Bozho (Lake Mendota Monster)

On June 22, 1883, Billy Dunn and his wife were fishing on Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, when a black object came moving toward their boat from the middle of the lake. The next day’s Wisconsin State Journal ran it as “A True Snake Story”: the head “was reared in the air two feet or more above the surface of the water,” and when Dunn swung an oar at it, the creature “darted its fangs entirely through the oar.” Dunn beat it with the other oar and then a hatchet until it let go and sank. One retelling dates the fight to June 27, 1883, and describes a 25-foot greenish-black snake.

That serpent would later be called Bozho. Over the years witnesses described it as 10 to 20 feet long with black scales, according to a Badger Herald roundup, though some accounts give it blackish green scales instead.

The papers didn’t agree on what happened to Dunn’s oar either. The 1883 article said a drummer from Chicago bought it, fangs and all, for a Chicago museum, while an 1892 Chicago Tribune piece headlined “Billy Dunn Still Keeps The Oar” said Dunn kept it. Dunn was a Civil War veteran and a mailman who once took President Cleveland fishing on the lake, and he also claimed to own a pet fish large enough to pull his boat.

Stories that predate Dunn surfaced later. In 1892, W.J. Park wrote to the State Journal about an 1860 encounter in which he mistook the serpent for a log until it moved. Another version has a couple in the 1860s canoeing across Lake Mendota who bumped a “log” that churned the water and disappeared. “This was a monster of some sort, we have no doubt,” one of the canoers wrote. “We were not too long in deciding that retreat was the better part of valor and we resolved to say nothing about the matter.”

The 1890s brought more reports. In 1892, boaters and people on shore watched a serpent “undulating in an up and down motion” across neighboring Lake Monona toward Esther Beach. In 1897, Eugene Heath vowed to catch the serpent after reports that dogs were being swallowed alive while swimming. And in August 1899 the Baraboo Republic reported that Mrs. E. Grove, Mrs. J.J. Pecher and several other women out boating saw “a long, snake-like monster with a head ten inches across, and a tail which had horns,” which plunged into the lake “making a great deal of foam.” The Racine Daily Journal told the same story that year with two women in the boat.

After 1899, according to Driftless Times, the papers gave the serpent only passing mentions until 1942, when it emerged as Bozho in a pamphlet by Charles E. Brown, “Sea Serpents; Wisconsin Occurrences of These Weird Water Monsters.” Brown helped found the Wisconsin Archeological Society in 1903, and Driftless Times credits him with Bozho’s popularity. The Ho-Chunk, whose home the Madison area was and is, called the lake Wâkcikhomįgra (The Indian’s Bed).

Brown’s best-known story involves a university boy and a coed sunbathing on a pier, which Brown puts at a frat house and the Badger Herald places on Langdon. She kept feeling something tickle the sole of her foot and blamed him, until she looked and found the serpent. “It had a friendly, humorous look in its big eyes,” Brown wrote. He called Bozho “a rather good-natured animal, playing such pranks as overturning a few canoes with his body or tail, giving chase to sailboats and other lake craft, uprooting a few lake piers and frightening bathers by appearing near beaches.” He also told of a 1917 fisherman off Picnic Point who saw a “large snake-like head, with large jaws and blazing eyes” rise from the water.

Skeptics thought the “reputed serpent [was] only a large pickerel, or perhaps a gar fish, with a collection of artificial baits clinging to its head.” Brown himself warned at the start of his pamphlet that many such creatures may come from mistaken identity or be made up by real estate agents and summer resort promoters.

Reports continued into the 1940s and then tapered off. It’s said Bozho left by way of the Yahara River, and one writer wonders whether it died of old age. The Driftless Times writer could find no modern-day accounts of the sea serpent. The same article lists newer reports at the lake: UFO encounters in the National UFO Reporting Center database, the earliest from 1990, and a January 18, 2016, report to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization from several young men who saw a creature seven or eight feet tall with “a ton of hair.” Lake Mendota is the largest of Madison’s four lakes, at 9,781 acres, and is called the most studied lake in the country, with a remote sensor buoy for the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON).