The Canvey Island Monster: the fish with feet (1953 and 1954 carcasses)

Canvey Island lies in the Thames estuary, in Essex. On 31 January 1953 the North Sea tidal surge devastated it. It killed 58 people there. That same year, the shore gave up something strange.

August 1954. A Tuesday. The Rev. Joseph D. Overs was walking on the beach at Canvey with his children. He was not the local vicar. He was a priest of the Old Roman Catholic Church of Great Britain, and better known on the island as its photographer.

Something was bobbing in a small tidal pool. It was dead. Overs described it as over four feet long, with staring eyes and a large mouth. "Underneath, on its stomach, it had two feet, each with five toes." On 11 August 1954 the Liverpool Daily Post ran it as "Fish with feet found on beach." The Londonderry Sentinel followed the next day.

The local paper added a twist. "A peculiar fish was found in almost the same place last year and identified as a pocket or 'fiddler fish'." Colin Day was about nine, and one account ties his memories to that first find. Through the crowd he could see only part of it, and he took it for a person. He touched it. He kept shouting "It's a mermaid." The flesh, he said, "looked like wobbly human flesh with cellulite (orange peel texture)."

In 1959 Frank Edwards retold the case in Stranger Than Science. His first creature, dated November 1953, was about 2.5 ft long, with thick reddish-brown skin, a "pulpy head with two protruding eyes", gills and sharp teeth. It had no forelimbs. Its hind legs ended in five-toed, horseshoe-shaped feet, "suited for bipedal locomotion." Two zoologists sent by the authorities examined it, photographed it and had it cremated. Edwards also tied the case to the Devil's Footprints of 1855.

Later retellings gave the 1954 animal skin "pink and tough, like the hide of a healthy pig." The zoologists were never named. The Strange Animals Podcast suspects Edwards invented them.

In 1999 the researcher Nicholas Warren went looking. The Marine Biological Association laboratory in Plymouth had no records. Nor did the National Rivers Authority. But he found locals who believed the creature was an anglerfish. Alwyne Wheeler, a former ichthyologist at the Natural History Museum, gave his view in a letter to Warren. It was Lophius piscatorius, the angler or monkfish. Its pronounced fins had been described as hind legs. Warren raised the case in Fortean Times in February 1999.

The monkfish fits. It is native to British waters, broad-bodied and toothy, and it uses muscular fins to "walk." A damaged one with frayed fin tips could look as if it had toes. Dale Drinnon filed the case as a non-cryptid.

One question stays open. A newspaper photograph shows a broad-bodied fish with a gaping mouth, projections at its sides and a tapering tail. Garth Haslam noticed that the font beside it is very different from the original article's. Its newspaper and date are unknown. So is the fate of the 1954 carcass.

In 2011 Beyond the Point and Liam Heatherson made The Canvey Island Monster Returns, a spoof news report. A sequel followed in 2012. The fish with feet keeps walking.