Marmaduke Wetherell's Loch Ness Monster Footprints

By late 1933, Loch Ness was caught up in a wave of monster interest. Hugh Gray had taken his photograph that November. In December 1933 the Daily Mail made its move. It hired Marmaduke Wetherell, an actor, filmmaker and big-game hunter born in Bodmin, Cornwall, to "track down the beast."

Wetherell searched by car and by boat. Three days, by one account. Then, on a beach on the south shore of the loch, he found what he was looking for.

Footprints. Fresh ones. A large, four-toed animal, with pads 8 inches across. The reports spoke of the outlines of claws and nails. By some accounts, the prints led into the water. Newspapers as far away as Australia described "a most powerful, soft-footed animal 20 ft. long" that could "breathe like a hippopotamus out of water." Wetherell planned a systematic search of the shore. He hoped to find its lair.

Even the spot became a puzzle. The Scotsman placed the find in the vicinity of Foyers. The Highland News said between Dores and Foyers. Decades later, Roland Watson weighed the old reports and concluded the beach was near Foyers.

The Daily Mail announced the discovery before Christmas, presenting it as proof the monster was "not a legend but a fact." On 22 December 1933 the New York Times carried the story too. Wetherell made plaster casts and sent them to the Natural History Museum in London.

Then came the wait. As NOVA later told it: "While the world waited for the museum zoologists to return from holiday, legions of monster hunters descended on Loch Ness, filling the local hotels. Inverness was floodlit for the occasion, and traffic jammed the shoreline roads in both directions."

Early January 1934. The zoologists gave their answer. The prints were those of a hippopotamus. Not a living one. A dried or stuffed hippo foot, the kind popularly used as an umbrella stand or ashtray. According to Watson, the museum identified it as the right foot.

Hippos do not live in Scotland. The bubble burst. The Daily Mail publicly ridiculed the man it had hired, and Wetherell retreated from public view.

That part is still argued over. Some accounts say a prankster fooled Wetherell. Others suspect the hunter himself. In the 1990s, Alastair Boyd and David Martin investigated the Surgeon's Photograph. Boyd traced the tracks to a hippo-foot ashtray belonging to Wetherell's grandson.

The humiliation is the usual motive given for what came next. "We'll give them their monster," Wetherell is quoted as saying. In April 1934 came the Surgeon's Photograph, made by the same man for the same newspaper. In 1994 it was exposed as a fake through Christian Spurling's confession. The footprints on a beach near Foyers may be where it all began.