Utah Lake Monster

I began thinking about the old tales of the Utah Lake Monster while traveling through the Salt Lake City area in May 2021. Utah Lake and the Great Salt Lake to the north are both remnants of ancient Lake Bonneville. Lake Bonneville was formed roughly 32,000 years ago and lasted until about 14,000 years ago. According to Wikipedia:

Lake Bonneville was the largest Late Pleistocene paleolake in the Great Basin of western North America. The Western Interior Seaway preceded Lake Bonneville. Lake Bonneville was a pluvial lake that formed in response to an increase in precipitation and a decrease in evaporation as a result of cooler temperatures. Lake Bonneville covered much of what is now western Utah and at its highest level extended into present-day Idaho and Nevada. Many other hydrographically closed basins in the Great Basin contained expanded lakes during the Late Pleistocene, including Lake Lahontan in northwestern Nevada.

Utah Lake is shallow with the maximum depth of its waters only reaching fourteen feet. Despite its depth, Utah Lake is a large body of (slightly salty) water and it covers 148 square miles. In the 1860s, residents near the lake began coming forward with reports of a lake monster. Isaac Fox spotted a reptilian creature, twenty-five to thirty feet in length while hunting near the lake in 1864. The animal had black eyes and a dog-like head. Fox claimed that the monster chased him to the shore, nearly catching him. Fortunately for Fox, he got away from the monster. After the animal failed to snatch Fox, it swam out into the lake where it met another creature with a similar appearance. Some folks presumed this was its mate.

Residents along the lake spotted the Utah Lake Monster numerous times throughout the mid-1860s. In 1865, a lake monster was spotted near the northern end of the lake. In 1866, two men who were cutting hay saw a large, yellow creature with dark spots and a red, forked tongue. The pair fled in terror.

Two commercial fishermen might have obtained physical evidence of the Utah Lake Monster in 1870. The pair found a large, peculiar skull that had  five-inch tusks protruding from its jaw. A Deseret News correspondent from Springville, Charles D. Evans, took possession of the skull and welcomed curious readers to see it for themselves.

As you might guess, the weird skull the fishermen found was not the end of the monster. A Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints bishop, William Price, and two traveling companions spotted the monster in 1871 on the western shore of Utah Lake. The witnesses claimed the creature looked like a section of stove pipe and estimated its length to be sixty feet.

The Utah Lake Monster took a brief hiatus, but resurfaced in 1880. Two boys, Willie Roberts and George Scott, had swam a fair distance out into Utah Lake, when they noticed something coming toward them. Initially it looked like a beaver or dog was headed their way, but the creature they saw was much fiercer. It let out a chilling lion-like roar and had four legs as long as a man’s arm and an alligator-like head. The boys said the creature made “savage gestures” toward them. Fortunately, they reached the lake shore free from harm. Their story was widely dismissed by people and even used as a way to poke fun at the LDS church.

Reports of the Utah Lake Monster died down until the 1920s when it enjoyed a brief revival. After that, it faded into obscurity, and as far as I know, there are no credible recent sightings of the creature. This makes sense, as Utah Lake only has a few species of fish living in its waters, and up until the 1960s, localities dumped raw sewage into the lake.

If you would like to read about the fascinating places I visit in my travels, consider checking out my Detours Into the Paranormal series of books.   

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