The Con Rít carcass of Hongay, Bay of Along, 1883

1883. The French were still taking control of northern Vietnam, and that year they seized Quảng Yên, the area that included Hòn Gai. Today the old town of Hongay is the centre of Hạ Long, on the water the colonial maps called the Bay of Along. Somewhere on that shore, on a beach no one recorded, the sea left something behind.

Several local Annamites found it. A headless, putrefying carcass, washed ashore. It was about 60 feet long and 3 feet wide, built of numerous identical segments. Each segment measured 2 feet long and 3 feet wide and carried a pair of lateral spines about 2 feet 4 inches long. The terminal segment bore two more, directed backwards like a pair of spiny tails.

It was dark-brown on top. Light-yellow underneath. One of the locals struck the segments with a stick. They rang like sheet-metal.

There was the stench. It grew so intense that the locals towed the body out to sea. There it sank. They called it con rít. Karl Shuker translates the name as millipede, though the Vietnamese word is usually glossed as centipede.

Among the people on the beach was an 18-year-old called Tran Van Con. He touched the body. Thirty-eight years later, around 1921, he told his story to Dr A. Krempf, director of Indochina's Oceanographic and Fisheries Service. Krempf passed the account to Abel Gruvel, a professor at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, who printed it in 1925 in L'Indochine: ses richesses marines et fluviales.

That page is the only primary record. No remains survived. No photograph was taken. No government inquiry followed.

Bernard Heuvelmans made the Hongay carcass the key specimen of his many-finned sea serpent. He named the type Cetioscolopendra aeliani, after the sea-centipedes of Aelian and the cetacean centipede of Rondelet, and proposed an armoured archaeocete whale. That idea leaned on fossil scales later shown to belong to other animals. Darren Naish has called the Krempf account an enigma.

Karl Shuker argued for a giant crustacean. The paired spines, he suggested, sheltered soft limbs that rotted away, leaving the hard dorsal shell. He insists it was not a marine centipede or millipede. Others have proposed an isopod, a giant polychaete worm or a decomposed globster. George Eberhart listed a whale backbone, oarfish vertebrae, a surviving basilosaurid and a eurypterid.

The sharpest doubt is about memory. In 2022 a reader, Chris Forbes, asked whether the 60 feet was overestimated or misremembered after so many years. Shuker replied that overestimation is less likely for a carcass people examined at close range.

The same bay would produce more stories. In 1897 and 1898 the gunboat Avalanche reported living serpentine animals there and fired on them, a different case entirely. The con rít itself has travelled from Gruvel's single page into cryptozoology books, blogs, games and YouTube explainers. It remains one memory of one beach. A carcass that rang like metal, and then sank.