SHORELINES

Photo courtesy of Alabama Power Archives By Erin Harney For more than 100 years, stories and newspaper accounts have told tales of serpents, sea monsters and man-sized fish swimming the rivers of Alabama. "e local newspaper warned parents to keep their children away from the Coosa River in 1877," said Danny Crownover, president and executive director of the Etowah Historical Society and Heritage Museum in Gadsden. e earliest recorded sighting of a monster lurking in the Coosa came from a letter dated to 1816. "A group of settlers near Ten Islands found a sea monster, half out of the water," Crownover said. "When they killed it, inside they found an Indian with his canoe, bow and arrows, rifle and, likely, a recently hunted deer." Unfortunately, the letter does not describe the beast, merely its stomach contents. A recorded description came later, in 1877, aer Gadsden citizen Marcus Foster spent the day fishing on the Coosa. "He was setting out bait hooks near Ball Play Creek when he thought he saw a man in a slowly driing boat on the opposite bank," Crownover said. Foster was curious about what he saw, so he crossed the river. "As Foster got nearer, he was amazed as the man and the boat began to change appearance into a woman, partially submerged in the water," Crownover said. "At 50 yards, amazement turned to fear, as the woman changed into a serpent monster." "He described it as having a head and neck that resembled a horse, large popped-out eyes and a fiery red tongue," Crownover said. Foster quickly paddled away and the serpent disappeared into the depths. Worried that his outrageous story would not be believed, Foster told only a few people at first. But, as he told people, others came forward with similar accounts. "Foster's neighbor, a 'Mrs. Martin', claimed to have seen the monster in 1862," said Crownover, "and Captain J.M. Elliott and Judge Lemuel Standifer both claimed to have seen something similar in Rome, Georgia – 60 miles away." e reports were similar in description: a scaled beast 15-20 feet long, with large fins. ere were no more reports of the sea monster aer 1877, although in 1882, a news reporter who had spent an aernoon in a small rowboat on the placid Coosa advanced an explanation of the mystery of the river monster, according to Crownover. Tall tales of the Coosa DID LARGE SEA MONSTERS AND GIANT HUMANS ONCE ROAM THE RIVER? 14 | 2017 Vol:3

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