COULD IT BE MAGIC

“It moved away growling fiercely, and I saw the huge black body had two humps on it and four short legs with huge flappers on them. I could not see any tail,” he told the press. The creature moved quickly out to sea, and the last Herbert saw of the monster was “two eyes like torch lights, shining out to sea.” The coastguard remarked that it had been “a most gruesome and thrilling experience.”

Yorkshire folklore tells of ‘parkin’, (a local type of sticky cake,) loving dragon having lived around Filey Brigg, and the rocks of the Brigg having been formed from the bones of such a creature. One hundred and forty million years ago, plesiosaurs roamed the oceans where Filey Brigg now stands as part of the Jurassic Coast, and in 2001 a nearcomplete skeleton of an elasmasaur, a long-necked plesiosaur, was found nearby.

In the same year that Herbert chased his creature from Filey Brigg, the Atkinson family reported a dark creature with eyes ‘the size of portholes’ swimming in the Humber River, near Hull, just a little further south of Herbert’s sighting. Could plesiosaur sightings have inspired the tales of the dragons of old? Now believed extinct, could plesiosaurs or their successors somehow have managed to survive to the present day, hidden beneath those cold, dark waves? It would explain how rational people such as the Atkinson’s keep reporting sightings of such fantastic beasts.

In early August of 1936, another sea monster was spotted in the sea off Withernsea when a local magistrate, Mr Twig, was out walking by the shoreline with his young grandson. While they were taking the air, the boy drew his grandfather’s attention to an unusual dark shape moving at great speed across the water. “It looked like a sea serpent,” reported Mr Twig to the Aberdeen Press and Journal, who covered the story. “Another man who was near us also looked out sea, and we saw some strange thing moving something like 100 miles an hour!”

The magistrate went on to say that the creature had been seen about two miles from the shoreline. The cryptid was travelling so fast that it was soon out of sight. “I am not an imaginative person,” remarked Mr Twig, “and there is no doubt about what I saw with my own eyes. It was not a speed boat!” There was also another witness that day. Mrs Ethel Foster, taking a day trip from the nearby port of Hull, was also reported in the press to have spied the same creature.

Sightings of such watery beasts weren’t occurring just at sea either. In the same month, Alderman A.J. Richards was spending a pleasant summer’s day with his son and a friend, boating on Loch Oich in Scotland. This freshwater loch in the highlands comprises part of the Caledonian Canal and isn’t far from Loch Ness and its famous resident monster, Nessie. As the party enjoyed the scenery, a huge, dark-skinned beast suddenly rose from the water, less than ten feet away from their boat. They described its body as being two-humped and coiled like a snake, and as the head broke the water’s surface, they saw what looked like “the face of a large, unearthly dog.”

Only days later, on Thursday, 20th August 1936, the Dundee Evening Telegraph carried news of another strange sighting, also on the east coast. Two ex-MPs and a local chairman