Storsjöodjuret, the Great Lake Monster of Jämtland: the 1893 sighting and the 1894 capture company

Storsjön is a deep lake beside Östersund, in Jämtland. Its monster is older than its name. In 1635 the vicar Mogens Pedersen recorded a folktale of two trolls, Jata and Kata, whose cauldron brew produced "a strange animal with a black serpentine body". In 1685 Andreas Plantin wrote that the serpent lived under the runestone on Frösön. Sightings followed in 1839 and 1857. Then came the 1890s. That was when the interest truly began.

13 October 1893. Two girls, Karin and Märta, were washing clothes on the beach near Sörbyn. Other accounts place them at Åssjön. They saw an animal's head rising and falling in the water. Karin threw some stones at it. The animal swam swiftly toward the shore.

The sisters described a round, smooth, hard head like a dog's. Two large ears. Eyes like teacups. Fins instead of forelegs, hind legs as long as the body, and a lashing tail. It was about four meters long. To them it looked like a gigantic frog. A local newspaper editor interviewed the sisters and published their account.

1894. Amusement-park owner Maria Helin and other citizens of Östersund formed a company to catch the beast. Reuters later rendered its name as "the Company to Capture the Great Lake Monster". King Oscar II contributed money. The city paid for a specially built trap. Norwegian whale harpooners came. A jetty went up. A young pig was offered as bait.

Nothing took it. Albert Engström mocked the whole effort. The trap survives today at the Jämtland County Museum, Jamtli, in Östersund.

By 1898 newspapers were flooded with old and new testimonies. In 1899 the lecturer Peter Olsson published Storsjöodjuret: framställning af fakta och utredning, gathering 22 eyewitness testimonies. He concluded the animal was probably an unknown aquatic mammal, perhaps a giant seal. That same year a satirical ballad appeared in Jämtlands tidning. Later tallies count more than 200 testimonies from more than 500 people. The composite picture is serpent-like, over 10 metres long, with two or three humps.

No hoax finding exists for the 1893 account. Olsson himself argued for a real animal. Others look to folklore. José Alfredo González Celdrán argued in 2023 that the legend grew from locals who could not read runes and misread the serpent carved on the Frösö Runestone. Sanna Händén-Svensson's 2024 Lund dissertation treats the monster as shaped by social, cultural, historical and local factors.

The search never stopped. In 1986 the Jämtland County Administrative Board made it illegal to kill, injure or capture Storsjöodjuret, or to disturb its eggs or nests. The protection was later revoked after criticism from the Parliamentary Ombudsman. In 1998 a 15-boat flotilla with sonar and an underwater camera, including Adrian Shine of the Loch Ness Project, found nothing. In 2008 cameras on the islet Nysvehälla caught a blurry, long and narrow silhouette moving in the depths.

Locals call it Storsie. Clas Svahn returned to it on SVT's Det okända. And the trap from 1894 is still waiting.