Williamsport, Pa. — Out of all the types of cryptids, water creatures are some of the most interesting.
There are stories of snaky monsters living hidden in lakes and oceans everywhere. The most famous, of course, is the Loch Ness Monster, but there’s also Raystown Ray, Chessie, South Bay Bessie, and the Gloucester Sea Serpent. And, in the middle of Pennsylvania, there’s the Susquehanna Seal.
The Susquehanna Seal was also known as the West Branch Dugong or the Kettle Creek Monster. It was sighted mostly to the north end of Clinton County, near Kettle Creek, but also further to the south, throughout the Susquehanna River.
Newspaper articles about the sightings, written by historian John Meginness, ran on the front pages of Clinton County’s Daily Democrat in February of 1897. He reported that the creature seemed to have been in the river for a while, perhaps having come in during a flood and getting stranded when the waters went down.
The articles did not report much about the creature's physical description, but suggested that it might look like a hippopotamus or some species of dinosaur. It was not often seen above the water level and was mostly nocturnal; the articles described the creature howling at night, audible to the people living near the river.
During the day, lumbermen occasionally encountered it as it brushed up against their rafts, sometimes causing them to fear the raft overturning. Meginness, who wrote under the pseudonym “John of York,” describes one such incident in an article:
“Suddenly the raft began to scrape and rub hard against some hidden object, which they supposed to be either a new sand bar, or a rock detached and rolled into the channel,” he said in the article, describing an incident sometime after the 1889 flood.
“The raft swung around, squeaked, strained, and finally came to a full stop. The obstruction seemed to disappear, which incident was very strange and puzzling to the old pilot…Those who believed that the dugong still lived in the deep water maintained that the raft had run into him….Causing him to kick and roar with pain, which noise some of the men mistook for thunder, while others imagined the noise to be the struggling of water and the grinding of the timbers over the rocks.”
And the Susquehanna Seal may have been seen by witnesses in Northumberland County, as well.
In the early 2000s, an outdoor guide and his friend saw repeated sightings of something large swimming in the water, surfacing and then diving back down. They referred to it as the “Susquehanna Mystery Thing,” but it could be the same creature, sighted over a hundred miles away. This would mean that the creature, or creatures, has access to all of the food and space in a hundred miles of river.
To this day, unexplainable sounds are sometimes heard in the Susquehanna River. Most recently, strange noises were reported in 2017. Nowadays, though, water cryptids bring up what’s known as the “Population Problem.”
Clearly, people are not sighting one monster that’s hundreds of years old. What's more likely: they're sighting a family of creatures, generations of animals over centuries. And that brings up the question of if the body of water has enough food and space to sustain an entire family of creatures for centuries.
The bigger the body of water, the more likely this becomes. Lakes are problematic, with limited space. Rivers are somewhat better.
Perhaps the creature is still out there, swimming from Northumberland to Clinton County, occasionally spotted. It’s just another one of those exciting mysteries for which central Pennsylvania is known.
Most Popular
Comments / 0