Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – South Bay Bessie and the Long Life of Lake Erie’s Sea Serpent Legend
Lake Erie has never needed much help becoming mysterious. It is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, quick to turn rough, quick to fog, and quick to make even experienced boatmen respect the weather. Along its Ohio shore, from Toledo and Port Clinton to Sandusky, Huron, Cleveland, and the islands, people have long told stories about strange things moving under the water.
The best known of those stories is Bessie, also called South Bay Bessie, South Bay Besse, the Lake Erie Monster, or simply the Lake Erie sea serpent.
As with most lake monster traditions, the evidence is not proof of an unknown animal. It is better read as folklore, newspaper history, local promotion, misidentification, and the persistence of a good story. Yet the legend itself has a real history. It moves through early natural-history writing, nineteenth-century newspapers, island snake lore, twentieth-century hoaxes, and the tourism imagination of the late twentieth century.
Bessie may or may not live in Lake Erie, but the story of Bessie has certainly lived there for more than two hundred years.
A Monster in the Inland Sea
Lake Erie sits like an inland sea between the United States and Canada. Its southern shore touches Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, while its northern shore belongs to Ontario. Ships have crossed it for war, trade, fishing, immigration, rum-running, tourism, and summer pleasure. It is a working lake and a haunted lake, a place of shipwrecks, storms, ghost lights, island snakes, and strange sightings.
That kind of water breeds stories.
Bessie is usually described as long, dark, serpent-like, and partly hidden. Some accounts give the creature a head above the surface. Others mention humps, fins, scales, a tail, a body moving just below the water, or an enormous shadow sliding beneath a boat. The size changes from report to report, but many modern retellings settle on something in the range of thirty to forty feet.
That consistency is part of the legend, but so is the inconsistency. Bessie is sometimes a serpent, sometimes a giant eel, sometimes a sturgeon-like animal, sometimes a reptile, and sometimes only a dark shape in troubled water. Those shifting descriptions matter. They show that Bessie belongs not only to the lake, but also to the imagination of the people trying to explain what they saw.
Rafinesque and the 1817 Lake Erie Serpent
One of the most important early printed sources for the Lake Erie monster tradition came from Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, a naturalist whose interests ranged widely across American plants, animals, and fossils. In 1817, he published “Dissertation on Water Snakes, Sea Snakes and Sea Serpents” in the American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review.
Rafinesque discussed a report from July 3, 1817, in which the crew of a schooner supposedly saw a large creature in Lake Erie about three miles from land. The animal was described as thirty-five or forty feet long, about one foot in diameter, and dark mahogany or nearly black in color. Rafinesque admitted that the report was incomplete. He did not know whether the animal had scales, and he could not say for sure whether it was a snake or a fish.
Still, he tried to place it within the language of science. He suggested that it might be a gigantic eel and gave it the name Anguilla gigas.
That name did not establish a real species. Later writers treated the animal as an imaginary or doubtful form. What matters historically is that the Lake Erie serpent entered print at a time when American naturalists, newspapermen, and the reading public were fascinated by sea serpent reports. The famous Gloucester sea serpent sightings of 1817 had helped stir national interest, and Rafinesque was writing in that larger atmosphere.
Lake Erie’s monster, then, did not appear in isolation. It surfaced during a moment when Americans were debating whether the old sea serpent of legend might be explained by modern science.
A Copper-Colored Water Snake and an Early Doubt
Rafinesque’s account also noted a second Lake Erie report. This one described a copper-colored creature with bright eyes, said to be sixty feet long. According to the story, musket balls had no visible effect on it.
That detail sounds dramatic, but it is also one of the reasons the source must be handled carefully. Rafinesque himself was working from reports, not from a specimen. Later skeptical writers thought he had been taken in by a hoax. The language of the account belongs to the old sea serpent tradition, where witnesses often shot at mysterious animals, watched them vanish, and left behind no body.
For a historian, the value of the report is not that it proves Bessie existed. It proves that by 1817 Lake Erie could already be fitted into a wider American pattern of sea serpent storytelling.
That is the beginning of Bessie’s paper trail.
The Cleaveland Gazette and the Monster That May Have Been a Bank
One of the strangest early Lake Erie monster items appeared in Cleveland newspaper tradition. The Cleaveland Gazette & Commercial Register published a sea serpent account on July 31, 1818, according to later local-history discussion. At first glance, it looked like a dramatic monster story. The creature reportedly hissed, lashed the water, and disappeared into the foam.
Yet historians have argued that the 1818 item may not have been a literal monster report at all. Cleveland historian John Grabowski has connected it to political and economic anger over the Second Bank of the United States. In this reading, the monster was a newspaper allegory, a way of comparing the bank’s hard credit policy to a sea serpent attack.
That makes the account more interesting, not less.
It shows how sea serpent language could be used as a political weapon. A monster in the water was frightening, but so was debt, credit, and financial panic. The serpent could be real in one story, doubtful in another, and symbolic in a third. By the early nineteenth century, Lake Erie already had enough monster language available for editors to use it in more than one way.
Lake Erie’s Snake Islands
Long before modern Bessie, Lake Erie’s western islands had a reputation for snakes. French names such as Isles aux Serpents and English names such as Rattlesnake Island preserved that association. Travelers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries wrote about rattlesnakes and water snakes on and around the islands, sometimes with exaggeration, sometimes with genuine fear.
The National Museum of the Great Lakes has preserved a 1947 Inland Seas article by P. W. McDermott titled “Snake Stories of the Lake Erie Islands.” That piece is valuable because it places Bessie within older Lake Erie snake lore. It reaches back to accounts by travelers such as Father Charlevoix, Jonathan Carver, Samuel R. Brown, and others who described the islands as places full of reptiles.
Some of those old accounts were clearly embroidered. Carver’s famous “hissing snake,” said to exhale a deadly odor, sounds more like frontier exaggeration than careful zoology. Still, the basic setting was real. Lake Erie’s islands did have snakes, water snakes were common, and travelers carried those stories forward.
That matters for Bessie because folklore often grows in familiar soil. A lake already associated with snakes, storms, shipwrecks, and eerie islands was ready for a sea serpent.
The Dusseau Brothers and the Monster Near Toledo
One of the more unusual Lake Erie monster stories involved two French fishermen or settlers named Dusseau, connected in later source trails with an 1887 newspaper account from the Omaha Daily Bee. The story carried a Toledo dateline and described the brothers returning from fishing late at night when they saw something strange on the beach.
This was not the usual long serpent in the water. The creature was described as phosphorescent, twenty to thirty feet long, and shaped something like a sturgeon, except with arms. The brothers supposedly rushed away to get ropes and help, hoping to capture the monster. When they returned, it was gone. All that remained were tracks on the beach and a handful of large silver-colored scales.
It is a wonderful newspaper monster story, but it should not be read too literally. The details are theatrical. The glowing body, the arms thrown into the air, the vanished creature, and the silver-dollar scales all sound like the kind of tale editors knew would travel well from paper to paper.
Yet the Dusseau story is useful because it shows how flexible the Lake Erie monster could be. Bessie was not always imagined as a clean copy of a sea serpent. Sometimes the monster borrowed from the sturgeon, the fish, the reptile, the ghost story, and the tall tale all at once.
Sandusky, Sea Serpents, and Newspaper Theater
Sandusky also belongs in the Bessie tradition. In April 1912, the Sandusky Register carried a monster story that later researchers have treated cautiously, partly because of its April Fool’s timing. On July 22, 1931, Sandusky again entered the sea serpent record with a story about a supposed captured creature in Sandusky Bay.
The 1931 episode spread widely enough to attract attention outside Ohio. Later summaries describe two men who claimed to have encountered a large snake-like animal, subdued it, and boxed it up. The story became even stranger when a python was reportedly exhibited as the captured sea serpent.
That is the point where Bessie becomes showmanship.
A lake monster does not have to be believed by everyone in order to become useful. It can sell newspapers. It can draw crowds. It can give a town a joke, a mascot, or a temporary attraction. The 1931 Sandusky story fits that tradition well. It reads less like scientific evidence and more like the meeting place of waterfront gossip, practical joking, and public curiosity.
South Bay Besse and the 1990 Revival
The modern Bessie story surged again in 1990. Associated Press reporting, printed in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, described new sightings of a huge serpent-like creature in Lake Erie. The renewed attention began after Harold Bricker and his family reported seeing something large in the water after a fishing trip on September 4. They described a black creature roughly thirty-five feet long with a snake-like head.
Other reports soon followed. A Huron firefighter and a Pennsylvania woman vacationing on the lake were among those mentioned in the coverage. John Schaffner, editor of a weekly newspaper in Port Clinton, set up a toll-free phone line for sightings and ran a naming contest.
The name South Bay Besse was chosen partly because of the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant near Port Clinton and partly because it rhymed with Nessie, the famous Loch Ness monster. Over time, many writers and storytellers shifted the spelling toward Bessie, which gave the Lake Erie monster a more creature-like name.
This 1990 revival is one of the most important moments in the legend. It took old Lake Erie sea serpent material and gave it a modern identity. The monster was no longer just a passing newspaper oddity. It had a name, a place, and a public life.
Huron and the Monster as Civic Promotion
Huron, Ohio, became one of the towns most closely associated with the modern Bessie craze. Thomas Solberg, owner of Huron Lagoon Marina, offered a five-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who captured South Bay Besse alive. He also posted a sign calling the marina the future home of the Lake Erie sea serpent.
By 1993, Huron’s connection to the monster had drawn national attention. The Wall Street Journal covered the city’s effort to embrace its own sea monster, and later folklore researchers and monster writers pointed to that episode as a key moment in Bessie’s public life.
This kind of promotion is easy to dismiss, but it is part of how folklore works. Communities do not only inherit legends. They reshape them. They name them, market them, joke about them, argue over them, and turn them into local identity.
Bessie became a way for Lake Erie towns to take the strangeness of the water and make it their own.
Sturgeon, Seiches, Driftwood, and Other Explanations
The most responsible way to write about Bessie is to separate the legend from the zoology. Lake Erie is not empty, and the lake itself can produce strange sights.
Lake sturgeon are especially important to the discussion. They are large, ancient-looking native fish, and Ohio wildlife officials note that they were once abundant in Lake Erie and the Ohio River system. Their populations declined sharply because of overharvesting, habitat damage, dams, pollution, and other human pressures. In earlier centuries, when sturgeon were more common, a large fish seen briefly in rough water could easily become part of a monster story.
Lake Erie’s water can also behave strangely. NOAA explains that seiches occur when strong winds and changes in atmospheric pressure push water from one end of a lake to the other, causing it to slosh back and forth for hours or even days. Lake Erie is especially known for this, particularly when strong winds blow from southwest to northeast. Michigan Sea Grant notes that Lake Erie’s east-west orientation, prevailing westerly winds, and shallow western basin make storm surges and seiches common.
That does not explain every sighting, but it explains the setting. A dark shape under churning water, a floating log, a line of waves, a sturgeon, a swimming group of animals, or storm-driven water movement could all become something more frightening when seen from a boat.
The old skeptical explanation also matters. Samuel L. Mitchill’s “History of Sea-Serpentism” repeated a Lake Erie serpent story near the Sisters Islands and then said a sailor later admitted it had been based on a floating dry tree. Whether or not that explains a particular report, it shows that doubt has been part of the Lake Erie serpent tradition almost from the beginning.
Bessie has always had believers, skeptics, jokers, and explainers.
Bessie in Folklore
Modern folklore scholarship helps place Bessie in the right category. Judith S. Neulander’s Folklore of Lake Erie includes material on South Bay Bessie and even a chapter suggesting a possible origin in the Lake Erie Cow Monster tradition. Her work treats Lake Erie as a region rich in ghost ships, storm legends, monster stories, folk belief, local humor, and community memory.
That is where Bessie belongs.
Bessie is not just a question of whether a giant creature exists under the waves. The better question is why people along Lake Erie keep finding room for one. The answer lies in the lake’s character. Lake Erie is beautiful, useful, dangerous, shallow, stormy, industrial, polluted in memory, recovering in ecology, and full of places where people look out over gray water and wonder what is moving beneath it.
Folklore often lives in that space between knowledge and uncertainty.
Why the Lake Erie Monster Still Matters
Bessie endures because the story does several things at once.
It connects modern Ohio to the old American sea serpent craze of the nineteenth century. It preserves the newspaper habits of an era when strange reports could travel across the country and become entertainment. It reflects older Lake Erie snake lore from the islands. It gives lakeside towns a mascot, a joke, and a mystery. It also reminds readers that folklore does not have to be ancient to matter. A legend can grow in print, on docks, in taverns, in newspapers, in tourist campaigns, and in family stories told after a long day on the water.
The historian does not have to prove Bessie is real to take Bessie seriously.
The monster is part of Lake Erie’s cultural history. It belongs to the same waters as shipwreck tales, storm warnings, island snake stories, fishing memories, and marina gossip. It is a creature made from water, weather, fear, humor, and the old human habit of seeing something move in the dark and giving it a name.
Maybe Bessie was a sturgeon. Maybe Bessie was driftwood. Maybe Bessie was a wave in the wrong light. Maybe Bessie was a newspaper joke that refused to die.
Whatever first stirred the story, Lake Erie kept it.
Sources & Further Reading
Rafinesque, Constantine Samuel. “Dissertation on Water Snakes, Sea Snakes and Sea Serpents.” American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review 1, 1817. Reprinted in A. C. Oudemans, The Great Sea-Serpent. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/78334/pg78334-images.html
Oudemans, A. C. The Great Sea-Serpent: An Historical and Critical Treatise. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1892. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78334
Oudemans, A. C. The Great Sea-Serpent: An Historical and Critical Treatise. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1892. Biodiversity Heritage Library. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/63980
Mitchill, Samuel L. “History of Sea-Serpentism.” Reprinted in A. C. Oudemans, The Great Sea-Serpent: An Historical and Critical Treatise. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1892. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/78334/pg78334-images.html
Library of Congress. “The Great American Sea Serpent.” Folklife Today, August 8, 2016. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/08/great-american-sea-serpent/
McDermott, P. W. “Snake Stories of the Lake Erie Islands.” Inland Seas, April 1947. National Museum of the Great Lakes, May 25, 2020. https://nmgl.org/snake-stories-of-the-lake-erie-islands-april-1947/
“Legend of Lake Erie Monster Rises Again: Myths: New Reports of Sightings of the Huge, Snakelike Creature Are Causing a Stir. Marine Researchers Remain Skeptical.” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1990. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-09-30-mn-2507-story.html
“Sea Serpent Sighted in Lake Erie.” Daily Kent Stater, September 28, 1990. Kent State University Libraries. https://dks.library.kent.edu/cgi-bin/kentstate?a=d&d=dks19900928-01.2.26
“Nessie Losing ‘Lock’ on Fame, May Have a Cousin in Lake Erie.” Deseret News, September 30, 1990. https://www.deseret.com/1990/9/30/18883701/nessie-losing-lock-on-fame-may-have-a-cousin-in-lake-erie/
“Huron, Ohio, Wants You to Come See Its Own Sea Monster.” Wall Street Journal, July 29, 1993. Wall Street Journal Archives. https://www.wsj.com
Neulander, Judith S. Folklore of Lake Erie. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2024. https://iupress.org/9780253069795/folklore-of-lake-erie/
Evans, Timothy H. Review of Folklore of Lake Erie, by Judith S. Neulander. Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, 2025. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/jfrr/article/view/41123
McClelland, Edward. “Bessie: The Lake Erie Monster.” Belt Magazine, July 20, 2018. https://beltmag.com/bessie-the-lake-erie-monster/
Dickey, Chris. “Toward a Unifying Theory of Lake Monsters.” Atlas Obscura, January 17, 2024. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/column-lake-monsters
Cleveland Magazine. “CLE Myths: Lake Erie Monster.” November 25, 2019. https://clevelandmagazine.com/articles/cle-myths-lake-erie-monster/
Monsters of Ohio. “Meet the Monsters: The Lake Erie Monster.” November 7, 2021. https://monstersofohio.com/2021/11/07/meet-the-monsters-the-lake-erie-monster/
Cassady, Charles, Jr. “Summer Reading Excerpt Part III.” Cleveland Scene, August 12, 2009. https://www.clevescene.com/news/summer-reading-excerpt-part-iii-1612300
Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Lake Sturgeon.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://ohiodnr.gov/discover-and-learn/animals/fish/lake-sturgeon
Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife. Ohio Lake Sturgeon Restoration Plan for the Lake Erie Watershed. Columbus: Ohio Department of Natural Resources, 2025. https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/ohiodnr.gov/documents/wildlife/fish-management/Ohio_Lake_Sturgeon_Restoration_Plan_2025.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. “Telemetry Based Determination of First-Year Survival for Lake Sturgeon Reintroduced into the Maumee River.” April 24, 2025. https://www.usgs.gov/data/telemetry-based-determination-first-year-survival-lake-sturgeon-reintroduced-maumee-river
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Mapping Lake Sturgeon Habitat in Ohio.” September 24, 2021. https://www.fws.gov/story/mapping-lake-sturgeon-habitat-ohio
NOAA Ocean Service. “What Is a Seiche?” Updated June 16, 2024. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/seiche.html
International Joint Commission. “They Come in Waves: Seiches and a Type of Tsunami Affect the Great Lakes.” October 23, 2014. https://www.ijc.org/en/they-come-waves-seiches-and-type-tsunami-affect-great-lakes
Michigan Sea Grant. “Surges and Seiches.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.michiganseagrant.org/lessons/lessons/by-broad-concept/earth-science/surges-and-seiches-2/
Author Note: This article treats Bessie as folklore and newspaper history, not as proof of an unknown animal in Lake Erie. The goal is to trace how old reports, local memory, natural explanations, and lakeside promotion kept the Lake Erie Monster alive.