Bessie Rides Again: Lake Erie’s Monster Becomes a Plastic Protest

Lake Erie’s best-known monster has not made headlines for a sighting in decades, but over the past year she has been everywhere in northeast Ohio – on the Cuyahoga River, at a lakeside folklore festival and on Detroit television. Bessie, also known as South Bay Bessie, is now as much a regional mascot as a mystery. Here is how a 200-year-old sea-serpent story became a vehicle for an anti-pollution campaign, and what the record actually shows.

A monster made of trash

On November 12, 2025, a 15-foot Bessie floated down the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland, towed by kayak and later docked at Settler’s Landing Park, Ideastream Public Media reported. This one was built from garbage: plastic shoes, balls, bottles, hard hats, sand shovels, children’s toys and an orange construction barrel, all pulled from the river over the previous six years by Eddie “Trash Fish” Olschansky, a Cleveland water activist who runs kayak-based river cleanups.

Olschansky built the sculpture with artist Ian Petroni and volunteers, according to Ideastream. The Cleveland nonprofit news site The Land reported that the work was done in September and October 2025 at Ingenuity Cleveland, with painter Max Unterhaslberger of High Key Murals, and that Olschansky had been developing the idea since 2020. “This is the new face of the stressors of the Cuyahoga River,” he told Ideastream.

The launch was timed to a rally by the People Over Petro Coalition, held while the plastics industry’s AMI Plastics World Expo was meeting at Cleveland’s Huntington Convention Center. The Land counted about 60 people at the event, which also drew Earthworks, Third Act Ohio and the Northeast Ohio chapter of the Climate Reality Project. Speakers argued that plastic production, not just litter, is the root problem, and one organizer pointed to research placing Erie second among the Great Lakes for plastic contamination, The Land reported. Olschansky told News 5 Cleveland that “we can’t recycle our way out of the plastics crisis,” and the station noted, citing Cleveland Water, that roughly 400,000 people draw their drinking water straight from the lake. Ideastream reported that the trash Bessie would appear at community events around Cleveland.

Festival season

Bessie’s more traditional fans gathered on August 2, 2026, at the Conneaut Arts Center in Conneaut, in Ohio’s far northeast corner, for its annual Lake Erie Monster Festival – a free day of monster art, face painting, storytelling and live entertainment, according to Ohio Magazine’s listing. In May, Detroit’s WDIV ran a short explainer on the legend of a 30- to 40-foot “sea monster” said to have been spotted in the lake since 1793.

What the old reports say

Lake Erie’s serpent stories go back to the early 19th century. Accounts collected on Bessie’s Wikipedia page describe a schooner crew reporting a dark serpent 30 to 40 feet long in July 1817; a crew sailing from Buffalo to Toledo describing a creature about 50 feet long in July 1892; and four witnesses at Crystal Beach, near Fort Erie, Ontario, watching a 30-foot animal with a doglike head for 45 minutes on May 5, 1896. Several of the oldest stories, including a 1793 encounter near Sandusky, rest on secondhand retellings rather than documents that can be checked today.

The modern legend took off in 1990. According to an Associated Press story carried by the Deseret News on September 30 of that year, Harold Bricker, his wife Cora and their son Robert said that on September 4 they saw a black creature about 35 feet long, with a snakelike head, moving in the water roughly 1,000 feet from their boat, and reported it to rangers at East Harbor State Park. John Schaffner, editor of a weekly paper in Port Clinton, set up a toll-free sighting line and ran a naming contest; the winner, “South Bay Bessie” (spelled “Besse” in the AP story), nodded to the nearby Davis-Besse nuclear plant. Thomas Solberg, owner of Huron Lagoon Marina, offered $5,000 to anyone who caught the animal alive.

From there Bessie moved into pop culture. A sculpture called “Lemmy” stood in the Huron River near Huron in 1994; Cleveland’s American Hockey League team took the name Lake Erie Monsters in 2007 (it is now the Cleveland Monsters); and Great Lakes Brewing Company named a seasonal IPA after her.

The skeptical view

Scientists have never been impressed. In the same 1990 AP story, Ohio Sea Grant researcher Fred Snyder called a resident monster highly unlikely, noting that the lake basin took its present form only about 12,000 years ago, after the glaciers retreated – far too young to shelter a holdover from the age of dinosaurs. Lake Erie is also among the most heavily fished, boated and studied lakes in North America, and no carcass, bone or clear photograph has ever been produced.

Skeptics often point to large fish as the source of at least some reports. The lake sturgeon, a long, armored, shark-shaped fish that can grow well over six feet, is native to the Great Lakes – and one of the 1817 accounts on Bessie’s Wikipedia page describes a creature shaped like a big sturgeon, albeit one with arms. Floating logs, boat wakes and swimming animals seen at a distance are other explanations commonly offered for lake-monster sightings.

Writer Edward McClelland, in a tongue-in-cheek folk tale published by Belt Magazine, even recast Bessie as a sturgeon mutated by industrial waste in the Cuyahoga – the river that famously caught fire in 1969 – who shrank back to normal once the river was cleaned up. Olschansky’s plastic Bessie makes a similar point without the joke: the real monster in Lake Erie, he argues, is pollution.