
The captain, Abijah Kellogg, would claim that it looked almost like an earthworm, with no discernible face, and that it was making its way up the St. In the Augedition of the Kingston Gazette and Religious Advocate there was also the account of a group of children playing by the waterside when they saw a serpent in the water around 30 feet in length, described in the article as “a hideous water snake, or serpent, of prodigious dimensions.” In 1833 the steamer Polyphemus also came across the beast in Kingston Harbor with the crew saying it was 175 feet in length. In July of 1817, a ship was in the area when the crew spotted a dark-colored snake-like monster measuring 40 feet long and 1 foot in diameter about 3 miles offshore.

This “rowboat” then began ominously moving towards them, and as it grew closer they could see that this was just a part of a much larger, serpentine creature with huge eyes that they estimated as being an absurd 150 feet in length, as big around as a barrel, and with a mouth “frightfully large and aspect terrible.” Kingston would go on to become ground zero for all manner of other such reports, and gathered quite a reputation as being a favorite haunt for the mysterious monster. In the 1800s there were quite a few sightings of the creature in Lake Ontario, starting in 1805, when four fishermen near the area of Kingston, on the eastern shore, saw what they took to be an overturned rowboat bobbing about out on the lake.
