Beast of Busco

The first witness was Oscar Fulk, who farmed the lake in 1898 and told neighbors he'd seen a turtle bigger than anything in the county. They smiled; he eventually let it go. Fifty years later, in the summer of 1948, two fishermen ran into something that nearly swamped their boat, and the laughing stopped.

The defining sighting came in March 1949, when farmer Gale Harris — who by then owned the lake — was roofing his barn with a friend and looked down to see the turtle surface like a islet of wet stone. Harris was a churchgoing man of careful reputation, and when he said the shell was the size of a dinner table, Whitley County believed him. Then the newspapers came.

What followed was the greatest turtle hunt in American history. Harris tried chicken-wire traps, then a homemade diving helmet, then professional divers from Fort Wayne whose lines tangled in the lake's sunken stumps. A female sea turtle was lowered in as romantic bait. Up to three thousand spectators a day parked along the roads; vendors sold sandwiches; newsreel cameras rolled.

By autumn Harris was pumping the lake dry — and had it nearly beaten, the water down to a few feet of black soup, when the pumps failed and rain undid a season's work overnight. Harris had ruined his health and most of his savings. The town took up a collection. Oscar, somewhere under the mud, declined to comment, and the hunt was quietly abandoned. He was reportedly glimpsed again in following years, exactly as large and exactly as free.

Could he be real? Alligator snapping turtles past two hundred pounds exist in southern rivers, and snappers are champion survivors — but a quarter-ton turtle in a Hoosier farm pond would rewrite the books. Believers point out the lake connects to wetlands in flood years; skeptics point at the books. The mud keeps the answer.

What's certain is what Oscar did to the town. Churubusco's water tower wears a turtle; its businesses are Turtle this and Oscar that; and each June, Turtle Days brings parades, races, and several thousand people to celebrate the beast that beat them. There is something deeply Hoosier in the moral: the monster never hurt anyone, the hunt nearly ruined an honest man, and the only winner was the one who stayed in the mud and waited everybody out.