That doesn’t mean that Coleman himself isn’t serious about his work. It’s moved locations over the years, but is now situated in a relatively new development called Thompson’s Point-there’s a wine bar and a taco joint, and a pretty busy brunch spot, along with an adjacent concert venue. Loren Coleman’s International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, remains the hub for all things Sasquatch and Nessie, as it has since 2003. Why doesn’t it get more love? Two hundred miles north of here, there might be an answer. But this is as good a story as cryptozoologists are likely to find, in terms of the preponderance of evidence. It would be impossible to know for sure, of course, since we have nothing but those eyewitness reports. It seems possible, a rationalist could argue, that it was an oar fish, or some other animal that’s since been cataloged.

The sightings defy all of the modern tropes for cryptid sightings, and yet the sea serpent has none of the cachet that other cryptids do. The people who saw the sea serpent all agreed it was much bigger than a normal snake anyway. But while Jacob Bigelow’s analysis of the rickety snake disproved the holotype specimen, Bigelow didn’t disprove the sightings themselves. When their error was exposed, the original sightings, it seems, were forgotten. The Gloucester sea serpent faded from memory because the New England Linnaean Society got it wrong, creating a new species based on a snake plagued by rickets. Whatever it was, it was not a hoax or a hallucination. Stephenson’s sea serpent mural, likewise, has become a fixture of the community, perhaps more so than the monster itself. After he retired, he returned to Gloucester and formally began his training as a painter, and became a local fixture until his death in 2013. Robert Stephenson had only graduated from high school when he painted the beast in 1955, before joining the Army. It has four stubby legs, each with ferocious claws, and a long jaw and red sliver of a tongue. On a large boulder that marks the end of the beach, a long, loosely coiled creature that looks a bit like the ampersand on the Dungeons and Dragons logo.

Any weekend now, though, the tourists will be back, breathing life once more into Cape Ann.ĭown on Cressy Beach, on a shoal of rocks beneath a promontory, there is a mural of the sea serpent. For months the town has sheltered in place through the winter, like any seaside town-half the houses empty, the businesses with reduced hours. The whole town seems to be holding its breath for the tourist season, just about to begin. A rainy, early spring day in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

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