Cressie and Chessie, Giant Eels.of the (US) East Coast

Chessie, The Chesapeake Bay Monster

Ever since this country was young, a strange creature has been sighted in the Chesapeake Bay. This creature, unofficially known as Chessie, is said to be a dark tubular or snake-like animal averaging 20- 30 feet long and capable of swimming up to 10 MPH. Chessie is known to be sometimes curious of nearby humans and is not afraid by those who work and live on the Bay, and who might therefore chance upon it. The creature is still seen intermittently. concentrations of sightings occur in May through September most likely because that is when the Bay is most populated with boaters and swimmers. Chessie has been sighted most often are Love Point at Kent Island, the mouth of the Potomac, and the Eastern Bay.

Chessie was by all acounts not your typical Longnecked, Humpbacked, Plesiosaur-shaped sea monsters. Instead, Chessie seemed to be truly serpentine and travelled along in a serpentine motion, in broad horizontal sine-curves or closer=knit sets of squiggles.

In May of 1982, the first hard evidence of Chessie's existence arrived. While at their Kent Island home, the Frew family, along with friends, believed they spotted Chessie and they made a videotape. Mr. Frew and his wife were looking out at the bay when they noticed a large snake-like creature. Frew and his wife spotted the creature in shallow, clear water about 200 yards from the house. The Frews grabbed their camera and started recording. That video tape was later analyzed by people at the Smithsonian. It was determined that the creature taped was a living animal. Frew video taped the creature as it swam toward a group of swimmers. It dove beneath the swimmers and reappeared on the other side of them. The creature they saw was about 25-30 feet long, 1-2 feet in diameter, dark brown with aa undulating back. In 1978, a retired CIA employee, Donald Kyker, also reported seeing Chessie and 3 others about 75 yards off shore. His neighbors, the Smoots', also witness the creatures. They gave descriptions of a 30 ft, sleek, dark gray creature swimming about 7-8 miles per hour.

In the summer of 1982, the Smithsonian had a minisymposium to determine if the videotape was indeed evidence of Chessie's existence. Along with the video, there was a photograph taken by a woman who was previously afraid to bring it to public attention. The officials concluded that the object was definitely alive, but they did not conclude what it was. The creature in the Bay was left Unidentified.

Although a manatee was discovered to frequent Chesapeake bay and frequently migrated to and from it, the descriptions of the manatee do not match the creature and there is virtually no chance that the manatee is responsible for any of the sightings, still photos or video footage.




Showing a frame of he Frew video.










[On the other hand, every now and then a sighting in the more typical Plesiosaur mode also pops up. At the beginning of the Wikipedia's entry on Chessie, it states:
"Chessie is a legendary sea monster said to live in the midst of the Chesapeake Bay. Over the years there have been many alleged sightings of a serpent-like creature with flippers as part of its body. According to Matt Lake in Weird Maryland, two perch fishermen, Francis Klarrman and Edward J. Ward, in 1943 spotted something in the water near Baltimore.
“This thing was about 75 yards (69 m) away, at right angles from our boat. At first it looked like something floating on the water. It was black and the part of it that was out of the water seemed about 12 feet (3.7 m) long. It has a head about as big as a football and shaped somewhat like a horse’s head. It turned its head around several times—almost all the way around.”[1]
(-After which the Wikipedia emphasises a snakelike creature swimming by horizontal undulations-DD )
[1.^ a b Lake, Matt: Weird Maryland, page 68. Sterling Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1402739060.]

Sources: Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chessie_(sea_monster)

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/05/chessie-monster-of-chesapeake-bay.html

http://www.gettysburgghosts.net/chessie.htm

The latter including an added photo page, "See what we came across during a trip to the Potomac area"-
http://www.gettysburgghosts.net/chessiemonster.htm

-Which look as if there might be something akin to the Frew video monster hiding just below the surface in several shots.


Shadowlands SS Page Excerpts:
"Cressie" Sighted in Newfoundland

Crescent Lake, located 400 kilometers west of St. John's, Newfoundland, appears to have its own version of the Loch Ness Monster. Sightings of "Cressie" have taken place several times over the last 50 years. No Cressie
sightings were reported in 2002, leading residents to wonder if perhaps the animal had died. But Cressie, described by witnesses as being a "snake-like creature with a fish-like head", resurfaced in the summer of 2003.

Source: CBC News

More 'Cressie' sightings in Newfoundland
The alleged sighting of a mysterious creature has reignited talk of whether Newfoundland's Crescent Lake has its own version of the Loch Ness Monster.
Reports of "Cressie" sightings in the lake near Roberts Arm – about 400 kilometres northwest of St. John's on Notre Dame Bay – go back over half a century.

But there were none last year, which led some residents to think Cressie was dead.

Vivian Short of Roberts Arm was one of those who used to think there was no Cressie – until she rounded a corner while driving with a friend.

"I was just a screamin', 'We saw Cressie, we saw Cressie!' Excited, eh," she said.

She described a snake-like creature with a fish-like head.

"Well, I said to my friend, 'Oh my that's big. That could eat four or five people if they were swimming, like.'"

Ada Rowsell, the town's clerk, said Short's wasn't the only reported sighting of Cressie lately.

"I've had several reports of sightings. People sighting some kind of a huge monster or sea serpent or some kind of a fish."

Some observers wonder whether there really is a Cressie, or if it's a gimmick to boost tourism.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2003/08/01/cressie_nfld030801.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cressie
http://americanmonsters.com/site/2010/02/cressie-newfoundland/

CRESSIE: (NEWFOUNDLAND)
04 February 2010





These large, eel-like creatures are notorious for attacking divers during search and rescue operations… and have even been credited with assailing their victims through thick sheets of winter ice.
Central Newfoundland’s Crescent Lake harbors a quaint fishing town – known as Robert’s Arm – along its shore, and a big secret in its depths. Known to the locals as “Cressie”, this animal has been reported as being eel-like in appearance and averaging between 5 and 15-feet in length [sometimes up to 25 feet-DD].

Chessie mock-ups, the last is a mock-up of Chessie's head representing it as an eel-like creature.

The first reports of this mysterious lake dweller can be traced back to pre-colonial Native American legends, which warned of the Woodum Haoot (Pond Devil) or Haoot Tuwedyee (Swimming Demon), both of which purportedly dwelled in the lake. Since the early 1900′s there have been numerous reports of encounters with this creature (or creatures) and not all of them have been pleasant.

One of the more recent accounts concerns the underwater search for the corpse of a downed pilot, who had crashed his plane into the depths of Crescent Lake in the mid-1980′s. The scuba divers, who braved the black depths of the lake in the hopes of finding the pilot’s corpse, found themselves surrounded by a vicious school of gigantic eels (described as being as thick as a man’s thigh) who proceeded to attack the them with voracious intensity. The divers retreated to the surface posthaste, neither of the divers was severely wounded, but both were visibly shaken by the event.

Another bizarre phenomenon which has been associated with creatures in Crescent Lake, involves mysterious holes which have been known to appear in the ice sheet which covers the water during the brutal, Newfoundland winters. Often mistaken (due to their size) as the results of tragic snowmobile accidents, divers who have mounted exploratory expeditions beneath the ice in order to ascertain the cause of the holes, rarely find any man-made objects to account for the ice rifts. This has, of course, led some to speculate that these tremendous breaks in the ice are not caused by something falling in, but, rather, by something bursting out.

On the afternoon of July 9, 1991, at approximately 12:00 PM a gigantic, eel-like entity was seen on the lake by retired school teacher and local newspaper correspondent, Fred Parsons. Parsons claimed to have seen a shadowy, 20-foot long, serpentine creature undulating across the surface of the lake.

Just two months later on September 5th, 1991, at about 4:30pm, Robert’s Arm native Pierce Rideout, was driving his pickup truck when he noticed a commotion on the surface of Crescent Lake. He watched a black, slow moving object (approximately 15-feet in length) drop below the surface and rise again: a black, some 500-feet beyond the shore.

Ironically, Rideout admitted that just a few days before his sighting he had openly ridiculed the idea of a “monster” in Crescent Lake, but that his attitude had changed since his not-so close encounter.

In July of 2000, Richard Goudie and Robbie Watkins were two of a group of people who saw Cressie while landscaping on the Hazelnut Hiking and Adventure Trail and as recently as August 14, 2003, the CBC published a report about a woman named Vivian Short who claimed to have seen a serpentine animal with a fish like head, which she believed could easily have been capable of devouring 4 or 5 swimmers.

On September 17, 2008 History Channel’s Monster Quest broadcast an episode entitled “Lake Monsters of the North,” which focused on the legends of the monster eels and in 2010, Robert’s Arm intends to revolve their 10-day (July 22 to 31) “Come home, spot Cressie, visit family and friends” celebration around the beast. According to Aubrey Golding, chair of the come home year committee:

“We have a unique theme for our come home year; one that centers around our Cressie. A lot of our events will also center around the lake and its monster, like a trail day at Hazelnut Hiking and Adventure Trail.”

Whatever it is that lurks beneath the waves in Crescent Lake — be it giant carnivorous eels or creatures as yet unknown — there can be no doubt that it is large, it is and vicious, and it remains one of the most credible North American lake cryptids.



Nova Scotia Sea Monster By Pristichampsus


"Sea Monster" Sighting Reported by Nova Scotia Fisherman
[Shadowlands SS Page]

In the early summer of 2003, Wallace Cartwright was headed out to sea to check his lobster traps. The native of Alder Point, Cape Breton County, saw what he thought was a big log in the water. The "log" had a head similar to
a sea turtle with a brown, snake-like body. It was approximately eight metres long, brown with smooth skin. The creature submerged and surfaced again two minutes later.

Cartwright and his assistant observed the animal for 45 minutes as it surfaced several more times. Mr. Cartwright, who has been a fisherman for 30 years, stated that what he had seen was unlike anything he had ever encountered before.

Andrew Hebda, curator of zoology at Halifax's Natural History Museum, is of the opinion that what Mr. Cartwright observed was an oarfish....
Both submitted by "Curlyjoe"
http://theshadowlands.net/serpent.htm

Lake Utopia ["Old Ned"]

Native american legends speak of a vicious serpent with a huge mouth and teeth that inhabits Lake Utopia in New Brunswick, Canada. The serpent has been known to break holes through the surface of the frozen lake and snap at people through them. There have been numerous sightings over the last 100 years. In 1982 the creature was observed by Sherman Hart, who saw the creature surface the and then submerge again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Utopia

Lake monster

Local legend has it that the Lake is inhabited by a sea monster known as the Lake Utopia Lake Monster. The story goes that long ago two Maliseet Natives were canoeing on the lake when suddenly the monster appeared and chased them from one end to the other. Since the arrival of Europeans to the area in the late 18th century, the story has continued, with new sightings being reported every three-five years.

As noted in research by cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, the locals have called this cryptid "Old Ned." It has a decidedly long and bulky cetacean [or eel-like] appearance, and may be representative of an unknown group of animals that travel back and forth between Lake Utopia and the Atlantic Ocean in routine cycles related to breeding and feeding.

Sightings: 1867 - Sawmill workers claim to see something 30 feet (9.1 m) long and 10 feet (3.0 m) wide thrashing in the lake. Similar reports the following days. 1868 - A Saint Croix Courier reporter says he and one other witness saw the monster. 1872 - Natives describe a terrifying monster with a large head and bloody jaws following their canoes. 1891 - William Francis Ganong records in his notebook a description of a monster provided by a lumberman who claimed to have seen it 20 years prior. "It was dark red in colour, the part showing above the water was 20 feet long and as big around as a small hogshead; it was much like a large eel." 1969 - The Saint John Evening Times Globe reports on an interview with Mrs. Fred McKillop, who said she saw a huge creature 18 years earlier. "It looked like a huge black rock... It moved up and down the lake, boiling and churning the water, making great waves." 1982 - Sherman Hatt says he and his family saw a large creature that looked like a submarine with spray coming from both sides and a hump out of the water about 10 feet (3.0 m) long. 1996 - Roger and Lois Wilcox were canoeing on the lake when they saw ripples break the placid surface 100 metres away from them. It was heading toward Cannonball Island, a common monster sighting spot. Wilcox reports the monster as being 40 to 50 feet (15 m) long, undulating upward, not sideways. [Unfortunately this describes the typical standing wave action in a wake, it is not determinative of anything. At this location, the typical pattern is for creatures to undulaste laterally. There is a complication in that if one of these creatures scoots along at the surface, it can ALSO produce the same "String-of-buoys" effect!-DD]

Reference-The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep with Patrick Huyghe (NY: Tarcher-Penguin, 2003

Recent article from CFZ Canada is at:
http://cfz-canada.blogspot.com/2011/06/lake-utopia-monster.html