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Monstrous Mysteries
By Lynne Snifka
There was no question that John Lee’s skiff had seen better days. Still, each summer during the mid-1950s, he dragged the rickety little boat down from the village of Iliamna in Southwest Alaska to the shore of the lake that shares the village’s name. While his father minded the family store, the Iliamna Trading Co., Lee—with the sort of resolve often seen in eight-year-old boys—aimed to explore Alaska’s largest body of fresh water.
What he most wanted to see was the creature some called the Iliamna Lake Monster.
Alaska’s vastness has all the makings of great tall tales—untamed wilderness, rich and varied Native culture, exotic wildlife, colorful characters, jaw-dropping magnitude. There are many stories: whole herds of mastodons preserved in a glacier, utopias born of ice and snow, strange disappearances, tides that swallow men whole. Some are too fake to be real, others too real to be fake. The common trait of these myths and mysteries is endurance. The Alaska version of the Loch Ness Monster is only the beginning.
“It was referred to as ‘the big fish’ or ‘the mystery fish’ by the locals,” Lee recalled recently. “It was seen (from the air) by several credible pilots. But a lot of them didn’t like to talk about it much because they were afraid people would think they were crackers.”
But people did talk sometimes, like when they picked up supplies at the Iliamna Trading Co. The fish was huge, they said. Some claimed it was 10 feet long. It supposedly had a bulb-like head and a long, slender body, Lee remembered. It had a temper. And catching a glimpse of it was never a good thing.
“The old timers thought that if you saw the fish, you were doomed,” Lee said. “People were reluctant to look below the horizon when they were out in boats.”
In the early 1950s, tuberculosis was rampant in parts of rural Alaska, including Iliamna. People often died from the then-mysterious disease. Lee wonders if the mystery fish didn’t play a part in helping villagers explain the many deaths. “You might surmise that there was a mental effect as well as a physical effect going on at the same time.”
But even after tuberculosis was under control the rumors persisted. Newspaper articles from the 1970s and ’80s describe tales of an “enormous creature” that “can make the lake pitch until it is almost impossible to put a boat on it.” The creature was prone to attack boats with red bottoms, people said. There are stories of helicopter pilots who claimed to have seen four—four!—of the mystery fish swimming together and “looking like sharks,” tales of dorsal fins frozen in the winter ice, and lore about a monster that devours caribou that try to swim across the lake.
The mythology of the fish is as long and wide-ranging as the lake itself. With a surface area of 1,000 square miles, Iliamna is the seventh-largest body of fresh water in the United States. Its often crystal-clear water reaches depths of more than 1,000 feet, plenty of room for monsters (and myths) to hide and grow.
In 1980, the Anchorage Daily News offered 0,000 to the first person who could provide conclusive evidence that the monster existed. The money was never collected. Yet, even today the Bristol Bay regional office of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game keeps an open file on the Iliamna Lake Monster, though Jason Dye, the area management biologist, says reports aren’t very frequent anymore.
The persistence of the stories could stem from the countless rivers and streams that flow into Lake Iliamna like so many rumors. The mystery fish could be a freshwater seal, folks say, a beluga whale that lost its way, an octopus, a huge lingcod or—perhaps the most popular theory—a giant sturgeon. The sturgeon seems a likely choice, with its long, torpedo-shaped body, dorsal fin and prehistoric appearance. But there’s still the burden of proof.
“There’s never been any documentation that anyone’s caught (a sturgeon) in the lake, or seen one, as far as I know,” Dye said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not in there.”
Lee doesn’t believe the sturgeon stories, but he never saw the big fish. And while his father was convinced the mystery fish were a few large lingcod, Lee wanted to see for himself and continued his boyhood search. Determined to make his ramshackle boat more presentable one spring, Lee perched his skiff upside down in the tall grass near Iliamna’s shore. It was a sunny day, perfect for a little touch-up, he thought. Then two men from the village approached him.
“I was getting ready to paint the bottom of my skiff red. And they told me, ‘don’t do that or you’ll be done for,” Lee said. “I was trained to pay attention to the old timers. If they said to do something, I’d do it.”
He painted the bottom of his boat green instead.
Murderous Mud Flats
Drive down Turnagain Arm when the tide is out and someone is bound to mention the stories: Don’t go out on the mud flats! You’ll get stuck in the mud and die!
It’s happened, they say. They offer proof. It was a newlywed. An old woman. A hunter. Sometimes the tale gets grisly. A man once got stuck once while the tide was rushing in. Time was of the essence. A rescue helicopter was called, the story goes, and they strapped him into a harness and tried to pull him free. That mud held him fast, they say, and the helicopter ripped him in half.
And it’s all true. Sort of.
The mud flats along Turnagain and Knik arms aren’t like the sandy beaches of the Lower 48. They may look inviting at low tide, but don’t be fooled.
“Most people think of mud as dirt and water,” Girdwood Fire Chief Bill Chadwick said. “This is actually glacial silt mixed with water. So it’s like powdered rock. It’s a lot heavier.”
Stepping on the powdered rock dislodges water and allows the tiny grains to settle and gain stability, effectively suctioning an intruder in place. The silty goop holds objects and people in its grip with no regard for time or tide. And while dozens, even hundreds, of people find themselves temporarily immobilized by Turnagain mud each year, most lose little more than a boot or a bit of pride.
Most.
In September of 1988, Adeana and Jay Dickinson, a young couple married just a month, loaded an all-terrain vehicle and trailer with supplies for a mining excursion and set off over the mud flats for a destination “on the other side of the inlet,” according to Chadwick. A few hundred yards from shore, the trailer became stuck and Adeana hopped off the back of the ATV to shove it free. The Turnagain mud tightened around her legs.
Her husband tried to free her for more than two hours, according to media accounts, using a dredge from their mining equipment to pump water into the mud around her legs. He freed one leg, but then the dredge broke.
And the tide moved in.
Chadwick, who then worked for the Anchorage Fire Department, responded to the call. Other rescuers came as well, from the State Troopers and Girdwood. They toiled frantically as the water rose first to Dickinson’s waist, then her shoulders. Unable to free her as the tide surged forth, they had to break off the rescue attempt and watch her drown, Chadwick said.
The tide showed no mercy in September 1961 either, when a Fort Richardson soldier named Roger Cashin suffered a similar fate. But it was not the Turnagain mud flats that caused his demise, it was the goop in Wasilla Creek near the lower end of Palmer Slough. According to accounts in the Anchorage Daily News and The Anchorage Times, Cashin, 33, was hunting when the mud fastened its grip around his legs. He tried to wriggle free but soon found himself mired to the waist. The tide advanced and rescuers, unable to free Cashin, removed the barrel of his shotgun for use as a breathing tube in a last-ditch effort. It was no use. Hypothermic but unusually calm, Cashin quietly drowned.
So the stories of the hunter and the newlywed are true, but what of the macabre helicopter scene? In the Cashin case, The Anchorage Times reported, a recovery crew tied a rope around his body and a helicopter tried to pull it free from the mud. The mud held so fast to its victim, the rope snapped.
“I’ve been involved in emergency medical service since the early ’70s and I’ve never been able to confirm that,” said Chief Chadwick of the torn-body tale. “I think it’s just an urban myth.”
To the best of Chadwick’s knowledge, Adeana Dickinson was the last person to die on any of Alaska’s mud flats, thanks in large part to new tools, warning signs along roads, and the mud flats’ deadly reputation. Still, about six times a year the fire department gets a call—a hunter, some tourists, hooligan fishermen—someone is stuck and needs to be freed. Those, Chadwick said, are stories he can confirm.
“But there’s always the possibility that someone goes out and gets covered in mud and we’ll never know about it.”
The Hairy Man
When Donald watches the Discovery Channel, especially programs about the unexplained or mysterious wildlife, he sometimes gets the urge to call his brother-in-law, Frank. He and Frank talk, said Donald (who didn’t want his last name or the name of his village used) and Frank gets somber and quiet. It’s at those times they remember.
They remember the night more than 25 years ago, and the creature that stood a good four feet above their teenage frames in the early winter moonlight. They remember the long arms, the body covered in thick hair, the face with features that were somehow human, somehow not. They remember its strength.
“I remember watching when he was running through the alders in the moonlight,” Donald recalled. “And we have a lot of alders here. He was sweeping them aside and running at the same time.”
Donald and Frank saw what the village elders called Olak. It’s the creature many Alaskans know as the Hairy Man: a solitary, vaguely malevolent, hairy biped with astonishing strength, near-human features and, sometimes, a penchant for stalking people.
“These stories have been around for hundreds of years,” said Danny Seybert, a pilot who grew up in Chignik. “My grandparents heard these stories from their grandparents. And when you think about it, when you go to Canada you hear those same stories from those people.”
In Canada and most of the United States, what Alaskans call Hairy Man goes by Sasquatch or Bigfoot. The Himalayan region has Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman. In Mongolia and China, it’s called the Alma. So persistent and endearing are the stories that an entire field of science, cryptozoology, exists to study creatures like Hairy Man. A search for “Sasquatch” on Amazon.com turns up more than 1,000 books.
Most every region of Alaska has Hairy Man lore. The Dena’ina Athabascans call him Nant’ina and warn that he’ll steal children and raise them in the wild. There’s the story of a man who shot and injured a Hairy Man. The creature escaped, but left behind its blood, something akin to “transmission fluid.” In a 1981 publication from the school in English Bay, a student wrote of her summer in Port Graham and a mysterious figure in the dark that whistled and scared her and hid behind trees. While some dismiss believers as feebleminded, witnesses and their supporters speak without doubt. Donald is reserved when he speaks, but certain of what he saw that night.
The boys were maybe 16 or 17 years old, Donald said. It was the 1970s, and a typical weekend night in their Southwest Alaska village. They stayed up late and played cards at Frank’s house. The dogs started to “go crazy” outside, Donald remembered, which usually meant there was a bear around.
When the barking didn’t subside, the boys decided to investigate. As Frank reached for his rifle they heard someone—or something—toy with the door latch. A massive figure then moved to a broken window that had recently been patched with scrap glass. The creature tried to reach in, cut itself, and ran.
“At first we thought someone was playing around with us, so we decided if it came back we’d run outside and chase it,” Donald said. “We thought it was just some stranger, coming up from another village to scare us.”
Donald and Frank eased back into their evening. Then the creature returned and again fumbled with the door latch. The teens rushed onto the porch, which was built on a foundation nearly four feet high, Donald said. “And we looked up at him.” The creature stood in the snow beyond the house. The teens gave chase toward a series of nearby hills.
“I remember going up the (first) hill. And when I got to the top, it was already on the third hill,” Donald said.
There were a lot of Hairy Man reports from nearby villages for a while. Donald’s grandmother, who lived in a neighboring village, told him a story of when she was younger and caught a Hairy Man.
“They trapped him somehow,” Donald said. “And brought him into the village. And they shaved him and found he was just a runaway from World War II. And the Army came and got him.”
The “man gone wild” or “outside man” is a common theory in Alaska Native culture, said Phyliss Morrow, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Morrow studied Yupik culture in western Alaska and found the phenomenon so common that a set of rules exists for encounters with a wild person.
“You can approach them,” Morrow said. “You can speak certain things to them in Yupik and you can draw them back.”
Again though, there’s the burden of proof.
“I think it’s just myths and stories,” said Seybert, the pilot. “I’ve spent over 20 years flying all over and I look everywhere I fly. I love looking for animals. I’ve counted (for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game) just about every kind of animal you can count out there from an airplane and I’ve never seen anything I couldn’t explain.”
The Outside Man and the Hairy Man, like the Iliamna Lake Monster or even the deadly Turnagain mud, may simply be cautionary tales or coping mechanisms—colorful ways to explain the otherwise unexplainable, or tools to ensure respect for one’s elders. Reports have certainly become more rare as technology has grown more sophisticated. When village parents can call from house to house to check on their kids, it might be less important to scare them with stories of the Hairy Man who may “get them” if they stray too far from home. How better to keep children away from water’s edge than to have them imagine being torn apart by a helicopter or struck ill by a sea monster’s gaze?
“The standards of truth in terms of documented evidence—photographs, stuff like that—you’re not going to find it,” Morrow said. “These are cultural understandings of what happens. It’s true in people’s experience, and it’s meaningful to them.”
So what, then, of the blood on Frank’s window, and Donald, who saw tremendous footprints in the autumn snow?
http://www.alaskamagazine.com/stories/1004/feature_mystery.shtml
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