Photo of Mysterious Aquatic Animal Sparks Speculation in South Carolina

The image uploaded by Jessica Plate to social media site Nextdoor. (Jessica Plate)

South Carolina resident Jessica Plate posted a photograph to social media site Nextdoor recently that has some speculating about a monster in Lake Wylie.

“Lake Wylie monster?" Plate asked in the photo's accompanying text. “I know this picture isn’t the greatest, but tonight while walking around the lake in our neighborhood we saw this 3 to 4 foot ‘thing’ moving in the water. At first, I thought it was a dog or deer, shoot, maybe a scuba diver!”

“The wake it made was enormous! Please, does anyone know what it was!” she added.

Plate took the photo at Sunset Point on Lake Wylie in South Carolina last Saturday around 7:15 pm, and since posting it to Nextdoor on Sunday, the picture has garnered significant speculation from people who have tentatively identified its subject as everything from an alligator to a floating log to some sort of water monster.

Lake Wylie, like its neighbor Lake Norman to the north, was created by damming the Catawba River.

Lake Norman is said to host its own lake monster, which witnesses have described as being similar to a large sturgeon or alligator gar—although some say it is closer to an overgrown alligator.

Neither lake, nor the Catawba River which connects them, has any indigenous alligators, although several alligators are found along the Catawba each year. Wildlife officials believe those animals are likely exotic pets abandoned by their owners, despite alligators living naturally in other parts of North and South Carolina.

One person who viewed the photograph suggested it was “a big nasty snake.”

Author John Hairr wrote in Monsters of North Carolina: Mysterious Creatures in the Tar Heel State that both the area’s indigenous people of the Catawba Nation and European settlers have legends going back centuries of snake-like monsters living in the Catawba River.

According to Hairr:

The Catawba Indians believed that monstrously large snakes inhabited the Catawba River, and preserved stories of these large animals killing people on the rocks of the rapids near what is now Charlotte.
Giant snakes were not the only mysterious creatures inhabiting the river in the days before European settlement of the region. The Catawba had legends of giant leechlike creatures that lived in the river. These creatures made their presence known by coming out of the water and sunning themselves on the rocks.
The Native Americans were not the only ones who believed that a monster lived in the Santee River system, of which the Catawba River is a major part. As it turns out, the white inhabitants of the Catawba River Valley had their own beliefs that some mysterious creature was swimming in the Catawba.

As for Plate, whatever she saw, she doesn’t believe it was a semi aquatic mammal as some have suggested, and she’ll continue to return to Lake Wylie, hoping to spot the creature again.

“Beavers, muskrats, and otters were a few other guesses. There is no way, this creature was way too big!” she said. “Definitely will go back to the shore (with more people for evidence) to try and catch another glimpse!”

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to support the Singular Fortean Society, please consider becoming an official member by signing up through our Patreon page—membership includes a ton of extra content and behind-the-scenes access to the Society’s inner workings.