Hunting Monsters by Darren Naish

Author:Darren Naish
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcturus Digital Limited

The lake monster: indefatigable cultural icon

The very fact that people associate ‘monsters’ – giant, weird, dangerous creatures – with large and sometimes not-so-large bodies of water is probably the one crucial, core component of the lake monster mystery. As anyone who has grown up or lived close to any large body of water can attest, a collection of vague ideas, concerns and half-remembered stories are forever associated with such places. Large pools and lakes are said to be unfathomably deep, to harbour unexplained whirlpools, sometimes to possess deep caves and tunnels, to retain the drowned and to be home to large, dark, dangerous creatures: giant fish, monsters with backs like upturned boat hulls and serpentine animals that are giant versions of land snakes. Amphibious monsters disguised as horses or bulls but which are secretly carnivorous and plunge human riders to their deaths in the deep are a motif of certain northern European cultures. They persist, lurking, in our minds as vague reminders that cold, dark waters and the animals in and around them can be dangerous. It’s not difficult to suppose that all these stories were invented by rural people for the purposes of entertainment, and to instill in children a sensible respect of things and places that might really be dangerous.

The existence of this cultural landscape is the crucial background to the lake monster phenomenon, regardless of one’s opinion or position on cryptozoology. As argued by Meurger in Lake Monster Traditions, it’s not just that people have similar, culturally ingrained beliefs or suspicions about lakes and their denizens, they’ve also taken these ideas with them when they have migrated, sometimes merging them with those of other peoples and other cultures. The European colonists of North America saw horse-headed monsters and giant serpents in the enormous lakes of the United States and Canada and interpreted indigenous legends about horned water serpents, ‘water panthers’ and giant scaly fish-monsters as descriptions of the same creatures. A sort of cultural hybrid legend was the inevitable consequence. This cultural background exists regardless of any interpretation of monsters as real, flesh and blood animals.

Whenever people visit lakes, lochs, pools and so on, it is therefore inevitable that this cultural background is there in their minds, functioning as a framework for the way in which the world is understood. It’s an inescapable consequence of being part of a human culture. Whether we ‘believe’ in water monsters or not, the fact is that we expect to see or experience monsters at such places.

Comparatively few people are familiar with the unusual phenomena that are associated with large water bodies. These include standing waves, converging wakes, mirages and erupting debris. People are also generally quite bad at identifying animals seen at lakes, including waterbirds and large fish. Many lakes associated with water monsters are surrounded by habitats in which deer forage at the water’s edge and even swim from bank to bank. An experience involving any one of these events, animals or objects at a lake already linked in

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