Although the "Cressie" depicted on the entry to our town may be somewhat dramatic, you may be surprised to learn that at Loch Ness in Scotland, Montepelier in Vermont, Port Henry in New York, and elsewhere, lake monsters are even protected by law!

Reports of sea serpents and lake monsters come from all parts of the world and are often given pet names: Ogopogo of British Columbia, Montana’s Whitey, Lake Champlain’s Champ, Igopogo of Lake Simcoe, Manipogo of Lake Manitoba, Chessie of Chesapeake Bay, Slimy Slim of Idaho’s Payette Lake, and Morag of Lake Morar, Scotland. The most famous is Nessie of Loch Ness, Scotland, known since the sixth century. The 1984 movie, Baby, originated from reports of the legendary "mokele mbembe" of the swampy Ubangi-Congo basin of central Africa.

Like the Scots living around their famous lake, many residents of the Beothuk Trail Community of Robert’s Arm on the shore of Crescent Lake tend to wonder what all the fuss is about. However, earliest Indian legends tell of the wooden haoot - the "pond devil", or the "swimming demon" - haoot tuwedyee. In the local oral tradition, sightings of Cressie go back to the turn of the century when one of Robert’s Arm’s first residents, remembered today as "Grandmother Anthony", was startled from her berry picking by a giant serpent out on the lake.  In another daylight sighting of the early 1950's, two local woodsmen on the shores of the lake noticed what they thought was a boon log just off shore.  Puzzled that it was drifting into the wind, the men hurriedly motored out in time to witness the upturned "log", now huge, black, and rounded, slip beneath the waters of the lake.  One of the gentlemen, Mr. Andrew Burton, long since retired and deceased, recalls that they wasted no time in regaining the shore!

Since then, occasional sightings raise only a few eyebrows in the area; local mothers threaten misbehaving children with, "Be good or the monster in the Lake will get you!"

In the late spring of 1990, a slim, black shape was observed at about 9:00 am to rise momentarily five feet from a patch of churning water before sinking immediately out of sight just off the southern end of the lake; was it a rotten log?  The observer refuses to be identified.

On July 9^th of 1991, at about 12:10pm, "Cressie" was sighted again. Mr. Fred Parsons, a local retired school teacher, newspaper correspondent, and 1991 winner of "Citizen of the Year Award" from the town of Robert’s Arm for his volunteer work in the area, saw a dark, undulating serpent-shaped creature surface while it crossed the lake. Mr. Parsons’ estimation of its length exceeded twenty feet.

On Thursday afternoon, September 5^th, 1991, at approximately 4:30pm, Mr. Pierce Rideout, a resident of Robert’s Arm, was driving his pickup truck at the approach to that town, when he noticed a disturbance on the surface of Crescent Lake. He observed through the open window of his truck what seemed to be the bow wave of a small boat about 150 yards off shore, or three quarters of the way from the small beach near Warr’s Service Station (now Bruce Warr and Sons Limited) and the forested point of land across the lake.

It appeared to Mr. Rideout that a slowly moving object had just dropped below the surface, but as he watched it rose to sight again: a black, fifteen foot long shape pitching forward in a rolling motion much as a whale does but with no sign of a fin, "sail", paddle, or fluke. Nor did it show a head or neck. It then sank out of sight and did not reappear.

Mr. Rideout had the object in sight for about three minutes. His initial report was given to this writer the following Tuesday night; he remarked at the time that several days before his sighting he had freely ridiculed the notion of a "lake monster" in Crescent Lake but that his attitude had changed since Thursday.

In mid July, 2000, Richard Goudie and Robbie Watkins were two of a group of people landscaping on the Hazelnut Hiking and Adventure Trail who saw Cressie.

Doubters scoff and claim that bubbles of gas from the decomposing pulpwood littering the lake bottom is likely the explanation. Others point out the huge, mysterious hole punched in the winter lake ice early in the eighties. RCMP divers, fearing a snowmobile mishap, uncovered nothing. No, not even dynamite!

Other RCMP divers, several years later, may have accidentally discovered related "monsters" while investigating an unfortunate drowning accident in another similar-sized lake in the area, South Pond. They returned to the surface with descriptions of giant eels as thick as a man’s thigh. Many believe Cressie to be such a creature. Adult eels have been know to reach several feet or more, but a "monster eel"? In the early thirties, Danish marine biologists discovered evidence of a sixty foot long eel. They found a deep-sea eel larva six feet long; normal eel larva grow no more than four inches!

The life cycle of the North American Anguilloidei or freshwater eel involves spawning at sea, maturing while navigating up brooks, streams and rivers and finally a long adult like spent in the depths of ponds and lakes. As with all fishes, eels do not stop growing during their lifetime. Although Cressie appears to be enormous, no one has ever spotted such a monster attempting to navigate down Tommy’s Arm Brook, the lake’s only outlet to the sea less than two miles away. Would not Cressie have to leave the lake to spawn in salt water? Perhaps not!

Long time residents of the area claim that Crescent Lake is three hundred feet deep in places, much less than the 754 foot depth of Loch Ness, but still putting its bottom below the low-tide level of Robert’s Arm harbour half a mile away. In addition, early lakeside homeowners have to sometimes contend with brackish drinking water. Is the bottom of Crescent Lake actually ocean water? If so, Cressie needs only to "migrate" three hundred feet down to spawn! If adult Cressie's continue living after spawning, who knows how big they could grow?

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