Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Coosa River Monster: Gadsden’s 1877 Serpent Sightings and the Legend Beneath the Water
In the summer of 1877, something strange moved through the Coosa River near Gadsden, Alabama.
The reports did not begin with an anonymous traveler or a story remembered decades later. They appeared in contemporary newspapers and were attached to the names of local residents. One witness described a creature holding a long neck above the water, with a head resembling that of a horse, glaring eyes, and a brilliant red tongue. Another group watched something approach their raft and saw what they described as a pale underside and great knots rising along its back. Other people soon came forward with stories of their own.
For several weeks, the Coosa River Monster became part of everyday conversation in Etowah County. Later local accounts claim that curiosity seekers took boats onto the river hoping to find it and that newspapers warned parents to keep children away from the water.
The story eventually expanded far beyond the sightings of 1877. Older tales were pulled into the excitement, including a remarkable tradition from the Ten Islands area in which settlers supposedly killed an enormous water creature and discovered that it had swallowed a Native man, his canoe, a deer, and his weapons. Decades later, stories of gigantic catfish around hydroelectric dams gave the old monster a new form.
Yet when the layers of folklore are separated, the most compelling portion of the story remains the events around Gadsden in 1877, where newspaper reports allow us to watch a regional legend being created almost in real time.
M. L. Foster and the Ball Play Creek Encounter
The most important surviving account appeared in the Gadsden Times on June 8, 1877.
The witness was M. L. Foster of Etowah County. His first name is uncertain in later retellings. Historian Dale Cox transcribes it as Marens L. Foster, while the Gadsden Messenger identifies him as Marcus L. Foster. The disagreement is a reminder that even a well-documented piece of folklore can accumulate small changes as it is copied from one source to another. What is much more certain is the newspaper, the date, the location, and the substance of Foster’s story.
Foster had gone onto the Coosa near the mouth of Ball Play Creek to set fishing hooks. While on the water, he noticed something near the opposite bank. At first it resembled a person standing in a slowly drifting boat.
That was strange enough to attract his attention, so Foster moved closer.
As the distance narrowed, the object no longer looked like a man. For a moment it appeared more like a woman standing in the water. Foster continued approaching until he became convinced that he was looking at neither.
The Gadsden Times described what he saw as a “living monster or serpent.” Its head and neck rose several feet above the river. Foster thought the head resembled that of a horse. He saw large eyes and an open mouth containing a vivid red tongue. Instead of fleeing from the boat, the creature appeared to look directly back at him.
Foster decided not to investigate any further.
He retreated toward the opposite bank and continued watching from a safer distance. The animal moved along the river, periodically exposing portions of its back, before reaching the area opposite Thornton’s log yard and disappearing beneath the water.
The newspaper was apparently aware of how unbelievable the account sounded. Rather than presenting Foster as an excitable storyteller, it emphasized his standing in the community and described him as reliable and intelligent. It also noted that Foster himself had been reluctant to discuss the experience because he knew how improbable it sounded.
That detail is important. The article did not present Foster as someone eagerly seeking attention. According to the newspaper, embarrassment and disbelief were exactly what had kept him quiet.
Whatever Foster saw near Ball Play Creek, he seems to have believed that it was alive.
Old Sightings Return to the Surface
Once Foster’s story became public, other accounts began appearing.
Mrs. Martin, who lived near Foster, reportedly remembered a frightening encounter with something unusual in the Coosa in 1862. Judge Lemuel Standifer recalled being in a rowboat near Rome, Georgia, when he heard a tremendous disturbance behind him and saw what appeared to be a serpentine head sinking into the river. Captain J. M. Elliott was also associated with an account of an unusual creature near Rome.
Green Rasbury reportedly encountered a dark creature around the mouth of Wills Creek, where it disturbed the water as it moved across the river. John Burgess was credited with seeing something similar in the same general area.
Later compilations describe a creature roughly fifteen to twenty feet long, serpent-like, scaled, and equipped with large fins. Those details should be treated more cautiously than Foster’s description because the surviving modern accounts combine several witnesses whose original newspaper statements have not all been located.
The distinction matters.
Mrs. Martin’s story may have concerned an event in 1862, but the evidence presently available does not establish that it was written down in 1862. Instead, it appears in connection with the excitement surrounding the later sightings. The same caution applies to several of the other witnesses.
They remain valuable parts of the Coosa tradition, but they should be understood as earlier experiences recalled during the 1877 monster scare unless contemporary newspaper reports can eventually be found.
The Raftsmen Meet the Monster
Foster was not the only 1877 witness whose experience can be connected directly to a nineteenth-century newspaper citation.
On July 3, the Montgomery Advertiser repeated a report from the Gadsden Times concerning a party of raftsmen on the Coosa near Gadsden.
The men encountered something approaching their raft and attempted to drive it away by throwing sticks. Their efforts apparently had little effect. The creature continued alongside them.
Their description differed from Foster’s in some respects. Instead of concentrating on the animal’s head, they noticed a light or white underside and large raised areas along its back. The newspaper described these features as “large knots.” One young man reportedly became so terrified that his companions had to restrain him to keep him aboard the raft.
Here the legend becomes particularly interesting.
Foster had already described portions of the creature’s back appearing above the surface as it moved. The raftsmen also emphasized the back, but described separate raised areas or humps. Although the reports do not prove that both groups saw the same thing, the similarities helped establish the image of a long animal moving partly above and partly beneath the Coosa.
More importantly for historians, the raftsmen account means Foster’s experience was not simply a strange newspaper story printed once and forgotten. By early July, reports of a mysterious creature in the Coosa were circulating beyond Gadsden itself.
The monster had become news.
When Gadsden Went Looking for It
Later local histories describe the summer of 1877 as a period of genuine fascination around the river.
People reportedly went onto the Coosa hoping to see the creature themselves. Stories circulated from Gadsden toward Rome and along the tributaries entering the river. According to Danny Crownover’s compilation for the Gadsden Messenger, newspapers became concerned enough to advise parents to keep children away from the river.
The atmosphere is not difficult to imagine.
The nineteenth-century Coosa was not the controlled chain of reservoirs familiar to modern travelers. Rivers were transportation routes, fishing grounds, commercial corridors, and dangerous natural barriers. People who lived beside them understood their currents and channels, but deep water could still conceal almost anything from view.
A strange shape glimpsed from a boat could become a story before the boat reached shore.
Yet the Coosa River Monster is unusual because the surviving tradition includes named witnesses, recognizable landmarks, and contemporary newspaper references. This places it somewhere between ordinary folklore and documented local history.
A historian cannot demonstrate that a monster existed.
A historian can demonstrate that people in northeastern Alabama were talking about one in 1877.
The Ten Islands Monster
As the 1877 reports circulated, another remarkable story became associated with the Coosa.
This one supposedly belonged to an earlier generation.
Near Ten Islands, farther south along the river around the Fort Strother area, settlers were said to have encountered an enormous aquatic creature lying partly on land and partly in the water. It seemed badly weakened or dying.
According to a version attributed to The Daily Times of August 25, 1877, the settlers approached the animal and eventually killed it. When they opened its body, they supposedly found an astonishing collection inside: a bark canoe, the skeleton and antlers of a deer, the skeleton of a Native man, a rifle, a bow, and arrows.
From this collection, the settlers reconstructed what they believed had happened. A Native hunter had killed the deer, loaded it into his canoe, and attempted to cross the river. The monster swallowed the man, the deer, the canoe, and everything inside it. The flesh was digested, but the canoe and weapons supposedly could not be, leaving the creature sick enough to drift helplessly onto the island.
It is the kind of story that sounds almost designed for a nineteenth-century newspaper.
That does not make it worthless. Tall tales, legends, and exaggerated newspaper stories are historical evidence too, but they are evidence for what people told and believed, not necessarily for the literal events being described.
A modern reference also points to a New York Times story from 1877 with the spectacular title “An Alabama Tradition,” followed by a description of the monster swallowing a deer, a Native man, a canoe, and a musket. This shows that some version of the Ten Islands tale had escaped Alabama and entered the national press by 1877.
What it does not prove is the date often assigned to the original event.
The Problem with the Supposed 1816 Letter
Modern retellings frequently state that the Ten Islands story came from a letter written in 1816.
There is a serious problem with that claim.
Some versions say the letter described settlers in St. Clair County. According to the Alabama Department of Archives and History, St. Clair County was not established until November 20, 1818. The neighboring county later known as Calhoun was not created until 1832.
Someone writing in 1816 therefore could not have described the site contemporaneously as being in St. Clair County.
That does not prove that the entire story was invented in 1877. A genuine early letter could have existed and later writers may simply have added a modern county designation when retelling it. The date could also have been copied incorrectly. Another possibility is that an old local tradition was eventually transformed into the claim of an 1816 document.
At present, the safest conclusion is much narrower.
A Ten Islands monster tradition was circulating in print by 1877. The claim that it can be traced to a surviving letter from 1816 has not yet been demonstrated.
That difference is important because it moves the story from an apparently documented frontier encounter to something closer to historical folklore whose origins remain uncertain.
Ten Islands Before the Monster Story
The setting itself, however, is undeniably historic.
Ten Islands lies along the Coosa near the site where Andrew Jackson established Fort Strother during the Creek War. In 1813, Jackson used the position as a military base while campaigning against the Red Stick Creeks. The fort stood roughly thirty miles south of present-day Gadsden and became a staging ground for operations including the attack on Tallushatchee.
Long before the nineteenth-century monster stories appeared in newspapers, the Coosa Valley had been a Native landscape.
That history has encouraged later writers to connect the Coosa River Monster with older Indigenous traditions of great serpents and supernatural creatures associated with water.
There is reason to discuss those traditions, but there is also reason to be careful.
The Uktena and Older Serpent Traditions
James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee, published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1902 from material gathered largely during the late nineteenth century, preserves Cherokee traditions concerning the Uktena, an enormous supernatural serpent.
In the stories recorded by Mooney, Uktena were associated with dangerous and secluded places, including deep river pools and mountain passes. The creature was far more than an unusually large snake. It belonged to a religious and mythological world involving supernatural power, danger, medicine, and sacred knowledge.
Southeastern Native traditions collected by ethnographers also include other giant and horned water serpents.
This does not establish that the Coosa River Monster of 1877 was simply a renamed Uktena story.
There is no evidence in Foster’s account that he called the creature Uktena or connected what he saw to Cherokee tradition. Nor should distinct Cherokee and Muscogee traditions be blended together merely because both peoples lived in the broader Southeast.
What the older material demonstrates is something more modest and more historically useful. Stories of extraordinary serpentine beings associated with water existed in the region long before Gadsden newspapers began printing reports of a river monster.
The two traditions can be discussed beside one another without claiming that one directly produced the other.
An 1882 Reporter Finds a Monster
Five years after the great wave of sightings, someone apparently decided to investigate.
According to a later Gadsden Messenger account preserving the story, a newspaper reporter took a small boat onto the Coosa in June 1882. He traveled roughly a mile and a half above the Broad Street Wharf when the water near the eastern bank suddenly became disturbed.
Then a large black shape began rising.
From a distance, it appeared to be exactly the kind of creature that had frightened residents five years earlier.
The reporter moved close enough to investigate.
The monster dissolved into something considerably less supernatural.
It was a large accumulation of leaves and aquatic vegetation rising from the river bottom, apparently pushed upward by gases trapped beneath the decaying material. The reporter admitted that the sight was alarming before its true nature became apparent.
That account is one of the most valuable pieces of the entire Coosa story because it shows that people in the nineteenth century were not universally willing to accept the monster explanation.
It also demonstrates how convincingly an ordinary river phenomenon could imitate something alive.
A dark mass appearing from below, breaking the surface in several places and then sinking again could easily become a series of humps or the back of an enormous animal when seen from a distance.
The 1882 explanation does not solve Foster’s 1877 encounter. Foster described a distinct head, neck, eyes, mouth, and tongue. It does show that at least some mysterious shapes on the Coosa had perfectly natural origins.
Could a Real Animal Have Helped Create the Legend?
The Coosa also contained animals large enough to surprise someone who encountered them unexpectedly.
One particularly interesting possibility is the lake sturgeon.
The Georgia Department of Natural Resources confirms that lake sturgeon were native to the Coosa River basin in northwestern Georgia and northeastern Alabama. They are ancient-looking fish with shark-like tails and rows of hard bony plates called scutes. Large individuals can exceed one hundred pounds, while exceptional specimens elsewhere have grown considerably larger. The original Coosa population disappeared during the twentieth century before a restoration program began in 2002.
That makes the species worth considering when reading descriptions of a pale underside, large fins, and unusual projections along an animal’s back.
It does not provide a complete solution.
A sturgeon does not normally hold a horse-like head several feet above the water, and no fish neatly explains every feature Foster reported. Historical witnesses can also misjudge size, distance, movement, and shape, particularly when observing something unfamiliar from a boat.
Alligator gar are often offered as explanations for southern river-monster stories, but that solution is weaker in this particular case. The Encyclopedia of Alabama places the species primarily in river systems connected with the Mobile-Tensaw Delta farther south.
The historical evidence therefore leaves several possibilities rather than one satisfying answer.
Some witnesses may have encountered unusually large fish. Some may have mistaken vegetation, logs, wakes, or other river phenomena for animals. Details may have grown as stories were retold. It is also possible for a witness to encounter a real animal and describe it imperfectly.
None of those possibilities require an undiscovered twenty-foot serpent to have lived beneath Gadsden.
None can tell us with certainty what Foster thought was staring back at him in 1877.
From Serpents to Giant Catfish
As the Coosa itself changed, so did its monsters.
Twentieth-century dam construction transformed long stretches of the river into reservoirs. Around Neely Henry and other projects, stories began circulating about divers encountering catfish of extraordinary size in deep water.
The creatures in these accounts were no longer necessarily long-necked serpents with horse-like heads. They were enormous fish, sometimes described as being as large as a person and, in the most exaggerated versions, as large as automobiles.
The Gadsden Messenger preserves local recollections of divers working around Neely Henry Dam returning with stories about giant catfish swimming through the dark water below.
These tales belong to the larger Coosa monster tradition, but they represent a different generation of folklore.
The landscape had changed. The monster changed with it.
Where nineteenth-century witnesses imagined serpents in a largely free-flowing river, twentieth-century storytellers imagined immense fish hiding beside concrete dams in black reservoir depths.
The common thread was the water itself and the enduring belief that something beneath it might grow far larger than anyone standing safely on shore could imagine.
What the Historical Record Supports
The Coosa River Monster becomes more interesting, not less, when the evidence is divided according to its strength.
The strongest material belongs to Etowah County in 1877.
The June 8 Gadsden Times account of M. L. Foster can be traced to a specific newspaper and date. The July 3 Montgomery Advertiser preserves another contemporary report derived from the Gadsden Times. Together they establish that multiple monster stories were circulating around Gadsden during the same summer. Historian Dale Cox’s work is particularly useful because he identifies those exact newspaper citations rather than relying only on later cryptid retellings.
The Ten Islands story is different.
It was clearly part of nineteenth-century tradition by 1877, but the alleged 1816 documentation remains uncertain. The reference to St. Clair County in an 1816 account is chronologically impossible if that wording is supposed to be original.
The later giant-catfish stories are different again.
They belong to the twentieth-century dam era and reveal how old folklore can adapt itself to a transformed landscape.
Putting all three together without distinction makes the Coosa River Monster seem like one continuous series of sightings stretching across two centuries.
The historical record tells a better story.
It shows folklore evolving.
The Monster That Stayed in the River
The Coosa River Monster never became as famous as the creatures supposedly inhabiting Loch Ness, Lake Champlain, or other legendary waters.
There was no permanent tourist attraction built around it. No scientific expedition swept the river with sonar looking for an unknown species. No specimen was recovered and no photograph settled the question.
What survives instead is something more distinctly local.
There is a fisherman approaching a shape near Ball Play Creek because he thinks someone is standing in the water.
There are raftsmen throwing sticks at an animal that refuses to move away.
There is an old story from Ten Islands about a creature that swallowed a canoe and died because it could not digest the contents.
There is a reporter rowing toward a terrifying black mass only to discover leaves and weeds rising from the bottom.
There are dam workers returning to shore with stories about fish large enough to make men reconsider entering the water.
Together they form more than a monster story. They preserve changing relationships between people and one of the great rivers of the southern Appalachian region.
The Coosa carried Native communities, armies, settlers, fishermen, timber, commerce, steamboats, and eventually hydroelectric power. Every generation looked across its surface knowing that most of the river remained hidden beneath it.
That unseen depth gave the monster somewhere to live.
Whether anything unknown ever moved beneath those waters is a question the surviving sources cannot answer. What they can show is that during the summer of 1877, people around Gadsden looked at the Coosa differently. For a few weeks, an ordinary trip onto the river carried the possibility that a long neck might rise from the water, a pair of glaring eyes might turn toward the boat, and one of Alabama’s strangest legends might suddenly become real.
Sources & Further Reading
Gadsden Times. “A Living Monster or Serpent.” June 8, 1877. Reproduced and discussed in Dale Cox, “The Alabama Monster of 1877: ‘A Living Monster or Serpent.’” https://twoegg.blogspot.com/2019/10/alabamamonster.html.
Montgomery Advertiser. “The Monster.” July 3, 1877. Quoting the Gadsden Times. Reproduced and discussed in Dale Cox, “The Alabama Monster of 1877: ‘A Living Monster or Serpent.’” https://twoegg.blogspot.com/2019/10/alabamamonster.html.
New York Times. “An Alabama Tradition: The River Monster that Swallowed a Deer and an Indian, and Digested Them, but Died from the Effects of Gulping Down the Red Man’s Canoe and Musket.” 1877. Referenced in “For Halloween: He Was Alright Until the Canoe Part.” Deep Fried Kudzu. https://deepfriedkudzu.com/2010/10/for-halloween-he-was-alright-until-the-canoe-part.html/.
The Daily Times. “River Monster” account concerning the Ten Islands creature, canoe, deer, and Indigenous hunter. August 25, 1877. Reproduced at S8int.com. https://www.s8int.com/news/84/66/Your-Daily-Dinosaur-Human-and-Dinosaur-Inner-Action-Unfortunate-Humans-Provide-Evidence-of-Interaction-with-Dinosaurs-from-Inside-Their-Stomachs.html.
Alabama Department of Archives and History. “Gadsden Times, March 1873.” Alabama Civil War and Reconstruction Newspapers. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/collection/cwnp/id/15380/.
Alabama Department of Archives and History. “Newspapers Database.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.archives.alabama.gov/research/newspapers.aspx.
Alabama Department of Archives and History. “Alabama Fast Facts.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.archives.alabama.gov/research/guidance/Fast-Facts.aspx.
Alabama Department of Archives and History. “Research at the Alabama Department of Archives and History.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.archives.alabama.gov/research/.
Cox, Dale. “The Alabama Monster of 1877: ‘A Living Monster or Serpent.’” Dale Cox, Historian & Author, October 23, 2019. https://twoegg.blogspot.com/2019/10/alabamamonster.html.
Crownover, Danny. “Watch Out… There May Be Monsters in the Coosa!” Gadsden Messenger, September 8, 2026. https://gadsdenmessenger.com/watch-out-there-may-be-monsters-in-the-coosa/.
Crownover, Danny. “The Vagabond: Strange Happenings Around Etowah County Part III.” Gadsden Messenger. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://gadsdenmessenger.com/the-vagabond-strange-happenings-around-etowah-county-part-iii/.
Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Wildlife Resources Division. “Lake Sturgeon Reintroduction to the Coosa River Basin.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://georgiawildlife.com/lake-sturgeon-reintroduction-program.
Ginger. “For Halloween: He Was Alright Until the Canoe Part.” Deep Fried Kudzu, October 2010. https://deepfriedkudzu.com/2010/10/for-halloween-he-was-alright-until-the-canoe-part.html/.
Jackson, Harvey H., III. Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817307714/rivers-of-history/.
Mooney, James. “Myths of the Cherokee.” In Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897–98, 3–548. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902. https://repository.si.edu/items/dbbe788c-e66b-41b0-92a2-347a1651177d.
National Anthropological Archives. “Creek Stories, MS 4140.” Smithsonian Institution. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://sova.si.edu/record/naa.ms4140.
National Park Service. “Fort Strother Site.” National Register of Historic Places. NRIS No. 72001440. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/72001440.
Rowell, George P., and Company. Geo. P. Rowell & Co.’s American Newspaper Directory. New York: Geo. P. Rowell & Co., 1873. Library of Congress. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/gdc/scd0002/0012/00123363747/00123363747.pdf.
Swanton, John R. Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 73. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922. https://repository.si.edu/items/31e9c94f-bc32-4e74-993b-049ba8089c71.
Swanton, John R. Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 88. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1929. https://repository.si.edu/items/7208e24b-87f4-4d52-b5c7-19fc44466b78.
Encyclopedia of Alabama. “Battle of Talladega.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/battle-of-talladega/.
Encyclopedia of Alabama. “Battle of Tallushatchee.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/battle-of-tallushatchee/.
Encyclopedia of Alabama. “Coosa River.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/media/coosa-river-2/.
Encyclopedia of Alabama. “Alligator Gar.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/alligator-gar/.
Author Note: The Coosa River Monster is unusual because its legend can be traced to named witnesses and contemporary newspaper reports from 1877. This article separates those documented accounts from later traditions, possible explanations, and stories that cannot yet be independently verified.