Distinctly Montana Magazine

13 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m As of this writing there have been more than 115 reported sightings of the Flathead Lake monster, as well as a couple of sketchy photos of… something. Eyewitnesses typically describe the beast as eel-shaped, from 20 to 40 feet in length, sometimes with four flippers. Its long neck curves up out of the water, sup- porting a small head with a long, pointy snout as it undulates through the water like a snake. It's dark in color, usually blue- black, with a pair of large, black eyes. Joseph Zelezny was gigging large fish around 1900 with a spear in the shallow water of Polson Bay ("At the time it wasn't against the law, as far as we know") when his two companions spotted what they thought was a log on the bottom. Accord- ing to his son, Bill, who shared the story in a 1950s interview, Joseph handed his spear to one of the men. "I says, 'Sock that spear into it and see what it is.' They did and it shot out of there like a shot out of a gun." Joseph added that the "log" was ten or twelve feet long. "Oh, I think it was a sturgeon," he said. "It couldn't have been any- thing else." The legend of the Flathead Lake monster has been floating around the Flathead Valley and beyond for more than a century, and for every officially recorded sighting, there are several more anecdotal reports of people who believe a large mystery crea- ture is swimming around in the lake. In 2017, Cindy Johnson was in her house in Polson and lost track of her three-year-old son Andrew. She ran down to the shoreline and found the tot, soaking wet, standing at the edge of the lake. He'd fallen into the water, and his horrified mother asked how he'd gotten to shore. "The Flathead monster lifted me up," he said. While some witnesses do describe something similar to a sturgeon, many swear that they've seen something else entirely. On a warm Sunday afternoon in July, 1953, Mrs. Robert Olson was on the beach with her four sons, near the mouth of the Flat- head River at Bigfork. "I was sitting on this big log and looking out into the lake," she told the Daily Inter Lake, "when this big, huge thing just came out of the water. It looked like a big boat… it was swimming east and west, barely moving, and then it turned quite suddenly and came north and south. Then it turned again and went east and west and then I watched it submerge." She added that her father had also seen the creature years before. One of the nuttiest chapters in the legend of Flessie hap- pened in 1955 when a group of Polson businessmen formed a corporation called Big Fish Unlimited, which offered cash prizes to anyone who could bring in the "superfish." Fishermen con- verged on the area, setting up fish camps and trolling the lake from sunup to sundown, all hoping to tie into the legendary ser- pent and claim the cash. On the evening of May 28, C. Leslie Griffith, fishing near Cromwell Island off the west shore of the lake, had something big take his bait of eel chunks just as the sun was setting. The beast towed his small boat several miles down the lake, and finally, five hours later, he was able to boat the exhausted creature, which turned out to be a seven-and- a-half-foot-long white sturgeon, weighing in at 181 lbs., 1 oz. It was the biggest fish landed in the contest, and it's still on dis- play at the Polson-Flathead Historical Museum. The appearance in the lake of the occasional white sturgeon seems to provide an explanation for many skeptics. It's not out "oh, I think it was a sturgeon," HE SAID. "IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN ANYTHING ELSE." "the flathead monster LIFTED ME UP," THE BOY SAID.

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