The Loch Ness Midget

In the Highlands of northern Scotland, between the towns of Acch and Edenocker there lies Loch Ness, a body of water with a name that's Scottish for "Nasty Lake." This name dates back to the time of the Picts, a clan of tattooed assholes native to Scotland who ruled the land for thousands of years before modern-day Scots came over from Ireland and started throwing telephone poles around and head-butting small children and deer and whatnot.

Loch Ness was know to the Picts for being incredibly foul, thanks to the thousands of ducks who disobeyed the numerous "We don swim in yer terlet, so don you a crap in ar lach" signs posted around the lake. In order to keep slow children from swimming in the filthy loch, the Picts invented a story about a hideous creature named Nessie who lived within, a beast described as "a big smelly piano with flippers" that swallowed young children whole and wiped its ass on trees. Even more vivid details were summoned for particularly stubborn youths, tales of the beast using children's livers to play rugby and routinely cheating at checkers to boot.

As time went by the Picts were gradually head-butted out of Scotland, but their stories of Nessie lived on in the imaginations and heartburn-inducing nightmares of the modern Scots. Most were doubtful of the existence of the beast, unless they were standing on the shores of the loch and being double dog dared to go skinny-dipping within, in which case Nessie's existence was a forgone conclusion.

It wasn't until a spring day in 1804 that the public consensus began to turn. That morning, a pair of Scottish fisherman, pissed out of their minds and navigating with a map of continental Africa, set out onto the loch in search of brown herring. Their search for fish hampered by a lack of bait, nets or poles, they soon consoled themselves with a drinking game. The game was going smashingly until the fisherman happened to glance down into the water and saw the pale white face of a child staring up from beneath the murk of the loch. Upon seeing this frightful visage ruminating up from the deep, the fishermen cried out "Ayyybe! Vagoda!" which is Scottish for "Shit! Midget!" and made like the Harvard rowing team on Naïve Freshman Co-Ed Night getting back to shore.

Word spread quickly around Scotland like a game of "telephone" and by the time it got back to Loch Ness, the word was that the legendary Nessie was, in fact, some kind of terrifying midget nightmare who played bocce ball at the bottom of the loch. That was enough to inspire the populace to stay the hell away from the lake for another hundred years, but Londoners were not so smart.

In 1933 the London Daily Mail hired a big-game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell to get coked up to the gills and either capture the Loch Ness Midget or make a newsworthy ass of himself in the process. Few doubted that he was the right man for the job.

Within days, Wetherell reported that he had spotted the wee little beast near the loch, and had made a plaster casting of one of its footprints. This he promptly sent to the Natural History Museum in London for analysis. While the world waited with baited breath for the zoologists to make their determinations, Wetherell slept with every available woman in Scotland and bought lots of things on credit. By the time word came back from the Museum that the tracks were merely the marks left from someone dropping a donut in the mud, Wetherell was nowhere to be found.

The Wetherell hoax set back the cause of Nessie research for the better part of a year, and it did not recover until the Daily Mail published a shocking photo by a London Physicist named R. Kenneth Wilson in 1934. The picture, a snapshot from Wilson's vacation to Scotland that year, featured Wilson standing in front of Loch Ness and showcasing with his smile the most horrendous set of odd-sized, discolored and poorly-maintained teeth the world had ever seen. Even the English people were appalled, and dentists the world over sent him hate mail.

It wasn't until a year later, when some of the shock had worn off, that someone was able to look at the photo closely enough to realize that, over Wilson's shoulder, the Loch Ness Midget was plainly visible signaling for a fair catch on the shores of the loch. A re-cropped version of the photo swept the globe and Nessie-mania was born again.

Although the photo was determined to be a hoax in 1980, when researchers discovered that the "midget" in the photo was merely a Raggedy Andy doll that Wilson's daughter had left on the beach, it had helped to keep the search for Nessie alive for over fifty years. Several sonar sweeps of the loch between the 1970's and 1990's revealed numerous unexplainable midget-sized objects moving in the loch, and thousands of eyewitnesses have come forth with tales of seeing the creepy little bugger frolicking in the waves. Scientists have discounted their claims, suggesting that people are merely mistaking floating logs, otters, schools of fish or bathing leprechauns for the fabled midget, but eyewitnesses remain unconvinced.

While experts are forever skeptical, the prudent are reminded of the numerous legendary creatures of yore that turned out to be improbable, yet quite real. There was a time when narwhals, gorillas, the Smothers Brothers and okapis were all thought to be merely the products of overheated imaginations, and yet today they exist squarely in the realm of scientific fact. Is the Loch Ness Midget to be the next? Or will it be beaten to the punch by the Abdominal Snowman or the Sascrotch? Only time can tell.

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