The Legend of Tahoe Tessie Persists

For years, Lake Tahoe souvenir shops have sold t-shirts, bobble-heads, and other items featuring “Tahoe Tessie,” a local version of Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster. In most depictions, Tessie is a big, friendly eel-like creature who frolics in Tahoe’s deep, cold waters.

But is there more to the story?

For a number of years there have been alleged sightings of something in the lake. In the early 1980s, the Reno News and Review newspaper featured a story about a fisherman named Gene St. Denis, who, along with a friend, reported seeing something unusual near Cave Rock.

St. Denis said he and his companion were in a fishing boat when they spotted a ““a blotchy gray creature about 10 feet to 15 feet long” swimming nearby. He said the thing turned sharply in the water, leaving a big V-shaped wake.

Later, St. Denis claimed that several fish he caught that day showed signs of being scored by teeth marks on by something as he tried to reel them in.

“About halfway to the boat, these fish—they were big fish—got raked,” he said.

As for what might have attacked his fish, St. Denis said he thought it might be a giant white sturgeon or an oversized Muskie.

Or maybe it was something else. Over the past decade there have been a handful of reports from people saying they have seen some type of big, serpent-like creature swimming in Lake Tahoe.

For example, the Tahoe Daily Tribune reported in April 2005 that two Sacramento visitors, Beth Douglas and Ron Talmadge, saw a strange, dark undulating object near Tahoe Park Beach. Douglas said she had seen something very big and long, which appeared to have three to five humps on its back.

Talmadge told the paper, “Damn, that’s Tessie . . . I thought, ‘Whoa, this sucker’s real.’”

Perhaps the most bizarre story is one that has appeared on several web sites alleging that the world famous oceanographer, Jacques Cousteau, explored the bottom of the lake in the 1970s using a special submersible vehicle and stumbled on a horrible sight.

According to this tale, Cousteau found something so grotesque that he refused to ever show the film footage he shot that day or to ever speak of it again. Cousteau supposedly said the world wasn’t ready for what he had found down there.

Despite Cousteau’s vow of silence, these Internet sites claim that the explorer had found something even more unbelievable than a giant eel monster. It’s said he encountered remarkably preserved, virtually untouched human bodies at the bottom of Lake Tahoe, including drowned 19^th century Chinese woodcutters and victims of various gangland executions.

Unfortunately for those who spread the story, it isn’t supported by any facts. Former Nevada State Archivist Guy Louis Rocha, who is adept at puncturing Nevada myths, has written that the story is false because Cousteau, who died in 1997, never visited Lake Tahoe.

Further, Rocha wrote, experts, such as Dr. Graham Kent of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, say there’s no possible way the bodies could be intact because they would have been eaten by fish and digested by bacteria.

In other words, it’s complete nonsense.

As for the existence of Tessie, retired University of California at Davis professor, Dr. Charles Goldman, studied Lake Tahoe for more than 40 years and has long dismissed the legends.

“You can’t prove that something’s not there,” he told the Reno News & Review in 2004. “We think that a lot of the Tessie reports are actually colliding boat wakes which produce a series of waves.

“Tessie’s like Santa Claus. It’s a fun story,” he said.

A longer version of the legends about what lives at the bottom of Lake Tahoe can be found in the newest version of my book, “Myths and Legends of Nevada,” published in 2019 by Globe Pequot Press.