The Lake Erie Monster began her life as a sturgeon, hatched off Edgewater Beach. She was ten feet long, longer than most of her species. One day, she was sucking worms out of the mud near the mouth of the Cuyahoga when she inhaled a mouthful of iron sulfite, which had floated downstream from a steel mill and settled in the riverbed. Right away, she felt a change in her body. Her snout and tail grew longer. Her fins lost their fanlike shape, becoming long, thin tentacles. Rather than a sturgeon’s usual diet of insect larvae and worms, she developed a ravenous appetite for toxic waste. And in those days, the mouth of the Cuyahoga offered plenty: ferrous sulfate and fleece dust, gasoline and oil, calcium sulfate and iron scale. The monster scarfed it all. She couldn’t control herself. And the more she ate, the larger and more grotesque she grew. Schools of sturgeon in which she had once swum anonymously now scattered at the sight of her, fearing she was a predator. She tried eating worms again, hoping they would restore her to the shape of a sturgeon, but she could no longer digest them. Her metabolism had changed, and now she could only consume toxins.
In her hideous new state, the creature developed a hatred of the humans who had polluted the lake and transformed her into a monster. She decided to take revenge on Cleveland, and the entire state of Ohio. After her attack on the Cool Breeze, a family of six reported seeing “a huge snakelike creature” off Cedar Point. A lakefront farmer claimed that one of his pigs had gone missing, and that the trail of a “long, thin creature, like a giant slug,” led from his pigpen to the beach.
As the monster sightings multiplied, a marina owner offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who captured her alive, so she could be examined by a zoology professor from The Ohio State University. The marina owner labeled a containment pond on his property “Future Home of the Lake Erie Monster.” The Port Clinton Beacon held a contest to name the monster, settling on South Bay Bessie—quickly shortened to just Bessie—after the Davis Besse Nuclear Power Plant, surely a symbol of humanity’s capacity to mutate nature. A Cleveland wax museum displayed a portrait of the Great Lake Erie Serpent.
Bessie decided that harassing fishermen and farmers was not the way to punish the real culprit for her predicament: the industries that had fouled the Cuyahoga. To strike at them, she would have to sink one of the freighters that delivered iron ore to the steel mills. So she began lurking among lake traffic, seeking an opportunity to attack a boat. Sailors standing watch in pilothouses told of seeing a black head protruding thirty feet above the lake’s surface, and a body “shaped like an eel’s.” But the largest freighters are a thousand feet long, so no matter how much toxic waste Bessie consumed, she never grew large enough to get a grip on a hull. Perhaps she could have crippled a ship by tangling herself in its propeller, but her self-loathing was never strong enough to drive her to suicide. She had to satisfy herself with being a specter, a sight so frightening she might drive sailors to quit the Lakes. As one wrote in a letter, “For the last three summers, we’ve seen one of the most terrific sea monsters in existence in different parts of the lake.”
Bessie did not meet her end in a confrontation with a ship, or entangled in a serpent hunter’s net. She disappeared because Cleveland was so embarrassed about the Cuyahoga catching fire it decided to clean up the river. The city built huge tunnels to store rainwater, so it wouldn’t have to dump untreated sewage into the river during storms. The president of the United States signed a law prohibiting factories from dumping their wastes into rivers. The paint factory closed, as did the slaughterhouses. Some of the steel mills closed, too. When the mills shut down, fewer freighters docked in Cleveland. The Cuyahoga stopped smelling like rotten eggs. With the river’s freshness restored, kayakers began paddling through downtown Cleveland, to Lake Erie. With each passing year, there was less toxic waste for Bessie to eat. Gradually, she began to shrivel. Her tentacles shrunk back into fins, until finally, she was a sturgeon again, eating larvae and worms.
Bessie only terrorized Lake Erie for a brief period during the 1970s and ’80s, when Cleveland was at its most dismal and polluted. Yet her name and image live on as symbols of the city’s nadir. Then she became a sturgeon again, and sturgeon don’t concern themselves with the affairs of people, unless they find themselves on the end of a hook.
FOR FURTHER READING
The Oneida Creation Story, Demus Elm
The Algic Researches, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Plains Indian Mythology, Alice Marriott and Carol K. Rechlin
The Pawnee Mythology, George A. Dorsey
Legends of Le Detroit, Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin and James Valentine Campbell
Michigan Legends: Folktales and Lore from the Great Lakes State, Sheryl James
Legends of the Land of the Lakes, George Francis
The Voyageur, Grace Lee Nute
Werewolves and Will-O-the-Wisps: French Tales of Mackinac Retold, Dirk Gringhuis
Mike Fink: A Legend of the Ohio, Emerson Bennett
The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock, Otto Arthur Rothert
Heroes, Outlaws, and Funny Fellows of American Popular Tales, Olive Beaupre Miller
Febold Feboldson: Tall Tales from the Great Plains, Paul R. Beath
The Refugee, or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada Related by Themselves, Benjamin Drew
Paul Bunyan, Esther Shepard
The Saginaw Paul Bunyan, James Stephens
Lore of the Lumber Camps, Earl Clifton Beck
Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy, Franz Rickaby
Long Live the Hodag! The Life and Legacy of Eugene Simeon Shepard: 1854-1923, Kurt Daniel Kortenhof
The Hodag and Other Tales of the Logging Camps, Luke S. Kearney
The Hobo’s Hornbook, George Milburn
Tall Tale America: A Legendary History of Our Humorous Heroes, Walter Blair
A Mouthful of Rivets: Women and Work in World War II, Nancy Baker Wise
The Long Ships Passing: The Story of the Great Lakes, Walter Havighurst
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, Francis Parkman
The American Songbag, Carl Sandburg
Chicago Haunts: Ghostlore of the Windy City, Ursula Bielski
Haunted Lakes: Great Lakes Ghost Stories, Superstitions and Sea Serpents, Frederick Stonehouse
The Lake Erie Monster, Shiner Comics