Nebraska: The Thing in Alkali Lake

This week the road trip leaves the timber and runs into the Nebraska Sandhills, where there's nothing to hide behind for 100 miles and the only thing you can't see into is the water.

A few miles southeast of Hay Springs sits a 50-acre lake the state renamed Walgren Lake decades ago and that nobody local has ever stopped calling Alkali Lake. In the early 1920s it produced one of the strangest monster stories in American newspapers, a 40-foot alligator-shaped animal with a single horn and a smell that could turn a man's stomach, reported in the Omaha World-Herald in 1923 under the initials J.A. Johnson and carried from there to Chicago, New York, and by some accounts London.

Brian walks through the Hay Springs News items that started it, the wire-service telling that made it famous, and the Chadron newspaperman John G. Maher (1859–1939), a man Nebraska historians remember as the state's most accomplished hoaxer, whose fingerprints a lot of people see on the whole affair.

Then the episode goes to the people who lived on the lake and never went near a reporter, from a homesteader's daughter who found a calf torn up on the shore in 1922, to a county road worker on the dam in 1954, to a couple bank fishing for bullheads in 1979, a grain hauler on a wet road at midnight in 1986, two brothers on the ice in 2001, and a woman whose kayak came to a stop over 8 feet of water in 2014.

From there the trip follows the rivers, because Nebraska's woods run in lines, and the second half of the episode is given over to people who saw something upright in the Pine Ridge in 1994, along the Niobrara in 2006, in the Missouri bottoms near Ponca in 1988, on the Dismal River below the hand-planted forest at Halsey in 1971, and on the frozen Platte south of Omaha in 2003.

A deer hunter on a rock, a woman driving home from her sister's, a farm wife waiting with supper, a 12-year-old with a fishing pole, and a rural mail carrier who still parks where he parked that day.


If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop to add to the map, reach Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com, and find everything we do at paranormalworldproductions.com.


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