Terror Tuesday: Sea Serpents

It’s Terror Tuesday time here again on Dark Bits. Time to grab your goblin and…ah, nevermind. Grabbing your goblin is never good. In public, I mean.

Screened: Village of the Damned. Hadn’t seen this since I was a kid but it’s still a creepy little movie. Little blond kids scare me anyway. This is the original 1960 film, not the remake, which I have not seen.

Ghost Whisperer has been improving this season, after the first disjointed episode. Well, Jennifer Love Hewitt was a pole dancer in the most recent show, so for me that’s a definite improvement. But now that they have that whole Jim fiasco out of the way the shows have been better. Now to get rid of that annoying kid…maybe we should send him to the Village…

I’ve always found sea serpents and lake monsters particularly fascinating. Like werewolves, they’re played a part in a number of favorite episodes of shows I used to watch as a kid. My all-time favorite episode of The Wild Wild West is still "Night of the Kraken", in which a giant squidy terrorizes a seaport. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea contained a number of episodes—and rightly so, since it was a sea series—dealing with sea monsters. Ok, not-so-scary big rubber sea beasties, but as a kid I still peed my pants. Then, of course, there was the infamous Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. I think they eventually ate the kid from Family Affair, which is pretty frightening when you stop to think about it.

Of course, sea monsters are not simply the domain of fiction and television fantasy. They’ve been spotted in oceans and lakes as long as sailors have taken to the water and Inns have needed tourists. The most famous of these beasts is, of course, Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, but huge, snake- and dinosaur-like creatures have been sighted from Canada and the USA to Japan and everywhere between.

Are these creatures real or figments of over-active imaginations? The product of evolution or imbibing in too much liquid fermentation? Cryptozoological or unknown species of reptiles or fish?

It may be a mix of all of the above. Some lakes, such as Loch Ness, are sealed off from the sea (unless some connecting lake cave is discovered) and though large by lake standards are unlikely to contain the ecological food chain necessary to support a creature such as an extinct plesiosaur. A monster would likely starve, let alone the passel of them required to produce centuries of offspring. Bad news for Nessie most likely, but it probably won’t affect the sale of plastic dino souvenirs anytime soon.

The problem becomes much worse in smaller lakes with supposed monsters, such as Ogopogo in Canada.

But an ocean or a large lake with ocean outlets? That’s another story. Everyday species long thought extinct are discovered alive and rarin’ to swallow in the briny depths. The most well-known of these is the coelacanth, an ugly son of a bitch by any fish standards. But ancient and still in existence. It’s not at all inconceivable some dino or unknown serpent of the deep might still be haunting the seven seas, occasionally surfacing to chomp on a sailor or two. And I’m still not willing to rule out lake monsters, so watch where you go skinny dipping. Being munched is not way to verify the existence of lake monsters. We’ll leave that to the folks at Gortons…

Have any of you ever seen a lake of sea creature?

The Chloe Files: Kicking Evil’s ass one demon at a time…
In paperback.