Chessie is a name applied to unidentified animals that are reported to frequent the waters and tributaries of Chesapeake Bay, an estuary covering nearly 4,480 square miles in Maryland and Virginia. Sightings have taken place for more than a century and a half, and appear to have involved several different kinds of creatures.
Researchers have classified reports of large swimming creatures appearing in Mid-Atlantic and New England newspapers for July and August 1840 as probable sightings of leatherback sea turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) that had strayed or been transported out of their normal range (Shoemaker 1988, 31). As the largest living turtles, leatherbacks can grow more than nine feet long and weigh more than a ton.
Most other reports of unusual animals in Chesapeake Bay and its large watershed have been of serpent-like creatures. This was the case with the most important sighting of the first part of the twentieth century, in which the crew of a military helicopter observed something “reptilian and unknown” in the Bush River (Okonowicz 2012, 73). This and later sightings have led to the suggestion that long tropical snakes such as anacondas may have been released in the area, but herpetologists discount the theory.
There were scattered sightings during the 1960s and early 1970s, but reports grew more numerous and more substantial in the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s. Retired Central Intelligence Agency employee Donald Kyker and two of his neighbors saw four unidentified animals in the estuary in 1978 (Coleman and Huyghe 2003, 66). That same year there were reports of large reptilian footprints on a Maryland beach and what appeared to be the tracks of large snakes near a creek in Maryland. Farmer Goodwin Muse and five friends watched a ten- to fourteen-foot serpent-like creature undulating through the waters of the Potomac River for about a quarter of an hour in 1980. Muse described it as being “about as big around as a quart jar” (Bright 1989, 67). Other 1980 sightings involved snakes or snake-like creatures as much as forty feet long.
Then in May 1982 businessman Robert Frew, his wife, and several of their friends saw a long, dark, serpentine animal swimming near Kent Island. In August, seven scientists affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, along with representatives from the National Aquarium and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, studied a two-minute videotape that Frew had shot. According to George Zug, chair of the Smithsonian’s Department of Vertebrate Zoology, “All of the viewers of the tape came away with a strong impression of an animate object,” but the group was not able to identify it (“Chessie Videotape Analysis Inconclusive” 1983, 9).
Two years later, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory performed a computerized enhancement of the Frew tape. According to Michael Frizzell of the Maryland-based Enigma Project, the enhancement yielded “an impressive, unmistakable, serpentine shape,” but the funding available for further enhancement was exhausted before further studies could be made (Coleman and Huyghe 2003, 67).
The publicity surrounding the Frew tape raised Chessie’s profile, and soon entrepreneurs began turning out products such as Chessie T-shirts. Fishermen named their boats in honor of Chessie. With an aim to increasing children’s environmental awareness, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service produced two Chessie-themed coloring books.
Chessie had been the name of a cat mascot used by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in the 1930s, and a 1972 merger produced a larger system known as the Chessie. But in the case of the mysterious Chesapeake Bay animal, the name was probably suggested not only by geography but also by the nickname Nessie, as Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster is popularly known.
In 1994 and several successive years, a West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus) strayed far from Florida’s warmer waters to visit points up and down the American east coast, including Chesapeake Bay, and was affectionately christened Chessie.
Bessie
Many bodies of water play host to monster sightings; Loch Ness and Nessie are undoubtedly the best known in this regard. “Bessie,” aka “South Bay Bessie” is such a monster said to live beneath the waves of Lake Erie. The first recorded sighting of Bessie dates to the late eighteenth century. Bessie is said to resemble a large snake or fish between a dozen and several dozen feet in length, sometimes with a head rather like a dog’s. Although Bessie is often seen in deep water from shipboard, there have been reports of beached monsters, although no evidence besides large scales has been found. Sometimes known as “the Snake in the Lake” by irreverent Cleveland schoolboys, Bessie has found new life in popular culture, as in the Lake Erie Monsters hockey team and a seasonal beer of the same name produced by the Great Lakes Brewing Company.
C. Fee
Grove Koger
See also Big Water Snake of the Blackfoot; Champ; Hudson River Monster; Igopogo; Ogopogo; Sharlie/Slimy Slim; Whitey
Further Reading
Bright, Michael. 1989. There Are Giants in the Sea. London: Robson Books.
“Chessie Videotape Analysis Inconclusive.” 1983. ISC Newsletter 2(1, Spring): 9.
Coleman, Loren, and Patrick Huyghe. 2003. The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.
Okonowicz, Ed. 2012. Monsters of Maryland: Mysterious Creatures in the Old Line State. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole.
Shoemaker, Michael T. 1988. “The Day They Caught ‘Chessie.’” Strange Magazine 3: 30–31.
Chessie—Primary Document
C. R. Hervey, “When the Sea Serpent Came” (1906)
Stories about sea serpents and river monsters entertained newspaper and magazine readers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As with Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster, America’s Champ, Chessie, and other creatures spawned unsubstantiated tales of sightings and encounters, followed by investigations that exposed many of the reports as elaborate hoaxes. This 1906 article in a travel magazine told the story of the 1855 sighting of the Silver Lake (New York) Serpent in a way that enhanced the legend, while still deriding the silly opportunism spawned by the reports.
In the Summer of the year 1855 the inhabitants of western New York were greatly excited over the appearance of a mysterious monster in Silver Lake, a beautiful little body of water twenty miles south of Batavia. Witnesses with reputations for truth and sobriety gave testimony sufficiently positive to convince the last doubting Thomas that some great creature had there made its abode. This testimony was repeatedly confirmed as the weeks passed, until the countryside was thoroughly aroused. No one dared venture on the lake, but crowds of people lined the shore, and all roads leading thither swarmed with vehicles. Business was suspended at times, during the excitement, in the adjacent villages of Perry, Castile and Warsaw, and people came en masse to view, if possible, the strange phenomenon.
But the mysterious visitor never showed itself to the multitude; shy by nature, coy, or shrewd in the interests of local business, it appeared only at intervals sufficient to stimulate expectation, and before a sufficient number to keep alive the testimony of its existence.
From the accounts of these witnesses a somewhat positive idea of the form and shape of the creature was gained. It appeared from fifty to seventy-five feet in length, capable of rising to the surface, and submerging itself, at will. At such times an horrific head appeared, and place spots were visible on its dark body.
Many tales of its ferocity became rife; fictitious rumors of hairbreadth escapes from its clutches were told, and claims were made that some had heard strange noises from the lake in the night.
Then old settlers remembered that the Indians had always avoided the lake and said of it, “Heap no good,” and that their name for it had meant “Lake of the Serpent.”
Wiseacres asserted that there was one place in the lake where no bottom could be found, and that by far more water discharged through its outlet than could be accounted for by any visible supply. Reasoning from these premises led them to suppose that a subterranean channel might lead from the bottom of the lake to some sea inhabited by such creatures.
As the Summer advanced, news of the mystery attaching to Silver Lake reached the cities, and long excursion trains, swarming with people, began to arrive from Rochester and Buffalo, and intervening points. The crowds swelled to thousands, and each reappearance of the monster was the signal for still greater multitudes.
The local hotels, which had previously depended on the patronage of the few who were attracted by the beauty of the lake, did a thriving business, and many pitched tents on the shore, resolved to stay and solve the mystery. Fakers gave the occasion the appearance of a county fair. The excitement was equal to that produced by the discovery of the Cardiff Giant, but of shorter duration, for the “sea serpent” of Silver Lake disappeared as mysteriously as it came. Possibly the monster died, or went back through the subterranean channel to the suppositious sea whence it came.
The general public never knew what became of it. A few years later, however, an old building by the lake burned, and when the conflagration reached the cellar, there issued forth a most powerful and searching odor of rubber. Some way this incident served, in the minds of the people, as an explanation of the mystery.
But a few there are still among the living who, when the subject is broached, will sagely shake their heads, and seriously protest that there was something mighty queer about it, and with that proposition all agree.
The wide attention which the excitement attracted worked much good for Silver Lake. Its great natural beauty, the invigorating air of its high altitude, and its charming surroundings in the rich valley of the Genesee, influenced many to build summer homes upon its shores, and it became a popular resort. Hundreds of summer cottages were erected in the course of time, and schools of art and philosophy were established. The excursion business became a permanent feature of the place, and fortune smiled.
This is the story of Silver Lake, agreeably differing from many through which runs the trail of the serpent.
Source: Hervey, C. R. “When the Sea Serpent Came.” The Four-track News: A Monthly Magazine of Travel and Education. Vol. 10, No. 6 (June 1906): 471–472.