If a man meets a female were-snake, he wanders the marshes at the borders of the human world that no longer interests him. Then he’s mysteriously found dead.
For a woman, it may be more complex. She goes off as a bride with the fast-talking, elegant stranger. Before long, she discovers his beastly, size-shifting nature, but what’s she to do? He’s as potentially hostile as he is amorous. But a Thunder Being just waiting for this moment comes to her and gives her the guidance to flee her demon-husband. As he pursues in his true form, the massive, hypnotic snake comes into the open and is killed by a bolt of lightning.
With the big-lake snakes, we start in the realm of folklore and step into that of the paranormal.
The Great Horned Snake of Lake Ontario is a figure of Iroquoian legend. Sometimes his horns are the shape and spread of the antlers of a massive buck deer. Sometimes they’re like those of the buffalo, though many times larger. This being is not by nature evil. He helps outcast human beings in many a tale. Still, he’s at war with the Thunder Being and his allies. For some reason these two have it out for each other, and whenever old horny flashes his hide under open sky, he risks taking a bolt. Many geological features around the state are reputed to be the work of the climactic clash. Ironically, a big slithery has been reported many a time in Lake Ontario. Soldiers stationed at Fort Niagara have called it in.
There is a two-hundred-year-old string of reports about a less religious mythological creature in Lake Erie. Back Bay (or South Bay) Bessie is a variably sized critter blamed in at least one boat capsizing and attack in 1992. (We have not interviewed witnesses of that event and have to tell you that this is an Internet rumor.)
Then there is the famous Lake Champlain monster. While it’s rumored to have been mentioned first in the 1609 journal of French explorer Samuel de Champlain, that water-critter sighting most likely took place in the ocean waters of the St. Lawrence estuary. Still, the Mohawk and some Algonquin-speaking nations thought there was some big animal in the long lake, nicknamed Champ after the French explorer. The legend continues to grow.
Several of the Finger Lakes and some of the smaller lakes and rivers have both Native American serpent legends and recent paranormal reports.
The 1850s flap over the serpent of little Silver Lake in Wyoming County was as much a hoax as the man-made Cardiff or Taughannock giant. The perpetrator claimed to have gotten the idea from a Seneca site legend. Even tiny Findlay Lake in Chautauqua County has its serpent tales.
Lakes Seneca and Canandaigua have both Iroquoian serpent legends and fairly current white reports, some of them well documented. We know the Seneca great serpent legend associated with the south end of Canandaigua Lake. In August 1891, many white Canandaiguans reported seeing a gigantic snake that could have been its twin, negotiating the lake’s beautiful waters. Lakeside innkeepers claimed that sightings were routine.
Likewise a feature of legend, the Seneca Lake monster was spotted in 1899 by a boatload of Geneva citizens. This one came so close that a geologist on board believed he could identify the species—a Clidastes, a finned croc nightmare. It was of modest size, though: twenty or thirty feet long.
A bigger something was seen on Seneca Lake in the summer of 1995. A responsible, educated woman on a Geneva hotel porch reported seeing a monumental form leap out of the water, lunge like a column, and lapse like a tree back. The distance from her she estimated at six hundred feet. She was so shocked that other aspects of the experience are foggy. Another curiosity, which could be related, is the Seneca Lake drums—massive, seemingly geological percussions occasionally heard coming from the lake.
Lesser-known “underwater drums” are also reported in Cayuga Lake, which has its own serpent legends and reports. Old Greeny, the whites call the eel-like thirty-footer. According to the Ithaca Journal of January 5, 1897, they’ve been seeing him since at least 1828, and the most recent sighting we’ve heard of was 1974. Cayuga is the longest and widest Finger Lake and maybe the best candidate for such a critter. Since both these lake bottoms dip below sea level, the possibility of underground channels between them, the Great Lakes, and, hence, the oceans comes into speculation.
Also in Cayuga country, Owasco Lake was the subject of big snake reports in 1889 and 1897. A lakeside farmer reported a fast-swimming critter. Two men in a boat saw a fifty-foot reptile with a huge girth.
The 1828 pamphlet of David Cusick, Tuscarora historian, memorializes a gigantic serpent legend based around Onondaga Lake near Syracuse. Cusick had spent midstate time with the Oneida, among whom it was said that this stenchful, venomous critter attacked and killed two hundred people.
There are also the serpents of outrage, of offense to the Native people and the face of the New York landscape. In this sense, they seem projections of the collective unconscious, if not the earth itself.
During the late-1960s turmoil over the Kinzua Dam, Salamanca residents reported all the bogies of the Iroquois zoo in the natural landscape, including the Great Snake of the Allegheny. It had apparently climbed the banks of the river and done some foraging in the hills above the construction site. Most witnesses were offended local Seneca, but not all. Such an image was also reported at and about the 1930 damming of the Sacandaga Creek, creating the Sacandaga Reservoir in Saratoga County. Though this was far less of an offense to Native American sovereignty, it produced plenty of local paranormal folklore.
The Kinzua snake may not have left us. In 2001, a local college physics professor and two friends reported seeing a gigantic snake in the reservoir water below them. It may not have been a match for Godzilla, but it was at the
