TAHOE MONSTER
by Skylaire Alfvegren
Continued...
“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.”
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