Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 2: Blake Smith.
Speaker 1: I'm doctor Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 2: Since we started doing this show, I've received so many
Speaker 2: kind and thoughtful messages from listeners who say that they
Speaker 2: find Monster Talk to be a rock in a stormy sea.
Speaker 2: We've been told that our show has helped folk through
Speaker 2: real rough times, and if that's true for you, we're
Speaker 2: glad to have been of any help. Life is precious,
Speaker 2: Your life, your neighbors, your friends, your family. We're all
Speaker 2: in this amazing connected network and precariously placed in what
Speaker 2: appears to be a cold and uncaring universe. It's important
Speaker 2: for us to look out for each other. This introduction
Speaker 2: has nothing to do with monsters, I suppose, but I
Speaker 2: just wanted to say thanks to you listeners as well,
Speaker 2: your messages, your notes, tweets, retweets, reviews on iTunes, your
Speaker 2: comments on Facebook, all the ways that you share this
Speaker 2: show with others, and your thoughts about the show with
Speaker 2: me and Karen.
Speaker 3: They're all deeply appreciated.
Speaker 2: Twenty sixteen's been a heck of a year, with many
Speaker 2: ups and downs and many downs, but I've got a
Speaker 2: few more things lined up for you before we end
Speaker 2: this year, and I wanted to say that in my mind,
Speaker 2: we're a family. I want to say thank you to
Speaker 2: my fellow Monster talkers. In a time when the media
Speaker 2: is calling this a post truth world, it's more important
Speaker 2: than ever to remember that fact checking is not a
Speaker 2: part as an ideal. We can't rely on Google and Facebook.
Speaker 3: To point out nonsense.
Speaker 2: Each of us has to be responsible for learning critical
Speaker 2: thinking and teaching other people as well. And if we don't,
Speaker 2: who will. I've got more to say on that, but
Speaker 2: not right here and not right now. For now, let's
Speaker 2: put those worries behind us and talk about a lake
Speaker 2: in Scotland that some say is the home to a
Speaker 2: mysterious monster. No, not that lake in Scotland, not the
Speaker 2: one in the theme song, a different one. It's actually
Speaker 2: quite unlike anything we've ever seen before. A giant, hairy
Speaker 2: preacher in part Ape part Mass.
Speaker 4: In Larkness twenty four, a mile long, bottomless lake in
Speaker 4: the Highlands of Scotland. It's a creature known as the
Speaker 4: Luckless Monster.
Speaker 3: Monstert Okay, as is frequently the case.
Speaker 2: As we get near the end of the year, I
Speaker 2: find that I have to cut to the chase instead
Speaker 2: of giving you all the cool background info I want
Speaker 2: to before the show. In this episode, we have the
Speaker 2: return of Mike Dash, one of my favorite forty and
Speaker 2: researchers and the author of the very fine book Borderlands,
Speaker 2: which I'll link to in the show notes.
Speaker 3: I hope you enjoy our little monster.
Speaker 2: If you were giving yourself a brief bio, how would
Speaker 2: you introduce yourself?
Speaker 4: Me? My golly.
Speaker 5: I've been associated with fourteen time since the early nineteen eighties.
Speaker 5: Background as a historian, those two things probably come together
Speaker 5: quite helpfully when it comes to researching stories of this sort.
Speaker 2: And what's you're doing? You write for National Geographic? Am
Speaker 2: I remembering that right? Smithsonian?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: See, I might remembering that right?
Speaker 1: Cool?
Speaker 3: But I love your articles.
Speaker 2: They're so in depth in a time when people are
Speaker 2: always looking for like click bait listical sound bites. Yeah,
Speaker 2: You're You're writing always goes deeper and has lots of
Speaker 2: citations in it.
Speaker 3: It's just a it's just fun to read.
Speaker 1: And is it about important but obscure topics as well?
Speaker 4: Just obscure?
Speaker 5: I would say, well, you could claim you could claim
Speaker 5: some importance for some of it. Mostly it's just interesting
Speaker 5: and obscure stuff, and the more obscure is the better.
Speaker 4: I tend to like it.
Speaker 5: And certainly I don't do sandbites because most of them
Speaker 5: are kind of eight thousand words long or something.
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 5: Actually, tomorrow my main target is I have to write
Speaker 5: an article for the Encyclopedia of Toxicology, because it turns
Speaker 5: out I'm the only person who knows anything about an
Speaker 5: obscure poisoning scale. It took place in Rome in the
Speaker 5: sixteen fifties, and that's a typical example the sort of
Speaker 5: thing I researched.
Speaker 3: Actually, wow, that's neat.
Speaker 1: So where do you do your research?
Speaker 5: Oh well, I thought this is a good thing about
Speaker 5: living in London. I mean, British Library is my second
Speaker 5: home really, and that has a pretty awesome collection.
Speaker 2: I say, you lucky bear, dude, you can. Yes, I'm
Speaker 2: very envious. That's I think I've meant. I don't know
Speaker 2: if I've said it on the show before, but I've
Speaker 2: mentioned to my wife I'd love to go to England.
Speaker 2: But even if I were going to go for like
Speaker 2: a week to just London, I would need two weeks
Speaker 2: because half of that time, I would like to go
Speaker 2: to libraries and museums, and then it was right right,
Speaker 2: so you know the other half, I'd want to go
Speaker 2: see the things that tourists see. But I really there's
Speaker 2: so many undigitized opportunities there.
Speaker 3: For the researcher.
Speaker 4: So yeah, that's so true.
Speaker 2: Well, I guess we should get to the questioning where
Speaker 2: were you on the night? No, so we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about a lake monster or a loch monster in
Speaker 2: this case when when that some of our listeners will
Speaker 2: have heard about and one that many will not have
Speaker 2: heard about. This is the Locke Morare creature known as well.
Speaker 2: It looks like more rag, but it's it's not more ag.
Speaker 5: Well, it's a it's a Gaelic word. I mean, we
Speaker 5: would pronounce it moag and Morag is now a fairly
Speaker 5: familiar Scottish girl's name actually, but the correct Gaelic pronunciation
Speaker 5: is vorak.
Speaker 3: That doesn't seem just like the munty python thing.
Speaker 2: It's it's a spelled luxury yacht, but it's pronounced throat
Speaker 2: main ground right there.
Speaker 5: That's it typically British if you like, And obviously Vorak
Speaker 5: is probably not the most feminine standing name you could
Speaker 5: imagine either, but.
Speaker 1: No, it seems like a Viking name.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's fascinating. Do you know what does it mean?
Speaker 5: Well, one of the early sources I found on this
Speaker 5: translates it as Little Sarah, which I suspect is almost
Speaker 5: certainly wrong, but we can go with that if you like.
Speaker 2: It's build Sarah, but it's pronounced Rabulian.
Speaker 1: So where is this?
Speaker 5: This Lockmoer Lockmore is on the west coast of Scotland,
Speaker 5: so I mean, if people maybe think in terms of
Speaker 5: it's a relationship to Lockness, which is obviously the thing
Speaker 5: that most people end up comparing it to. It is
Speaker 5: around about sixty or seventy miles to the west of Lockness,
Speaker 5: on right against the coast, just south of the Isle
Speaker 5: of Sky. So this is an area's got them known
Speaker 5: as the rough Bounds because it's by far the most
Speaker 5: inaccessible part of the Scottish Highlands, which in themselves are
Speaker 5: fairly well known for being pretty inaccessible. So this is
Speaker 5: one of the interesting things about it. I mean a
Speaker 5: couple of things apply therefore. I mean, firstly, it has
Speaker 5: quite a significant local folk law tradition which is quite
Speaker 5: unique to it. And secondly, and This is the key
Speaker 5: thing I think that you have to bear in mind
Speaker 5: about lockmow Are compared to Lockness. I mean, this whole
Speaker 5: point about Lockness, and the reason why the Lockness monster
Speaker 5: sories got into the papers in the first place, back
Speaker 5: in nineteen thirty three, when the story really to all
Speaker 5: intents and purposes begins, is that, you know, there was
Speaker 5: work going on creating a new road along the side
Speaker 5: of the lock So it's now actually possible to drive
Speaker 5: pretty much the whole length of Lockness, and I mean,
Speaker 5: although some trees are grown up so you can't see
Speaker 5: late the whole time. Essentially it's extremely close to civilization
Speaker 5: and indeed only sort of four or five miles south
Speaker 5: of Inverness, which is the capital city of the Highlands,
Speaker 5: so it's you know, one of the problems one has
Speaker 5: been thinking about Lockness as the possible home of an
Speaker 5: actual animal or set of animals is how the hell
Speaker 5: does it hide? Because literally thousands of people are driving
Speaker 5: up and down this road seeing quite wide expanses of
Speaker 5: lake now Loch More, as I say, is a lot
Speaker 5: more isolated than that. They're only about a quarter of
Speaker 5: the surface. Has anybody overlooking it at all? I mean
Speaker 5: it's almost entirely uninhabited in that thanks to the higher
Speaker 5: than clearances, which was when in the eighteen hundred landlords
Speaker 5: cleared a lot of the land of tenants so they
Speaker 5: could re establish the land as deer forest, in other words,
Speaker 5: just for sort of hunting and stalking purposes, which was
Speaker 5: considered to be more profitable. So a large part of
Speaker 5: the population that existed on Lockmow at that time left.
Speaker 5: Most of them went to Canada, where interestingly a lot
Speaker 5: of the local folklore kind of repeats itself as a result.
Speaker 5: So in fact that there's a one road that goes
Speaker 5: along two miles of the north throough Lockermower Up, which
Speaker 5: is an eleven mile long lock and the rest of
Speaker 5: it is essentially completely uninhabited. So a lot of things
Speaker 5: could be going on out there that we simply wouldn't
Speaker 5: know about. And in terms of it being a credible
Speaker 5: habitat for an actual animal, I mean, we can go
Speaker 5: on to whether or not this is translating to yes,
Speaker 5: there is an actual animal there later on.
Speaker 4: There are many things that go for it.
Speaker 5: I mean not only the isolation, but the fact that
Speaker 5: the other thing that lockness is, you know, relatively famous
Speaker 5: for is that the waters are almost entirely impenetrably black
Speaker 5: because of the huge number of peat particles washed down
Speaker 5: from surrounding hillsides. So you can put your you know,
Speaker 5: I mean, you can swim in Lockness and look down
Speaker 5: at your feet and you won't see them because it's
Speaker 5: so black. So aside from that making it a sort
Speaker 5: of spooky, weird place, it also means that there's very
Speaker 5: very little in the way of fish life in Lockness,
Speaker 5: whereas Lochmar is completely clear, pure water and you can
Speaker 5: see down forty to fifty feet quite easily, and as
Speaker 5: a result it has a much more substantial food chain.
Speaker 5: So there are a couple of quite major differences that
Speaker 5: one would want to point to in terms of isolation
Speaker 5: and the biomass as well.
Speaker 1: Does anyone ever swim in Lockness?
Speaker 4: It's pretty and cold.
Speaker 5: I spent a couple of time in the in the
Speaker 5: eighties working with the Lockness and Moile Project thing run
Speaker 5: by a guy called Adrian Shine, which is the main
Speaker 5: sort of investigative Strokes scientific group looking into that area,
Speaker 5: and it was way too cold for me to want
Speaker 5: swimmon it. And the same applies to Lockmore as well.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, the very the top couple of
Speaker 5: feet in the hot summer would warm up and everything
Speaker 5: else would be pretty chilly.
Speaker 2: I love Adrian's work, and he does have one of
Speaker 2: the most spectacular beards in cryptozoology.
Speaker 4: Makes even Charles Darwin looked like a bit of an antide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he really does. I'd love to talk to him.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I've been I've been following his work since
Speaker 2: I was a kid. And yeah, in such a memorable character.
Speaker 3: So quick question.
Speaker 2: This is really covering on secretor but along the shore
Speaker 2: of likeness the there's the house that was owned by
Speaker 2: Alistair Crowley. Yeah, Jimmy Page, Well in Jimmy Page And
Speaker 2: is it bleskin or is it bullskin or how is
Speaker 2: that pronounced?
Speaker 4: Well, I've always said bileskin, but I could easily be wrong.
Speaker 2: Okay, You're probably more likely to be right than me.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, so, I.
Speaker 3: I was just I was.
Speaker 2: I've just started reading about Crowley a little bit lately
Speaker 2: because I've become interested in the history of ritual magic
Speaker 2: and that that whole sort of nineteen twenties resurgence of
Speaker 2: paganistic sort of magical activity that happened in the UK
Speaker 2: and Europe in general, and so while I was reading
Speaker 2: about it, I saw that Bleskin had burned in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: and I think more than half the house was ruined,
Speaker 2: and I didn't know if they were going to put
Speaker 2: it back together or whatever. But it seems like a
Speaker 2: beautiful So not only was it a house where Crowley
Speaker 2: performed ritual magic, but it's also right there on the
Speaker 2: shore of Nest and I was like, how what a
Speaker 2: cool place.
Speaker 1: You know who.
Speaker 2: It's privately owned unless the insurance company took over, but
Speaker 2: I forget where the people were from, but it's a
Speaker 2: it's a family that owned it and they were away.
Speaker 2: They were it was like right around Christmas time twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: and they left to go shopping or something, and then
Speaker 2: the house caught fire and by the time they got back.
Speaker 3: It was like, I say, more than fifty percent gone.
Speaker 2: It's really quite damaged and I'm not sure nobody was hurt,
Speaker 2: which is great, but and they don't think any sort
Speaker 2: of foul play or you know, it didn't seem to
Speaker 2: be deliberately set. But I don't know if there's any
Speaker 2: effort to restore it, because from what I've heard locally
Speaker 2: it's it's kind of a not a popular place because
Speaker 2: of all the legends about it. But anyway, not really
Speaker 2: a monster story, but I am interested in.
Speaker 3: It, so it may come up with another episode, you know.
Speaker 4: Well we need to look more story if yeah.
Speaker 2: You can. Again as I as I prefaced the question,
Speaker 2: non sequitur, right, sorry, so actual question, like morre you're
Speaker 2: on because there have been sidings of monsters, I guess
Speaker 2: we should start with what sort of sightings have been
Speaker 2: made and how far do these sightings go back?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that's interesting to me.
Speaker 5: I mean, I have to say I'm not really a
Speaker 5: cryptozoologist in this sense. I'm not really interested. I'm not
Speaker 5: very convinced at the you know, with the concepts of
Speaker 5: sort of real dinosaur like animals and any of these legs.
Speaker 4: But the interesting thing, the fascinating.
Speaker 5: Thing about Lockermore is that it's one of only there's
Speaker 5: probably maybe three lakes in the world where there's a
Speaker 5: sort of significant monster tradition that goes back before Lockness
Speaker 5: comes onto the scene in nineteen thirty three. The others
Speaker 5: might be Okanagan and here's my.
Speaker 4: Plantation going again.
Speaker 5: Canigan, I don't know, Inada in Canada and British Columbia
Speaker 5: and Lake Sturgeon in Sweden. Those are the only two
Speaker 5: others that I'm familiar with which have sort of substantial
Speaker 5: numbers of reports that go back before nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 5: And yeah, this is really important because Lockness made such
Speaker 5: a giant sort of splash in the news after nineteen
Speaker 5: thirty three that it sort of pollutes and tanks a
Speaker 5: whole of sort of lake monsters afterwards, and in terms
Speaker 5: of the types of things that are seen and then
Speaker 5: particularly the way in which you know, the Lockness monster
Speaker 5: type of animal, the sort of long neck, multi hunt
Speaker 5: dinosaur like animals sort of tends to become the default
Speaker 5: for lake monsters. So one of the interesting things about
Speaker 5: Lockmoer is that there's probably at least fifteen to twenty
Speaker 5: reports that we have that go back before nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 5: And it's will be worthwhile talking a little bit in
Speaker 5: a moment about you know, how those are sort of
Speaker 5: characterized and how they differ from Lockness. But I mean, overall,
Speaker 5: probably I guess we've got maybe nearly somewhere between seventeen
Speaker 5: and one hundred cases I've probably been reported from Lockmower overall.
Speaker 5: The earliest one goes back to about eighteen forty we think,
Speaker 5: So it's not not just a couple.
Speaker 3: That's a lie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It is. And so from what I've read, it seems
Speaker 1: like some reports talk about a lake monster and others
Speaker 1: seem to talk about a mermaid. So do you think
Speaker 1: people are seeing the same creature or these different creatures.
Speaker 5: Well, I think that this is what we're probably seeing,
Speaker 5: I would say, is that the a legend coming into
Speaker 5: focus almost. I mean, you're right if you go back
Speaker 5: to the very beginning, the Lochomower monster, if we want
Speaker 5: to call it whatever we want to call it, is
Speaker 5: associated with sort of the deaths of members of a
Speaker 5: local clan. It's a it's something just seen as a
Speaker 5: sort of warning, a harbing go of something dreadful. It's
Speaker 5: going to happen to one of these guys. Normally they're
Speaker 5: going to die, or it's going to be a battle
Speaker 5: or something like that. And it's the guineas on McDonald,
Speaker 5: people of the northern shores of Lockermart specifically. So you
Speaker 5: get one group of reports which are sort of essentially
Speaker 5: seen as almost a funeral barge, some of black shapes
Speaker 5: on the water. But there is this second set of
Speaker 5: stories which do refer to them so effectively as a
Speaker 5: sort of half monster, half mermaid type creature. It's capable
Speaker 5: of coming on land, it's kind of talking to people.
Speaker 5: There's one sort of legend of Bedic coming and visiting
Speaker 5: a man in a Glenn Close lockmow, for example. So
Speaker 5: it's clearly not just kind of a water animal in
Speaker 5: these early stories. And there is a book which was
Speaker 5: published in nineteen oh six by a guy called McDonald,
Speaker 5: James McDonald, who was distantly related to the relevant clan
Speaker 5: on the north Shore, called Tales of the Highlands, which
Speaker 5: is the one where you find this sort of version
Speaker 5: of events showing the monster as a mermaid, and he
Speaker 5: dates back to eighteen eighty seven and says he's seen
Speaker 5: something on the lock himself which he thinks must have
Speaker 5: been this thing. And there is a second set of
Speaker 5: stories that are told at about this time, and these
Speaker 5: have already come to light very recently because they exist
Speaker 5: in the collection called the Carmichael Collection, which is a
Speaker 5: set of Gaelic folklore manuscripts that are stored in the
Speaker 5: University of Edinburgh, and there's a project going now to
Speaker 5: transcribe these and from those who come several of these
Speaker 5: early Lockmoil reports, and what's interesting about them is that
Speaker 5: there's there's two initial entries in the Carmichael archive which
Speaker 5: talk about the first sort of monster. There's sort of
Speaker 5: just an undifferentiated black mass, a sort of black lump
Speaker 5: is one of the descriptions, sort of rolling around on
Speaker 5: the surface, I mean, not really animal like at all.
Speaker 5: And then a few months later there's a second one
Speaker 5: which is exactly like the James McDonald's story. And so
Speaker 5: one speculates that this guy has probably talked to somebody,
Speaker 5: maybe McDonald himself or somebod who knows McDonald and got
Speaker 5: a sort of a second story trope from him. So
Speaker 5: you have these sort of two quite different sets of
Speaker 5: stories in the late nineteenth century, which by the time
Speaker 5: lock Meess comes along, they sort of solidify into just.
Speaker 4: Another late monster. And I think that it would be.
Speaker 5: A very good idea to go back and explore in
Speaker 5: as much detail as possible how these earlier stories sort
Speaker 5: of work and what they're for in order to really
Speaker 5: understand what's going on in Lockmore.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was as a clarification.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to understand, are the oldest stories that you've found,
Speaker 2: are they actually alleged sightings or are they sort of folklore?
Speaker 2: Does the folklore pre data sightings, I guess is my question.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean essentially yes.
Speaker 5: I mean what you start with is a massive stories
Speaker 5: which are extremely undetailed.
Speaker 4: And along the lines.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, I said I said earlier that
Speaker 5: the first story dates back to the to eighteen forty
Speaker 5: and we can date it by this because you know,
Speaker 5: what we have is simply a line in the Carmichael
Speaker 5: papers saying and it appeared just before Ian Rudd Ready
Speaker 5: Ian died, and we know that this guy died.
Speaker 4: In eighteen forty. But that's it.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's that they're only interested in the fact
Speaker 5: that it appeared and then he died, because it's a
Speaker 5: confirmation of the folklore trope that it's a harbinger of death,
Speaker 5: and so you would expect someone to die. And there's
Speaker 5: the most notable landowner in that area at the time
Speaker 5: of the turn the century, at the time of sort
Speaker 5: of Queen Victoria's death, was a guy called Angus Natregue.
Speaker 5: And again, I mean he died in eighteen ninety eight,
Speaker 5: and the monster Lockemore was.
Speaker 4: Seen just before he died as well.
Speaker 5: And so really all you are getting there is a
Speaker 5: kind of internal confirmation of a story, which is to
Speaker 5: do with it being a sign important and no interest
Speaker 5: at all in the idea of well, this thing could
Speaker 5: be an animal or anything like that. It's completely differently
Speaker 5: situated within the sort of folklore spectrum at that point.
Speaker 2: So quick additional follow up, So from a and this
Speaker 2: is my ignorance, but I think it might be important.
Speaker 3: From a historical perspective.
Speaker 2: I don't know what the nature of British journalism was
Speaker 2: in eighteen forty was it? It seemed like in America in
Speaker 2: the eighteen hundreds. The newspapers they can be historically useful,
Speaker 2: but they also kind of mix in things that aren't
Speaker 2: true with with the sort of a stew was kind
Speaker 2: of hard to pick out what's supposed to be legitimately
Speaker 2: actually factual and what might be an entertainment sort of nearly.
Speaker 3: Is that a problem in old British papers or is it?
Speaker 4: I certainly wouldn't deny.
Speaker 5: I don't think there's quite the same tradition of sort
Speaker 5: of tall tail telling as a as a form of
Speaker 5: entertainment in newspapers.
Speaker 4: There's one season. I mean, I've done a.
Speaker 5: Little bit of work on some of these sort of
Speaker 5: early American airship sighting, so exactly, Yes, clearly this is
Speaker 5: something which plays on I mean, the tall taiale telling
Speaker 5: is something that plays a large part on the spread
Speaker 5: of those sorts of stories.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah.
Speaker 5: The reality, as I mentioned earlier, is that lockermow was
Speaker 5: actually so distant that there was no local newspaper in
Speaker 5: the nineteenth century. The nearest would be the Oben Times,
Speaker 5: and Oben is like, you know, fifty sixty miles to
Speaker 5: the north of Lockmowre or the you know, the Invernestua Courier,
Speaker 5: which is the paper that first reported the lockmess Monster.
Speaker 5: You know, covered that area. But I mean none of
Speaker 5: these stories made the press at all. I mean you
Speaker 5: you get them as a saying by folklore is talking
Speaker 5: to people. There was a famous monk from for ad
Speaker 5: Augustus Abbey. For Augustus Abbey, of course, is right at
Speaker 5: the southern end of Loch Ness who did a lot
Speaker 5: of work amongst parishioners in the west coast of Scotland
Speaker 5: and recorded stories from Lockmore around Lost Shield as well,
Speaker 5: because you know he was the only person essentially who's
Speaker 5: in a position to get this sort of stuff and
Speaker 5: actually put it down in writing. There's no local written
Speaker 5: tradition of anything happening until well, certainly not the in
Speaker 5: nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties, you know. But what you
Speaker 5: do see start to see happening around about the turn
Speaker 5: of the last century is as a result of the
Speaker 5: clearances and the establishment of sporting estates in the west
Speaker 5: of Scotland, you start getting outsiders and they start picking
Speaker 5: up on stories in the same sort of way, and
Speaker 5: they're talking about it very much. Is kind of you know,
Speaker 5: odd interesting bits of local folklore. I mean, the famous
Speaker 5: example actually comes from lock Arcade, which is literally next
Speaker 5: door to Lockmow. There's a connection that Glenn between the two.
Speaker 5: They're about ten miles apart, where Lord Malmesbury, who was
Speaker 5: actually the British Foreign Minister in the eighteen fifties, had
Speaker 5: a shot there and talked to one of his stalkers,
Speaker 5: and you know they were talking to him about the
Speaker 5: local water horse kelpie. You know that there could only
Speaker 5: be one at a time. They come in different lakes,
Speaker 5: but you know there's any one in the Hole of Scotland,
Speaker 5: and there's one scene in lock Arcaic in the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 5: and so he wrote down this story in his memoirs,
Speaker 5: which are published in eighteen fifty seven. So occasion you
Speaker 5: get these sort of outsiders, sort of amused takes on
Speaker 5: Gaelic vocalore, and again you're kind of seeing it through
Speaker 5: a rather distorted lens as a result, because you know,
Speaker 5: they're having it translated for them by some local gilly
Speaker 5: and sort of fishing fishing helper that is, and they're
Speaker 5: probably not really getting the full flavor of what the
Speaker 5: local people would have thought about all of this.
Speaker 1: Do you think there's any connection at all between more
Speaker 1: Egg and the Lockness monster or are they completely separate creatures?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, this is the interesting thing I suppose
Speaker 5: about the the reason we're talking now. I mean you
Speaker 5: could say there are two obviously from the cryptos ologist
Speaker 5: point of view. You know the problem I have with
Speaker 5: the average cryptosologists. They tend to kind of blunder in,
Speaker 5: grab whatever they think could possibly be a distorted version
Speaker 5: of a story about a real animal stripper out of
Speaker 5: its storytelling context, and kind of you know, look for
Speaker 5: anatomical features almost literally. But the other thing you can
Speaker 5: do is say that, you know, there's obviously also the
Speaker 5: possibility that all of these stories have their origins in
Speaker 5: Gaelic folklore and the idea of you know, the stories
Speaker 5: of water horses, water bulls and all this, I mean,
Speaker 5: the Highland stories a poketails are full of these sorts
Speaker 5: of stories. And you know, in the kelpie, which is
Speaker 5: something which you Lockness is often supposed to be. You know,
Speaker 5: you look back and people say, well, they're all these
Speaker 5: reports are kelpies around Lockness, and these probably if you're
Speaker 5: seeing the monster, you know, in fact, the kelpie is
Speaker 5: a kind of a a demonic figure in Highland folk
Speaker 5: or it's a sort of demonic horse which when it
Speaker 5: gets hovers around the edges of the lock, looking beautiful
Speaker 5: with a bridle and a saddle on and sort of
Speaker 5: lures young girls to get on its back, and the
Speaker 5: second they're on board that it tears off and drowns
Speaker 5: him in the lock and takes them down to its
Speaker 5: underwater palace and sort of you know, they're dead. So
Speaker 5: it's not not a monster really at all, but people
Speaker 5: kind of co opt elements of it and just say,
Speaker 5: you know, strange thing on the shores of the lock.
Speaker 4: It must have been.
Speaker 5: What we're seeing is a distorted bit of folkal which
Speaker 5: is a real monster. So I think that one would
Speaker 5: want to upend that and say, you know, possibly what
Speaker 5: we're really seeing is folklore stories that are getting turned
Speaker 5: into something which is a bit more deterministic at a
Speaker 5: time when folklore is at a low premium by the
Speaker 5: nineteen twenties, nineteen thirty and you know, all the things
Speaker 5: that we've doubtless talk about with other guests, you know,
Speaker 5: the you know, the the animations of monsters and Lost
Speaker 5: World films and things like that sort of start kind
Speaker 5: and stories about dinosaurs, of course, and we can start
Speaker 5: with the dinosaurs all come in and start informing a
Speaker 5: new way of looking at these things.
Speaker 2: Yes, and especially when, as you've probably heard me say,
Speaker 2: I'm fond of saying this that when when cryptozoological creatures
Speaker 2: are derived from movies, I like to call them scriptids,
Speaker 2: and I am I'm so fond of that term. So
Speaker 2: I am going to use this as another opportunity to
Speaker 2: spread it, get it out there people. So these varieties
Speaker 2: of sightings, I mean we're talking about a lot of
Speaker 2: different I want to say morphological patterns here. This is
Speaker 2: these they don't seem to be describing the same creature
Speaker 2: in every story. Can you talk a little bit about
Speaker 2: what people are seeing as far as the physical characteristics.
Speaker 5: Well, we can go through this a little bit. I mean,
Speaker 5: at the beginning, as I say, I mean, most of
Speaker 5: the stories are a very specifically, very vague black rolling
Speaker 5: heaps on the black rolling heaps on the surface, shadows
Speaker 5: under the surface, you know, sort of to a boat
Speaker 5: pulling two smaller boats, which of course the crypto orgis
Speaker 5: would say that must be a three monster.
Speaker 4: But they're very specifically described as boats.
Speaker 5: So yes, you then end up, you know, by the
Speaker 5: nineteen twenties nineteen thirties, with things that are.
Speaker 4: Much more like the Lockness monster.
Speaker 5: Now you know, I've standed, you know, even more than
Speaker 5: my usual skeptical self so far. But I must stress
Speaker 5: that the other interesting thing about Lochmar, which makes it
Speaker 5: very unlike Lockness is that it does have a dramatic
Speaker 5: history of very very very close up sightings, which you know,
Speaker 5: however skeptical wants to be. I mean, it removes that
Speaker 5: the way in which one tends to do with a
Speaker 5: lot of Lockness stories if one is a skeptic, but
Speaker 5: you know, a humanistic skeptic is to say, well, a
Speaker 5: lot of them are probably just mistaken, you know, they say, obviously.
Speaker 5: Lockness is famous for examples. It's a classic natural wave tank.
Speaker 5: It's a long narrow waves from passing ships roll out,
Speaker 5: hit the shore, comeback meet in the middle and you
Speaker 5: get this sort of long, low hump effect, which if
Speaker 5: you're looking at it from a shallow angle because you're
Speaker 5: standing on the shore, looks really quite dramatic. I've seen
Speaker 5: it myself, and you know, it's very easy to understand
Speaker 5: why people are reporting dramatic multi humpt animals quite honestly,
Speaker 5: now what happens in Lockmore, as you know, you get
Speaker 5: a lot of that is removed.
Speaker 4: I mean.
Speaker 5: The most famous of all the reports from Lockmore is
Speaker 5: the McDonald Simpson sighting, which dates to August nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 5: where these two local Scottish guys, both very highly respected
Speaker 5: in the community by the way, were traveling down the
Speaker 5: in a small boat with an at board motor on
Speaker 5: a fishing expedition and they saw that three humps were
Speaker 5: sort of converging on their boat, and in fact, whatever
Speaker 5: it was in their account came up bumped accidentally against
Speaker 5: the side of the boat, and one of them had
Speaker 5: to fend it off with an all I mean literally
Speaker 5: pressed against whatever with an ord to try and force
Speaker 5: it away, while his mate went and probly loaded a
Speaker 5: rifle which they presumably had on boarded a bit of
Speaker 5: proaching and sort of fired a while shot in its direction.
Speaker 5: So you know, I mean, you can't say that's a
Speaker 5: mistaken identity. I mean, you know they're talking about three humps,
Speaker 5: you know, a head held low over the water. You know,
Speaker 5: they can describe its texture, they can describe the feel
Speaker 5: of pressing against it. This is either you know, an
Speaker 5: out and out hoax, or you know they've encountered some
Speaker 5: sort of interesting thing. I mean, their own explanation for it,
Speaker 5: by the way, was not a dinosaur out.
Speaker 4: And wants a but a giant deal.
Speaker 5: And there's another report actually literally from the month before
Speaker 5: that of a guy called Robert Duff who was on
Speaker 5: holiday there from Edinburgh, who again was fishing, and again
Speaker 5: this is where the clear water is coming. Who's fishing
Speaker 5: in Meeble Bay, which is about halfway down the lock
Speaker 5: and again not one of the parts.
Speaker 4: Of the lake that's overseen by anybody.
Speaker 5: And looks down over the side of the boat, down
Speaker 5: twenty through twenty feet of water the bottom and there's
Speaker 5: this sort of what he describes as a monster lizard
Speaker 5: looking up at him with and he can see four
Speaker 5: legs digits on each foot. It's really quite clear. So again,
Speaker 5: I mean, you're you're not necessarily talking about a case
Speaker 5: of mistaken identity with cases that are that close, and
Speaker 5: that's dramatic, and I think that's the other interesting thing
Speaker 5: about the Lockmower imports to me.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 1: So aside from these sightings, has there been any physical
Speaker 1: evidence that's turned up or any photographs.
Speaker 4: There's a few photographs. They're the usual sort of thing.
Speaker 5: They're not very different to lock messic so they're not
Speaker 5: as good. But then of course we know the most
Speaker 5: Lockermoess photographs that are fake and that's why they.
Speaker 4: Again, I mean we talked we mentioned that Adrian Shine earlier.
Speaker 5: Adrian started off at Lockmore because he thought that it
Speaker 5: was a better place to investigate. And this is back
Speaker 5: in the days when he was more of a monster
Speaker 5: hunt when he is now nowadays. He would very much
Speaker 5: like to be seen as a scientist, and most of
Speaker 5: the work he does is sort of you know, studies
Speaker 5: of fish stocks and things like that, actually is good
Speaker 5: quality scientific work. But back then he was more of
Speaker 5: an adventurer and a monster hunter. And the first thing
Speaker 5: he did at Lockermowre was he built himself this tiny
Speaker 5: little sort of submersible thing which is literally just kind
Speaker 5: of a pod which he could sit in, and he
Speaker 5: sank it down in the loch about twenty feet, which
Speaker 5: is an almost suicidally dumb thing to do, in my opinion.
Speaker 5: The idea was that you would he had this sort
Speaker 5: of viewing portal looking upwards, and he thought that the
Speaker 5: best way of identifying what's an animal he was looking
Speaker 5: for would be sort of sit on the bottom and
Speaker 5: wait for a monster's from over him, so he'd get
Speaker 5: it sort of silhouetted against the surface and he'd be
Speaker 5: able to see lots of sort of morphological characteristics. So
Speaker 5: he spent quite a lot of time sitting on the
Speaker 5: bottom of Lockmower hoping for this to happen, which it didn't,
Speaker 5: and when that happened, he then then his next step
Speaker 5: was to get a sort of glass bottomed boat, and
Speaker 5: he did a survey of the whole of the lock
Speaker 5: sort of down to about twenty feet so you sailed around.
Speaker 5: It's eleven miles long, So he sailed around all twenty
Speaker 5: two miles a shoreline up to about twenty feet out,
Speaker 5: looking in the hope he might find a car, a
Speaker 5: sort of skeleton or something again without any luck. But
Speaker 5: you know, those are the sort of things that are
Speaker 5: possible in Lockermore that has something be completely impossible in Lockness.
Speaker 5: So one would have thought, if ever one is going
Speaker 5: to find the sort of physical evidence that would actually
Speaker 5: excite a crypto as well just an interested actual scientist.
Speaker 5: More is the place it's going to happen.
Speaker 3: So the lake is very deep.
Speaker 4: It's the deepest lake in British.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's how long is it? I mean, because
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 5: It's eleven miles it's eleven miles long, which is half
Speaker 5: the length of Lockness, okay, and one and seventeen feet deep,
Speaker 5: whereas Lockness is about seven hundred and fifty feet deep,
Speaker 5: So it's got about another two hundred and fifty three
Speaker 5: hundred feet on Lockness.
Speaker 4: That's an very small part of the bottom. But it's
Speaker 4: very it is jolly deep. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, very icy.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, so was it also like lock Ness was
Speaker 2: cut by glaciers if I remember correctly, And yes, it
Speaker 2: is the same true for more are well.
Speaker 5: I'm not a geologist, I would imagine that I believe
Speaker 5: that to be true, but yes, absolutely, And it's what
Speaker 5: you don't You don't have the same sort of bottom
Speaker 5: characteristics as you do in Lockness though, so it's been
Speaker 5: cut in a such slightly different way. And there's also
Speaker 5: no sort of large rivers flowing in. I mean in
Speaker 5: Lockness there's famous to kind of two deep basins and
Speaker 5: they're separated because there's a river halfway down that's been
Speaker 5: sort of pouring silt into the water into the lake
Speaker 5: for ten thousand years, and so there's kind of a
Speaker 5: ridge is built up halfway down. The lake on the
Speaker 5: bottom close to the sea is really very shallow and
Speaker 5: there are a few islands there, which is not a
Speaker 5: characteristic Lockness, which is fairly typically deep all the way across.
Speaker 2: So have there been any I just want to say,
Speaker 2: have there been any of those sort of sonar surveys
Speaker 2: or that kind of exploration of the lake where they
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: I imagine it was easy.
Speaker 2: It was easier to get funding for like nests because
Speaker 2: of its same you know.
Speaker 5: Well absolutely, and there hasn't been the same level of investigation.
Speaker 5: I mean, yeah, both nests and more thoroughly surveyed by
Speaker 5: the famous pathemetric survey that went around this all Scottish
Speaker 5: major lakes in the between about eighteen nineteen nineteen ten,
Speaker 5: and that's how we know how deep it is. So that,
Speaker 5: but that was done literally by of chucking away over
Speaker 5: the side of a rowing boat and then hauling it
Speaker 5: back up and checking it over again several thousand times.
Speaker 5: So it wasn't quite the sort of modern sonar survey
Speaker 5: type of thing.
Speaker 1: So you've told us a little bit about some of
Speaker 1: the expeditions that have taken place there. Could you tell
Speaker 1: us some more about the various expeditions that people have
Speaker 1: undertaken to find the creature?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean this didn't really happen till the late sixties.
Speaker 5: I mean the McDonald simpson report, the one where the
Speaker 5: monster bumped into a boat made it into the papers,
Speaker 5: much to the annoyance of the two guys. Actually they
Speaker 5: vowed not to talk about it, but they meant they
Speaker 5: had told some relatives, and some one of their relatives
Speaker 5: told the papers, and when that report came out, the
Speaker 5: Lockness Investigation Bureau been active at Lockness for three or
Speaker 5: four years at that point got interested and you know,
Speaker 5: again because of the physical characteristics and more, a small
Speaker 5: group of people, led by a woman called Elizabeth Montgomery Campbell,
Speaker 5: got the idea that it might be more likely they
Speaker 5: could get a quick result at Lockmore. I mean this
Speaker 5: was the an IB had already begun to get a
Speaker 5: bit frustrated by the amount of sort of camera hours
Speaker 5: it was putting in at Lockness without getting any.
Speaker 4: Sort of real results.
Speaker 5: And so the Lockmow Survey began in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 5: nineteen seventies seventy one, so it ran for about three years,
Speaker 5: and then Adrian Shine took over in the mid seventies,
Speaker 5: but then largely for the fundraising reasons I think you mentioned,
Speaker 5: he relocated to Lockness in the in the early eighties.
Speaker 5: So there hasn't been a significant a mand of work
Speaker 5: done at Lockmore now for thirty five or forty years.
Speaker 5: And it's very much the sort of little Sister from
Speaker 5: the point of your actual investigation, which again in a
Speaker 5: way makes it much more interesting, because you know, the
Speaker 5: Lockness thing has been so carefully investigating now that you
Speaker 5: can kind of, in my view at least speak of
Speaker 5: someone who's involved in it. You can pretty much rule
Speaker 5: out there being actual large numbers of large anivine animals
Speaker 5: and nocamaths. We just know too much about it now
Speaker 5: for that to be true. So the romance really is
Speaker 5: still over in Lockmore where that work hasn't been done,
Speaker 5: so that the ruling out process hasn't got very far yet.
Speaker 2: So I think from what you've told us so far,
Speaker 2: we could kind of split the sort of story of
Speaker 2: this place into folklore versus actual sightings, Like, if you
Speaker 2: want to split it that way, there's stories and then
Speaker 2: there's people actually seeing things.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: A favorite hobby of the armchair skeptic is to say, well,
Speaker 2: what big animals exist there that might be mistaken for
Speaker 2: a monster? And I guess it's part of our due
Speaker 2: diligence to ask. I'm not saying that there's definitely a
Speaker 2: physical nature of everything people have seen, but I am curious.
Speaker 2: Are there things like seals or big otters or any
Speaker 2: that sort of thing.
Speaker 5: Well, it's very I mean, I guess the situation is
Speaker 5: relatively similar to Lockness, So in lochmar is even closer
Speaker 5: to the sea than lock Ness.
Speaker 4: Is.
Speaker 5: The problem with lock Ness and the whole idea of
Speaker 5: things getting into the lock is that the river Ness
Speaker 5: which flows from the sea.
Speaker 4: To Lockness or vice versa.
Speaker 5: I should say, it flows directly through the middle of
Speaker 5: Intervernest and you can drive into internsts and sea. Guys
Speaker 5: standing in the middle of this river in their wade
Speaker 5: is fishing. So it's obviously not a very deep river either,
Speaker 5: but it's about six or seven miles I guess long,
Speaker 5: whereas in Lockmore. Lockmo is actually one of its geographical
Speaker 5: curiosities is it is home to the shortest river in
Speaker 5: the British Isles. It's only just over half a mile long,
Speaker 5: so it's literally up against the edge of the sea,
Speaker 5: and there's a half mile long river connecting it to
Speaker 5: the sea. And I hadn't heard any stories specifically about seals,
Speaker 5: but you would expect that would be entirely possible that
Speaker 5: seals could get up that half mile long river.
Speaker 4: And into the lake.
Speaker 5: The other thing, of course, which you could see in
Speaker 5: the lake would be deer, and I mean there's certainly
Speaker 5: some cases from lock Ness which almost certainly are sightings
Speaker 5: of swimming deer. So and of course you know you
Speaker 5: have the if you think about the head and neck
Speaker 5: of a deer, it's quite similar to this typical sort
Speaker 5: of head and neck quarts you quite often get from
Speaker 5: places like lock Ness, So that is definitely another possibility.
Speaker 5: And certainly there is a quite lively local tradition that
Speaker 5: more of the lock being full of sort of overgrown
Speaker 5: eels as well, not necessarily the sort of thirty foot
Speaker 5: superheel that you would need to explain some of these stories,
Speaker 5: but you know, five six seven foot long eels, so
Speaker 5: that's also a possibility. And of course it's also I mean,
Speaker 5: as I mentioned earlier, it's got quite a large biomass,
Speaker 5: and it's full of salmon, so fish that swim sort
Speaker 5: of fast and along the surface and can create v
Speaker 5: wakes and so on certainly exists there as well.
Speaker 2: That I love the idea of these big mammals land
Speaker 2: mammals sort of crossing bodies of water. Personally, I'm not
Speaker 2: saying this is the explanation for every signing of Caddy
Speaker 2: the ked Borisaurus, but the idea of a moose in
Speaker 2: the water and you look out and see a moose crossing.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, that's so reminiscent of some of the
Speaker 2: things people have seen.
Speaker 5: Well, if you look at the sketches, you're absolutely right,
Speaker 5: and you certainly a locknest is one of the more
Speaker 5: dramatic sightings by a woman called Greta findn't they her
Speaker 5: son in the nineteen fifties, who saw sort of two
Speaker 5: hunt long neck creature. Again, it was quite close up, actually,
Speaker 5: it was only one hundred yards or so away from them,
Speaker 5: just offshore, and there's quite a lively debate about whether
Speaker 5: or not they could have seen a deer. I mean
Speaker 5: the thing they sort of looked very deer like, but
Speaker 5: of course it then sort of submerged under the water
Speaker 5: without apparently much of a struggle, so that the average
Speaker 5: to believe in the ons say, well, how do we
Speaker 5: had one of the chances of them being a deer
Speaker 5: just having a heart attack as they look at it
Speaker 5: in a dire So again, I mean a lot, a
Speaker 5: lot comes back to it, which is just so frustrating,
Speaker 5: isn't it The whole kind of how accurately are we
Speaker 5: getting these reports?
Speaker 4: And how good are the witnesses and.
Speaker 5: How credible are there, you know, sort of the Irish
Speaker 5: supports we're getting in terms of the accuracy levels. Given
Speaker 5: that one is not expecting to see something you want
Speaker 5: to see something that's quite dramatic, maybe even quite scary,
Speaker 5: it's not ideal circumstances for a very accurate cold blooded
Speaker 5: Ivans support really in any of these circumstances.
Speaker 1: So you've spoken about some sidings from the fifties and
Speaker 1: in particular the sixties. Are there any contemporary sightings.
Speaker 4: Of course there are a few. Yes, I mean again
Speaker 4: one tends to hear about this almost by chance.
Speaker 5: For a lot of the time, a lot of the
Speaker 5: local people are quite keen for Lockermowe not become Lockness,
Speaker 5: especially in terms of I mean they quite like it
Speaker 5: being quiet and lin to want to attract lots of tourists.
Speaker 5: So there is a local not even a newspaper with
Speaker 5: it's kind of a community newsletter called Westward, which is
Speaker 5: published there, which very occasionally, you know, reports something along
Speaker 5: these lines. Almost always it's from a visitor, a tourist,
Speaker 5: normally something he's gone fishing there, and it's very some
Speaker 5: of the sorts of things that we've been talking about
Speaker 5: sort of you know, a low hump in the water,
Speaker 5: something seen under the water, those types of things. There
Speaker 5: was one very dramatic case which hasn't really been publicized
Speaker 5: very much, involving the brother of the guy who had
Speaker 5: the dramatic close up sighting in nineteen eighty nine, a
Speaker 5: guy called Donald Simpson who claims to have seen what's
Speaker 5: essentially sort of a land sighting, a monster coming up
Speaker 5: into the lock from the River Mara, which he saw
Speaker 5: while he was driving along the road, only about twenty
Speaker 5: or thirty feet away from it. So again, I mean,
Speaker 5: that's one of those things where if you're cooked as
Speaker 5: older to get very excited by the idea that something
Speaker 5: can be coming in and out of the lock via
Speaker 5: the river, because that would explain lots of stuff about
Speaker 5: how things aren't being seen more often.
Speaker 3: For example, we talked about kelpies briefly.
Speaker 2: Are there any other sort of water based folklore that
Speaker 2: you're familiar with that would be relevant to these sort
Speaker 2: of sightings.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, we haven't really gone into this the
Speaker 5: mermaid thing, but I mean the and mermaid.
Speaker 4: Is the wrong word for it.
Speaker 5: Really, it is it is a monster with a woman's
Speaker 5: sort of torso attached to it, and you know, and
Speaker 5: that's the mermaid part, so you know, sort of the
Speaker 5: white breast, long hair and all that sort of thing.
Speaker 5: But the idea was at the time, and this is
Speaker 5: the way the photo puts it, is that this is
Speaker 5: the three elements of the of the Morag are supposed
Speaker 5: to be the three parts of a funeral service, where
Speaker 5: you have, you know, sort of one part represents the coffin,
Speaker 5: one part represents the gray one part represents the sort
Speaker 5: of burial ceremony. And so there's quite a confusion of
Speaker 5: different sorts of bits of photore being mixed into this.
Speaker 5: But Lockomore is full of of interesting legends. Apart from that,
Speaker 5: there's sort of electricorn like legends about very gold and
Speaker 5: another one which I've looked into some depths I've found
Speaker 5: a particularly fascinating story is the.
Speaker 4: Gray Dog of Mebel.
Speaker 5: Mebel as a little farm about halfway down the lock,
Speaker 5: but two miles down a river, so it's not within
Speaker 5: sight of the lock. And one of the guys who
Speaker 5: used to live there back in the time with the
Speaker 5: Napoleonic Wars, so about two hundred years ago, and that
Speaker 5: who was supposed to have had a faithful deer hound,
Speaker 5: went off to the walls. The deer haund gave birth
Speaker 5: to a litter of puppies after he'd gone, and because
Speaker 5: he wasn't a to look after it, they went ferell
Speaker 5: and set up a home on an island, a little
Speaker 5: lock and up in the hills above Lockmore. And when
Speaker 5: he came back from fighting Boney and went to fetch
Speaker 5: his faithful deer hound, these puppies had grown up by
Speaker 5: then to be sort of large for oceans dogs, and
Speaker 5: they didn't recognize and tore him to bits, and he
Speaker 5: was buried in the local graveyard, and the bitch who
Speaker 5: he had had as his dog, went and laid on
Speaker 5: the grave and was inconsolable. In this sort of way
Speaker 5: the dog was supposed to be and then sort of
Speaker 5: come back later on as a sort of spiritual.
Speaker 4: Again.
Speaker 5: That's sort of harbing of death for people in his family.
Speaker 5: And there are a lot of legends in Lockmore about
Speaker 5: people who've seen the gray dog and Mebele just sort
Speaker 5: of trotting along. It's normally said to be about the
Speaker 5: size of a Shetland pony, and it sort of trots
Speaker 5: along alongside you while you're walking along Scottish mountain tracks
Speaker 5: all by yourself in the middle of the night, and
Speaker 5: it's a pretty terrifying thing to encounter.
Speaker 1: Apparently, is there a very big community of people there
Speaker 1: or is it pretty small?
Speaker 4: No? Tiny?
Speaker 5: I mean so more village at one end of the
Speaker 5: lock as sort of twenty or thirty people. There are
Speaker 5: literally half a dozen people now who overlook the lock
Speaker 5: and live in a couple of very small communities and
Speaker 5: that's it, apart from sort of people who are just
Speaker 5: visiting for the day and going out fishing. So it's
Speaker 5: literally twenty to fifty people, which is very very different
Speaker 5: to Lockerness obviously.
Speaker 1: Do you think that these stories have been attracting more
Speaker 1: people to the.
Speaker 5: Area, Well, not many people. I mean, you'd have to
Speaker 5: be fairly dedicated. Crypto has all just fought into encounter
Speaker 5: the lockmow a monster and one of the things that
Speaker 5: very commonly comes up when you do get a slighting word,
Speaker 5: you're saying, I had no idea that they were supposed
Speaker 5: to be a monster in this lake, if you want
Speaker 5: to take that seriously. Again, that's quite an interesting thing
Speaker 5: because the problem with lockw with lockness obviously is that
Speaker 5: everyone knows as a monster in the lake and it's
Speaker 5: half on the lookout for it, and it's libel trinter
Speaker 5: butt almost.
Speaker 4: Anything they see in the water as.
Speaker 5: A monster as well as a result, so it kind
Speaker 5: of is a pure source of stories, if you like,
Speaker 5: as a result of that, if.
Speaker 2: You don't mind me reverting to the folklore question stuff again,
Speaker 2: I'm the idea of harbingers, of harbingers of as we
Speaker 2: say around here, of death, that that sort of folklore
Speaker 2: comes up again and again I'm thinking of the spectral
Speaker 2: hounds as being one, and then the idea of what's
Speaker 2: the there's a couple of different.
Speaker 3: Female ghosts that.
Speaker 2: The band she would be one where you know, there's
Speaker 2: sometimes round yeah, and they're associated with families oftentimes in
Speaker 2: the folklore. There may be that kind of folklore in
Speaker 2: other parts of the world, but it seems like the
Speaker 2: northern UK has a bigger amount of it, at least
Speaker 2: that's where I've run into it more.
Speaker 4: Have you?
Speaker 3: Do you see more of that kind of story in
Speaker 3: your life?
Speaker 5: You're right, and I think that, you know, I mean,
Speaker 5: what you have to bear in mind is, you know,
Speaker 5: we all talk about highlands of Scotland. Here we're talking
Speaker 5: about a clan based system where extended families exist in
Speaker 5: a much more real and concrete way than is typical
Speaker 5: in almost anywhere else, certainly in the UK and you
Speaker 5: know probably most of the rest of the world and
Speaker 5: particularly up to the nineteenth century.
Speaker 4: You know, you are a member of your clan.
Speaker 5: You have a very large extended family which is focused
Speaker 5: usually in a twenty or thirty or forty mile radius,
Speaker 5: with sort of sub families, but you will have the
Speaker 5: same surname, and so it's much much easier and more
Speaker 5: likely that these sort of stories will only grow up
Speaker 5: but also be circulated as a result of that.
Speaker 1: What can the monster of Lake Mora tell us about
Speaker 1: the nature of lake monsters in general? Is there anything
Speaker 1: that can tell us well, a couple of things.
Speaker 5: I mean, firstly, not all lake monster stories are a
Speaker 5: product of the publicity surrounding lockers, and that is a
Speaker 5: fairly typical skeptical position. So I think that it's important
Speaker 5: that we recognize that there are these two or three
Speaker 5: lakes where, however different the reports are, there are reports
Speaker 5: of things in lakes before nineteen thirty three, and that's
Speaker 5: really significant. I think that it gives us something to
Speaker 5: talk about, which is beyond everything is found on a
Speaker 5: hope that publicity stunt a single dramatic story that gets exaggerated.
Speaker 5: I think that you need to look a lot more
Speaker 5: carefully at local beliefs, local folklore, the way in which
Speaker 5: you know people look on these large, slightly scary, slightly
Speaker 5: isolated bodies of water. So that's the first thing. The
Speaker 5: second thing is is to say that you are looking
Speaker 5: here as I say, I mean a small number of
Speaker 5: interestingly dramatic stories.
Speaker 4: I've told a couple. I mean.
Speaker 5: I'll give you a third example. A guy called Lord
Speaker 5: Glenn Davon, who's another one of these sort of sporting
Speaker 5: gentlemen visiting Lockmore again before the locknows. Montster comes on.
Speaker 5: She's in nineteen thirty one, out trolling on the lock,
Speaker 5: and suddenly his line gets taken by something which is heavy,
Speaker 5: and then thing he's ever felt on the end of
Speaker 5: his fishing line before and sort of dives down to
Speaker 5: the depth of the lock seven hundred feet until it
Speaker 5: pays out the whole of his fishing wheel and he
Speaker 5: comes back to land, very very shaking.
Speaker 4: His Gilly tells him this is not something we should
Speaker 4: be talking about essentially.
Speaker 5: So again, there's a kind of mixture of sort of
Speaker 5: real animal local folklore going on there. But also again
Speaker 5: it's a different sort of story. You don't tend to
Speaker 5: get in most lakes. Physical elements to these sorts of stories.
Speaker 5: So you've got at least two or three of the
Speaker 5: lockmower stories involved elements of I pressed against it. I
Speaker 5: felt the weight of it on my fishing one, and
Speaker 5: that is the best of my knowledge.
Speaker 4: Unique.
Speaker 5: So so there's something unusual about the Lockmore tradition as well.
Speaker 2: Not asking you to wildly speculate, but at the same time,
Speaker 2: I am curious. So what do you think people might
Speaker 2: be seeing? I mean, it sounds like they're seeing a
Speaker 2: lot of different things. But for those stories that seem plausible,
Speaker 2: what do you do you have any idea?
Speaker 5: I hate these sorts of speculations because I'm soestly ignorant
Speaker 5: and not qualified to.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, then if you do, I can skip it
Speaker 2: if you want.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, I mean, you know, I started off
Speaker 4: like most of us.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think we've had this conversation on previous podcast,
Speaker 5: even you know, as an eleven twelve year old kid,
Speaker 5: I really badly wanted to believe some of this stuff
Speaker 5: was true. It be much more exciting, and I've gradually
Speaker 5: become more and more gnulled and skeptical over the years,
Speaker 5: and Lockmore has this little beacon quality in my mind
Speaker 5: where it's one of these very few places where, gosh,
Speaker 5: there could still be something actually interesting going on there.
Speaker 4: So so I think that, you know, for me, the
Speaker 4: reason I like, I mean, the other thing I haven't
Speaker 4: really mentioned is.
Speaker 5: It's unbelievably beautiful there. I mean, you really ought to
Speaker 5: go over you get the chance. Lockness is actually kind
Speaker 5: of quite a grim place. It's dark, and Lockmow has
Speaker 5: a softer feel to it, and you know, the Highlands
Speaker 5: has got the obviously you probably know, are very beautiful,
Speaker 5: and this is one of the most beautiful bits to it.
Speaker 5: So the whole thing has a sort of romantic feel
Speaker 5: of it to me, and I kind of treasured that
Speaker 5: because it, you know, it's this little spark of my
Speaker 5: old childhood self in this sort of niled, old skeptical
Speaker 5: help that I'm now dragging around in my fifties, and
Speaker 5: it's sort of it speaks to me for that, So,
Speaker 5: you know, it's a other special place for me from
Speaker 5: that point of view. I first went there when I
Speaker 5: was like fourteen years old and still wanted and able
Speaker 5: to believe in all this stuff. And so as I say,
Speaker 5: there's a little bit of a young boy and Lochmore
Speaker 5: inside me somewhere.
Speaker 1: Is it there any if you wanted to visit there?
Speaker 1: Is it there anywhere? Any places to stay in that
Speaker 1: area where.
Speaker 5: It's not I mean when I say it's isolated, I
Speaker 5: mean it's twenty or thirty or forty miles from civilization,
Speaker 5: not that far really, especially.
Speaker 4: Right some places in the US.
Speaker 5: I mean, there's the local village is about ten miles
Speaker 5: up the road at five miles, and obviously you can
Speaker 5: get bed and breakfasts and things like that around there
Speaker 5: as well, so.
Speaker 4: It's not not impossible.
Speaker 5: I mean it's not It's not like a five hundred
Speaker 5: thousand bed place, But then we have five hundred one
Speaker 5: thousand people don't normally want to go to a lot
Speaker 5: more all at the same time, so it shouldn't.
Speaker 1: Now they will.
Speaker 2: We'll have to get our numbers up a little higher
Speaker 2: for that to have an impact, I think. But you know,
Speaker 2: it's funny because you mentioned the more you research, the
Speaker 2: more skeptical you become.
Speaker 3: But I mean I I feel the same way.
Speaker 2: I mean, I remember distinctly the feeling of, you know,
Speaker 2: believing that Bigfoot was out there, you know, just waiting
Speaker 2: to be found. And over the years that's gone from
Speaker 2: Bigfoot's probably real, to Bigfoot might be real, to I
Speaker 2: really don't think Bigfoot's real, to I'm provisionally confident saying
Speaker 2: bigfoots not real, but in prepared to change that should
Speaker 2: a body appear. All that being said, it doesn't stop
Speaker 2: me from looking intently for Bigfoot when I'm driving in
Speaker 2: the woods at night.
Speaker 3: I mean, know what I mean.
Speaker 5: Exactly, And I guess one reason I don't want to
Speaker 5: go something in lockness is, however skeptical I am, I
Speaker 5: still don't like something in large, deep boders of water.
Speaker 5: I can't see what's coming up from underneath me. Yeah,
Speaker 5: coming from from that point of yes, yeah, Well. The
Speaker 5: any other thing I suppose I would want to.
Speaker 6: Say in kind of in conclusion, is that it would
Speaker 6: be it would be interesting to do some more work there,
Speaker 6: As I said, I mean, the Lockmower survey in the
Speaker 6: seventies did come up with quite a lot of evidence
Speaker 6: about the.
Speaker 5: Size of the fish population. And you know, to me,
Speaker 5: this was the sort of killer blow at loch Ness
Speaker 5: was well, actually there are two killer blows at Lockness,
Speaker 5: but that was one of them. The idea that, in fact,
Speaker 5: the fish stock in Lockness is probably only somewhere in
Speaker 5: the region of sixteen to twenty five tons of fish,
Speaker 5: which sounds like a lot. But then when you then
Speaker 5: multiply that and you start thinking in terms of what
Speaker 5: would be a breeding population of monsters, look like you
Speaker 5: start worrying about there's just not enough food to support
Speaker 5: actual animals. That doesn't seem to be true of Lockmow.
Speaker 5: And I'd like to know a lot more about that,
Speaker 5: and I would like to do more.
Speaker 3: Was gonna say, it's that the it's the miracle of
Speaker 3: the lock and the fishes.
Speaker 4: I'd like to do more.
Speaker 5: Work on the whole surveying of the you know, the
Speaker 5: clear water areas of the lake as well. I don't
Speaker 5: think I can go quite as far as agent and
Speaker 5: actually sit in little people, which I've made.
Speaker 4: It's extreme bottom of my garden. That was a little
Speaker 4: bit too extreme for me.
Speaker 5: So so I mean I think that I suppose the
Speaker 5: thing about lockmow in conclusion is, Hey, there is actually
Speaker 5: somewhere there there's more work to be done. And you
Speaker 5: know that that, again is kind of unusual for me
Speaker 5: when when I do research, I tend this is one
Speaker 5: of the very few cases where I've ended up thinking, well,
Speaker 5: there's more work to be done, as opposed to it, Okay,
Speaker 5: I've solved that to at least my satisfaction, there is.
Speaker 4: Still work to be done there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I feel that I have all the answers I
Speaker 5: want about Lockmore and that's quite unusual, and again something
Speaker 5: to be kind of cherished, because you know, it's nice
Speaker 5: to have at least a little and I don't know
Speaker 5: if I would even call it an element of mystery,
Speaker 5: but certainly an element of it inquisitiveness about something that
Speaker 5: I've been interested in now for sort of forty odd
Speaker 5: years and still has that little itch.
Speaker 4: Going at the back of my mind. And you know,
Speaker 4: I quite value that.
Speaker 1: Really, what do you think you might find?
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I mean I think that you know you've asked me
Speaker 5: to speculate wildly, so I guess I might as well
Speaker 5: finish my spectrum.
Speaker 4: You might find a.
Speaker 5: Large a large fish of some sort. I mean, I
Speaker 5: don't think that's impossible. You know, it could be you know,
Speaker 5: some people could be seeing larger ors. There could be
Speaker 5: a I don't know, I mean you were saying lock mess.
Speaker 5: Maybe a sturgeon that's agent shines view anyway, And once
Speaker 5: you take out the long head and neck bits of
Speaker 5: late monster reports, sturgeon are actually surprisingly good candidate for
Speaker 5: a lot of the rest of the stuff. So so
Speaker 5: maybe that so, I mean, you know that that would
Speaker 5: be undramatic but interesting to.
Speaker 2: Me definitely for wildly speculating, I would I would love
Speaker 2: it if they find a sort of like a giant
Speaker 2: anglerfish that's evolved so that the lure is shaped like
Speaker 2: a beautiful woman, but when you get close it gobbles
Speaker 2: you up.
Speaker 4: Yah. A wild speculation would be, hey, maybe there's a mermaid.
Speaker 3: Well there is that That would be wild.
Speaker 1: Find evidence.
Speaker 2: So I think I've mentioned several times on the show
Speaker 2: that your book Borderlands is just just a tremendously well
Speaker 2: researched collection of fortyana.
Speaker 3: Uh and big book.
Speaker 2: It is a big book and everybody should own it.
Speaker 2: Is there any and we'll have a link to that
Speaker 2: and to your articles of Smithsonian and to your website
Speaker 2: and her show notes. Is there anything else you'd like
Speaker 2: to talk about or promote?
Speaker 5: Golly not not from this point of view. I mean,
Speaker 5: I've been so called up in the writing of the
Speaker 5: history stuff I do that I haven't been writing a
Speaker 5: huge amount of forty on I guess I should mention,
Speaker 5: if this is coming out soon, that I actually have
Speaker 5: an article in the issue of fourteen Times about something
Speaker 5: I haven't written about before, which is the Antrum of
Speaker 5: Initiation at Bayer on the Bay of Naples, which is
Speaker 5: supposedly a set of a set of very mysterious tunnels
Speaker 5: dug into the remains of a volcano, which might be
Speaker 5: something to do with a peculiar sort of fifth century
Speaker 5: BC con game where people tried to persuade rich passing
Speaker 5: merchants they were able to take them down to the underworld,
Speaker 5: over the river sticks and into a sort of k
Speaker 5: where they would get their fortunes read by a civil
Speaker 5: and totally expecting very large something I need to the privilege.
Speaker 4: That's my latest fourteen Times writing.
Speaker 2: Quite a few of our listeners have asked if you've
Speaker 2: made any progress on your spring Hill Jack work. Is
Speaker 2: there a chance that you've moved forward with making that
Speaker 2: into an actual published book.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I hope you weren't going to ask that, you
Speaker 5: know what, I I've been working on these swiss Onian
Speaker 5: history articles so long that I've now basically I'm like
Speaker 5: three articles short.
Speaker 4: Of having a book for the books worth of them.
Speaker 5: I promised myself i'd finish that and then i'd do
Speaker 5: Swing Hill Jack. That was two years ago, and I
Speaker 5: keep getting distracted by new ideas for stuff, so I
Speaker 5: had I've still got two out of the three stories
Speaker 5: I want for my book I haven't actually written yet.
Speaker 5: So the idea is that at some point between now
Speaker 5: and Christmas, aally finish that up, and that next year
Speaker 5: I should try and get back to Spring hil Jack.
Speaker 5: There's about six months of work to do this, so
Speaker 5: it's kind of hard for me to imagine how I'm
Speaker 5: going to find enough time to do six months of
Speaker 5: work over any sort of relatively short period of time.
Speaker 4: And I say, basically, I need.
Speaker 5: To spend another few weeks on Spring hill Jack, maybe
Speaker 5: a couple of months at least. I'm hoping to do
Speaker 5: more of it next year.
Speaker 4: Short.
Speaker 5: No, No, it's terribly plenty excuse which probably would bore
Speaker 5: the plants of anybody.
Speaker 2: No, but I think the I think the end product
Speaker 2: should you be able to get it out.
Speaker 3: I think people are really interested.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I I need to get downe and I'm
Speaker 5: nagat to the point of thinking, Lady, how I better
Speaker 5: make sure I write something before I drop the dead act.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, you don't be like George R. Martin, So
Speaker 3: if that's your standard here.
Speaker 4: So I still try my best to make it happen.
Speaker 5: I've got some fantastic good stuff to talk about there
Speaker 5: as well, so I really really don't want to lose it,
Speaker 5: you know. I mean, the amount of new stuff there
Speaker 5: is far, far more than anything else I've done, so
Speaker 5: I kind of have an obligation to the greater community
Speaker 5: to do something about it.
Speaker 1: I think great. Right, So, Mike, we've had you on
Speaker 1: the show before and you've spoken about your favorite monster,
Speaker 1: so we thought we'd ask you a brilliant question on
Speaker 1: that theme instead. Do you have a scary movie that
Speaker 1: you can recommend?
Speaker 5: You know something. I'm really bad with scary movies. I
Speaker 5: tend not to watch them because I find them a
Speaker 5: little bit cynical and manipulative, and I'm sort of person
Speaker 5: who doesn't like going to amusement parts because I don't
Speaker 5: like going on things that are designed make me feel
Speaker 5: like I'm about to die. And it's very similar with
Speaker 5: the horror mo So actually I'm terrible at recommending scary movies,
Speaker 5: but I suppose the maybe one that's worth mentioning that
Speaker 5: some people it's probably not very scary, but it ties
Speaker 5: in with another piece of research I've done.
Speaker 4: Which is a film called The Maze.
Speaker 5: Which goes back to the nineteen fifties and is a
Speaker 5: version of the Monster of Glam's story, which I actould
Speaker 5: come and talk to you about some time, the sort
Speaker 5: of you know, the deformed air kept locked up in
Speaker 5: a secret room in a Scottish castle for Yeah, that.
Speaker 1: Would be a good episode.
Speaker 2: I'm familiar with the legend, so that would yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you think you could talk about it for half an hour?
Speaker 5: Oh, I could talk about it for longer than that.
Speaker 5: I've got a lot of research on it. Yeah, I
Speaker 5: mean there's some good speaky stuff there, so that would
Speaker 5: make a good episode for you.
Speaker 4: I suspect it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it. Okay, we'll go a
Speaker 3: linked to that.
Speaker 2: The show notes as well as always, it's been great
Speaker 2: talking with you.
Speaker 4: I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.
Speaker 5: I hope it was useful for you. I didn't feel
Speaker 5: like it was as focus as I wanted it to be.
Speaker 3: But don't know, that was really interesting. Actually, I mean I.
Speaker 2: Think, and I mean the listeners can correct me if
Speaker 2: I'm wrong, but my feeling is that one of the
Speaker 2: reasons people like the show is because we're long form.
Speaker 2: We're not a super tight fifteen minute you know, pikat.
Speaker 2: We're people with the who really thought deeply about these questions,
Speaker 2: you know, talking sensibly about monsters, and then that's what's
Speaker 2: wrong with that.
Speaker 1: Right, going into a lot of details.
Speaker 2: A lot of history, a lot of you know, side stuff.
Speaker 2: People like to learn new things, and I know every
Speaker 2: time we talk to you, we're going to learn something new.
Speaker 4: So it's great, definitely pleasure. It's always last to talk.
Speaker 4: So yeah, we'll do it again sometimes. Monster.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Monster Talk. I'm Karen Stolsner and.
Speaker 3: I'm Blake Smith.
Speaker 2: You just heard an interview with doctor Mike dash about
Speaker 2: the alleged beasts living in luche More.
Speaker 3: We hope you enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: A link to Mike's book Borderlands and to his articles
Speaker 2: at Smithsonian or in the show notes at monster.
Speaker 3: Talk dot org.
Speaker 2: Mike's written several lot books filled with meticulous research, not
Speaker 2: all of them forti in, but well worth checking out.
Speaker 2: Monster Talk is an official podcast of Skeptic Magazine. The
Speaker 2: opinions expressed here are those of myself and my guests
Speaker 2: and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Skeptic Magazine
Speaker 2: or the Skeptic Society. But if you want my opinion,
Speaker 2: it's a great time of year to donate to the
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