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Lair of the Beasts: Monsters of the Deep

Lake Mysteries

By Nick Redfern     August 22, 2009


White Rock Lake-Dallas, Texas
© Nick Redfern

 

Constructed in 1911 as Dallas, Texas's first reservoir, White Rock Lake, has nine and a half miles of shoreline, thick trees, a path for walkers and cyclists, and is home to an estimated thirty-three types of mammal, including squirrels, rabbits, skunks, raccoons, possums, bobcats, red foxes, and minks, and no less than fifty-four varieties of reptiles, among which are rattlesnakes, turtles, a whole variety of lizards, and horned toads. Salamanders and frogs also abound, along with an incredible 217 species of bird, including swans, pelicans, sea gulls, loons, and all manner of ducks.

And, between early 2004 and late 2008, it was a place that my wife, Dana, and I called home, after which we moved on to pastures new.

Not long after we moved to an apartment near the shores of the lake, I was interviewed for a local magazine that specifically served East Dallas. The feature, titled In Search of Sasquatch, brought me a lot of local attention and also, and more importantly, a lot of stories and leads to follow up on.

One such story, from Bobby John Craig, was particularly memorable. Craig’s family was originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma but had moved to Texas in the 1960s. And, as a lifelong fisherman, Craig had fished the lake for many years.

As I listened, Craig told me a macabre tale about the fateful night he sat on the far side of the lake in 1971. It was a summer’s evening and he had been fishing for a while, and with considerable success, when he was overcome by an all encompassing feeling of dread and saw something slowly begin to haul itself out of the water about twenty feet in front of him.
 
To his horror, he could see that it was a woman. Or perhaps some insane soul’s monstrous and diabolical idea of what a woman should look like would be a better description.

Craig said that the woman was dressed in dark rags, had long black hair, deathly white skin, and her soulless eyes were utterly jet-black. Dirty water dripped from her mud-encrusted locks and she moved slowly towards him with a maniacal grin on her face and in a slow, jerky fashion that reminded Craig of a relentless flesh-eating zombie straight out of a Hollywood movie.

The creature – it may have looked human, said Craig, but a creature is all it really was – continued to move towards him in faltering steps, its arms outstretched, while it issued a dark and sinister moan and pointed an elongated finger in his direction. This was enough to convince Craig to grab his rod and gear, and hit the road – which he duly did, unsurprisingly.

On the following day, and after the shock had worn off, Craig tentatively revisited the site of his unearthly encounter. The woman had gone. And despite the fact that Craig continued to fish that same area for several more years, he never saw the horrific specter again. But there were far stranger things than weird, wet women afoot at White Rock.

Phil Groff told me a notable story of a very large catfish that he estimated had to have been in excess of 200 pounds, and which he saw in the summer of 1979 while rowing across the lake. Too amazed to do anything than stare in awe for the several seconds that the majestic creature was in view, Groff watched the great beast sink beneath the waves, never to resurface.
 
Like a real-life Captain Ahab, an obsessed Groff took his boat onto the lake for years afterwards, in the hope of once again seeing the mighty fish. But it was all to no avail. The leviathan forever eluded him. But the lake's monsters of the deep extended far beyond large catfish.

In early 2005, I drove to Austin, Texas, to meet with fellow monster-hunter Rob Riggs and a friend of his, Mike, to discuss some potential television work. As we sat and ate lunch I was astonished to learn from Mike that he had a friend (not a friend-of-a-friend, I hasten to add) who knew of a baby alligator that had been secretly released into the heart of the lake some years previously.
 
Was the beast now fully grown, and marauding wildly within its murky depths? I actually hoped it was, as it would be a great story if true – albeit not for anyone that happened to have the bad luck to get in the way of its bone-crushing jaws. Perhaps they needed to change the lake’s name to Lake Placid, I thought to myself.

And this was just the tip of the iceberg: UFO encounters, sightings of so-called "Goat-Man" type characters, and even a Second World War conspiracy all emanated from the heart of the lake - truly one of the strangest, atmospheric and intriguing places I have ever lived.
 
Nick Redfern is the author of many books, including Science Fiction Secrets; There’s Something in the Woods; and On the Trail of the Saucer Spies.

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COMMENTS AND RESPONSES

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spiderhero 8/22/2009 2:58:53 PM

A cooler of beer plus night fishing equals the story above.

jayinvincible 8/23/2009 12:27:05 PM

He saw Bigfoot in drag! LOL!

galaga51 8/24/2009 2:31:57 PM

Nick, while such stories can be entertaining and I won't go any further into most ghost stories than to mention drugs (alcohol included), sleep deprivation and/or actual dreaming, if you're going to pass on a story as authentic don't try to oversell it.

First, an alligator being put into a lake is hardly astonishing, except maybe when you consider the IQ of the person who put it there. Second, it isn't really much of a story ... well, that is unless you swim there on a frequent basis. Third, this "source" may have been Mike's friend, but he was your friend-of-a-friend, and as you didn't claim that he was the one who did it nor a witness to it, at best this is a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend.

The fish story isn't really that fishy either. While a 200 pound catfish is impressive (and several seconds of estimation through murky waters is already questionable) F.O.U.S.s (Fish of Unusual Size) are not that unbelievable.

Bottom line: if you're going to use portions of your book for an article, use some that are more impressive, have a little more evidence or at least are entertaining. Well, the ghost story description was entertaining... it reminded me of The Ring. Good movie.

NickJones 8/25/2009 12:58:36 AM

"Determined to prove a point to the magazine's editor and show how easily the media might be manipulated, [creator of the comic strip 'Bloom County' Berke] Breathed convinced her of the utter falsehood that he had hatched several hundred alligators in his apartment and released them into the lakes surrounding Austin. For final, misleading proof of his hoax, Breathed produced for his editor two actual alligators that he really had hatched. She bought it, hook, line and sinker. 'I'll write the story,' Breathed volunteered, and soon enough a cover story screamed of a reptilian invasion. Soon the rest of the local media picked up the story, further warping it each time they told it..

'Property values plummeted. People pulled their boats out of the water. Investigators were called in," Breathed remembers. 'Then it got scary. They even brought federal charges. Then my good next-door neighbors turned me in. Then I got fined.'

The (Spokane, WA) Spokesman-Review, June 2, 1983, pg. 32.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=19830602&id=XtURAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1O4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=6771,1045960

"... the University of Texas at Austin, where Breathed enrolled in 1976...To win a bet about the ease of spreading false information, he once leaked a story to the campus magazine, Utmost, recounting how he had hatched 356 baby alligators in his apartment and then released them into nearby lakes. The fabricated story was indeed picked up by the wire services and circulated." 
 

http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20088400,00.html

I heard the story from the man himself when he came to give a talk at M.I.T. in the mid-Eighties.

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