![]() ![]() ![]() The Gloucester sea serpent faded from memory because the New England Linnaean Society got it wrong, creating a new species based on a snake plagued by rickets. Whatever it was, it was not a hoax or a hallucination. No other cryptid in the long history of such beasts can boast such visibility-not Bigfoot, not Nessie. Different people on different days, all independently, all with more or less the same basic descriptions. Visible from shore or from a boat, exactly as expected. Scores of people saw it-people came from all over, gathered on the shore to gawk, and there it was. But the Gloucester sea serpent was different. Maybe there’s a fuzzy photograph, but soon enough the creature vanishes, never to return. Most cryptid sightings are one‐on‐one occurrences: someone alone at night, on a backcountry road or in an isolated woods. But it is, I think it’s fair to say, special. It doesn’t even have a diminutive nickname. It may not have the pull of Nessie, or Bigfoot, or even Lake Champlain’s Champ. Soini refers to the botched taxonomy job by the New England Linnaean Society as a “flop”: “because a Loblolly Cove snake distracted and confused” the committee, they “lost their chance at scientific acclaim.” The story of the sea serpent has become a story of a committee duped by a rickety snake and the limitations of taxonomy.īut the sea serpent’s tale is more than just a failure, and any serious discussion of cryptozoology should have the Gloucester sea serpent front and center. It seems to be all Gloucester wants to say about their sea serpent. At two different bookstores I stop into, nobody knows much about the sea serpent, but they both point me to the book Wayne Soini’s The Gloucester Sea Serpent. The docent at the Maritime Museum has heard about it, of course-everyone has-but it’s just some local legend. ![]() No one here wants to talk about the sea serpent. This serpent, its long body spilling onto itself like a pile of rigging, lacks that simple elegance-though it has its own dragonlike charm. ![]() Stephenson’s sea serpent mural, likewise, has become a fixture of the community, perhaps more so than the monster itself.Īnd truth be told, it looks very little like the descriptions recorded during that 1817 summer, whose dominating feature was the humps rising out of the water. After he retired, he returned to Gloucester and formally began his training as a painter, and became a local fixture until his death in 2013. Robert Stephenson had only graduated from high school when he painted the beast in 1955, before joining the Army. It has four stubby legs, each with ferocious claws, and a long jaw and red sliver of a tongue. On a large boulder that marks the end of the beach, a long, loosely coiled creature that looks a bit like the ampersand on the Dungeons and Dragons logo. Any weekend now, though, the tourists will be back, breathing life once more into Cape Ann.ĭown on Cressy Beach, on a shoal of rocks beneath a promontory, there is a mural of the sea serpent. For months the town has sheltered in place through the winter, like any seaside town-half the houses empty, the businesses with reduced hours. The whole town seems to be holding its breath for the tourist season, just about to begin. A rainy, early spring day in Gloucester, Massachusetts. ![]()
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