On September 25th of 1808, a fisherman named John Peace spotted something unusual on the

rocky coast of his little island.

He lived on the Isle of Stranzae, part of the archipelago off the northern coast of Scotland

known as the Orkney Islands. He'd been fishing from a small boat along the rocky shore after

a night of heavy winds and torrential rain, and while we can assume he might have been

familiar with the aftermath of big storms, I'm not sure he expected to discover something

so otherworldly. It was the corpse of an animal, but it was unlike any animal he had ever

seen.

Others joined him in the examination. Local farmer George Sharar was able to get closer

to the corpse since he was on land, and he made a quick inspection of it. It was nearly

55 feet long, roughly eel-like in its shape and form, but with a distinct neck that measured

15 feet in length. Combined with the creature's small head and the mane of hair that ran

down the back of its neck, the details were just too confusing to help them identify

it.

Today we know more about the corpses like the one John Peace found, and many scientists

refer to them as globsters. A decaying mass of organic matter left behind by the corpses

of a whale or a large fish. Judging by the length of this corpse, most scientists believe

it had been nothing more than an ore fish, but that's not what John and his neighbors

thought.

No, they believed they had discovered the remains of something tossed out of the mysterious

depths of the ocean. A creature that most seafaring cultures have whispered about since the

dawn of time, but few have ever been able to witness in the flesh. It was a beast of

...