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To be continued... To be continued... and thick, but despite that, it swam at an unnatural speed. Sightings always happened in the early evening, between 6 and 8 p.m., and typically in a spot of water that was about 200 yards offshore where the water was deeper.
According to an article from the Daily Sun-Times that summer, it has a round head like a seal, and it can swim as fast as any motorboat. Now, the first person to spot the creature was a woman named Mary Marr. Although this being the 1930s, the papers didn't interview her. Instead, they asked her husband Thomas the questions.
He said that at first he thought it was just an abandoned canoe, so he climbed into his own boat to row out and retrieve it. When he got within 15 yards, though, Marr claimed that the shape suddenly sped off and vanished from sight and, I quote, churning up rollers like a steamer. He had lived in the area for over 25 years and had never seen anything like it. Word spread quickly, as news about such things has a tendency to do, and of course there were theories about what it might be.
One man even made a strong case for the creature actually being a loon, which he believed hovered so low over the water that it cast a shadow and made it look massive and dark. I do need to say, though, that Mary and Thomas Marr owned a grocery store right there along the beach, directly in line with the evening sightings, and thanks to the rumors and excitement over the legend, that meant that more and more people were coming to visit, and in the process, spending more cash at the Marr's shop. One reporter noticed this coincidence, and Thomas is even quoted in the paper as saying, no sir, we don't sell beer here. Still, it certainly makes you wonder.
As for the truth, well, no evidence was ever found. For skeptics, that's clear proof that the sightings were nothing more than wild rumor. For the believers, it meant that there was still hope that the creature might be found. Both sides have a shot at being right.
That is, of course, until the monster finally shows its face. I hope you've enjoyed today's tour through some of folklore's oddest animal hybrids. Fish with monks' haircuts, underwater bishops, screaming fish monkeys, you name it, the pages of history seem to have it. But we're not done just yet.
I've saved one last tale to share with you. Stick around through this re-sponsor break to hear all about it. It's hard to shot people who work at a slaughterhouse, but in 1886, that's exactly what happened. They worked at Frankton Junction on the north island of New Zealand near the city of Hamilton.
Someone had left a 70-pound sheep carcass hanging on a hook only to come back and find it completely picked clean, right down to the bones. But not everything was gone. Whatever had done it had left behind a clue. Strange, bloody, reptilian footprints that led away from the carcass and out to the nearby creek.
Newspapers of the time referred to it as a saurian monster, the word hinting at any kind of large lizard. Just think of it this way, saurian puts the sore in dinosaur. Naturally, people started to feel threatened and afraid. Men began to set up watch in the area with rifles in hand while they waited for the monster's return.
There were rumors that it was spotted again here or there with one witness claiming that it resembled a sea serpent with the head of an alligator. Another witness, a boy, said that the monster chased him all the way home. Other sightings placed the monster in the nearby river. There were many stories of the creature thrashing the waves with its massive tail.
Two men who were trying to cross the river in the canoe reported that the beast almost capsized them, and they got a good look at it in the process. Long body like an alligator, massive jaws filled with razor sharp teeth, and entirely covered in shaggy black hair. Almost overnight, the monster became the boogeyman for everything. Folks remembered how a local Maori girl was found dead near the river the previous year, the flesh stripped clean from one of her arms.
Obviously, they said, the beast was responsible. Here's the trouble, though. New Zealand doesn't have any reptiles that are over a few inches long, and certainly no alligators. Although some people theorize that an alligator could have been brought over from Australia.
Except Australia has crocodiles, not alligators. But what New Zealand does have is folklore. In Maori tradition, there's a creature known as the taniva, which is sort of like their version of a dragon or a serpent. They typically live in natural places, too, like caves and lakes and rivers.
Later that year, in November of 1886, a similar creature was spotted on the other side of Hamilton. One witness claimed that he had seen it over two dozen times, and gave the same description as before. Long snout, seven or so feet long, and covered in black hair. And this time, people of the area managed to capture it.
When they did, they claimed that it turned out to just be a gray seal. The trouble is, that type of seal doesn't live in New Zealand. One other person, though, managed to kill the Saurian monster about a year later. A local policeman in Raglan Harbor told the newspapers that he stumbled upon the monster sleeping on the beach, so he pulled out his gun and put two bullets through its head.
The newspaper article also includes the monster's dimensions. It was 12 feet long, six feet around, and instead of a tail, it had two weird screw-shaped propeller-like things. Apparently, the animal's corpse was even dissected to learn more, and then its skin and bones were removed for preservation, later being set up for display in Auckland. Which means that we could all go and see it now and figure out what it really was, right?
Well, not so fast. You see, just a week after the preserved monster was installed, the store it was inside of caught fire, and everything burned to the ground. Sometimes the truth is evasive. Just when you have the fingers of your mind wrapped around it, it suddenly slips away.
This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Menke, with research by Cassandra DeAlba, and music by Chad Lawson. Don't like ads? We've got a solution. There's a paid version of Lore on Apple Podcasts and Patreon that is 100% ad-free.
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