59 Fun Facts About Loch Ness Monster

Which village sits at the south-western end of Loch Ness?

Fort Augustus went by its Gaelic name, Cille Chuimein, until a government fort built after the 1715 rising was named for George II's son William Augustus, and the village took the fort's name.

What was the 'dead Nessie' that a zoo's education officer planted in the loch as a 1972 April Fools' joke?

A bull elephant seal: he shaved its whiskers, froze it and dumped it for his colleagues to find, and police chased down the van that was carrying 'Nessie' away.

Researchers link George Spicer's 1933 'dragon' sighting to which hit film?

King Kong shows a long-necked creature rising from a lake, and the film had come out only months before Spicer reported his 'dragon'.

Which Irish monk is said to have confronted a 'water beast' in the River Ness in 565?

Columba had just watched locals bury a man the beast had savaged, yet still sent a companion swimming across for a boat; the Life that tells the story dates from the following century.

How did a sixth-century saint halt a 'water beast' in the River Ness, according to Adomnán?

With the sign of the cross and an order to go back: the beast fled 'as if pulled back with ropes', a spear's length short of the man swimming across the river.

Which newspaper's 2 May 1933 article about a 'whale-like fish' kicked off modern interest?

The Inverness Courier did not name the couple, and it emerged only later that the woman who had seen the 'whale-like fish' managed a local hotel.

Which Loch Ness water bailiff and part-time journalist wrote the May 1933 newspaper report that launched the modern legend?

Alex Campbell got the story second-hand from the witness's husband, and his editor, Evan Barron, is said to have insisted on calling the creature a 'monster'.

What was Aldie Mackay doing when she made the April 1933 sighting that started the Nessie craze?

Driving along the shore with her husband, she saw something 'rolling and plunging' in calm water, and it was he, not she, who passed the story to the local water bailiff.

What did George Spicer and his wife claim to see on 22 July 1933?

An animal crossing the road, he said, with a long wavy neck: although he put his foot down, it had vanished into the loch before the car reached the spot.

The first alleged photo of the monster, taken by Hugh Gray in 1933, is suspected to show what?

His Labrador fetching a stick is one sceptical reading of the blur: they make out a dog swimming with a stick in its mouth, while others take the same shape for an otter rolling at the surface.

What was Arthur Grant riding when he claimed he almost ran into the monster one moonlit night in January 1934?

A motorcycle: Grant, a veterinary student riding home in the small hours, said a long-necked creature bounded across the road in front of him and plunged into the loch.

The famous 'Surgeon's Photograph' of 1934 is attributed to what kind of doctor?

A gynaecologist: Robert Kenneth Wilson refused to have his name attached to the picture, which is why it has been known ever since simply as the Surgeon's Photograph.

Which newspaper bought and published the Surgeon's Photograph in April 1934?

Daily Mail: months earlier the paper had hired a big-game hunter to find the monster, only for his 'footprints' to prove fake; the doctor's picture then made an international sensation.

What was the 'monster' in the Surgeon's Photograph really?

A toy submarine with a putty head, bought at Woolworths: the famous print was cropped tight, and the full frame shows the far shore of the loch and a much smaller 'monster'.

Which big-game hunter masterminded the Surgeon's Photograph hoax as revenge on his newspaper employer?

Marmaduke Wetherell had a model monster built and a respectable doctor front the picture, which was sold to the very paper that had humiliated him over his fake 'footprints'.

What animal's foot made the 'Nessie footprints' a big-game hunter found on the shore in December 1933?

A hippopotamus: museum zoologists found the prints were identical, made with a stuffed foot that was the base of an umbrella stand or ashtray, and whether the hunter was hoaxer or victim was never settled.

What happened to the model used in the Surgeon's Photograph?

Sunk in the loch on the spot: the hoaxer pushed it under with his foot when he heard a water bailiff coming, so the most famous Nessie ever photographed is presumably still down there.

Whose little-noticed 1975 newspaper confession revealed the Surgeon's Photograph was staged?

The ringleader's son told the Sunday Telegraph how the shot was set up, but the piece drew little notice, and only in the 1990s did two researchers follow it up and find the model maker still alive.

In 1938 Inverness-shire's chief constable doubted he could protect the monster from what?

A hunting party with a harpoon gun: a Londoner said he was having one specially made and would be back with twenty men, and the police chief wrote that a strange creature in the loch 'seems now beyond doubt'.

What did aeronautical engineer Tim Dinsdale film in 1960?

A dark hump leaving a wake: military photo analysts judged it 'probably animate', but later studies argue he filmed a small boat in poor light.

What does Sir Peter Scott's 1975 name Nessiteras rhombopteryx describe?

A diamond-shaped fin, the 'rhombopteryx' of the name, had shown up in a 1972 picture; Scott wanted a formal name so that a new conservation law could protect the animal if it proved real.

In 1975 an MP noticed that Nessiteras rhombopteryx is an anagram of what?

Monster hoax by Sir Peter S, a Scottish MP pointed out that December; Scott's co-author Robert Rines hit back that the same letters also spell 'Yes, both pix are monsters, R'.

What mocking nickname did stage magician Doc Shiels's suspiciously sharp 1977 monster photo earn?

The Loch Ness Muppet was the clearest Nessie picture yet taken, but the water around its neck showed no ripples and the beast looked translucent, so few experts took the magician's monster seriously.

What did American Dan Taylor build himself and pilot through Loch Ness in 1969, hunting the monster?

A submarine: his 20-foot yellow fibreglass Viperfish had a seven-horsepower engine and a top speed of 8 mph, too slow to catch whatever he said had made it turn and yaw.

What did Operation Deepscan's boats sweep Loch Ness with in 1987?

Echo sounders on a line of hired boats swept the loch like a curtain and logged three big contacts, which may have been nothing stranger than seals.

Tourists sketched a monster's head after a BBC team raised what?

A fence post: in 2003 most of the coach party said they had seen something square, yet several drew monster-shaped heads, and the team's 600 sonar beams found no trace of a large animal.

What kind of DNA turned up in abundance in the 2018 survey of Loch Ness?

Eel DNA turned up at almost every spot sampled, so the survey's leader said he could not rule out a giant eel, while finding no trace at all of any reptile, shark or sturgeon.

Which country's university led Loch Ness's 2018 DNA survey?

New Zealand: Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago took 250 water samples from the loch, and the DNA in them came from people and their dogs among much else, but from no giant reptile.

What was 'Lucy', which a TV channel slipped into Loch Ness for two weeks to test tourists' reactions?

An animatronic plesiosaur, 16 feet long and built by a special-effects firm: Channel Five filmed more than 600 sightseers looking out for it, and some swore they had seen a green hump.

Which fish did long-time watcher Steve Feltham suggest in 2015 might explain the monster?

Wels catfish was the verdict of a man who sold up in 1991, quit his job and has watched the loch ever since from a former mobile library van parked beside the beach at Dores.

Which water spirit of Scottish folklore was long said to haunt Loch Ness?

The kelpie was a water horse said to tempt children onto its back and drag them under; before the 1933 reports, says the keeper of the sightings register, the thing in the loch 'was always just the Kelpie'.

What did pensioner Gerald McSorley find when he stumbled in the shallows of Loch Ness in 2003?

Plesiosaur vertebrae, and genuine ones, but no ancestor of Nessie: borings showed the fossil had lain in the sea, not a freshwater loch, so museum experts concluded it had been brought there.

Loch Ness cruise skipper George Edwards admitted in 2013 that his much-publicised 'Nessie' photo really showed what?

A fibreglass hump made for TV: it had been built for a National Geographic documentary, and Edwards was unrepentant, saying that stunts like his had kept visitors coming to the loch for 80 years.

Which of Google's rivals had a satellite map that seemed to show a huge creature swimming in Loch Ness in 2014?

Apple Maps showed what looked like a boat's wake with no boat: analysts worked out that the vessel had simply washed out when separate satellite photos were stitched into one.

What had searchers forgotten to do when they heard four mysterious underwater 'gloops' during the big 2023 monster hunt?

Plug in the recorder: the team heard the gloops while testing an underwater microphone, ran to check the tape and found it dead, and the organisers later conceded the noises were probably ducks.

What does Loch Ness do on the coldest winter days?

Steams: the loch has never been known to freeze over, and on frosty days its water is warmer than the air above it, so vapour rises off the surface.

Loch Ness empties through the River Ness into which sea?

The North Sea: the River Ness carries the overflow to the Moray Firth, and the loch is only a mile or two wide, yet it holds more water than every lake in England and Wales combined.

Which body of water beats Loch Ness for surface area, the only one in Scotland to do so?

Lomond spreads over about 71 square kilometres to Ness's 56, but its broad southern basin is so shallow that Ness still holds far more water.

Loch Ness lies along which fault that splits the Highlands coast to coast?

The Great Glen Fault: the two halves of the Highlands slid sideways past each other along it, and Ice Age glaciers later gouged out the line of the fault to form Loch Ness.

What makes the water of Loch Ness so dark that daylight fades out within a short dive?

Peat from the hills is the culprit: rain drains through the bogs above the loch and the streams carry the brown stain down, leaving water the colour of tea that lets little light reach the depths.

Loch Ness forms part of which waterway linking Inverness with the coast near Fort William?

The Caledonian Canal was cut so that ships could cross Scotland without braving the stormy passage round its north coast, and only about a third of it had to be dug: a chain of lochs supplies the rest.

Loch Ness is a few miles shorter than which race distance?

Marathon: the loch is about 23 miles long, so the Loch Ness Marathon covers more ground than the loch itself, from a start on open moorland down the south-eastern shore to a finish in Inverness.

What did a tour-boat skipper's 'new deepest point' in Loch Ness, dubbed Nessie's hiding place in 2016, turn out to be?

A sonar anomaly, it seems: a few months later an underwater drone swept the same spot and found no such trench, so the loch's official maximum depth was left exactly where it was.

Which village on Loch Ness's western shore is home to the Loch Ness Centre?

Drumnadrochit's Loch Ness Centre occupies the old village hotel whose manageress, Aldie Mackay, reported the 1933 sighting that set the whole craze going.

What does the 'Inver' in Inverness, the city just north of the loch, mean in Gaelic place names?

River mouth: Inverness is 'mouth of the Ness', and the loch takes its name from that river too, not the river from the loch.

Cherry Island is the only island in Loch Ness; how did it get there?

Prehistoric people built it as a crannog, a defended home out on the water: a monk who went down in an early diving suit in 1908 found a platform of oak beams beneath the rubble.

Which engineer built the early 19th-century canal of which Loch Ness forms a part?

Thomas Telford's canal opened in 1822, years late and far over budget, and by then the new iron steamships had outgrown it; today it carries pleasure boats rather than cargo.

What did building the ship canal do to Loch Ness itself?

Raised its surface by over a metre: a weir across the outflow still holds the water up so that boats can pass, and the rise swallowed much of the loch's only island.

Which is the only freshwater loch in Scotland deeper than Ness?

Loch Morar goes down about 310 metres, deeper than most of the seabed off Scotland's west coast, and like Ness it has a monster of its own, known as Morag.

Urquhart Castle on the loch's western shore was partially destroyed in 1692 to stop whom using it?

Jacobite forces were the worry: the government garrison that had held the castle against them is said to have blown up its own gatehouse on marching out, so that the place could never again serve as a stronghold.

What ditched in Loch Ness on New Year's Eve 1940 and was lifted out in 1985?

A Wellington bomber came down with engine trouble in a snowstorm, and Americans scanning the depths for the monster in 1976 found the wreck instead. It now stands in the museum at Brooklands, where it was built.

Which record did John Cobb already hold when he died on Loch Ness in 1952?

The land speed record was his at 394 mph, set in Utah in 1947. On Loch Ness his jet boat Crusader clocked 206 mph, far above the water record, but it broke up before the return run that would have made it count.

Which British endurance swimmer gave up a non-stop Loch Ness swim in 2022 after 52 hours?

Ross Edgley swam for two days and nights without touching land or a boat, then came out about halfway to the 100 miles he wanted and was treated in hospital for a skin infection.

Why does a power station pump Loch Ness water uphill?

Energy storage: the Foyers station pumps loch water uphill when power is cheap, then lets it fall back through the same machines when demand peaks. A Victorian hydro plant on the same shore once smelted aluminium.

A 30-foot monster prop found on the loch bed in 2016 was built for a 1970 film about which detective?

Sherlock Holmes meets a fake monster in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes; the prop sank in 1969 after Wilder had its buoyant humps removed.

Which rescue charity has run a lifeboat on Loch Ness since 2008, its first inland station in Scotland?

The RNLI took over from a Coastguard boat that had covered the loch since 1995; the sea-rescue charity's very first inland station had opened in 2001 at Enniskillen on Lough Erne.

In 2006 a Glasgow palaeontologist argued that many 1930s Nessie sightings were really which circus animals taking a swim?

Elephants swim with only the trunk and two humps showing, Neil Clark noted, and travelling circuses bound for Inverness passed the loch in the 1930s.

Which rock guitarist bought Boleskine House, occultist Aleister Crowley's old home above Loch Ness, in 1970?

Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin bought it for the Crowley link, yet spent little time there and sold it in 1992; fires gutted the house in 2015 and again in 2019.

In a 1999 Simpsons episode, who drains Loch Ness to catch the monster and win Springfield's love?

Mr. Burns wrestles the monster into a harness single-handed, but the unveiling ends in a fire he causes, so he finds the friendly beast a job at a Vegas casino.