The First Chessie Sighting: "Nessie Jr." in the Lower Potomac

Summer, 1978. Westmoreland County, on the Northern Neck of Virginia. Here the lower Potomac River flows toward the Chesapeake Bay. It was on this shore that the story of Chessie, the bay's own sea monster, is usually said to begin.

Four witnesses. Donald Kyker, a retired CIA agent living on the Northern Neck. His wife. Their neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Smoot. What they saw was long. 25 or 30 feet long, by their estimate. And it was "as round as a telephone pole."

Then it moved. It "stuck its head out of the water and moved in an undulating fashion." They gave it a name borrowed from Loch Ness. "Nessie Jr."

The Rappahannock Record, in Kilmarnock, carried the report on 24 August 1978. Two days later Wilson Morris of the Washington Post wrote that it had drawn wide coverage the week before. His headline paired "Monster of the Potomac" with a second name. "Chesapeake Chessie." It would stick.

The Post found no new sightings since the first reports, though some people recalled earlier ones. Its verdict was dry. The monster, it said, "shows little sign of being verifiable scientifically, although it may become viable commercially." Later accounts would not even agree on the size. In 2024 the Bay Journal described something 15 feet long and serpentlike.

James E. Douglas chaired the Potomac River Fisheries Commission. He took a gentle line. The creature, he said, "deserves peace and quiet and a right to frolic unfettered and unharmed."

The Virginia Institute of Marine Science was less romantic. With Dr. John Merriner, it offered a list. Chessie was most likely "a pound net pole, an oar fish, a tree or stump, a common water snake, an escaped anaconda, an alligator, a wave, an optical illusion, or a skinny sea monster." The York Town Crier ran the story in October 1978 under the headline "Thin Sea Monster Unacknowledged."

No photograph, film or trace of the 1978 animal is known. No formal investigation followed. No one has ever accused the Kykers or the Smoots of a hoax. Over the years, other explanations joined the list. Atlantic sturgeon, up to 14 feet long. Boat wakes. Floating logs. Swimming deer. From 1994 a real Florida manatee, nicknamed Chessie, visited the bay. Writing in the Bay Journal, Tom Horton noted that most reports came from people boating for pleasure, not from professional watermen.

The sighting opened a long run of reports. Coles Point and Smith Point in 1980. Robert and Karen Frew's video at Love Point, Kent Island, in 1982. Kent Island again in 1984. Chessie became colouring books from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a statue in Baltimore, a brewery can and a baseball mascot. In 2024 Eric A. Cheezum published a cultural history of the monster with Johns Hopkins University Press. It opens on the Virginia side of the Potomac, in the summer of 1978.