Alkali Lake Monster

The legend of the Alkali Lake Monster bloomed in the 1920s, when the muddy little lake near Hay Springs became an unlikely state sensation. The creature was cast as a kind of prairie dragon — alligator-shaped but far too large, gray-brown and warty, with the unmistakable horn between its eyes that set it apart from any honest reptile. At roughly forty feet, it was said to be far too big for the lake it haunted, which only made the story stranger and better.

It was the smell that made people believers. Again and again the accounts return to a foul, rotting reek that announced the monster before it broke the surface, and a thrashing that churned the small lake to mud. Tongue-in-cheek or dead serious, the people around Hay Springs talked about little else, and a Nebraska newspaperman's joke name — Giganticus Brutervious — stuck to the beast like swamp mud.

The most famous account came in 1922 from a Hay Springs man named J. A. Johnson, who claimed to have watched the monster from close range along with two companions. By his telling the thing was about forty feet long, dull gray-brown, alligator-like in shape, with a horn protruding between its eyes and nostrils — and it gave off a smell so foul the men could hardly stand it. His description became the template every later account measured itself against.

Through the 1920s the reports piled up: campers and fishermen who saw the water heave, who caught the stench off the lake, who swore something enormous had rolled in the shallows. Nebraska and Omaha newspapers ran the stories with relish, and a steady stream of the curious made the trip out to the Sandhills hoping for a glimpse of the horned leviathan of Alkali Lake.

Skeptics have never had to work very hard with this one. A forty-foot horned reptile cannot live in a shallow Sandhills lake, and much of the legend bears the fingerprints of 1920s newspapermen and tall-tale tellers having a fine time with a slow news season — the mock-Latin name alone gives the game away. The likeliest seed is a real strangeness on the water — a big fish, a thrashing snapping turtle, a trick of mud and wind — dressed up into a dragon by a town that enjoyed the telling.

But the monster outlived the joke. The lake was renamed for a local family and became Walgren Lake, yet old-timers around Hay Springs still pass the legend down, and the horned beast of Alkali Lake remains one of Nebraska's best-loved pieces of folklore. The Sandhills are a lonely, wind-scoured country where a small dark lake can still look like it's hiding something. Forty feet of horned hide and the smell of the grave — out there, on the right gray morning, you could almost believe it.