21ST CENTURY BLUES

The quayside had small, brightly painted fishing boats moored to it that bobbed up and down with the incoming tide. Apart from the waves, the only sound was the occasional cry from the gulls wheeling overhead in the breaking sunlight.

“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,”

Suddenly, my grandfather spied movement in the water below him. The head of a strange creature broke the water’s surface, rising as if to gulp in the early morning air. It was darkly coloured, with a long thin neck standing proud of the rippling water. Grandfather stared in disbelief. He had seen many things during his young life, but never a sea monster. As the creature swam past him, it began to sink once more below the surface, becoming hidden from view.

“Did you see that?” my grandfather shouted to a gentleman who was cycling past at that very moment. The man shook his head in confusion and peddled away, obviously oblivious to what granddad had just witnessed. My grandfather rushed home to tell my grandmother about his strange experience, but he didn’t dare tell anyone else for fear that they thought he had lost his mind. He later heard that an off-duty policeman, probably on his way home after a night shift, reportedly also spotted the creature.

According to old newspaper reports, my granddad wasn’t the only one to encounter such a cryptid. Back in the 1920s and 30s, there was a spate of sightings of strange, long-necked monsters in the UK’s coastal waters, especially along the east coast where my grandfather fished.

In late February of 1934, a coastguard, Wilkinson Herbert, filed a report about a terrifying night-time encounter with such an aquatic leviathan. Herbert had been walking at Filey Brigg, a long, narrow, steep cliff peninsula situated less than thirty miles south of Whitby and my grandfather’s cryptid sighting.

“Suddenly, I heard a growling like a dozen dogs ahead walking nearer. I switched on my torch and was confronted by a huge neck, six yards in front of me, rearing up eight feet high!” The coastguard also stated that the creature was around thirty feet in length, its eyes akin to giant saucers and its cavernous mouth a foot wide. Scared at being alone with such a thing on that isolated shore, Herbert began to throw stones at the fearsome creature, driving it back into the water.