Johnnie, the St. Johns River Monster: Buck Dillard's Lake Dexter sighting, 1953

The St. Johns River runs slow and wide through central Florida. Just south of Lake George it opens into Lake Dexter, with Astor on one bank and Volusia on the other. In 1953 this water got a monster. The papers placed it "from Lake Monroe up to Lake George." Later reports came from Blue Creek, the Astor Bridge, and as far north as Jacksonville.

Buck Dillard was a longtime Astor resident and river guide. He had taken a Missouri couple out fishing on Lake Dexter. Then the creature's head popped up out of the water.

"He looked at us for about a minute, then he went under the water and swam underwater away from us," Dillard told The Orlando Sentinel in October 1953. "We waited about two hours in that same spot to see if he would come up again, but he didn't."

Dillard was called the first to report it, but he was not the last. The papers described an animal 35 feet long, "with a head 30 inches wide and a 10 inch horn in the middle of its head." Astor reports described it as grey, four-legged and snake-headed. One woman called it "the beast that swims like a fish and walks like a dog." It was said to eat water hyacinths and eelgrass, and several papers tied the vanishing hyacinths to the monster.

Homer J. Wright, president of the Astor Chamber of Commerce, stood by the witnesses. "That thing has been seen by many reliable persons," he said. Owen Godwin, owner of Godwin's Snake Village in Kissimmee, offered $5,000 for the creature alive or $1,000 dead if it was at least 30 feet long, with a narwhal-type horn. "At least six witnesses said he does," Godwin said of the horn. Hunts were proposed, and tourists came to Astor hoping for a look.

Florida State Attorney J.W. "Jesse" Hunter played along. "I thought they were extinct," he said. He claimed such animals lived along the river in the 1910s, "and the name for them was Borinkus." Citrus grower Barney Dillard of Volusia, he added, "used to use a team of them to ferry across the river."

There was no formal investigation. John Dequine of the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission had a simpler answer. "If you've ever been up in that country and have seen a cow come up with eelgrass and weeds all over its head, you might imagine it was a monster," he said. "They stick their heads under the water to get the eelgrass."

Biologists of the day suggested exaggerated manatees, but Dillard would not have it. "I've seen schools of 25 manatees. They're in the river all the time," he said. The Miami Herald blamed faster rainy-season currents for the missing hyacinths. No photograph, film or physical trace was ever recorded. In June 1954 Wright passed on a sighting by a wildlife officer "who didn't happen to have his camera with him at the time."

In 1849 Captain Adams of the schooner Lucy and Nancy reported a "dirty brown" animal of about 90 feet at the river mouth. In May 1975 five people in a boat near Jacksonville watched a head rise "like a periscope." Wallace McLean said it was "the color of boiled shrimp." That creature became Pinky, and Ivan T. Sanderson wrote about it in Argosy.

Johnnie lives on in Anthony Talcott's features for WKMG ClickOrlando, in Tim Gilmore's essays for JaxPsychoGeo and The Jaxson, in podcasts and in a novel. The 1953 sightings have no settled explanation.