A menacing monster
With one glance at the vision and utterly ignoring his bride, the young man leaped into the lake
A year after rising to international prominence on the heels of three high profile sighting, The New York Times just couldn’t get enough of the Loch Ness Monster. In 1934, Nessie garnered 55 mentions – seeming to surface more frequently in the paper of record than in the waves of the Scottish lake that bore its name.
Things kicked off on January 5th, when the creature made a rare appearance on land, as veterinary student Arthur Grant nearly crashed into it, riding his motorcycle home one morning at 1:30. “It looked like a hybrid,” he told the paper. “Something between a plesiosaurus and the seal tribe. I jumped off my cycle, but the creature, with great speed, had rushed into the loch, making a wild splash.”
By May, the director of the Bronx Zoo announced a $25,000 reward for the monster, on the condition, “that it be forty feet long, weigh two tons and be brought here alive.” It was, ultimately, an off-the-cuff joke made during a speech at an official zoo party. But the response that arrived from the other side of the pond was dead serious: “Our Loch Ness monster is not for sale.”
The previous month, the paper had published the “Surgeon’s Photo,” now regarded as the definitive image of Nessie. The grainy picture, credited to London-based gynecologist, Robert Kenneth Wilson, captured a silhouetted figure of the creature’s head and neck, emerging from the waves like a crooked finger. A week after publication, a 80-year-old painter contacted The Times.
“A menacing monster,” Harry W. Watrous described a similar creature that had terrorized the residents of Lake George, New York, some 30 years prior, “the glare of the sea-green eyes having a particularly baleful effect on the women.” The creature made numerous appearances in the summer of 1904, securing its own story in The Times, under the headline, “Marine Ogre at Lake George.”
"Mrs. Frank M. Bates, the dowager actress, was in one of the launches, apparently not more than thirty yards away,” the paper said of a "Georgie" sighting. “She was so frightened by its appearance that she either fell or jumped into the lake.”
Watrous contacted the paper not to reminisce, but to confess. It was, he told the paper, all in the spirit of “good natured fun.” What spurred such fun is a matter of some dispute. In one version of the story, the painter and a neighbor were competing to catch the largest trout. The latter held up a 30-pound fish one day that Watrous later realized was little more than painted wood. So he, quite literally, created a monster.
His confession to The Times, however, offers a less fanciful origin. Georgie was simply born as a way to prank some friends.
“I got a cedar log and fashioned one end of it into my idea of a sea monster or hippogriff,” he explained. “I made a big mouth, a couple of ears, like the ears of an ass, four big teeth, two in the upper and two in the lower jaw, and for eyes I inserted in the sockets of the monster two telegraph pole insulators of green glass. I painted the head in yellow and black stripes, painted the inside of the mouth red and the teeth white, painted two red places for nostrils and painted the ears blue.”
A ten-foot log served as the monster’s head. A rope, run through a pulley, was attached to a rock as an anchor. Watrous held onto the other end, waiting patiently behind a bush on shore, 100 feet away. His first victim was a boatload of friends. The execution was flawless. So much so, that Watrous kept it up for the rest of the summer.
The 80-year-old contacted the paper 30 years later both as a confession, but more importantly, to tell the world he believed the residents of the Scottish Highlands had also gotten one over on the world. Indeed, before his death, one of the men involved in the creation of the Surgeon’s Photo confessed that the that monster was wood putty mounted atop a Woolworth's toy submarine.
Long before his own confession, Watrous clearly felt some regret of his own, as visitors left Lake George in droves that summer of 1904. It was, however, the apparent breakup of a new marriage that truly laid Georgie to rest.
“We released the monster at one time, just a pair of newlyweds came along in a canoe,” said Watrous. “With one glance at the vision and utterly ignoring his bride, the young man leaped into the lake, struck out for the shore and disappeared in the woods. When he sought to make up with his bride, she refused to see him, and that was the one reason why I took from Lake George forever the first fresh-water sea serpent ever seen in the United States.”
Sources:
Marine Ogre at Lake George
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1904/07/03/120287070.html?pageNumber=21
Sea Serpent Hoax of 1904 is Bared https://www.nytimes.com/1934/04/25/archives/sea-serpent-hoax-of-1904-is-bared-mechanical-monster-created-by-hw.html