Lynne Kirton · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Loch Morar and Morag

added29 August 2026

The deepest freshwater lake in the British Isles — over a thousand feet, deeper than Loch Ness. A creature called Morag appears in local accounts from 1887. The best-known incident is from 1969, when two fishermen said something some thirty feet long struck their boat and one of them fired a rifle at it. The statement was made to police and recorded.

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56.95000, -5.67222

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DebunkedWhite

The Surgeon's Photograph

The most reproduced photograph in the history of cryptozoology: a long neck above the water of Loch Ness, published by the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934 and credited to a respectable London gynaecologist, Robert Kenneth Wilson — hence the surgeon. The neck was a Woolworth's toy submarine with a head of plastic wood, about a foot high. The story surfaced in papers in 1975, and in 1993 the ninety-year-old Christian Spurling, stepson of the hoax's organiser Marmaduke Wetherell, described building the model. Wetherell was paying back the Daily Mail, which had publicly ridiculed his own monster footprints — prints left by an umbrella stand made from a hippopotamus foot.

70 km away

FolkloreYellow

Loch Ness

A deep loch in the Scottish Highlands holding more water than every lake in England and Wales combined. Monster reports date from 1933; sonar sweeps and DNA surveys have found no such animal.

83 km away

CryptidOrange

Ben Macdui and the Fear Liath Mòr

Britain's second-highest mountain, where experienced climbers have reported the same thing since the early twentieth century: a sense of presence, the sound of footsteps following in mist, and a panic that drives them down. Professor Norman Collie described his own experience publicly in 1925, at real risk to his reputation. The thing is called the Big Grey Man; an explanation involving echoes and the Brocken spectre exists, and does not convince those it has happened to.

122 km away

More: Cryptid

CryptidYellow

The Kyshtym dwarf, Alyoshenka

In May 1996 Tamara Prosvirina, a resident of the village of Kaolinovy near Kyshtym in the Urals, brought home a creature about twenty-five centimetres long with an elongated skull and large eyes. She called it Alyoshenka, fed it, and told neighbours a son had come to live with her. She was taken to a psychiatric hospital; the body was filmed and photographed in the meantime, and that autumn it vanished without trace. What makes the case unusual is the sheer volume of material: video, photographs, dozens of interviews. Later genetic work points to human remains — most likely a premature infant with severe developmental defects.

CryptidYellow

The Goatman of Maryland

A half-goat, half-man with an axe, told of in Prince George's County outside Washington. The legend took shape in 1971, when a local paper ran a piece about a missing dog and rumours of a creature near Fletchertown Road; the article was picked up, and within a couple of years the story had acquired an escaped experiment from the agricultural research centre next door. The centre is real and still operating, which has helped the legend considerably — it has a building you can point at.

CryptidYellow

The Melon Heads

Creatures with disproportionately large heads living in the woods — a legend told in three American states at once, Ohio, Michigan and Connecticut, each with its own backstory. The Ohio version is the most widespread: supposedly children from a closed institution for hydrocephalus patients who escaped after a fire. No such institution and no such fire appear in the records. What is interesting is the rest: three unconnected regions invented almost the same image, and in all three it explains the same thing — that there is someone in the woods who was once hidden there.