South Bay Bessie: the Lake Erie monster sightings of 1990

Lake Erie has a long tradition of sea serpent stories. A sloop called the Bay Rat reported one near Sandusky in 1793. In July 1817 a schooner crew and the Dusseau brothers near Toledo told of another. In 1896, at Crystal Beach, Ontario, something was watched for 45 minutes. The lake's monster even had a name. Bessie.

Summer 1990 brought a new run of reports. July 8. Susan Seeson saw something two miles from Cedar Point, and her description matched the reports that followed. September 3. Jet skiing off Port Clinton, Bob Soracco at first took it for a porpoise with "humps with grey spots." "It was very long as I moved closer and it was going down."

September 4, 1990. Harold Bricker, his wife Cora and their son Robert were fishing north of Cedar Point Amusement Park. A large creature passed about 1,000 feet from their boat. Black. Roughly thirty-five feet long. A head like a snake's. It moved as fast as their boat. The family reported it to ODNR rangers at East Harbor State Park.

One week later. September 11. In Huron, fire inspectors Jim Johnson and Steve Dircks looked out from a third story window facing Lake Erie. The shape was dark blue or black, 30 to 45 feet long, with three visible parts above the water. "It laid there motionless for three to six minutes and was flat on top." One of the pair was a retired Coast Guardsman. They insisted it was "definitely not a log or a sea wall."

Late in September, the Associated Press carried the story nationwide. The creature, it said, "was reported by five people on three separate occasions, including a Huron firefighter and a 50-year-old woman from Pennsylvania vacationing at her Lake Erie cottage."

John Schaffner, editor of a Port Clinton weekly, set up a toll-free sightings hotline. The paper ran a naming contest. The winner, South Bay Besse, nodded to the Davis-Besse nuclear plant and rhymed with Nessie. Tom Solberg of Huron Lagoons Marina offered $5,000 for a live capture and put up a sign calling the marina the "future home of the Lake Erie sea monster." Charles Cassady Jr. writes that Lloyd's of London underwrote a $102,700 bounty and that a foot-deep holding pen was prepared at the marina. It was never claimed.

November 1990. The Huron council passed a resolution naming the city an official monster "capture and control center." Huron also brought in Charles Herdendorf, an Ohio State University oceanographer, who coined a mock scientific name. Obscura eriensis huronii.

No photographs, film, sonar returns or physical traces were ever recorded. Herdendorf's explanation was schools of carp, herded into serpent-like lines by sandbars. Others point to an unusually large lake sturgeon, the answer most often given for Lake Erie reports. The Bricker sighting itself has never had a specific explanation published.

No source accuses the witnesses of inventing anything. Still, commentators note how quickly the wave became a promotion. Cassady dates the naming contest to 1989, with 115 entries, before the 1990 wave. On July 29, 1993, the Wall Street Journal ran a cover story on Huron's monster boosterism.

The Lake Erie Monsters hockey team, now the Cleveland Monsters, took the name. So did Great Lakes Brewing's Lake Erie Monster IPA. Len Tieman's "Lemmy" sculpture was displayed near Huron in 1994. In 2025 Kevin Kelly's documentary, Legend of the Lake Erie Monster, brought the story back to Cleveland screens.