There's A Monster There

Lake Merritt is a place, for anyone in Oakland, both at the center and periphery of our lives. It is the center of many of Oakland’s parks and is a beloved place for many in the city to spend their leisure time. And yet, the waters of the Lake, for most of us, are often neglected our more keen sight. We might spot a few birds, admiring the aimless floating of the white pelicans, but we might not think much of the lake water itself. We’ve been told it is dirty and that it stinks and that the water is to be avoided. While the caution toward the lake water might be a good practice, the world of the lake, and its inhabitants, hold within them another part of the story of Oakland, and how this city so essentially is connected to the rest of the world.

This excerpt below on the mystery of the Lake Merritt Monster, recently published in the Oakland Review of Books (ORB for short), is my small attempt and trying to honor the lake, the Jewel of Oakland. Enjoy!

From what one can gather from accounts over the years, the creature in Lake Merritt has a long protruding neck, like a brontosaurus or the Loch Ness monster. “Sooner or later every loch must have its monster,” wrote Oakland Tribune columnist Jack Burroughs in June of 1946, describing it as “serpent-like” in the earliest account of the legend that I could find. After a heavy storm, “the amphibious creature slithered along one of these water courses into San Antonio creek, waded along the creek till he came to the estuary, swam out the estuary into the Bay and thence out to sea,” Burroughs wrote. “But before he left [for the ocean] he hollowed out with a [flip] of his tail, the basin that later became Lake Merritt.” Oddly, the article leads into a story about a performance in which a group of dancers wore an old dragon costume from the San Francisco Opera in Lake Merritt to promote recreational swimming. Aside from this, the creature and its whereabouts largely remain a mystery.

The existence of aquatic “cryptids,” creatures unrecognized by mainstream science, requires a cloudy body of water to suspend our disbelief. Without this opacity, legends of these creatures would eventually go extinct. We need the surface to remain murky: a simple “yes” or “no” would rob us, the mystified public, of the excitement of uncertainty, of living in a world in which humans’ ecological knowledge and dominance are put into question. And yet, when we examine these mysteries more closely, we learn much of the history of places themselves. In the case of Loch Ness in the Scottish highlands, for example, we may never have discovered the cavernous caves deep below the waters of the loch without the tale of a creature to lure explorers below the surface with sonar. Similarly, the legend of the Lake Merritt Monster and its disappearance can only be understood through the story of the Lake Merritt’s ecology and its direct connection to the greater bay.

The story of this mysterious creature has shifted throughout the years, originating as a fun aside in the Burroughs article and later cementing as local lore, occasionally rearing its quiet head up from the depths. The green Lakeside park play structure, designed by Bob Winston in 1952, was dubbed the “Monster,” or the “Mid-Century Monster” by its fan club. Sly and the Family Stone iconically posed atop the sculpture for the cover of Dance to the Music. It was the inspiration for The Lake Merritt Monster, a 2023 short film by Benjamin MulHolland that depicts the monster as a kind of triceratops-meets-Stranger Things creature. It also persisted as an urban myth amongst Oakland schoolchildren, a fun discussion topic during recess if perhaps nothing to take seriously.

That was, however, until the Lake Merritt Monster reappeared in an Oakland North article in 2011. The feature included the testimony of the respectable scientist and then-director of the Lake Merritt Institute Dr. Richard Bailey, who claimed to have personally seen the creature in the lake: “It’s black, it’s big, it has spikes on its head and its tongue sticks out,” he said, noting its “typical round monster humps.” The Lake Merritt Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to caring for the lake—could this have been a publicity stunt on the director’s part? Or was it an earnest firsthand account? I searched for traces of Bailey online, attempting to contact him from multiple avenues, but I found only silence. In journalism, sources can be as mystifying as long ripples of water on an overcast day.

Because they are alleged to exist in the absence of concrete proof, cryptids create the ideal backdrop for projecting one’s own preconceptions and beliefs onto the world, the veil in front of them leaving gaps for narratives to filter through. “Cryptids don’t just live at the geographical margins,” as Colin Dickey writes in The Unidentified, “They exist perpetually at that margin between the scientific and fantastic.” Yet a peculiar thing about the Lake Merritt Monster, as Dr. Bailey observed, is that the “Oakness monster” was sighted in the immediate aftermath of a successful large-scale cleanup of the lake, after its murky depths were rendered suddenly transparent: “Dr. Bailey believes the creature prefers clean lakes,” as Dara Kerr wrote, for Oakland North, “so perhaps it is no coincidence that he says these appearances come with massive lake clean-ups that make it easier for lake-goers to spot monster-like objects in the water.”

Sightings are often few and far between, but some have been verifiably false. One Oakland Voices writer witnessed something monstrous at the mouth of Lake Merritt, which was ultimately identified as a sea lion (which, admittedly, is still bizarre). But this was hardly the only strange sighting in the lake: Two years ago, local outlets were stunned to find an odd “alien-like” creature in the lake—a jellyfish, as it turned out. Six years ago, a poster on Reddit claimed that their friend went fishing at Lake Merritt and caught a five-foot sturgeon, a designated threatened species by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (before you ask, yes, recreational fishing in the lake is illegal). I recently spotted a dead shark on the northwest corner of the lake, and even with the help of a local shark biologist, I am still having trouble identifying the species. While investigating the possibility that the Oakness Monster exists, I found far more bizarre things afoot in Lake Merritt.

The first oddity is the lake itself…

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