WALKER LAKE MONSTER

by Skylaire Alfvegren

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Walker’s giant water snake piqued the curiosity of professor David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University. In the summer of 1907, newspapers reported Jordan, “generally conceded to be the foremost icthyologist in the United States,” and his colleague planned to high-tail it to Nevada upon the next sighting, capture the beast and send the dissected remains to that most reviled of institutions—the Smithsonian.

Samuel Pugh, superintendent of the Walker River Indian Agency, apparently rethought what he had chocked up as Indian superstition after “several white men claimed similar visions” of the serpent. In 1909, it was sighted by a Reno police captain; two years later, miners made a fuss of the monstrous “serpent-like fish” which disturbed their work. After a highway was built around the lake, “respectable” tourists and locals reported seeing “a huge monster, wholly unlike any fish inhabiting the waters of the lake, swimming about.” One hermit even asked the district attorney how much he would be paid in exchange for its scalp. A 1930s account in the Hawthorne News claimed it was sighted in a cave at the base of Mount Grant. The witness went to retrieve his gun—but by the time he returned, it had vanished.

As recently as 1956, a couple from Babbit, Nevada wrote to the editor of Hawthorne’s newspaper, claiming to have seen “something moving in Walker Lake at a terrific speed” which actually outpaced their automobile. It performed an aquabatic 100 yard dash before plummeting below the surface. The fall 1969 issue of non-fiction magazine Old West reprinted their letter, which continued, “It must’ve been 45 to 55 feet long and its back stuck up above the water at least four or five feet when it was swimming fast.”

Lake monsters are perennial newspaper fodder; nicknamed Sarah in the early 1900s, the Walker Lake monster was exploited for Hawthorne’s 1964 centennial celebration. One old coot claimed May 15 as Serpent’s Night at Walker Lake. He told the Nevada State Journal that every 100 years on the dot the serpent surfaces and seeks his prey. “He never fails, the old timers say he is as regular as the Capistrano swallows and far more dangerous.” As part of the celebration, local Paiutes attempted to lure the beast ashore with “an hours-long serpent dance,” even halting Naval frogmen from their exercises for fear it would be disturbed. Luckily the creature continues to elude capture.

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