Frozen Monster Found Under April Ice
Posted by: Loren Coleman on April 16th, 2007
Here’s an April report of a monster being caught under ice:
The St. Albans [Vermont] Messenger reports a story coming from Shelburne, Vt. A resident of the latter place while out on the ice in the vicinity of the Four Brothers, and near the New York side of the lake, found the remains of a monster creature frozen in the ice. The account says:
“With the aid of his companion, he scraped away the crust from the surface of the ice for a distance of 20 feet and revealed a portion of the remains of what he thought must be a gigantic sea-serpent which had become frozen into the ice near the surface and which stretched away no one knows how much farther than he had uncovered.
“Steps will be taken at once to cut out this ice and thus preserve the only specimen of this marine [sic]
monster which science has heretofore had an opportunity of examining.”Plattsburgh [New York] Sentinel, April 5, 1895
There was, unfortunately, no followup to this report.
Read the “Champ” after you buy the 2007 edition of Mysterious America on April 24th and beyond! Thank you.
Thanks to Jerome Clark.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Things like this fascinate me, but it seems that in almost every instance there is never any real followup. Perhaps my memory is skewed on this, though.
Again it’s a report from the 19th century, how valid is it?
Dated April 5th, recycled from another newspaper. Sounds like an April Fool’s gag to me.
Though I never write off these stories completely, it sounds like another variation of the Arizona flying reptile story (not the Thunderbird one). It also sounds like a very entertaining short story (from around 1900) called “The Monster of Lake LaMetrie.” It probably started out as a hoax (I’m not sure), because it was written as the journal of one of the characters, and more importantly, the journal begins on April 1.
I thank Loren for the historical reports. They make for interesting and enjoyable reading. It is frustrating though those detailed eyewitness accounts have never concluded with an actual specimen. One is left to wonder as to the ethics of the journalists of that era.
Regards
No matter how accurate it might be, the author has captured exactly how such a find would have been “investigated”, especially back then. At that time evolution was laying the foundation of what is taught today, and such ideas were unheard of. Dinos and such were unthinkable of still living, especially in such a populated area. The religious groups wouldn’t have accepted this thing either, even today most creationists won’t accept the concept that such creatures may still roam. Both have something in common-they are saturated with types of theology. This maybe surprising to some, but there are evolutionists out there that the idea of evolution is their religion. I’ve talked to them and I have talked to educated creationists, and except for a few words and the timeline, they speak in the same manner, “Professor _________ said that is impossible, therefore it is impossible.” So, accurate or not, a find like that would have never gotten a true examination, just filed away like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Well, considering the date here, I guess it never did get around to being studied by science as promised in the article. If this is a true account, I sure do wonder where it ended up.
mystery_man, I agree. It seems to me there is a plethora of these old accounts of (fill in the blank creature/monster/thing) discovered at/in (lake/seashore/quarry/ice block), and carefully packed away, and hauled off to be studied by Science. Which, tragically, none have been. Studied by Science that is.
On the other hand, there is the apparent assumption in many minds that people in the past were stupid, and couldn’t possibly know what they were talking about.
Right, Ceroill. I even wonder if some of these alleged specimens were indeed studied and the results were kind of swept under the rug over the years. I also wonder how effective the methods for collecting and preserving the specimens were. Some of them may have been acquired, but perhaps poorly processed or kept? Looks like we may never know.
mystery_man, yep. I’ve considered that possibility. Not so much an organized conspiracy as a combination of locking away something that couldn’t be made sense of in the light of then current knowledge, and the packrat-like tendency to take a puzzle you can’t solve yet, and putting it in the back room to be studied again later. It then gets forgotten about, and either relegated to deep storage, where it might eventually be found again in a century or so, or it is simply discarded with assorted rubbish.
Very good way to illustrate it, Ceroill. That is pretty much what I think too.
I really enjoyed Shumway’s comments. Maybe I’ve been influenced TOO MUCH by Charles Fort, but it seems like EVERY organized thing starts to sound like an organized religion in no time, including any given science. That’s why that whole “If it weren’t for organized religion, such-and-such bad thing wouldn’t exist” line of thinking (which gets more popular all the time) makes me roll my eyes.
I live in Waterbury VT, 25 miles from Shelburne. Ive been living in VT for 11 years, not once have I ever heard of this case. You would think that there also would be photographic evidence to support this claim. This has ole’timey hoax written all over it. With that aside, a close friend of mine actually saw the legendary “Champ” with his girlfriend from about 10 yards away. He described it to fantastic detail. I became a believer after I saw a documentary on our lake monster. They concluded with an underwater sound recording of an unknown large mammal. They determined this from the frequency of the sound which only could be produced by large mammal-like vocal cords. Made me think twice about waterskiing!