Hoppie

Lake Hopatcong is New Jersey’s largest freshwater lake, a nine-mile-long body of water on the Morris–Sussex county line that was created when the Morris Canal Company dammed two ponds and a river in the 1830s. The railroad reached it in 1882, and it became a summer retreat for New Yorkers, with grand hotels and, later, the Bertrand Island amusement park. It also acquired a monster, called “Hoppie.”

According to the usual retelling, which traces to August 1894 stories in the Lake Hopatcong Angler and the New York World, a fisherman rowing on the lake saw a creature about 40 feet long with a dog’s head, a black back and a dirty-white underside slither toward the stern of his boat, and he rushed ashore to report it. The same day, another boater is said to have fired a .38-caliber rifle at the serpent’s head, with the bullet bouncing off. Many residents are said to have stayed off the lake. The 1894 newspaper pieces are known today only through modern retellings, so the details should be treated as folklore.

Skeptical locals suggested mud turtles, dogs, beer kegs, eels, big fish or minks. The story is told cheerfully, and Hoppie is generally described as friendlier than most lake monsters. Folklore adds a tall-tale postscript: that the serpent’s bones were used to build the roller coaster at Bertrand Island, an unsupported rumor.

The legend got a comic sequel in July 2014. Gerald Andrejcak, assistant director of the group Common Sense for Animals, told the Associated Press he had seen the head and part of the body of an anaconda in the lake, and residents reported at least three sightings of a snake up to 16 feet long; the state set chicken-baited traps and searched, but New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection officials said they found no droppings, shed skin or other sign of an exotic snake, and the state ended the search in late July. Wikipedia’s account of the lake says the scare reportedly cut summer tourism by about 10 percent. No snake or monster has ever been captured.

In 1894, a serpent about 40 feet long with a dog-like head, a snake-like body, a black back and a dirty white underbelly; the 2014 reports described a snake up to 16 feet long.

The open, 50-foot-deep waters and coves of Lake Hopatcong, in the northern New Jersey highlands, mostly in summer boating season.

Hoppie is the local mascot of the lake’s Landing neighborhood, where community pages list the friendly monster among the residents, and the Lake Hopatcong Foundation and the lake’s historical museum preserve the area’s resort history. The 2014 hunt gave the legend a modern chapter that made national news.