ICELAND

A Dreamy Fishermen’s Village With Sea Monsters On The Side

Words by
Reetta Huhta
Photo by
Art Bicnick

Travelling through the Westfjords can be a tricky business. The roads conform to the curves of the endless fjords, paved roads alternate with gravel ones, and most of the time there’s no fence securing the car from drifting out of the road. The journey from Reykjavík to the Westfjords takes a good five hours, and since the internet connection cuts in and out, you’re forced to entertain yourself by taking in the sweeping roadside views, which Grapevine suggests even if your connection is working just fine.

The car weaves up and down the narrow mountain roads bisecting the rural landscape. Gravel rattles against the bottom of the vehicle while light rain washes the windows. Just when you think you’ve become blunt to the bare yet captivating scenery, the mountains yield, unveiling a spectacular view of a village resting in the valley’s embrace. There lies the destination, Bíldudalur.




Bíldudalur is a small fishing village, located right next to the Arnarfjörður fjord. It’s home to only 238 people. The atmosphere of the town is almost tangible: the few tourist attractions are all closed for the season, stores require customers to call the owner to open the door if they’re in need of visiting the shop, and the sidewalks and roads are devoid of people, even though it’s election day.

The shore of sea monsters

Although the tourist attractions in Bíldudalur—such as the Old Blacksmith’s Workshop and Bíldudalskirkja—are open only during the summertime, the Icelandic Sea Monster Museum opens its doors for special visits. The museum has amassed monster stories from all around Iceland and presents them to the visitors in multiple ways. Compact placards about sea monsters and their behaviour are presented throughout the museum, and visitors can listen to the stories of these cryptic creatures from an old radio. Skeptics will be converted through screening documentaries in which people who have encountered these monsters explain what it’s like to meet them eye-to-eye.

As the Icelandic winter draws in we’re reaching for our comfy traditional lopapeysa sweaters, the beautiful woollen garments which have been keeping Icelanders warm for generations. They’re available for international delivery through our online shop, and ours are hand-knitted right here in Iceland from local wool.

It’s no wonder that the museum is in Bíldudalur, since many of the stories have occurred near Arnarfjörður. Many of the people living on the shores of Arnarfjörður have a story to tell about sea monsters. While it is intriguing to hear the folk tales, you can’t help but wonder if it’s the dreaminess of the small towns that makes the mind create these visions.

Leaving the museum, you stroll down the shoreside and come across a small-scale breakwater, which tempts you to step aside from the pavement to explore the rocky ground more closely. You head to the end of the breakwater, skipping from one rock to another. Birds hiding in the crevasses flutter in flight as the turquoise swell beats against the boulders—or who knows, maybe they saw a monster swimming towards them.

Warming up in Reykjafjarðarlaug

It’s easy to lose track of time when the serenity and sounds of the churning sea take over. After breathing in the ambience of the village by wandering around the seaside and the streets accompanied by colorful buildings, it’s time to head to Reykjafjarðarlaug hot pools. Located within a 20-minute drive of Bíldudalur, the geothermal pools—one dug into the hot spring, the other built further away—rest in the midst of the surrounding mountains and fjord.

Photo by Art Bicnick

As the wind tries to carry you into the sea, second thoughts about dipping into the pools might enter your mind. Running from the changing rooms to the first pool, you try not to slip on the muddy pathway, and when you enter the pool, the water feels almost burning. But in a matter of seconds the temperature starts to soothe your wind-shaken body. The walls of the pool are given a beautiful green color by plantains and moss, and though the walls are muddy, the bottom of the pool stays clean. You feel confident that you’ll never want to leave this haven.

Photo by Art Bicnick

You relax there until it’s time to move on to a cooler pool, which is built right next to the changing area. This pool is much bigger, allowing sporty bathers to swim a few laps. Its water is much cooler and, unlike the first pool, it’s not ideal for lounging.

You fight the urge to move back to the warmer pool, and instead get dressed as quickly as possible. You blast the heaters in the car and feel the euphoric warmth taking over your body. Feeling refreshed, you head on with your journey in the Westfjords.

Travel distance from Reykjavík: 375km
Accommodation provided by: Fosshotel Westfjords
Car provided by: Go Car Rental Iceland

The Essex island where terrifying 'sea monsters' washed up on the shore

Residents were mystified as to what the fishy creatures were


By Anna Willis
28 DEC 2021

Canvey Island Beach

Essex is full of weird and wonderful stories, but none more so than when a sea monster was spotted on the county's coast during the 20th century.

On a cold November day in 1953, a horribly decomposed carcass washed up on the shore at Canvey Island, according to MyLondon,

In the same year as the Canvey Floods, residents didn’t know what to make of this strange marine creature.

The monstrous amphibian was described as being more than two feet long, with “thick reddish-brown skin and bulging eyes, and gills.”

It also had a pulpy head and two leg-like fins.

A resident, Colin Day, remembered seeing the sea-monster as a child.

He said: “I was THERE. I was a young lad of nine at the time.

“I noticed a group of peers in a crowd on the beach.

“Kids were prodding it with their spades.

“I actually touched it!

“I thought it was a person at first as I could only see part of it through the crowd.

“Its flesh was NOT fish-like scales.

“It was a pinkish colour and looked like wobbly human flesh with cellulite, a sort of orange peel texture.

“I remember shouting to the other kids “It’s a mermaid” over and over.

“I have to say that even at 66, my long-term memory is excellent, especially about the day I saw my first mermaid.”

The remains of the dead animal were cremated quickly, and the residents of Canvey Island continued on with their lives.

Until another sea monster appeared on the shoreline the following year.

Spotted by Reverend Joseph D. Overs in August 1954, he described the beast as being “over four feet long, with staring eyes and a large mouth” in a local newspaper report.

A photo of the Canvey Island sea monster seen in 1954, and reported in a local newspaper (Image: Canvey Island Archive)

Experts had no idea what these terrifying creatures were, although locals thought the sea monsters may be anglerfish, with their mouths packed full of razor-sharp teeth and bulging eyes.

Locals also insisted the fish had ‘humanoid’ features, leading to rumours of ‘sea-monster’ sightings.

Today, the most likely categorisation of the sea-monsters seen in the 1950s is a monkfish.

Comparing a photo of the fish to one taken of the sea monster, both have wide, gaping mouths, a similarly shaped flat, rounded body, two short fins at either side and a small tail.

No more ‘sea monsters’ were seen on Canvey Island after that second sighting, but other mysterious creatures were noticed in following years.

One islander said: "When I returned to Canvey and lived in Bardenville Road around 1962-3, we had some other rather unwelcome visitors.

“They were furry, anything up to 2 ft long, had a platypus like flat tail and the head of a rat.

"My sister noticed the first one, which must have come from the creek, in our back garden. She told mum about an oversized rat.

"Shortly afterwards, the Coypus were reported in the local press and Islanders warned to keep clear of them as they would attack.

“I’m surprised nobody else has mentioned them as it was quite scary at the time."

‘This thing meant business’: 1976 sea creature encounter off southwestern NS revisited

Kathy Johnson | Posted: July 7, 2021


CAPE SABLE ISLAND, NS – It was 45 years ago, between July 5 and 9, 1976, that five Cape Sable Island fishermen fishing off southwestern Nova Scotia on three different boats, on three different days, had encounters on the same fishing grounds with a sea creature unlike anything they'd seen before.

It’s certainly an experience 69-year-old Rodney Ross has never forgotten.

He's the only fishermen of the five still alive.

1976 story in the Yarmouth Vanguard. - File Photo


The encounters

The late Eisner Penney was the first to have an encounter – on July 5, 1976 – when fishing on Pollock Shoal, about eight to nine miles off the southern coast of Cape Sable Island, recalls Ross.

“Eisner seen it on a Monday,” Ross says. “When he got done fishing he was headed home and noticed this thing chasing him was out of the water, probably 10 to 15 feet out of the water and it chased him three, four miles or more and kept picking up steam. He didn’t lose it until he got into real shoal water – what we call the horse race – and it went under.”

When Ross set sail with his father Keith for Pollock Shoal two days later, they were unaware of Penney’s encounter.

“We went there Wednesday," he says. "We were fishing, doing pretty good, the tide started to go, so dad went down in the cud to get something to eat.”

Ross continued fishing on the deck. Back then they hauled by hand. No machines. He was getting one or two fish every sound.

But then, he says, it was like everything died.

"The gulls disappeared. The hags disappeared. I made three or four sounds, but nothing," he says.

"I could hear this noise like a swishing noise. It was thick fog . . . I seen this black thing coming through the water. It was like a hump, three or four feet out of water – this hump with two big eyes."

South Side fisherman Rodney Ross looks through his collection of memorabilia about the sea creature he and four other fishermen including his father Keith seen between July 5 and 9, 1976, on the Pollock Shoal off Cape Sable Island’s southern coast. 

KATHY JOHNSON

What is that?

At first he thought it was a sunfish and called to his dad to come out and see what he thought it was. He peeked out and said, "sunfish," but when the thing came back seconds later, his father didn't know what to think.

"He realized it wasn’t a sunfish. We watched this thing 15, 20 minutes. It would swim down by, pretty near go out of sight, swim back up to the westward and not one time would it look at us. It never went under. A whale, you can hear them a mile away. Not once did this thing blow."

"It was like it was ignoring us except for this one time. He turned and was looking right at me.”

Ross estimated it was about 70 to 80 yards from the boat.

“Dad went up and started the engine. We knew something was going to take place. It started coming for the boat. It kept coming, rising out of water. The last of it – it was about 15 feet out of water and opened his mouth. He was coming aboard. He was after me," says Ross.

"Dad waited until it was about 15, 20 yards away and opened it wide open and we shot ahead. I ran up underneath the house, turned and looked and could see this big body come out of water. He just clipped the stern of the boat."

"This thing meant business. If we had sat there, we would have been gone. He would have been half way on to the boat.”

Ross says the sea creature “looked liked a giant sculpin with big eyes, bigger than the rest of its body."

"It was full of barnacles, coral and had these rows of teeth – tusk looking things in his mouth. It didn’t have a whales tail, sort of like a cod tail.”

A drawing by the late Keith Ross of what the South Side Sea Monster looked like.

 “My father was no artist, but it did look something like that,” said Rodney Ross.

Their getaway

If it wasn’t for his father’s quick thinking to start the engine and wait until it got just close enough that it couldn’t turn, Ross shudders to think what would have happened.

“If people would have found wreckage of our boat, they would have thought we were run over by a steamer. Who would have thought we got ate by a sea monster?”

At the time of the encounter Ross says the boat was weighted to an anchor.

“We just shot up over the anchor and we could hear it hit the stern of the boat. It kept coming and kept raising out of water probably 10 to 15 feet out of water with its mouth wide open. If it had kept coming the top of his mouth would have been over my head.”

Dumfounded, the two fishermen sat there for about an hour and never spoke.

But "by and by," he says, they heard it again.

The swishing noise.

"We didn’t press our luck. We hauled anchor and took off. We seen this boat on our radar, so we steamed down to the boat. It was Eisner Penney, the guy that seen it Monday. I said to him, 'Eisner you want to get out of here if you see what we just seen,' and I remember him saying just as plain, ‘You don’t have to tell me what you seen because I seen it Monday.'"

That was enough fishing for everyone.

Penney threw everything in the middle of his platform and they all headed in.

As reported in the 1976 Yarmouth Vanguard. - FIle photo


"If there's a devil, that was it"

When fellow fisherman Edgar Nickerson initially heard about the sea creature encounter, he had laughed, according to an interview and story in the July 14, 1976, Yarmouth Vanguard newspaper.

“I thought it was funny. As a matter of fact, on Friday I bragged on my radio that I had Pollock Shoal all by myself,” he had said in the interview.

Only they weren't alone.

Nickerson and his 15-year-old son Robert were pulling gear when the sea creature appeared.

“It kept coming up. I thought it was a whale and I kidded to my son that it was coming after him," he had told Vanguard journalists Fred Hatfield and Alain Meuse 45 years ago.

"I turned on my sounder. That usually scare whales away. But not this thing. It kept coming and coming."

"It was a horrible looking thing I tell you. If there’s a devil, that was it.”

Photos of four of the fishermen from the 1976 Yarmouth Vanguard: Keith Ross, Rodney Ross, Edgar Nickerson and Eisner Phinney. 

PHOTOS BY FRED HATFIELD AND ALAIN MEUSE - File photo

After the encounters, nobody went fishing for a few weeks, Ross says.

“We didn’t go back there that year. When three different boats on three different days seen this creature in the same area, something was there.”

Ross remembers coming home the day after seeing the sea creature and going to visit his neighbours Weldon Cox and Seaton Nickerson, who were retired fishermen that had made a living on the water all their lives.

“They always waved for me to come over, so I went over and told my story. They looked at me and said back in 1930s . . . they told me the names of two fishermen who had an encounter with a creature off here, much the same as what we seen," says Ross, who can’t remember the names he was given.

Ross notes all of the sightings were two days apart and all of the fishermen who saw the sea creature were on fishing boats that were green.

Over the years, he's collected clippings and mementos about the encounter, and about other sea creature encounters that people have sent to him.

South Side fisherman Rodney Ross still has the handline fishing gear he was using the day he and his father Keith encountered a sea creature on the Pollock Shoal off Cape Sable Island’s southern coast. “This is the actual one that I was using back in 1976. We called it a Christmas tree. My father-in-law made it for me.” 

KATHY JOHNSON - Saltwire network

Ongoing interest

Back in the 1970s or 1980s, Ross gave a talk to the students at the Barrington Municipal High School about the encounter. He still has all the thank you letters and pictures drawn by the students of what they thought it looked like. Whatever they had seen was dubbed the South Side Sea Monster.

“When my father was living, people used to call him all the time,” says Ross. “We had a guy come from Florida one time; he was telling us about how many different things they discover every year. It could be ants, could be anything. Wartime they used to dump stuff in really deep water … it could have been something got into that,” he says, and was deformed.

Or something that was in an underwater cave had gotten out, or some sort of prehistoric thing, speculates Ross.

“Who knows what’s out there? It’s a big ocean,” he says.

Ross says he's usually contacted several times a year from someone wanting to know about the encounter.

Last fall Ross he was contacted by award winning author Max Hawthorne of New York who wanted to include Ross’s experience in a book he was writing. The book, 'Monsters and Marine Mysteries,' was just released several months ago. “I’m one of the chapters," says Ross.

Ross has only publicly spoke about his encounter a few times over the years. One of his presentations made in 2017 – South Side Sea Monster Story – is available on YouTube.

Thank you letters and drawings by students from the Barrington Municipal High School are among the keepsakes in Rodney Ross’s collection about the sea creature he seen in 1976 that was dubbed the South Side Sea Monster.

 KATHY JOHNSON


What's in the ocean? Sea serpent stories

Throughout the years there have been numerous documented sightings of sea serpents, mermaids, mermen, giant lizards and squid, monstrous fish, and a great sea monster in waters off Nova Scotia’s coastline.

The Serpent Chronologies, Sea Serpents and other Marine Creatures from Nova Scotia’s History, published by the Nova Scotia Museum in 2015, “is an annotated, systematic, account of reports of sightings of large serpents and other mysterious creatures recorded in Nova Scotia waters.” It includes Mi’kmaw petroglyphs, elements of captured oral history and documents excerpted from both the popular press as well as the scientific literature over the centuries, reads the abstract.

“Where appropriate, these are discussed in terms of the culture of the times, as well our current understanding of natural history. Illustrations have been created where there was sufficient information recorded, and based on these and the descriptions provided, these drawings reflect the nature of the creatures described in a modern context." it reads. "It becomes evident that the chronology of such reports is a reflection, to a great part, of the state and development of both popular and scientific cultures of Nova Scotia throughout these times.”

The book, available to download as a PDF, chronicles documented sightings from the 1600s up to 2003, when there was an encounter with a sea serpent in Alder Point, Cape Breton.

Written by Andrew J Hebda, the author concludes by saying, “As was pointed out in the beginning: Some of these are true accounts of events while others may be exercises in creativity in writing. In some cases, it is not obvious which is which.

"We should keep in mind what the late Dr. Fred Aldrich was reported to have said when commenting on marine marvels in the North-West Atlantic Ocean: 'We know more about the backside of the moon than the bottom of the sea.'”

An editorial cartoon in the July 21 1976, Vanguard.

A Second Sea Monster Washed Up In SoCal This Week And This One Looks Like A Water Dragon

ISTOCKPHOTO / IAN DYBALL

BY CASS ANDERSON

DECEMBER 3, 2021

Just a few days after a rare deep sea anglerfish called ‘the stuff of nightmares’ washed up in Southern California another bizarre sea monster has shown up on the beach

This rare Lancetfish looks like a modern representation of a water dragon and it also looks like something I’d like to avoid forever

The ocean is home to some of the most beautiful creatures on the planet like tropical parrotfish and sea turtles. It’s also home to some legitimate sea monsters that most people never come in contact with aside from seeing in pictures.

Just last week, a rarely seen deep-sea anglerfish washed up on the shores of Southern California. It was described as ‘the stuff of nightmares’ and picked up headlines worldwide. Here’s that fish form a few days ago:

Now, another sea monster has shown up in Southern California. This one is a rare lancetfish and it looks like a straight-up water dragon. I’ve never seen a real water dragon (if they exist) but if I had to draw one by hand starting from scratch I’d end up drawing this fish. Look at the crazy teeth and fins:

According to Scripps oceanographers, this is just the 17th lancetfish to be found in San Diego Beach since 1947 so it’s exceedingly rare. And the last one of these fish was found in 1996 so it’s been a hot minute.

Looking at this species it’s easy to understand how ancient civilizations believed in mythical creatures because there’s really nothing on land that looks anything like this. I look at this fish and think it’s an alien and I’m even able to do some quick googling and learn everything there is to possibly know about this species. Ancient civilizations didn’t even know how deep the ocean was. They must’ve thought these were dragons.

Capt. Nick Stanczyk is the #1 swordfishing captain on the planet in terms of tags and releases every year. He catches more swordfish than anyone. Back in May, he caught a swordfish that had eaten a lancetfish and he showed what it was like when filleting the swordfish.

Meet the Sweet Sea Monster of Portuguese Christmas

Lampreia de ovos comes loaded with sugar, eggs, and the long history of glorifying a most peculiar parasite

.
BY DANIA RODRIGUES

DECEMBER 23, 2021

So sweet and adorable, you almost forget it's based on an 

ancient bloodsucking sea creature.

 COURTESY OF LUÍSA GARRIDO

In This Story
DESTINATION GUIDE
Portugal

MANY FAMILIES IN PORTUGAL CELEBRATE Christmas around a table filled with cakes, biscuits, dried fruit, and good wine. Among the treats, they will likely have bolo rei, a crown-shaped cake decorated with crystallized fruit; sonhos, orbs of crispy-yet-airy fried dough; and rabanadas, a Portuguese version of french toast covered with sugar and cinnamon. In some regions, another treat will appear: a curved, eel-shaped mound of egg yolks, sugar syrup, and almonds that will stare at diners with candied-fruit eyes and a big smile. This is lampreia de ovos, a dessert that glorifies a 360-million-year-old sea monster.

Lampreys are parasitic fish with long, scaleless bodies and gaping mouths that contain multiple rows of teeth, which they use to guzzle the blood of their hosts. While this might not sound appetizing, the lamprey has long been regarded in Portugal (and much of Europe) as a culinary delicacy. More than 2,000 years ago, the Lusitani and Romans both consumed lamprey, and Apicius’s De Re Coquinaria, the oldest known cookbook, mentions preparations for the fish.

During the Middle Ages, the lamprey reemerged as a prestige food. A rare, seasonal fish that was geographically restricted to the rivers where it came to reproduce, the lamprey’s limited availability made it a symbol of status and power. The wealthy impressed their guests by serving elaborate lamprey pies, stews, galantines, and blood sauces, especially as a replacement for meat during Lent.

The lamprey doesn’t exactly look the part of culinary delicacy. 

NOAA GREAT LAKES ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LABORATORY/CC BY-SA 2.0

Such feasting was “an endowment of the rich, the enlightened, and the noble,” according to Mário Varela Gomes, author of the book Divine Lamprey. Since lamprey was high-status food, it was considered improper for serfs to consume it. In 1423, Portuguese King João I took this exclusivity to the extreme, establishing the death penalty for anyone who was caught fishing for lamprey without permission.

Considering the lamprey’s revered culinary status in Portugal, “it is no wonder, then, that someone had the idea to turn such a prized item into a dessert,” says Professor João Pedro Gomes. A historian from Universidade de Coimbra who researches the history of sweets in Portugal, Gomes says it’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly, lampreia de ovos originated. However, he does point to the rise of animal-shaped sweets (such as ornate sugar sculptures) during the Renaissance as the possible roots of a lamprey-shaped treat.

An 1884 painting depicts lampreia de ovos. 

LUCAS DE ALMEIDA MARRÃO/PUBLIC DOMAIN

Another chronological clue: The essential culinary techniques used to make lampreia de ovos were developed during the 1600s. “We have registries of the basic egg manipulation techniques used in this sweet in a cookbook from the late 17th century,” Gomes says. The elementary components of lampreia are capas de ovos, sheets of egg yolk cooked in sugar syrup and rolled around a filling. It is not clear precisely when or where a chef decided to shape these sheets into a lamprey form, but some historians hypothesize that it likely occurred in Central Portugal (such as Coimbra, Chamusca, or Tentúgal), where lampreia de ovos is commonly found today.

The earliest known recipe for lampreia de ovos comes from a 1903 cookbook. But references to the treat date back earlier, including a mention in the 1878 novel O Primo Basílio and an appearance in a rather elegant painting from 1884. When instructions for assembling for lampreia de ovos appeared in Tratado Completo de Cozinha e de Copa in 1903, its recipe consisted of a paste of almond and sugar, capas de ovos, and, as the eyes and mouth, raisins and red jam.

Some versions of lampreia de ovos look especially festive. 

CONFEITARIADALVOR/USED WITH PERMISSION

Luísa Garrido is part of a family who has been making lampreias de ovos for five generations in Chamusca, one of the towns where the dessert might have originated. The family uses a recipe from Garrido’s great-great grandmother, Ana Cuca. Garrido says her great-great grandmother likely learned the recipe from nuns who made the sweet inside their convent and sold it as a means of fundraising.

Even when Garrido was a young girl, only the upper classes could afford such an elaborate dessert (lampreia de ovos requires at least two dozen eggs and takes about a day to make). “I still remember my great-grandmother assembling it,” says Garrido. “She was a widow, and became a cook and sweet maker in order to support her family; she used to bake lampreia de ovos for wealthy families on special occasions.” In Chamusca, some sweet-makers produced lampreia not only for Christmas and other festivities, but also as a means of paying for house-calls from the doctor.

After 1986, the year in which Portugal joined the European Union, the general population’s living standards gradually began to improve. “Once the people started having more economic power, they started to emulate the behavior of the higher classes, and also their gastronomic traditions,” explains Gomes. Their Christmas tables, too, became more luxurious, with lampreia de ovos becoming a more widespread tradition

.

The egg threads at the bottom of the lamprey are also known as “angel hair.” COURTESY OF LUÍSA GARRIDO

As lampreia de ovos became more widespread, small confectioners like Garrido found themselves competing with mass-produced versions made by larger companies. Garrido admits that her lampreia is more expensive (25–30€ per kilogram) than most varieties sold in supermarkets, but she says its high price is determined by the amount of time needed to prepare it. “The full process takes around 24 hours to complete,” she says.

Even if it is such a laborious process, Garrido refuses to resort to any shortcuts that might compromise the quality of the sweet. To her, time and love are the key ingredients. Her clientele values this dedication as well. “The taste is totally different from the industrial version,” says Carolina Laurentino, one of Garrido’s customers. “Even if its price is quite higher when compared with the supermarket one, it is definitely worth every single penny.”

Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink.

SEA MONSTER SIZE COMPARISON LINES UP AQUATIC SCI-FI BEASTS
by Matthew Hart
Oct 19 2021 

Science fiction universes are often full of ocean worlds and watery beasts. Despite their ubiquity, however, it’s hard to say which aquatic sci-fi monsters should (theoretically) scare the squid ink out of us the most. A new video comparing the sizes of oceanic sci-fi baddies from YouTuber and animator MetaBallStudios now gives us some sense, thankfully. And the comparison serves as a reminder that Bruce from Jaws is a guppy compared to a lot of other creatures lurking in the imaginary depths.

MetaBallStudios (or MBS) recently posted the above video to YouTube. For those unfamiliar, MBS—a Spanish animator by the name of Alvaro Gracia Montoya—has created countless size comparison videos before. Including many that showcase ships and other vehicles from the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek.

In this size comparison, Montoya lines up dozens and dozens of the most popular sci-fi sea creatures; beginning with Sheldon J. Plankton (2 inches tall) and SpongeBob (4 inches tall) from SpongeBob SquarePants. The fact Montoya has included both of these characters, incidentally, hints that this list of “monsters” includes a lot of friendly fictional sea creatures along with frightening ones.

MetaBallStudios

Speaking of which, there are some genuine monsters from the deep in this lineup. After cruising past the Mosasaurus from Jurassic World (55 feet long) and the Megalodon from The Meg (75 feet long), things start to get truly gigantic. The Leviathan from Gears of War dwarfs the other creatures at 255 feet long, for one.

The sea monsters continue to grow in hugeness as Montoya shows Leatherback from Pacific Rim (265 feet tall), Godzilla from MonsterVerse (393 feet tall) and even H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, which Montoya notes is only described as being “hundreds of meters” tall. Things grow downright incredible, however, when Karathen from Aquaman appears at nearly two miles long, soon followed by Genbu from Naruto at approximately 3.1 miles long.

MetaBallStudios

As for the biggest sea monsters in Montoya’s lineup? The second place finisher is Kraken from Warhammer 40,000 at roughly 25 miles long. And, finally, SCP-169 from the SCP Foundation; a creative fiction website detailing top-secret investigations, research, and containment policies of the paranormal. SCP-169, Montoya shows, is an astounding 3,100 miles long—give or take about 1,800 miles. Which makes us wonder: If these creatures are fict

THE 17-YEAR-OLD WHO INVENTED SCIENCE FICTION

Oct 22, 2021

It’s June 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. A few months earlier, a giant volcano eruption in the Pacific had blown an enormous cloud of dirt into the air that affected weather around the globe. In Europe, 1816 would become known as the Year Without Summer.

It made what should have been a mild and pleasant stay for five visiting English folk a blustery and unseasonably foul June.

A particularly bad stretch led them to come up with some alternative entertainment, one now familiar to modern campers: telling ghost stories. But these weren’t the ghost stories we know now of hitchhikers and chainsaw-wielding loners: these were German ghost stories collected and published for the sole purpose of scaring the pants off educated capital-R Romantics.


After a few nights of reading stories, one of the five suggests a new pastime: “let’s all try our hand at writing one.” And over the next few days, that’s what they did.

One of the stories would later be published as The Vampyre, spelled with a y, by one Dr. Polidori. It would be the most famous and influential vampire story until Bram Stoker picked up his pen.

Amazingly, though, The Vampyre was only the second-most famous story to come out of this rainy day exercise. The champion would be the story of a fringe medical doctor who got the terrifying idea to put together parts of human corpses and see what happens if you zapped them with electricity.

Frankenstein (Or Modern Prometheus), by Mary Shelley, appeared to its author in a flash by the stormy shores of Lake Geneva. At the time, though, her name was Mary Godwin, a 17-year-old woman who’d never before written a novel, who had joined the party for an illicit rendezvous with one of the most famous poets of the day, Percy Shelley. And, in imagining the story of a scientist bent on creating life, she herself gave birth to a brand-new genre of literature we now call science fiction.

The five participants in this, the most famous story-telling game of all time, each had a role to play in the genesis of Frankenstein. The most famous was Lord Byron, a poet of such fame AND infamy, for both his artistic and amorous exploits, that people would crowd outside in the hopes of getting a glimpse of him. Number two of five was Byron’s personal doctor, John Polidori, recently the valedictorian of his medical school class at the University of Edinburgh.

The rest of the entourage included Percy Shelley, the up-and-coming poet in his own right who Byron wanted to meet. And of course, his mistress, Mary Godwin, who would soon become Mary Shelley once Percy’s first wife was out of the picture.

And last but not least, Mary Godwin’s half-sister Jane Clairmont. Though Jane was the least prominent of the five, the group found themselves together at Lake Geneva because of her. Jane was a renowned beauty with no particularly attractive prospects. Perhaps as a last sally against an unappealing future, she wrote what can only be described as a series of saucy fan letters to Lord Byron in the hopes of starting up some sort of an affair. This one laid it out as plain as could be ventured:

“If a woman whose reputation had yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control she should throw herself upon your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you these many years, if she should secure you secrecy and safety…could you betray her or would you be silent as the grave?”

Translation: Dad’s not watching and I don’t have a boyfriend. If I came around, could you keep it on the down-low?

And Bryon, being Byron, was game to get up to a little something something, though on distinctly Byronian terms as he would say later:

“I never loved her nor pretended to love her, but a man is a man, and if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours, there is but one way…”

So while Jane was beautiful and more than willing, her beauty alone couldn’t seal the deal: he had his pick of women from every rank and country in Europe. But what Jane had, that Bryon’s other pursuers didn’t, was a connection to Percy Shelley.

Shelley had made a name for himself as the English poet to watch in just a few short years, and Byron wanted to know him. And Shelley had been eyeing Jane’s half-sister Mary, who herself was looking to get out of her father’s house and out from under her stepmother’s foot.

So Jane, God love her, concocts a three-way rendezvous: If Mary comes with her, she will get to be with Percy. And if Percy comes, then Byron will join them. And then she will get some…shall we say “quality time” with the most infamous lover on the continent.

Both Byron and Mary were willing to travel across Europe to get to know Percy better. And why was he, himself interested in Mary? Partly because of who her parents were. Percy idolized both Mary’s father William Godwin, a renowned political philosopher sometimes called “the father of anarchism,” AND her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women and sometimes called the first feminist.

 


This all leads us back to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein’s soon-to-be Teen Mom. Before this fateful party game, Mary was not an author in her own right, but she did have serious reverence for one, namely her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft died from complications giving birth to Mary, and her shadow loomed large, especially early in Mary’s life.

One scene sums it up pretty nicely. The young Mary, around 10 or 11, would go to the cemetery and sit by her mother’s grave and read her works. She was so intimately knowledgeable of her mother’s writing and life, that to be compared favorably with her was the highest compliment.

“Mrs K says that I am grown very much like my mother…this is the most flattering thing anyone could say to me.”

Wollstonecraft was already a legend, one that Percy Shelley revered almost as much as Mary did. Both Mary and Percy were deeply influenced by Wollstonecraft’s call to live lives unfettered by society’s demands. So when Percy had a chance to meet the daughter of the most influential woman of her age, he took it. And the young woman he discovered blew him away.

“I do not think there is an excellence at which human nature can arrive that she does not indisputably possess…How deeply did I feel my inferiority, how willingly do I confess myself far surpassed in originality, in genuine elevation and magnificence of the intellectual nature.”

Their relationship happened fast and it was passionate. They schemed to run away together and read poetry and make love and in general live the life that the Romantics dreamed of.

When Mary openly professed her love to Percy, it was, of course, at a visit to her mother’s gravesite.

Shortly thereafter, Mary, Percy, and Jane travel to Lake Geneva to meet Byron. It was on this trip that Percy began to influence Mary’s sense of her own literary potential and also a possible topic: scientific experimentation.

As a student at Oxford, Percy’s rooms looked like a chemistry lab crossed with a gentleman’s library. He was a nut for science, particularly the then-fringe topics of human anatomy, biochemistry, and the just-being-figured-out force of electricity.

“What a mighty instrument would electricity be in the hands who knew how to wield it, in what manner to direct its omnipotent energies, and command an indefinite quality of the fluid.”

Percy’s characterization of electricity as a “fluid” captures the best understanding of his day. Forty years after Benjamin Franklin showed that lightning itself was electricity, an anatomist and physicist named Luigi Galvini showed that, somehow, electricity was involved in the nervous systems of animals by stringing up frogs on kites and watching them twitch after being struck by lightning.

Conjecture and theories about electricity’s connection to life excited Shelley, and Mary got an earful of anything Shelley was excited about. It’s easy to see then how the strange weather they experienced that summer in the Alps got Mary’s narrative juices flowing:

“The thunders that visit us are grander and more terrific that I have ever seen before. We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens.”

Basically, her time that summer was spent listening to Byron and Shelley blab about stuff they were interested in while it rained. A few days of that and you’d dream about creating a monster that would kill everybody, too.

“Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of those, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.”

This “discovery and communication of the principle of life” probably refers to not only Galvini’s experiment with frogs, but also the even more audacious and frankly bizarre attempts by Giovanni Aldini to revive human corpses by hooking them up to a primitive battery and just seeing what happened.

Not much did happen, but a slight flap of the eyelids and the twitch of an arm got the scientifically minded of Europe yapping, even a couple of poets on vacation with their mistresses. Both Byron and Shelley were excited by these new possibilities and saw them as further evidence that man was ready to finally master himself and nature.

Mary, though, wasn’t so sure that everything was just going to work out. Her mother had died in childbirth and she herself had already lost a young child. But she definitely saw the allure of reanimation, as it was called, and even dreamed about it:

“Dream that my little baby came to life again. That it had only been cold and that we rubbed it by the fire and it lived. I awake and find no baby. I think about that little thing all day.”

If Mary was a little darker than her fellow story-tellers that June, well, spending your time reading your mom’s books on her grave and being unable to shake the memory of a dead baby will do that to a person.

Luckily, darkness would be the order of the day for their story competition, so she had an edge over her sunnier counterparts. Apparently even two notorious windbags like Byron and Shelley got tired of hearing themselves talk. So the group turned to a collection of German ghost stories that Byron had brought along in his specially designed carriage built to function as a traveling library.

The book was called Fantasmagoria and in it were eight stories with titles like “Death’s Head,” “Death’s Bride,” “The Fated Hour,” and “The Black Chamber.” Basically these were stories about spirits and ghosts and possessions and dark secrets meant to evoke that strange combination of fright and pleasure that can be so thrilling. The closest modern equivalent would be a horror movie that has some sort of vaguely supernatural element, like The Ring or Final Destination. Anyway, after they had burned through those stories, Byron turned to the group with an idea:

“We will each write our own ghost story.”

It must have been an exciting moment for Mary. Here she was, the daughter of a great writer, being asked by the most famous writer of his day to enter into a friendly little writing competition that oh-by-the-way includes this dreamboat you are trying to steal away from his wife.

“I busied myself to think of a story, one which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake thrilling horror — one to make readers dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beating of the heart.”

Here she is with this great chance to show what she can do and of course she ends up with…a pretty good case of writer’s block:

“‘Have you thought of a story?’ I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.”

And so, in frantically casting about for ideas, she decides to build off all the talk about electricity and how it seemed to be tangled up with how humans operate:

“Perhaps a corpse could be reanimated: Galvinism had given token to such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and imbued with vital warmth.”

With this spark of an idea, she would later write that her unconscious did the rest:

“I placed my head on the pillow, I did not sleep…My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that around in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, at the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir…”

Mary almost immediately told her idea to Shelley, who, along with Byron, had already given up on his own entry in the contest. He encouraged her to expand it from a short story into a book. Percy’s support of her was unflagging during the long process that brought Frankenstein to print in 1818, including being intimately involved in her drafting and editing process.

“I sent you my dearest another proof — which arrived tonight in looking it over there appeared to me some abruptness which I have endeavored to supply but I am tired and not very clear-headed so I give you carte blanche to make what alterations you will.”

Frankenstein was published anonymously at first, and Percy’s known interest in the subject matter and the prominence of his name caused some to speculate that he in fact wrote the novel. But while his fingerprints are there, the book is Mary’s.

Considering all the pieces that came together to get Mary to lay her head down and dream of Victor Frankenstein, it’s not that surprising that she had the idea — but without Percy guiding her through the process of editing and using his connections to secure a publisher and, frankly, BELIEVING in her abilities it’s quite likely that the world would never have Frankenstein. It was a creative mentorship/romance that would last until his untimely death, and in Mary’s later description, could be the stuff of romantic poetry:

“For eight years, I communicated with unlimited freedom with one whose genius awakened and guided my thoughts. I conversed with him; obtained new lights from him and my mind was satisfied.”

It’s odd to think that all the boldfaced names associated with the Lake Geneva group — Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft — would ultimately be eclipsed by the name “Frankenstein.” So, why has it endured?

Some of it is the elegant simplicity of the set-up: mad scientist brings dead to life: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? But what’s been more influential than this particular story is the entire genre that Mary Shelley created when she wrote Frankenstein. With one foot in horror and one in modern science, Shelley, for all intents and purposes, invented science fiction, a way to tell new stories that didn’t rely on ghosts and magic, instead speculating on what science might actually make possible — and what that might mean for humanity.

The scientific revolution that had been chugging along in Europe was finally descending from the heavens and astronomy to the more human scales of chemistry and biology. Medicine as a scientific discipline was in its infancy. I mean, it was only in 1772 — barely 20 years before Mary was born — that science figured out oxygen was even a thing.

And so, 17-year-old Mary Shelley is the right woman at the right time, a half-romantic/half-realist who created a half-man/half monster during a dark and stormy summer in Lake Geneva. She was the first to capture the evolving world in literature, changing the fantastical “What If?” question of gothic horror novels into a more scientifically grounded “What now?”

Today, stories of science-run-amok surround us — The Terminator, Minority Report, Margaret Atwood’s Mad Adam trilogy — and they can all be traced to Mary Shelley’s questions: What will we do if something we’ve made turns against us? What happens when what we create escapes our control? And she realized that the biggest question isn’t what if our efforts fail, but what if they succeed?

“Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken.”

The above piece comes from our former Annotated podcast series, originally aired in August 2017. For further reading on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, dig into the show notes for the episode.

Frankness About Frankenstein

While Mary Shelley makes no mention of any electrical equipment in her novel Frankenstein, it is likely that the story was inspired by real-life events with which Mary would have been familiar.

Joe Schwarcz PhD 

MCGILL UNIVERSITY

| 14 Jul 2021
History

In virtually every film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic, Frankenstein, the Creature is brought to life with a jolt of electricity with sparks flying all over. Often there are also the requisite vigorously bubbling flasks associated with the lab of a mad scientist. The fact, however, is that the novel only provides a passing reference to the moment of creation: “It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”

It seems that film directors took the word “spark” literally and interpreted the “instruments of life” to mean some sort of electric generator. While Mary Shelley, who was only eighteen when she wrote the novel in 1818, makes no mention of any electrical equipment, it is likely that the story of Frankenstein was inspired by real-life events with which young Mary would have been familiar. At the time, gruesome public demonstrations of “galvanism,” drew large audiences and were much talked about. In the preface of the 1831 edition,” Mary cites the work of Luigi Galvani as an inspiration for “Frankenstein” and some commentators have suggested that she may even have been taken by her science-loving father to one of Giovanni Aldini’s spectacles.

Giovanni Aldini, being a nephew of Luigi Galvani, had a natural interest in “galvanism,” the application of an electric current to body tissues. It was back in the 1780s that Galvani carried out the experiment that would forever enshrine his name in physics texts. By poking a dead frog simultaneously with rods made of different metals, he had managed to make its muscles twitch! Galvani misinterpreted his finding, believing that his manipulations had released some form of “animal electricity.” It was Galvani’s countryman Alessandro Volta, who correctly concluded that the dissimilar metals, and not the frog, were responsible for the generation of an electric current. The frog was just providing a medium through which current could flow, and it was this flow of electricity that caused its muscles to contract.

Aldini was fascinated by the effects his uncle had discovered and managed to convince the authorities in Bologna to donate the bodies of executed criminals for further study of galvanism. While he was a dedicated scientist, Aldini was also a showman, carrying out his experiments in a theatrical atmosphere open to spectators. He stimulated the severed heads of cows, horses, dogs, and people with an electric current and demonstrated that the teeth could be made to chatter and the eyes roll. But Aldini’s most dramatic experiments involved intact bodies.

Perhaps his most famous “performance” took place in 1803 at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. George Foster had been sentenced to hang for murder, and the judge had decreed, in a fashion not unusual for the times, that his body be used for anatomical dissection. In front of a large crowd of doctors and other spectators, Aldini went to work. As always, he generated an electric current with a “voltaic pile,” the forerunner of the modern battery. Developed by Volta, based on Galvani’s observation, the pile consisted of a set of alternating zinc and silver plates separated by pieces of paper soaked in salt or sulphuric acid. In such an arrangement electrons flow from the zinc to the silver, generating a current.

Aldini connected a pair of metal rods to the top and bottom of the pile and proceeded to use them to prod Foster’s body. When he attached one probe to the ear and the other to the mouth, the jaw quivered and an eye opened. But the most spectacular result was produced when Aldini maneuvered one of the probes to the rectum. Foster’s body went into convulsions and his arms flew up! It seemed to the spectators that the dead man was on the verge of standing up! Of course, he did nothing of the sort, but the audience did leave with some novel insight into the dramatic effects that an electric current could produce on muscular systems.

While such demonstrations may have inspired the writing of Frankenstein, it is clear that Mary Shelley was not comfortable with the idea of scientists playing God by attempting to create life. While Victor Frankenstein, who incidentally was not a doctor, is at first successful, his Creation turns evil when he is shunned by society. Shelley’s message seems to be a warning to be careful when taking a new path because it may not lead to where you want to go. Indeed, that point has been capitalized on by alarmists with expressions such as “Frankenfoods” and “Frankendrugs” in reference to cloning, genetically modified foods and mRNA vaccines. While Mary Shelley did have concerns about the directions in which science could be heading, she was not against progress. Frankenstein’s experiment was well-intentioned, in that he aimed "to banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death." Indeed, experiments that explore new avenues come with risk, but there is also risk in taking no risk. No risk, no progress.

The Davis Strait vampires: Chilling (but completely true) events from Canadian history

The grand Montreal mansion that played host to horrific acts of human experimentation, and why you've probably walked over a mass grave without knowing it

Author of the article:Tristin Hopper
Publishing date:Oct 29, 2021 •

From a series of 1910 novelty photos by the Canadian amateur photographer John Boyd. Those are real human bones he dressed up, if you're wondering. 

PHOTO BY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA

Most Halloween stories involve ghosts, monsters or other unprovable phenomena. This may be fine for other countries, but Canada is a giant expanse of fog, snow, isolation and madness: We generally don’t need tall tales to get creeped out.

Below are 10 tales pulled directly from Canadian history that aren’t just bone-chilling, but entirely true.

The putrescent sea monster

It’s to be expected that the West Coast of Canada would lay claim to its own legendary sea monster: Everywhere from Lake Okanagan to Scotland’s Loch Ness has done that. But cadborosaurus is different than its contemporaries. Rather than being known only through a scattered handful of witness accounts and grainy photographs, cadborosaurus shows itself in the form of monstrous rotting corpses that regularly turn up in B.C. waters. One of the most famous — found in the stomach of a sperm whale in 1937 — was a snake-like creature with fins and a reptilian head that really, really looked like a baby sea monster. The most likely explanation of all the cadborosaurus discoveries is that they’re simply the bodies of conventional animals rendered into unearthly beasts by the effects of decomposition. As recently as 2008, a decayed raccoon found on a New York State beach was similarly spurring claims of a terrifying new sea monster.

The “Naden Harbour” carcass, found in 1935, one of the most cited alleged specimens of cadborosaurus. 

PHOTO BY PHOTO BY G.V. BOORMAN

The Davis Strait vampires

Eighty years before the sinking of the Titanic, it was the fate of a whaling vessel to plunge into the freezing Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg off the Canadian east coast. But the survivors of the Shannon soon found themselves entering a far more visceral hell than anything faced by the passengers and crew of the Titanic. Left to cling to the vessel’s half-sunk hull, the sailors faced a delirious death by dehydration. That is, until someone thought to drink the blood of one of their deceased comrades. “His blood was then divided among us, and that draught, which at one time our hearts would have sickened to look at, and we should have turned from with horror and disgust now became welcome and palatable,” one survivor wrote later.

The day the world ended

The sun rose normally into a blue sky on May 19, 1780. Starting just after breakfast, however, the sky was gradually devoured by an amoebic blackness which blocked out the sun, sent animals into panicked confusion and led communities throughout British North America to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the end-times were upon them. “The sun’s decline may be a sign, some great event is nigh,” reads a surviving poem from the event. The culprit was a massive forest fire in what is now Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. Although cities across North America have in recent years experienced the spectre of skies choked with wildfire smoke, the 1780 Dark Day was well beyond anything seen in modern times: Rivers ran black and the unilluminated world of the 18th century was forced to stop work. Until the skies cleared, a whole swath of the continent was left with the terrifying thought that the sun may never rise again.

The mansion of horrors

Ravenscrag was one of the grandest homes in Canada when completed in 1863, and the grandeur was all the more pronounced because of its mountainous location overlooking the growing city of Montreal. Throughout the 1950s, this imposing stone estate would become the site of some of the most horrifying examples of human medical experimentation to occur on Canadian soil. During that era the mansion was a psychiatric hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute, where patients were unwittingly enlisted as guinea pigs for a series of secret CIA-funded mind re-programming experiments spearheaded by psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron. Patients were given reckless amounts of psychedelic drugs, placed into induced comas and subjected to electroshock therapy in an attempt to reduce their brains into a primitive state from which it could then be rewired. All the experiments did, however, was plunge patients into an emotionally shattered fugue state from which they never emerged.

Ravenscrag 

PHOTO BY MCCORD MUSEUM

The haunted ambassador

Ghosts are big business in Canada. Ghost tours, ghost hotels, haunted restaurants; even the Royal Canadian Mint has cashed in with a series of ghost-themed coin sets. So don’t be surprised if many of the country’s most popular ghost stories have been ginned up for touristic consumption. But it’s worth taking notice when a man renowned for his powers of observation reports an encounter with a spectre . Kevin Vickers was the parliamentary Sergeant at Arms whose pinpoint marksmanship famously helped stop a 2014 terrorist attack on the House of Commons. Later, as Canada’s Ambassador to Ireland, the ever-vigilant Vickers would tackle a suspicious protester at a ceremony commemorating British dead from the Easter Rising. It was while living in Canada’s official ambassadorial residence in Dublin that Vickers reported hearing footsteps, laboured breathing and even the occasional rattling of a chain. “I never believed in ghosts. Until I arrived here,” he wrote in a Facebook post.


The Pacific apocalypse

George Vancouver is known to history as the mariner who first charted the coast of what is now British Columbia and lent his name to its largest city. Less known is that Vancouver’s voyage coincided with the immediate aftermath of one of the most apocalyptic single events in human history. A smallpox outbreak originating in New England during the American Revolutionary War had surged westwards along Indigenous trade routes, wiping out whole populations before they had even seen a European. As a result, when Vancouver arrived in the Salish Sea in 1792, what had once been one of the world’s wealthiest and most populous regions was now mostly ruins, unburied bodies and small bands of shattered survivors. “The skull, limbs, ribs and backbones, or some other vestiges of the human body, were found in many places, promiscuously scattered about the beach in great numbers,” Vancouver wrote in a diary entry.

The floating feet

Almost everyone knows about the “floating feet”; the rash of disembodied human feet discovered on Salish Sea beaches. The mystery of the feet has been solved: They largely belong to Vancouverites who died by suicide by jumping off Fraser River bridges. The victims’ bodies initially sunk to the bottom, but as decay set in the feet broke free and were carried to the surface by the buoyant running shoes into which they were still tightly laced. But there’s an extra horror to the “floating feet” when you consider that B.C. beaches were likely strewn with disembodied feet for decades before anyone noticed. Sneakers were ubiquitous on the feet of Vancouverites — and Vancouverite suicide victims — since at least the 1980s. But before a little girl unwittingly discovered the first “floating foot” in 2007 (thus kickstarting an immediate wave of similar discoveries) nobody had considered that the not-unusual sight of a sneaker bobbing in the surf of a British Columbia beach contained skeletal human remains.

In this 2008 photo, Ken Johnston and wife Diane show where they found a running shoe with a human foot inside. 

PHOTO BY GLENN BAGLO / VANCOUVER SUN

The headless murderer

Canada was founded at the tail end of an era where public executions were the norm. Right up until 1870, Canadian cities regularly saw the gathering of large festive crowds who hurled insults and taunts at the rapists and murderers condemned to twitch at the end of a rope. But the business had long been moved behind closed doors by the time Canada saw its most gruesome execution. Montreal woman Tommasina Teolis’ crime was to have successfully ordered a contract killing on her husband, an act for which she was sentenced to die. The executioner did his due diligence and got Teolis’ weight from her jailers so he could calculate how far to drop her and ensure a humane death from a snapped neck. There was just one problem: Teolis had added 40 pounds to her official weight while in prison. When the trapdoor opened, Teolis’ extra bulk severed her head clean from her body, leaving the event’s small coterie of onlookers to witness the sickening sight of a headless corpse loudly impacting the ground while spurting blood from the neck.

The mass grave beneath your feet

The events of last summer showed in tragic detail just how much of the Canadian landscape abounds with forgotten graves. But if you’re reading this in a Canadian city founded before 1860, chances are good you’ve unwittingly walked across a mass grave left behind by one the many devastating epidemics that battered the settlers of early Canada. Toronto’s St. James Park — a favourite place for wedding photos — is a former “cholera pit” containing the hastily buried bodies of as many as 5,000 people. Montreal put a Costco near a mass grave of more than 6,000 refugees of the Irish Potato Famine killed by typhus. Kingston, Ont.’s McBurney Park is a pleasant collection of playgrounds, basketball courts and picnic benches set atop hundreds of graves from the early 19th century. The spectre of gravestones and human bones working their way to the surface is apparently so common that locals have taken to dubbing it “Skeleton Park.”

Toronto Mayor John Tory pictured in Toronto’s St. James Park in 2015. The ground around him is saturated with bones. 

PHOTO BY ERNEST DOROSZUK/TORONTO SUN/POSTMEDIA NETWORK

The nightmare voyage

The saga of the SS Princess Sophia abounds with some particularly nightmarish details. Sophia was a B.C. passenger liner that became grounded on a reef just off the coast of Alaska in 1918. While the Sophia was quickly surrounded by would-be rescue boats, rough conditions meant that none could do anything except shout encouragement at the 364 trapped aboard the groaning ship. For two days, the passengers occupied a terrifying limbo between life and death before the sea finally came for them just as darkness began to fall on the night of October 24. Not one passenger survived, and storms shielded the carnage from nearby vessels, leaving investigators only a few chilling clues to the ship’s final moments. The panicked last message from the wireless operator. The recovered water-damaged letter containing a hastily scrawled final will . And the dozens of oil-blackened desiccated bodies that washed up on surrounding beaches for months after the disaster, many of them wearing watches that all stopped at the same time

.

The Princess Sophia pictured alone amid stormy waters only hours before its final plunge. 

PHOTO BY STATE OF ALASKA DIGITAL ARCHIVES

If you need more terrifying Canadian stories that actually happened, check out our previous edition, in which we explore ghost soldiers, Arctic zombies and criminals with near-supernatural powers.

What techno-anarchists of the crypto world got totally wrong

Photo: AFP.

 Updated: 20 Oct 2021

Andy Mukherjee

Digital stablecoins backed by state-run currencies are what work

The techno-anarchist pioneers of cryptocurrencies believed they were creating a new form of unregulated, decentralized money. They couldn’t have been more wrong. While Bitcoin and Ethereum did succeed in spawning a highly speculative alternative asset class that has come to enjoy wider use and popularity, the innovation that is really set to challenge fiat cash is stablecoin: the less turbulent corridor through which investors reach volatile digital tokens.

Far from being an alternative to state-issued money, the likes of Tether and USD Coin are pegged to government-backed legal tender such as the dollar. These tokens allow investors to switch in and out of their cryptocurrency assets without having to interact each time with a bank wary of unwittingly enabling money-laundering, terror financing, child pornography or extortion hacking. Indeed, blockchain-based clones of national currencies started becoming popular as crypto exchanges took off in late 2017; many of them did not have licences to accept fiat money.

But with payment networks like Visa Inc allowing customers to settle claims using USD Coin, stablecoins have begun to acquire mainstream appeal, clocking $3 trillion in transactions in the first half of 2021, according to McKinsey & Co. Although this is a fraction of the money moving through state-blessed banking channels—annual cross-border payments alone were $130 trillion before the pandemic—private-sector players now have a ‘first mover’ advantage over governments, the consultancy says.

In China, the monetary authority’s pilot has at least made a modest start, distributing the equivalent of $40 million of digital yuan via lottery ahead of an expected debut around 2022’s Beijing Winter Olympics. Most other big central banks are nowhere near coming up with their own official digital cash for widespread, public use.

How much more ground will authorities surrender before offering competing products, or introducing regulation to clip the wings of the private sector? The answer has broad implications both for the payment industry and beyond. Funds parked with Tether have grown by 230% this year, according to Fitch Ratings, which reckons that on current trends, stablecoins could become a bigger holder of short-term US commercial paper than money market mutual funds in two or three years. While Diem, the upcoming Facebook-backed stablecoin, has said that it will invest predominantly in government securities, alternative allocation strategies are possible and, “depending on its scale, the operator may become an important participant in other short-term markets," Fitch says.

Stakes are high for overall financial stability, especially if a large number of people decide to simultaneously cash out of a popular stablecoin amid scepticism about its true exchange value. Tether, which had claimed for years that its digital tokens were fully backed by fiat currencies, will pay $41 million to settle allegations that they weren’t. From June to September 2017, there was never more than $61.5 million backing Tether, even as roughly 442 million coins were circulating at one point.

Money is valuable only when those who have it and those who want it in exchange for something else aren’t plagued by doubts. This ‘no-questions-asked’ property of sovereign currencies may not hold for unregulated stablecoins, according to Yale School of Management finance professor Gary Gorton and Federal Reserve attorney Jeffery Zhang. The researchers recently drew a parallel with the pre-Civil War era of wildcat banking, when a Tennessee lender’s bank notes were discounted by as much as 20% in Philadelphia.

Unsurprisingly, regulatory scrutiny is now squarely directed at stablecoins. Within its own borders, each country may decide how it wants to regulate these odd creatures, which settle claims even though they’re neither a commercial bank’s money nor a sovereign’s IOU. Consultations are ongoing over a set of international rules to govern any stablecoin arrangement that is “systemic or is likely to become systemic."

Stablecoins are here to stay. Since they provide liquidity and a perceived “safe haven" for investors during times of heightened crypto volatility, McKinsey expects their recent growth spurt to continue, at least as long as the overall market for digital tokens is expanding. Central banks’ own paperless cash may, therefore, have to learn to coexist with private money.

That’s bound to cause friction. The state playing second fiddle in monetary affairs may be anathema to Beijing, which at least partly explains why China’s central bank is more determined than its peers to launch a digital yuan. Other countries appear to be still largely complacent about their ability to domesticate wildcats. One hopes they aren’t already too late.

Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services