In
Utah folklore, the North Shore Monster is a monster purported to live in
Utah's Great Salt Lake
The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth-largest terminal lake in the world. It lies in the northern part of the U.S. state of Utah and has a substantial impact upon the local climate, particula ...
.
History
At dusk or evening of the early summer of 1877, J.H. McNeil of
Kelton, Box Elder County, and several other employees of the Barnes and Co. Salt Works company on the lake's north shore reported seeing a huge creature with a
crocodile
Crocodiles (family (biology), family Crocodylidae) or true crocodiles are large semiaquatic reptiles that live throughout the tropics in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia. The term crocodile is sometimes used even more loosely to inclu ...
-like body and the head of a
horse
The horse (''Equus ferus caballus'') is a domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal. It belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of ''Equus ferus''. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million y ...
in the waters of the Great Salt Lake. The creature made a "fearsome bellowing noise" and charged the workers, who promptly ran up a nearby hillside and hid in the brush until morning. Some believe the "monster" was a
buffalo. Around 30 years earlier, "a man identified only as Brother Bainbridge reported seeing a monster with a dolphin-like body in the lake near
Antelope Island
Antelope Island, with an area of 42 square miles (109 km2), is the largest of ten islands located within the Great Salt Lake in the US state of Utah. The island lies in the southeastern portion of the lake, near Salt Lake City and Davis Coun ...
."
References
{{reflist
American legendary creatures
Great Salt Lake
Utah folklore
Water monsters