Howick Falls Inkanyamba: Bob Teeney's sighting and the photo reward (1995)

Long before 1995, the pool at the foot of Howick Falls had a reputation. In Zulu tradition it is the lair of the Inkanyamba. A serpent with the head of a horse, a mane and a crest along its back. Its name has been translated as "snake cloud." It is tied to the hail, tornadoes and summer storms of KwaZulu-Natal, and only sangomas, traditional healers, are said to approach the pool safely.

There were earlier reports. In 1962 a conservation ranger, Mr. Buthelezi, saw a monster on a sandbank near Midmar Dam. It slithered off the bank as he and a companion approached. Johannes Hlongwane, caretaker of a caravan park near the falls, reported sightings in the 1970s and in 1981. "It raised its head and neck thirty feet out of the water," he said. "It had a crest running along its back."

September 1995. Bob Teeney, a local businessman with a fast-food shop at the falls, stood on the viewing platform above the plunge pool on the Umgeni River. Then, he said, a snake-like head and neck reared up out of the water. A giant serpent-like creature. About 25 feet long.

He had no camera. But he had a theory. The monsters, Teeney said, belonged to "an aquatic, snake-like dinosaur family known as the Plesiosaur." And there was more than one: "mom, pop and baby monsters."

Teeney offered a reward for a photograph, advertised in a local paper. Journalists, photographers and crowds of sightseers came to Howick. Reuters correspondent Ellis Mnyandu filed the story under the headline "Is it a duck? No, it's the Howick monster."

Pictures followed. One showed a long-necked animal apparently rising from the water, waterweed in its mouth. Another showed a pipe-like neck rising from a half-submerged, swollen body, with three smaller objects beside it that looked like ducks. Teeney called them "baby monsters." Photos he said showed the creature soon lined the walls of his shop.

Sian Hall, an anthropologist living in Howick, was not convinced. "There are no physical monsters in the Howick Falls," she wrote. "Giant eels, perhaps, and even huge otters, if that is your idea of a monster. But we do not need to misinform the public, nor to use their gullibility to attract tourists to Howick."

In 2009 Richard Freeman of the Centre for Fortean Zoology looked at the first photograph. "As soon as I saw the picture I knew it was a hoax," he wrote. The monster was an Apatosaurus from page 14 of Know Our World: Prehistoric Life, a 1977 children's book, reversed. The duck photo was never formally analysed. Sceptics saw a floating tree trunk with ducks. Others suggested eels, Nile crocodiles, drifting logs or spray at the base of the falls.

No official body ever investigated. But the story had weight. In May 1996 Zulu-speaking people from a camp near the falls went to the local council, upset by the "hype and rumours about the monster being captured." Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff later used the Howick monster to illustrate "occult economies," quoting a sculptor from Zaire who became a believer: "First I believe in God and then the monsters." Locals still call the creature Howie.