Rock Lake Monster

Rock Lake is a long, narrow lake carved by the Ice Age floods in the dry wheat country of Whitman County in eastern Washington, roughly 30 miles south of Cheney. It is more than 360 feet deep in places with steep drop-offs, and depth that startling in a landscape of grain and sagebrush has a way of breeding stories. A 1995 Spokesman-Review feature on the lake’s “tall tales” found local landowners who insisted that something very large lives in the water, and noted that they had no obvious reason to invent it.

The reports are low-key but consistent. One landowner’s sister said that while rounding a point in a boat one evening she saw “something huge” splash on the surface, “as big as a tree and stretched further across than my living room.” Anglers told the paper that their electronic fish finders had recorded very large moving objects deep in the lake. More recent coverage by the Whitman County Gazette (2024) repeats the story that something large has bumped boats, once nearly tipping a fisherman out. The landowner who shared the sister’s account, a self-described hobby historian, thought the animal was a sturgeon.

Rock Lake’s lore also includes stories of loss. On March 19, 1956, four local men home on Army leave were on the lake in two boats when a strong March wind came up; their bodies were never recovered, and a granite headstone at the Pine Creek cemetery commemorates the event. Two priest brothers are said to have died there on another occasion. Rumors say a train wreck dumped Model T cars into the lake, a story that led salvage divers to search a few years before 1995, and that military staff cars joined them during World War II, a claim the local historian called nonsense. A hotel, the Cliff House, stood by the lake’s outlet in the early 1900s.

Some accounts say the Spokane people told stories of something enormous or dangerous in the lake, and one author has linked those stories to Ice Age flooding. These accounts are secondhand, and they should be understood as part of the Spokane Tribe’s own history and not as support for a monster.

Never clearly seen. Witnesses describe a very large, tree-sized body breaking the surface, large moving objects on sonar and a heavy bump against boats.

The deep, cold central basin of Rock Lake in Whitman County, Washington, which has steep drop-offs of more than 300 feet and hidden basalt pinnacles.

Rock Lake’s lore – monster, drowned brothers, a Model T train and ghostly music – is a favorite of Palouse-area local history and Halloween stories. It is a popular trout fishery and has a long record of cautionary stories for boaters on the dangerous water.