Horse-headed Sea Serpent Seen

Published in a California newspaper:

Sea Serpents Visits the Indians Up North

Victoria [British Columbia], April 14. — Officials of the cabin station at Bamfield are speaking of the story that a sea serpent from forty to sixty feet long and with a head like a horse has been seen off the station. The cabin operators say, in letters to the local newspapers, that Indians had been telling of the existence of a sea serpent, but the stories were not credited. David Osborne, one of the officials, says that a week ago the animal was seen from the cable station to raise its big horse-like head and swim out of the mouth of the Bamfield Creek into Barclay Sound.

Mr. Godson of the cable staff says that when he first saw the animal it looked like a massive sea weed, but presently he saw the head elevated and the big serpent moved off toward the sea. Mr. Godson says it moved off with the speed of a torpedo-boat. On April 10 an Indian saw the thing and was so frightened that he ran his canoe into the breakers, left it and fled along the beach to the cable station.

The Indian said the thing had a head shaped like a horse and its body, ten feet of which was lifted, was the size of a barrel. The Indians in the neighborhood are terrified.San Francisco Call, San Francisco, California. April 15, 1903

Thanks to Jerome Clark for this news item.

For more information on this subject, please see The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep (NY: Tarcher/Penguin, 2003).