Three priests' sighting of the Lough Ree Monster

Lough Ree is one of the great lakes of the River Shannon. It covers 105 km², shared by Longford, Westmeath and Roscommon. Old stories already placed something in its waters. In the legend of St Mochua of Balla, a hunted stag found safety on an island in the lough, because hunters feared "a fierce monster said to live in the lake." The lough also holds a commercial eel fishery. That detail would matter later.

May 18, 1960. Around 9:30 in the evening, by one later account. Warm. Still. Three Catholic priests were fishing off Holly Point, near Glasson, close to Athlone. Their names were Fr Richard Quigley, Fr Matthew Burke and Fr Daniel Murray. One of them saw "a very strange object which was moving slowly on the flat calm surface, about eighty yards away." He pointed it out to the others. They began to note its size and features in great detail.

"It was moving. It went down under the water and came up again in the form of a loop. The length from the end of the coil to the head was 6 feet. There was about 18 inches of head and neck over the water. The head and neck were narrow in comparison to the thickness of a good-sized salmon."

The head was serpent-like. It tapered "rather abruptly to a point." Peter Costello, who retold the case in his 1974 book In Search of Lake Monsters, described "a large black animal swimming up the lough."

May 28, 1960. The Westmeath Independent put the story on its front page under the headline "Lough Ree Monster Sighted!" The BBC reportedly picked it up. Many locals came forward with their own tales.

The same front page carried an advertisement. Tom McCann, a publican in Athlone, offered £100 "for the capture dead or alive, of the Lough Ree Monster." Within weeks someone claimed it, reporting a large dead creature at the Weir Wall. It was a dead calf that had drifted downriver. McCann refused to pay.

In 1980 the priests went back out on the water for Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. The programme put them in their boat in the middle of the lake to tell their tale. The beast did not make another appearance while the cameras were rolling.

In 2001 the Global Underwater Search Team arrived, led by Swedish journalist Jan Sundberg with Nick Sucik and Espen Samuelsen. One night near Killinure Point their hydrophones picked up sounds. "One sequence sounded like large bodies propelled by large flippers, moving through the water," the team said. By 2004 the Irish Times reported that the listening devices had found nothing conclusive.

No one has accused the priests of inventing anything. The debate turned instead to what they saw. The eel fishery invited one answer, and the Irish horse-eel tradition another. Sundberg himself suggested a "Vampire Lamprey eel." Even the size drifted in the retelling. Most accounts keep to six feet of visible animal, while one 2004 report put it at over 20 feet long.

Three clergymen. A calm lake. A looping shape that rose and sank. No photograph of the creature is known, and boats on the Shannon still report hard knocks and thumps on their hulls. That combination made the 1960 sighting the case writers reach for whenever an Irish lake monster is called credible.