Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: “Normie” – The Lake Norman Monster

I just started following the Lake Norman Monster’s Twitter feed (LKNmonster) and I gotta say – I’m a little skeptical. “Happy Thanksgiving from the Lake Norman Monster”? Really? If I’d wanted to follow the Lake Monster’s personal assistant, I would’ve gotten her name from whoever designed the Flash intro for LakeNormanMonster.com.

In a way, it almost makes sense – first sighted in 1982, the Lake Norman Monster is still in its 20s. Hell, Lake Norman itself didn’t even exist until the early ‘60s, when the Duke Power Company dammed up the Catawba River and built a hydroelectric plant along the shores of the resulting 34-mile-long body of water. The lake was even named after then-sitting Duke Power President, Norman Cocke. (I wonder if the town would have been quite as eager to spread stories of the Lake Cocke Monster.) The Mcguire nuclear station is also positioned along Lake Norman, and both power plants vent hot steam into the lake.

The monster was first sighted by a group of lollygagging high schoolers, who were no doubt playing grab ass in one of the lake’s fission-warmed hot spots. At one point, the teens saw what appeared to be a mass of leaves and floating debris drifting along in the current. They also noticed that, like everything else in 1982, it gave off a strong fetid odor. Suddenly, the thing splashed and submerged, leaving only a cloud of thick, reeky mud. Later reported sightings find the monster surfacing, usually out of a pocket of boggy filth, to reveal the stereotypical long neck and dinosaur head of classic reptilian lake lurkers the world over.

I know what you’re thinking (because I thought it, too). Clearly the legend here must be that some hapless lizard ventured to close to some broken canister of power plant ooze and went all teenage mutant stinky Normie. But, in fact, what little legend there is simply regards the beast as a mystery – and not without some reason. In the 1990s, baffled scientists found the lake teeming with a non-native species of fresh water jellyfish, and in 2000, the Department of Wildlife was called in to remove two alligators (although these were most likely abandoned pets). It only makes sense that, with the lake at the heart of these other zoological mysteries, the legend of Normie would persist.

As for the 21 years between the creation of the lake and the first Normie sighting – it’s just enough time for a generation of kids to be born. Kids disconnected from the lake’s unspectacular genesis. Kids who grew up along Lake Norman’s shores and read fantastical stories from older times, set in faraway places. Kids who slept with their windows open, breathing in the damp air blown off the lake and dreaming up fantastical stories of their own. Stories set in their time and their place. Stories they parlayed into visions.

And the Twitter feed? Perhaps it cheapens the mystery a bit. But it also represents America’s beautiful, enduring reliance on folktales, even in the face of strict character limits.

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