The Lough Dubh Monster: A Horned, Cow-Sized Animal Hooked on Black's Lake

Lough Dubh is a small lake. Fifteen acres, in the River Suck valley near the village of Creggs. Dubh is Gaelic for black, and the lake is also called Black's Lake. It was popular with local anglers, well stocked with roach and pike. Even its county depends on who tells the story. Some writers place it in County Roscommon. Others in County Galway.

The early 1960s. Most accounts say 1962. Some say March of that year. A schoolmaster, Mr. Mullaney, was fishing the lake with his son. Later writers give the father's first name as Alphonsus. The son is never named.

The son's hook caught something heavy. What came up was "quite unrecognizable." It was the size of a cow. Some versions say a cow or an ass. Others a cow or a donkey. It had short thick legs with small ears. It was "dark grey in colour, and covered with bristles or short hair, like a pig." And on its snout was "a white pointed horn." One retelling gives it a head like that of a hippopotamus. Another, a hippo-like face with a "rhinoceros-like horn."

The animal was aggressive. In one telling it tried to climb onto land. In another it battled so vigorously that it broke the fishing line and retreated into the depths. Either way, the two fled in terror.

They came back with a band of armed men. The lake was quiet. The monster had gone, and no trace of it was found.

It may not have been alone. Possible sightings at the lake were reported in 1956 and 1960. In 1961, one large animal was seen together with two smaller ones. Nothing has been reported since. Some writers add that similar animals were reported in other lakes as early as 1912.

Every account leads back to one book. Peter Costello's In Search of Lake Monsters, published in 1974. No contemporary newspaper report has surfaced. Later writers built on Costello and drifted apart. One dates the hooking to 1961, which sits awkwardly beside the 1961 sighting usually called the last. Visit Galway moves the story to Connemara. The details shift. The scene stays the same.

In 2011, Dale Drinnon asked whether this was the Irish Hogzilla. His answer was a feral or wild boar. The white pointed horn, he argued, was a tusk. Hogs eat bait, swim well and wallow in water. A commenter suggested a hippopotamus. Drinnon rejected it.

Gary Cunningham, co-author of The Mystery Animals of Ireland, tentatively suggested a walrus with an oddly placed tusk. The CFZ-USA blog weighed the options and concluded that nothing about the animal can be stated with certainty.

Karl Shuker retold the case in 2016, beside a folk story of a horned dobhar-chú, "like a lutrine unicorn." Nearby, the Lough Ree monster had been reported on the Shannon in 1960. Today Lough Dubh lives on in blogs, in a tourism listing, and in one father and son who pulled something out of black water and ran.