Connecticut River Serpent

Most American sea-serpent stories come from the open ocean, but in the late 1800s one turned up in a quiet stretch of New England river. In September 1886, according to a letter its author wrote to a newspaper, E. J. Stockwell of Cromwell, Connecticut, and a companion named Silas Sage were in a boat on the Connecticut River opposite Cromwell when something struck the stern. They said they then saw a huge serpent thrash the water, lift its head some ten feet into the air and open its mouth to show a red tongue. Other people, Stockwell wrote, had seen it too – including a sea captain, a clergyman and a Middletown oil dealer who was fishing near the Portland shore.

The newspapers were delighted. The New York Times is reported to have described a black head as big as a flour barrel and a creature of perhaps a hundred feet, and, according to modern retellings of the coverage, people sat along the banks hoping for a glimpse. Not everyone was convinced. A Middletown professor, William Brewer, was quoted as doubting the whole thing, and Stockwell wrote to rebut him, pointing out that the professor had been about three miles from the spot and had spoken to neither witness. He also dismissed the idea that the boat had merely struck a floating log. He added that two Middletown men fishing for eels near the steamboat dock three nights later heard a loud commotion in the dark water and rowed for shore.

Later reports kept the legend alive up and down the river. In 1894 a farmer named Austin Rice, who lived at East Deerfield in Massachusetts, described a dark serpent with a horse-sized head and a belly stripe that reared out of the river close to his land, according to a retelling of the newspaper account. Over a century later, in 1995, the Main Street Museum of White River Junction, Vermont, issued a deadpan press release about a river monster seen where the White River joins the Connecticut and declared it a cousin of Lake Champlain’s Champ. The museum’s humor shows how the legend has become a local in-joke as much as a belief.

The serpent belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century newspaper monsters. The 1886 reports appeared in the same weeks that other papers were running serpent stories, and the same page of one reprinting carried a report of a “sea serpent” at Gloucester, New Jersey. Whatever its truth, the Connecticut River serpent is a good example of how a single sensational letter could set off a local sensation.

Witnesses in 1886 described a very long dark serpent whose head rose about ten feet above the water; the 1894 account added a stripe on the belly and a head about the size of a horse’s, and the creature was reported strong enough to swim against the current.

The lower and middle Connecticut River, with 1880s reports centered on the Middletown–Cromwell stretch and later ones upriver in Massachusetts and Vermont. Most reports date from late summer.

The serpent is a small but fond part of Connecticut River Valley lore, sometimes grouped with Lake Champlain’s Champ and the sea serpent of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Local museums and conservation groups have used the monster to draw people to the river, while the story itself remains thinly documented and mostly rests on a handful of 1880s newspaper items.