Sarah the Sea Hag: the Kitsilano Beach carcass

The British Columbia coast has its own sea serpent. Locals call it Cadborosaurus, or simply Caddy. By 1941 strange carcasses had already kept the legend alive. In 1934 remains at Henry Island, near Prince Rupert, were identified as a basking shark. In 1937 at Naden Harbour, a creature was taken from the stomach of a sperm whale and photographed.

Tuesday, 4 March 1941. Kitsilano Beach, on English Bay in Vancouver. Near the foot of Larch Street, the tide brought in a body. Nobody recorded who found it. Nobody saw it alive. It was dead and decomposed.

The press described a large horse-like head with flaring nostrils and eye sockets. Behind it ran a tapering snake-like body 12 feet long. There were traces of long coarse hair on the skin. The next day Jim Coleman of the Vancouver Province gave her a name in a playful column. "Sarah The Sea-Hag," he wrote, "was washed ashore Tuesday on Kitsilano beach." He called her "a distinctly graceless relative of Cadborosaurus, British Columbia's famed sea serpent."

Then the scientists came. Dr. Wilbert Amie Clemens, head of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, arrived with Dr. Ian McTaggart-Cowan, an assistant professor in the same department. They looked at the body where it lay on the sand. Their verdict was careful. "We're not sure if it's a basking shark, but there is no doubt that it is of the shark family," Clemens said.

G. V. Boorman did not accept it. He was a former whaler who had served as first-aid officer at the Naden Harbour whaling station, and he said he had seen close to 4,000 whales in 10 years. In 1941 he was reportedly an army private stationed nearby. "I've seen the skeletons of scores of varieties of sharks and they had no resemblance to these remains," he said. One later account has him adding: "If that's a shark, I'll eat my uniform."

Boorman went further. He had photographed the 1937 Naden Harbour carcass himself. That marine monster from the sperm whale's stomach, he said, "was the twin sister of odoriferous Sarah."

Most writers side with the zoologists. A rotting basking shark loses its jaws and gill structures. The small skull and long spine remain. Exposed muscle fibres look like hair. What washes up has a small head and a long neck, the classic false plesiosaur. Later summaries call Sarah a decayed basking shark outright, although Clemens only committed to the shark family. Nobody ever suggested a hoax. The argument was only about what animal it was, and it could not be settled. Sarah's remains were not preserved.

Today Sarah lives on as one line in the lists of Cadborosaurus carcasses, and as a Vancouver urban legend. Local writers call the story more legend than verified sea monster, but insist that "it is 100 per cent true that the body of some sort of animal was found in 1941 on the beach." Some sources even use her name for Caddy itself. She remains one of the few early West Coast sea serpent carcasses that scientists examined in person while the newspapers were still watching.