TAHOE MONSTER

by Skylaire Alfvegren

Lake Tahoe, straddling the Nevada-California border, has mesmerized white settlers since John Fremont laid eyes on it in the winter of 1844. Mark Twain, who had the distinction of starting the lake’s first forest fire during a visit in 1861, described it as "a noble sheet of blue water lifted 6,000 three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that tower aloft a full 3,000 feet higher still!” To give an idea of Tahoe’s depths, all of California could be completely immersed in its water to a depth of 14 1/2 inches; it’s the tenth deepest lake in the world, the largest high atmosphere lake in the northern hemisphere, and the second deepest. With 71 miles of shoreline, portions of which remain deeply forested, Tahoe is a place of perennial legend.

The local Washoe Indians had many tales of creatures and spirits inhabiting the Tahoe region. The most persistent is that of the Big Fish, a water-dwelling monster now nicknamed Tahoe Tessie. Tales of the beast made it into local papers almost as soon as whites began inhabiting the shores of Tahoe, and persist to this day. How many lake monsters can claim a best-selling children’s book and a mention on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?”

Today the creature is most often associated with Bob McCormick’s Tessie character, but the "Big Fish" was notoriously nasty in the 1800s. The Carson City Daily Index of May 11,1883 relates an encounter with a monstrosity that is anything but cute and cuddly. "He suddenly rose in front of the steamer Governor Stanford and disputed her passage… the fish leaped upward, and snapping off the bowstrip, went away with it in its mouth." It further reports that in 1863 it had “attacked a large boat and drowned four Canadians.” Captain Lapham, builder of the Stanford, told the paper he thought “there is just as much probability” of something huge dwelling in the lake “as a huge saltwater fish in the bottom of the sea.” He even built a small schooner, and sent for “hook and line that is strong enough to hold 1000 pounds… forever on the alert to capture what I positively believe exists.”

What to do with something you don’t understand? Annihilate it with “a harpoon gun!” Reports were so numerous that the beast was nicknamed Lizzie Ann in the ‘30s, and hunting parties were organized to capture what would surely be the ultimate fishing trophy. But it continued to outsmart its would-be captors.

There have been accounts of a standard-issue lake monster--in June, 1888, the Carson Morning Appeal reported "the head of the monster, the only part above water” was easily the length of the spectators’ rowboat and “resembled a serpent in appearance"--but the great majority of sightings, from the pioneer days to the present, are interchangeably fish-like. In August of 1884, The Carson Daily Index described a sighting four years prior: "They plainly saw a huge fish,” estimating it at 600 pounds, and “about 14 to 15 feet long from tip to tip.”

“The thing that strikes me as most interesting is that most of the stories are the same,” claims Bob McCormick, author of ‘Tahoe Tessie: The Original Lake Tahoe Monster.’ “They describe something very large and very lethargic. It doesn’t jump out of the water, like a trout. It’s black, very dark, with smooth skin like an eel. It’s huge and slow and strong. It acts like a fish, because it doesn’t rear its head like the Loch Ness monster, but it sounds like a nightmare from the movie ‘Anaconda.’” Many witnesses see humps. Postal workers meeting near King’s Beach reported a creature with undulating humps “four to six feet out of the water.” In July 1984, two local women spied the creature as they were hiking above the western shore. It had a humped back and seemed to surface in a “whale-like” manner; they stated emphatically it was not a “log, diver or ripple.”

“A big hump,” according to Chris Beebe. In June of 1982, two sober Reno police officers were out for a day of water-skiing on the deepest part of the lake when something resembling “the top of a Volkswagen Beetle” paced their boat from roughly six feet away. It was so massive, water was sucked down around it. “I knew that whatever it was, it was alive, and I knew it was bigger than my boat,” officer Chris Beebe said, estimating its length at 18 to 30 feet. “My immediate reaction was that I would stop moving so that I did’t lose any of my feet." Luckily for them, Tessie--or son of Tessie--seems to have given up its old habit of taking chunks out of anything that floats. Beebe never returned to the lake, and eventually quit his job and moved away from Tahoe because of the publicity.

Far from a figment of his imagination, McCormick says he put the book out because of all the sightings. “There are two Tessie's. One is the real monster and the other is my creative imagination. The reason I wrote the book was that there were so many well-publicized sightings in the summer of 1984.” They gained enough attention that one national tabloid ran an article headed “Monster Threatens Reno Shore of Lake Tahoe.” (Nevermind that there isn’t one).

McCormick has become something of a clearinghouse for sightings. “These people aren’t crackpots. One retired doctor told me that back in the ‘50s he was on the lake in a new Chris-Craft. It was a glass smooth day, and all of a sudden with no warning, the boat just exploded up into the air like something had come up underneath it, and cracked the windshield. It blew the mirrors off. Other boats nearby had seen this geyser come up under them. The guy was convinced that some big creature had come up and lifted the boat. It hadn’t hit a rock. The boat would’ve been damaged if it hit something solid.”

Andrew Navarro spied the beast in 1991. “The first thing I saw was water shooting out of the lake, like when a whale blows water out of its blow hole. Then I saw the surface of the water being disturbed by something underneath,” he told John Kirk of the BC Scientific Zoology Club. “This was followed by a hump of a brown creature which came out of the water It moved around in a circle…up and down, not side to side like a snake. My first thought was it was a whale, since the creature had to be huge from the size of its hump, but I know that there are no whales in Lake Tahoe.”

Although McCormick no longer operates the Tahoe Tessie Museum at King’s Beach, Tessie continues to popping up. Lake-goers continue to report giant “black shadows” beneath their boats and torpedo-like waves. Fishermen have hooked something, which after a tremendous struggle, bends the tines of their lines and leaves dime-sized scales on their hooks. Trout reeled in are found mauled, or covered with teeth marks an inch apart, the holes big enough to “put a pencil into,” indicating something with very large jaws had tried to turn them into lunch.

Mike Conway saw “a brown humped beast” during a commercial shoot at Zephr Cove a few years ago. “I believe I yelled ‘cut’ and told them to swing the camera around,” he says. Did they film it? “I heard they destroyed the footage.” They? “You know,” he says. “Them.” Some Tahoe insiders whisper that the lake’s marketing council has bought up film footage of the creature because they don’t want their lucrative tourist destination strangled by something scary, scaly and potentially dangerous.

Skeptics claim that the most likely candidate for the beast in Tahoe is a huge sturgeon. Sturgeon can live to be 100 and have no natural predators. One sturgeon found in the Sacremento River was measured at over 22 feet long, and weighed in at over a ton. A seven-foot sturgeon was caught in Pyramid Lake in 1888, which is connected to Lake Tahoe by the Truckee River.

There are tales of underground rivers connecting Tahoe to Pyramid Lake. Although Tahoe has 63 tributaries, The Truckee River is its only outlet, flowing strangely north-east into Pyramid Lake. (Perhaps Tahoe Tessie and the Pyramid Lake monster are one in the same. Perhaps they trade lakes from time to time, utilizing an underground river system to facilitate their aquatic time-share agreement.)

Dr. Charles Goldman, limnologist and director of the Tahoe Research Group at UC Davis, organized conferences in Nevada in 1984 and 2004 to discuss “Unidentified Swimming Objects,” where a number of scientists testified they had seen Tessie. The only person to have been to the bottom of Lake Tahoe, Goldman says his ’79 expedition was “inconclusive” in terms of the monster. His possible explanations include frolicking river otters, mirages, colliding boat wakes, rocks, and that reliable old sturgeon. In case Tahoe does harbor a cryptid, Goldman has his own name for it: Acipenser Tahoensis. (Which isn’t as catchy as Tessie--and a sturgeon isn’t as fun, either.) But witness’ descriptions don’t sync up with a hypothetical ‘Mother of All Sturgeons.’ In April 2005 tourists from Sacremento reported seeing a creature “with three to five humps along its back” in Tahoe.

And “the problem is that sturgeon have very noticible, rough scales. They’re very scaly, prehistoric-looking fish. What Beebe and others have claimed to see is smooth like an eel,” McCormick says. “I’m convinced there’s something big out there, and its not natural to Lake Tahoe. But if it’s not a sturgeon, what the hell else could it be?”