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Stories of Sightings Flood In

By Beacon Staff

I look for the Flathead Lake Monster now. Sometimes I see waves and, for a fleeting monster moment, I believe. But in actuality I haven’t seen anything. No sturgeon, no logs, no unexplainable wakes, no monsters. Other people, however, have seen something, and after my History of the Flathead Lake Monster was published, I began receiving e-mails and letters from people who were previously too shy or nervous to discuss what they had seen with anybody. Someone even barred up next to me at Red’s with a monster tale. Here are a few excerpts from their stories:

A woman wrote me a letter from Canada with perhaps the most interesting sighting. In the early 1970s she took a group of five girls from her church to the lake. She was a teacher at Flathead High at the time. The group spotted a deer frantically swimming to shore. Behind the deer a large wake was moving in fast. The girls screamed for the deer to swim faster and maybe it did, as it made it to shore just before whatever was in pursuit could catch up. The large wake then fizzled out and disappeared and the lake was calm. The woman and all five girls to this day swear by what they saw.

Another person wrote me an e-mail saying he knows somebody who has a videotape of the monster. The keeper of the tape doesn’t show it much in fear of coming off as crazy. But the e-mail writer said it is not the usual long-distance grainy footage that could easily pass as a hoax. It was taken from a boat with the creature – whatever it was – swimming close by.

Other people, who don’t know each other, told me similar accounts of seeing a serpent-like large creature snaking through the lake. They all admit it could have been a natural feature distorted by the conditions, by light or ripples, but they doubt it.

A girl from Whitefish who writes for the Bulldog Breeze, the high school’s newspaper, contacted me with questions about doing her own monster story. I gladly offered what I could. But in the end, the stories are most interesting when told by the believers themselves. I’m sure I’ll get a few more in the future and I welcome them.