Top 10 Creepiest Sea Monster Sightings of All Time

For more than two centuries, the Pacific Northwest has been home to the legend of Caddy, a sea serpent said to inhabit Cadboro Bay in western Canada. One sighting of Caddy in 1943 was debunked as being a large group of sea lions swimming, but a chilling 2009 sighting casts doubt on whether sea lions are truly behind the hundreds of other encounters. Footage recorded by fisherman Kelly Nash seems to show a large sea serpent swimming through the water. The sighting was investigated by “Deadliest Catch’s” Hilstrand brothers but to no avail. Whatever Caddy is, it’s still out there.

One of the most famous sea monster photos of all time came from the camera of Robert Le Serrec in 1964, who snapped a picture of an enormous, dark tadpole-like animal while off the coast of Hook Island in Australia. It’s been a viral image ever since, but nobody is quite sure what it is. Le Serrec even claimed that the creature tried to attack him. Attempts to explain the sea monster as any animal we’ve so far identified just don’t hold water. It’s been argued that it may have been a hox. Journalist Darren Naish suggested that it was probably just a giant, plastic sheet weighed down onto the seabed with sand. Real or not, this sinister picture will stay with you.

Norwegian scholar Erik Pontoppidan was a staunch believer in all kinds of spooky sea creatures – he included many stories of the legendary Kraken in his “Natural History of Norway” as well as one noteworthy sea serpent sighting. Pontoppidan reproduced a letter from Captain Lawrence de Ferry to John Reutz, which tells a blood-curdling tale of a coiled serpent that was a fathom – or around six feet – long. The sailors foolishly pursued the creature and were able to shoot at it but couldn’t catch it. A century later and British sloop HMS Plumper encountered another sea serpent off the coast of Portugal in 1848, which also had a large mane like the one de Ferry saw.

Residents of and visitors to the Chesapeake Bay in the eastern United States have been seeing a strange creature in the water since the 1930s. Nicknamed “Chessie,” the sea serpent is said to be around 12 feet long, although some reports suggest it’s much larger. But despite Chessie’s image being a mascot for the Bay, in 2014 a very ominous encounter with the monster was reported. Two people driving along a riverbank witnessed Chessie first-hand, only a few feet away from the car and staring right at them. Though it was dark out, the witnesses were sure they’d just seen Chessie – but they were left so shaken by the experience that neither of them bothered to take a picture.

This small and isolated island off the coast of Scotland was invaded by a mysterious creature in the last century. In 1959, Tex Geddes – owner of the entire island and legendary sharker – and an engineer named James Gavin witnessed the “Soay Beast.” It was described as looking a lot like a turtle, with a hard, serrated back, a tortoise-like head, and up to ten feet long. There are large sea turtles in the water of the Inner Hebrides, but none of the species identified match the description given by Geddes and Gavin. It speaks volumes that the Soay Island Sea Monster was creepy enough to frighten an experienced shark fisherman.

Without a doubt, the Loch Ness Monster is the most iconic sea – or lake – creature in the world, but years later we’re still no closer to proving whether Nessie is fact or fiction. And one of the most famous sightings is also one of the strangest. While driving on a road close to the loch in 1933, George Spicer and his wife saw a 25-foot-long creature with a long neck and fat body cross the road in front of their stopped car, making a beeline for the water’s edge. Spicer’s hair-raising tale sparked so much interest that Nessie became one of Scotland’s most famous cultural icons, and so many decades later his story is still eerie.

Identifying living creatures that could be mistaken for sea monsters is difficult enough, and that can be even harder when they’re dead. Many times over the years have rotten carcasses washed up on land or been fished out of the sea, decomposed so severely that it’s hard to identify what they once were. One famous example is the Zuiyo-maru carcass, found by Japanese fishermen near New Zealand. The creepy critter was analyzed and was probably a dead basking shark, but it was never proven definitively. Dead sea monsters have been reported as far back as the 2nd century BC, when the Greek Poseidonius encountered a deceased “dragon,” and as recently as 2003, when the Chilean Blob washed ashore.

Back in the icy waters of 18th century Scandinavia, yet another freakish monster was encountered by a sailor. Hans Egede described seeing a creature rise out of the water next to his ship, a creature so tall its head was higher than the ship’s crow’s nest. It was also longer than the ship when it swam. It’s not clear exactly what kind of ship Egede was aboard to estimate the size, but even if they were on a small sloop that could still be as long as 65 feet. The terrifying monster has been explained as either another sea serpent or, more interestingly, an early giant squid sighting.

This creature has existed in Japanese folklore for hundreds of years; it’s a sea spirit that appears as a large, black mass with just two eyes visible. It can sometimes be very globular and inhuman, and other times resembles a bald monk. A crew of Japanese sailors came across one in 1971 off the coast of Onagawa. Many feet long, the umibōzu stuck around just long enough to terrify the fishermen who encountered it, but the spirit vanished when they tried to shoot it with a harpoon. These creatures aren’t well-known outside of Japan, but they’re distinct enough that they may have inspired a kaiju, Hedorah.


Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few Honorable Mentions:

Champ Caught on Camera (2005)
In 2005, This Elusive Beast Was Allegedly Filmed

Ogopogo Lurks Just Under the Surface (1968)
Okanagan Lake’s Nessie Was Filmed Swimming Close to Shore in the 1960s

Sightings of Nessie increased in the 1930s, thanks in no small part to the notorious and fake “surgeon’s photograph”, now known to be a toy submarine with a model on top. But the first recorded story about Nessie dates back to the 6th century. Legend has it that the monk St Columba happened across a funeral for a man who had been violently murdered by a creature described as a “water beast.” The monk had a follower swim across the River Ness, and a beast began to pursue him, until St. Columba made the sign of the cross and ordered it to go away. Nessie isn’t known for murder, so this gruesome tale is particularly unsettling.