies live in rivers and streams, while the each-uisge (water horse) lives in the sea or lochs (Briggs 1976: 115). Our only real clue lies in the St Columba story, which as we saw earlier has its own issues. Cairney cautions us not to take the story literally, due to the political intention of the story. But this is a folklore blog. So in terms of folklore, St Columba encountered the monster in the river, suggesting a kelpie at work. The beast tries to drag the man beneath the water—something we often find in kelpie stories.

Of course, kelpies are associated with waterways all over Scotland. It would be easy to ‘borrow’ an existing kelpie story and move it to the River Ness, since St. Columba was in Pict territory. Kelpies are also pretty far away from either the long, many-humped serpent-like monster or the plesiosaur options proposed by the media since the 1930s. But if it was a kelpie, then an Otherworldly creature would be likely to evade contemporary science.

But.

I’m not arguing the Monster exists, or that it is a kelpie. I don’t know any more than anyone else does. It’s highly unlikely Nessie exists, even though it would be cool if she did. But we’re looking at folklore, not scientific evidence. It was worth exploring the links to folklore, even if they get us no closer to whether or not the Monster is real. It does show, however, that we would need to separate kelpies from the media-generated view of the Monster. This means the St. Columba story would have nothing to do with the Loch Ness Monster at all.

Why does the legend of the Loch Ness Monster persist?

I think we can point to several factors. First, the lack of evidence means that while scientists can say there is no plesiosaur DNA in the loch, they also can’t identify the monster itself. The ambiguity creates a space in which people can present theories that become difficult to prove or disprove. That kind of ambiguity will always appeal to the imagination. Besides, with the regular stories of species endangerment or extinction, why wouldn’t we want confirmation of a new species?

Second, Nessie has become a somewhat beloved figure, beneficial to tourism but also appearing in pop culture. Does anyone else remember The Family Ness?

Third, the story never really goes away. We see the same thing with alien big cat sightings. Every time a new witness comes forward, it reignites the fascination with the legend. These sightings keep us interested, discussing the possibilities, and that ‘appeal of the unknown’ keeps us exploring deep space. Why wouldn’t it keep us exploring Loch Ness too?

What do you think the Loch Ness Monster is, or do you think that part doesn’t matter?

References

Aberdeen Press and Journal (1933), ‘Loch Ness “Monster” Again Seen’, Aberdeen Press and Journal, 23 May, p. 8.

BBC (2019), ‘Loch Ness Monster may be a giant eel, say scientists’, BBC News, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-49495145.

Belfast Telegraph (1934) ‘Loch Ness Monster: Seen Fifty Years Ago’, Belfast Telegraph, 5 January, p. 5.

Briggs, Katharine (1976), A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures, London: Penguin Books.

Cairney, Chris (2018), ‘Other Dragons or Dragon Others? A Cultural View of the Loch Ness Monster’, in Lisa Wenger Bro, Crystal O’Leary-Davidson and Marry Ann Gareis (eds), Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable: The Cultural Links between the Human and Inhuman, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 377-399.

Daily Mirror (1933), ‘The Loch Ness Monster’, Daily Mirror, 9 December, p. 27.

Inverness Courier (1933a), ‘Loch Ness “Monster”: Ship Captain’s Views on Occurrence’, Inverness Courier, 12 May, p. 5.

The Inverness Courier (1933b), ‘Loch Ness “Monster”: Attempt to Solve the Mystery’, Inverness Courier, 30 May, p. 4.

Inverness Courier (1933c), ‘Visitors Experience Near Foyers’, Inverness Courier, 4 August, p. 5.

Lyons, Stephens (2000), “The Beast of Loch Ness,” PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lochness/.

Todmorden Advertiser and Hebden Bridge Newsletter (1934), ‘Loch Ness “Monster”‘, Todmorden Advertiser and Hebden Bridge Newsletter, 5 January, p. 6.