Lake Monsters of Michigan

This strange and brilliantly camouflaged creature is allegedly responsible for scaring one teenage angler nearly to death and has got to be one of the flat out weirdest lake cryptids ever chronicled.

Sometimes known as “Carp Lake, ” Lake Leelanau — which, translated from the local Ojibwa language, means “delight of life” — actually consists of two adjacent lakes, which are located in of Leelanau County, Michigan. The north lake has a reported depth of over 120-feet, while the southern lake only goes down to about 62-feet, nevertheless both lakes are the alleged habitat of a bizarre North American LAKE MONSTER, that the locals have (unimaginatively perhaps) dubbed “Leelanau.”

While the lakes themselves may be relatively nondescript, the creature that supposedly dwells beneath their muddy depths is anything but. Said to have a long, stump-like neck, an equally long tail and two abnormally large eyes, there are but a handful details from which to paint a picture of this beast. Still, in this case, the lack of particulars can be almost as telling as a plethora of adjectives.

Most notable is the fact that the animal has never been associated with the prototypical plesiosaur-like beasts or any of the other oft reported FORMERLY EXTINCT creatures that are normally reputed to live in large, freshwater bodies.

According to local legend, the beast first appeared after the Lake Leelanau dam was built in the late 1800’s. The dam, which was designed to provide power to the Leland Sawmill, effectively sealed off the Lake’s largest outlet, and — according to various sources – also managed to seal in the monster in along with it.

After the dam was erected, the water level of the lake rose between 10 and 12-feet, flooding a large portion of land and creating a marsh-like environment around the lake. This is where the creature was said to thrive.

While there are purportedly scores of reports of this nefarious beast, the most detailed account of an encounter with this critter comes to us all the way from 1910. In the summer of that year, a teenager — who hailed from a local family of “prominence” — named William Gauthier was perch fishing from his row boat in the shallow reeds along the shores of what was then called “Carp Lake.”

Finding that his luck was threadbare, young Gauthier decided to row out a little further, toward a section of the lake where he had never fished before.