The idea that giant monster serpents reside in the waters of Walker Lake is an old one. One of the earliest mentions of some kind of strange Loch Ness-type creature plying the waters of Walker Lake appeared in the Walker Lake Bulletin in August 1883.
Beneath the headline, “The Sea Serpent in Walker Lake,” the paper noted that “in former times” the native Paiute people traditionally suspended their dead on pliable willow boughs that were placed on the lake’s shoreline.
However, after the settlement of the town of Hawthorne by white settlers, the dead began to mysteriously disappear. “It was thought to be the work of the encroaching and barbarous pale faces,” the article noted.
But about a year ago, two tribal members were fishing at the north end of Walker Lake when they “were startled at seeing an immense sea serpent, with the regulation saucer-shaped eyes and barrel-shaped head, rising out of the water, and after lashing its tail in sport until the water for miles around was turned into a sea of seething foam, suddenly, with a loud hissing sound, disappear.”
The story continued that the next morning another group of Paiutes camping in the forest at the end of the lake were unexpectedly awakened by a “horrible, soul-shrinking screech.” The members of the party looked out into the lake and witnessed two large serpent-like creatures apparently fighting over the body of a deceased child who had been placed on boughs along the lake.
The creatures fought for some time and when it ended, one of them was badly injured and the other snatched the body and disappeared into the lake. The wounded creature tried to crawl away but was killed by the arrows of the Paiutes.
The native people then took the remains and gave them to a man named Charley Kimball, a local businessman who owned several enterprises including a saloon (The Capitol) and a local cabinet of curiosities or oddities museum. It added that because the serpents appear to enjoy consuming the dead, the Paiutes would in the future burn or bury their deceased.
As for Kimball, the story said he turned down an offer from a rival businessman for the serpent’s skeleton, which, it claimed “measures just exactly seventy-nine feet, seven inches in length.” It concluded by nothing that Kimball was going to head out to Walker Lake with a pair of local Paiutes to try to capture the other serpent.
Sightings of the Walker Lake sea serpents seemed to fade away for several decades before resurfacing in 1907. In a newspaper story that appeared in the Sacramento Bee in July (as well as in several other papers around the country), a Goldfield miner named Dan Cornelison claimed that he and a companion, John McCorry, were fishing in the lake when they sighted a “monster sea serpent” near the north shore.
Cornelison said he initially thought the object was a capsized boat but upon rowing closer he saw it was a creature that measured about thirty feet in length and six-feet across the back.
The story also cited a third man, named Peters, who said he had come upon the creature “reposing in shallow water near the shore and on being aroused disappeared in deeper water.”
About a month later, in August 1907, the Reno Reveille reported that the president of Stanford University, David Star Jordan, who was considered the foremost expert on prehistoric fish, would be mounting an expedition to try to capture the mysterious creature in order to present it to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.
While nothing apparently came of this, the sea monster was back in the news two years later with additional sightings that were reported in the Reno Evening Gazette.
In 1914, however, the Gazette published an article about Alf McCarthy, brother of Dennis McCarthy, onetime owner of Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise and the longtime owner of the Walker River Bulletin, that appeared to blow the lid off the sea serpent sightings.
In the story, Frank J. Kinghorn, a former Assembly member from Mineral County and friend of McCarthy’s said, “Alf McCarthy is the greatest bunch of contradiction ever assembled in a human frame.
“As publisher of facts and reputed facts, he is absolutely truthful and fearless,” Kinghorn continued. “As the originator of the Walker Lake sea serpent story, he is the most colossal faker that ever crossed the pike.”
Not wanting to let the story—regardless of whether it was true or not—go away, in 1918 the Gazette shared a story from the Tonopah Daily Times claiming the serpent had been seen again.
“Every once in a while, some fisherman or Indian tells a tale of having seen the monster, until it has now become the stock yarn of the natives of the vicinity,” the Gazette added. “The best fire-water legends have it that there is a subterranean channel from Walker Lake to the ocean through which this monster travels to throw scares into unfortunate fishermen.”
More than a decade later, in August 1929, the Nevada State Journal added its own skepticism to the story. In a short article about prohibition agents raiding a brewery in Hawthorne, the paper said with more than a little snideness, “To see the serpent now one will have to carry his own vision-inducing liquids with him when visiting the lake.”
Harsh.
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