I Know What I Saw: Modern-Day Encounters with Monsters of New Urban Legend and Ancient Lore

The study of folklore is a scholarly discipline equal to any other and commands its own field of inquiry. The good news is there will be no pop quiz here. I’m strictly an amateur folklorist myself. But like any subject pinned down and formalized by academia, folkore has its own accepted lingo. Luckily, the short list will do for our purposes. But the terms—f olklore, legend, and myth— are not as interchangeable as casual users might think. And merely pasting the correct label on the story type of a creature encounter won’t prove the true nature of that cryptid. The folklore/legend labels are simply tools to help us categorize things that lounge beyond our comprehension— things such as, perhaps, legends of meat hooks guarded by dog women, to be examined in our next chapter. But before we run off with a pack of hounds to bay at Pennsylvania’s October moon, let’s go over the basic categories. Legends are stories from the past, ranging from far ancient times to mere decades or less. The stories are told as if based upon the experiences of some actual (if unknown) person or group of persons, and are sometimes still alleged to be occurring. They may contain an element of the supernatural, such as the Loch Ness– type situation that popped up in 1892 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and lasted for at least a full decade. The resort town near the Wisconsin- Illinois border became famous for modern-day sightings of a huge lake serpent spotted by area residents and tourists in the city’s springfed Geneva Lake, one of the state’s deepest bodies of water. (The city and lake are distinguished by the word order of their respective titles.) According to reports, the sinuous, scale-covered creature chased groups of boaters and was witnessed by a well-respected minister from nearby Delavan, the Reverend M. N. Clark. Some witnesses estimated the serpent’s length as equal to that of a familiar lake ves-sel, the Steamship Aurora, which measured sixty-five feet! Residents nicknamed the serpent Jenny (or Genny). Area newspapers recorded some incidents viewed by multiple witnesses. An article in The Milwaukee Sentinel reported one sighting by no fewer than six people in September 1902. The mystery creature disappeared soon after that date, fading with the tourist season, her origin and escape route still unknown. Perhaps as boat traffic became heavier, the lake could no longer protect creatures that needed to stick their long necks out of the water for air. But legends explaining where she might have gone already existed in the area. Jenny wasn’t the first outsize gigantic creature believed to swim in Geneva Lake. She was preceded by ancient legends of other lake monsters taken as a matter of course by the town’s former residents, the Potawatomi, the last native tribal people to live on the shores of the seven- and- a- half- mile- long lake. Area chronicler Paul B. Jenkins and other local historians recorded local Na-tive belief in several different water monsters, including a great, horned water serpent much like Jenny; a giant fish; and the strange water panther, or water spirit. (More on the latter creature later.) Incidentally, the Potawatomi leader at that time was known as Chief Big Foot. This name had nothing to do with the large, hairy, humanlike creature now popularly called Bigfoot, a term that didn’t come into use in that sense until the 1960s or so. The chieftain’s name was said to have come from the large footprints he left by walking in snowshoes, or in mud that spread out and enlarged his tracks—whichever version you choose to believe. But he is the reason why near the Wisconsin-Illinois border, you’ll find a small community named Big Foot, a Big Foot High School in the city of Walworth, a Big Foot Archery Club, and other places and things intended to honor the displaced chieftain. His footprints became a legend in their own way. The lake monster stories told by the Potawatomi and other area First Nation folk were also published in a series of pamphlets by Charles E. Brown1 and Dorothy Moulding Brown in the Wis-consin State Historical Society from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. This was twenty to forty years after the decade-long lake monster flap in Geneva Lake (and many other Wisconsin lakes, as well), which showed that sightings of the aquatic creature weren’t inspired by the Browns’ later published stories. To complicate the origins of these legends, the stories of bat-tles between the water panther, lake serpent, and thunderbird are widespread in the lore of various Midwestern Native people, and may have been known to Big Foot’s Potawatomi band before they moved to southeastern Wisconsin from the western shores of Lake Michigan around 1700 to 1800. For all we know, Big Foot’s people may have localized the older story to fit their own observations of Geneva Lake. But that does not make the legend any less important, just more universal. And it is always thrilling to find a universal truth living in your own backyard.We may trace Jenny the Lake Monster, then, from very old indigenous legend, to fairly contemporary sightings in the early 1900s, to written versions recorded by folklorists a decade or more after the sightings ended. With such strong oral and written back-ground, the Jenny sightings  really do seem like legends come to life. So who saw her first, Big Foot’s band, the turn-of-the-century tourists, or more ancient native inhabitants of Geneva’s shores? If only we knew how long the sightings had been occurring, we might be able to associate the correct ancient lake monster legend with the modern Jenny. But given the time frame of the sightings, Jenny could also technically glide into the subject of our next  category. . .