Bessie, the Lake Erie Monster: Two Centuries of Serpents in the Inland Sea

A sailboat at sunrise on Lake Erie, seen from Sandusky, Ohio, with a motorboat and a distant light on the horizon — the waters where Bessie is said to swim

About 4 min readFor more than two hundred years, sailors and fishermen on Lake Erie have reported a long, dark, serpentine creature, thirty to forty feet long, sliding through the water off Sandusky Bay. No body, photograph, or DNA sample has ever confirmed it — and the reports have never stopped.