The Amphibious Lake Demon of Browns Lake

Browns Lake is a glacial lake just northeast of the city of Burlington, in Racine County, Wisconsin. Officially it belongs to the Town of Burlington. In August 1876 a letter arrived for the editor of the local paper, the Burlington Standard. The writer's name has not survived in any modern retelling. Neither have the names of the witnesses. What survived is the story.

It began with two men. On the lake they saw "something like a log twenty feet long" lying in the water. They went out to find it. It was nowhere to be found.

They were not the only ones. Women at the lake were "frightened from the water." The letter, as it has come down to us, does not say what they saw.

Then the thing was seen on land. A man reported "the very old devil" in the bushes by the lake. A creature in the water. Now a creature on the shore. The letter described other encounters too, though their details have not been passed on.

The Burlington Standard printed a response, and it was not sympathetic. The editor dismissed the stories. His explanation was a fish. A "mammoth pickerel," he suggested, one that had been seen on and off for the previous 25 years.

Pickerel was a common name in the period for large northern pike and muskellunge. Other ordinary readings are possible. A waterlogged timber could drift and then sink from view. An animal in the brush could be mistaken for something stranger. The letter could even have been written tongue in cheek. No official investigation ever followed.

In 2016, Chad Lewis made the case the opening chapter of Lake Monsters of Wisconsin, a book with a foreword by Jerome Clark. He called it "The Amphibious Lake Demon of Brown's Lake." The shore sighting is the likely reason for the word amphibious. That same year, Jennifer Eisenbart retold the letter for local readers in an article titled "Book recalls the demon of Browns Lake."

Later retellings online go further. One fan wiki describes a creature over 27 feet long, with a broad and flat head, an under jaw full of sharp teeth and a tail with three fins. Green on the top. Blue on the sides. Yellow on the underbelly. None of that has been traced to the 1876 letter.

Browns Lake is one of more than 40 Wisconsin lakes in Lewis's collection. Its neighbours include the Lake Pepin serpent, the Devil's Lake Monster and Bozho of Lake Mendota. Lewis has observed that many of these old stories name some of the most prominent people in the community. This one names no one.

He has also offered a wry theory about the state as a whole. "If you were a tourist destination in the early 1900s and you didn't have a lake monster, you were behind the times." The Browns Lake letter came decades earlier. Its full text still waits on microfilm, along with the editor's reply and perhaps the names of those who saw the log that vanished.