🗄️ ENIGMA ATLAS // FILES
🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº6501 ACTIVE

Con rit

Con rit is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Costa e islas del norte de Vietnam (golfo de Tonkín), VN. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.

Where and when was Con rit sighted?

Location
Costa e islas del norte de Vietnam (golfo de Tonkín), VN
Date sighted
Unknown
Coordinates
20.9, 107.1
Testimonies
0
Last updated
LOCATION

What is Con rit?

The con rit is a Vietnamese sea monster with an unusually thin paper trail: the entire case rests on one interview. On 15 September 1921, Dr A. Krempf, director of the Oceanographic and Fisheries Service of Indochina, took the testimony of Tran Van Con, a fifty-six-year-old customs launch skipper who described an enormous armoured, segmented carcass stranded at Hongay in Along Bay, on the Tonkin coast, thirty-eight years earlier. That places the stranding in 1883, and the name the witness used, con rit, is simply the everyday Vietnamese word for a centipede. Nothing was preserved: no bone, no photograph, only a drawing Krempf made from the description. Bernard Heuvelmans published the account decades later and, far from explaining it away, made it the type of his Many-finned category and named it Cetioscolopendra aeliani, proposing a surviving armoured archaeocete. The same waters produced separate naval sightings by the French gunboat Avalanche in 1897 and 1898. Decaying sharks and whales do generate segmented-looking monsters, and northern Vietnam really does have giant centipedes, including a swimming species described in 2016 — but nobody ever examined the Hongay body, so nobody identified it.

What is the history of Con rit?

The con rit does not begin as folklore. It begins as a single deposition, taken down by a colonial scientist thirty-eight years after the event it describes. On 15 September 1921, Dr A. Krempf, director of the Oceanographic and Fisheries Service of Indochina, interviewed a fifty-six-year-old Vietnamese man named Tran Van Con — in the French sources the skipper, or coxswain, of a customs launch. Tran Van Con told Krempf that as a young man he had seen an enormous dead animal stranded on the shore at Hongay, in Along Bay, on the coast of Tonkin. Bernard Heuvelmans, who published the account decades later, put the stranding at thirty-eight years before the interview: 1883. Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, summarising the same testimony, give the body as sixty feet long and three feet wide. What made the account remarkable was not the size but the surface. The witness described a body divided along its length into armoured segments, each pair carrying appendages — a build with no counterpart among known large sea animals, and one that gave the animal its name. The word Tran Van Con used was con rit. In Vietnamese, rết is the ordinary noun for a centipede, con being the classifier placed before animals; rít is the southern form of the same word. Krempf's French write-up rendered it as le mille-pattes, and the cryptozoological literature in English has repeated the gloss as millipede ever since. Centipede is the better translation, and it matters: the name is not a description of the carcass but the everyday word the witness reached for. Krempf did not simply write the story down. Heuvelmans records that Krempf considered the witness entirely trustworthy and nevertheless went and checked the account against other people. Krempf also produced a drawing of the segmented armour, which Heuvelmans later reproduced in his own book under a caption crediting it to Krempf. That drawing is the whole of the physical record. No specimen was preserved, no photograph exists, and there is no contemporary 1883 report — the case surfaced only in 1921, and only through Krempf. The waters involved had already produced a documented file of their own. In July 1897 the French gunboat Avalanche, under Lieutenant Lagrésille, reported sighting two large unidentified animals off Along Bay, with further observations logged in the bay of Fai-tsi-long, north of Along Bay, on 15 and 24 February 1898. Heuvelmans's own arithmetic ties the two files together: he dates the stranding to fourteen years before the Avalanche affair, which puts it in 1883 and the Avalanche's first sighting in 1897. The idea of a sea centipede is far older than Tonkin. Aelian, writing in Greek in the third century, described a sea-scolopendra among the creatures of his On the Nature of Animals, and Pliny the Elder's Natural History records the same beast. When Heuvelmans built his classification of sea serpents he took the con rit as the type of the category he called the Many-finned, and gave it a formal-sounding binomial that reached straight back to that tradition: Cetioscolopendra aeliani, Aelian's cetacean centipede.

Timeline: the documented record of Con rit

  1. 3rd century Aelian, writing in Greek, includes a sea-scolopendra among the creatures of On the Nature of Animals; Pliny the Elder's Natural History records the same beast. The category of a giant marine centipede is in circulation some seventeen centuries before any Vietnamese report.
  2. 1883 According to the testimony he gave in 1921, Tran Van Con — then a young man, later the skipper of a customs launch — sees an enormous dead animal stranded at Hongay, in Along Bay, Tonkin. Coleman and Clark, summarising the account, give the body as sixty feet long and three feet wide. No contemporary record of the stranding is known: the date is reconstructed from Heuvelmans, who places it thirty-eight years before the interview.
  3. July 1897 The French gunboat Avalanche, commanded by Lieutenant Lagrésille, reports sighting two large unidentified animals off Along Bay — the first of a series of naval observations in the same waters, and the event fourteen years after the stranding by which Heuvelmans dates it.
  4. 15 and 24 February 1898 Further observations from the Avalanche are logged in the bay of Fai-tsi-long, north of Along Bay, an area of scattered islets. Heuvelmans catalogues both dates in his list of reports.
  5. 15 September 1921 Dr A. Krempf, director of the Oceanographic and Fisheries Service of Indochina, takes the testimony of Tran Van Con, aged fifty-six. Heuvelmans records that Krempf considered the witness entirely trustworthy and checked the account against other people; Krempf also drew the segmented armour described to him. This interview, not the 1883 event, is the origin of the whole file.
  6. 1965 Bernard Heuvelmans publishes Le Grand Serpent-de-mer, translated in 1968 as In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents. He reproduces Krempf's drawing of the armour segments under a caption crediting it to him, makes the con rit the type of his Many-finned category, and names it Cetioscolopendra aeliani — Aelian's cetacean centipede — proposing an armoured, scaly archaeocete. He does not identify it as a decomposed known animal.
  7. 1997 Glen J. Kuban publishes an analysis of the carcass netted by the Zuiyo-maru in 1977, setting out how a decaying basking shark loses its jaws and gill arches first and takes on the pseudoplesiosaur shape that has been mistaken for sea monsters many times. It is the documented mechanism behind carcass reports — though no one ever examined the Hongay body.
  8. 2016 Warut Siriwut, Gregory Edgecombe and colleagues publish a taxonomic revision of Scolopendra in mainland Southeast Asia. They call Scolopendra dehaani the largest centipede in Asia, and describe Scolopendra cataracta, an amphibious species recorded from Laos, Thailand and Vietnam whose paratype swam powerfully underwater with vigorous horizontal undulations. A swimming giant centipede turns out to be real; one the length of a ship does not.
  9. 2023 UNESCO extends the Ha Long Bay property by a boundary modification to include the Cat Ba Archipelago. The listing now covers 65,650 hectares and 1,133 islands and islets across Quang Ninh province and Hai Phong city — the seascape in which the con rit account is set.

Is there a rational explanation for Con rit?

The first thing to notice is what Heuvelmans concluded, because it is the opposite of what is usually attributed to him. He did not explain the con rit away. He made it the type specimen of a new category and proposed that it was an unknown animal: an armoured, scaly archaeocete — a surviving member of the extinct whale lineage — which he named Cetioscolopendra aeliani. Karl Shuker, Coleman and Clark, and the French writer J.-J. Barloy all report the same identification. Anyone who writes that French naturalists examined the body and pronounced it a rotten oarfish is describing a scene that does not appear in the sources. That matters, because Heuvelmans's proposal is the weakest part of the file. Archaeocetes are known only as fossils, none of them armoured, and none younger than the Oligocene. A binomial does not make an animal; it makes a hypothesis look like a taxon. Shuker, who examined the same account, declined to follow him, and read the paired structures as something other than limbs — soft-tissue sensory filaments that would leave no trace and therefore no evidence either way. The evidential position is thin in a very specific way. There is one witness. He was interviewed thirty-eight years after the event, when he was fifty-six, meaning he was about eighteen when he saw it. Nothing was kept: no bone, no plate, no photograph. Krempf's drawing is a drawing of a memory. And the name shapes the memory — a man who calls the thing a centipede has already described it as segmented before he describes anything else. Decomposing sea animals do produce monsters, and the mechanism is documented rather than speculative. Glen J. Kuban, analysing the carcass netted by the Zuiyo-maru in 1977, set out why a basking shark, Cetorhinus maximus, is such a reliable source of them: "When the basking shark decays, the jaws and loosely attached gill arches often fall away first, leaving the appearance of a long neck and small head", with the tail and dorsal fin sloughing away before the better-supported paired fins. The result is the shape people call a pseudoplesiosaur. A large decaying shark or whale, stripped down to vertebrae and ribs, can also read as a segmented body, which is the honest version of the identification our own earlier text asserted. It is a plausible mechanism, not a finding: nobody examined this carcass, so nobody identified it. The oarfish, Regalecus glesne — the subject of Tyson R. Roberts's modern systematic monograph of the genus — is likewise a ribbon-shaped animal that beaches and is mistaken for serpents, but it is not armoured and it is not segmented, and no source ties it to Hongay. There is also a plain zoological reason the image was available. Northern Vietnam really does have enormous centipedes. The 2016 taxonomic revision of Southeast Asian Scolopendra by Warut Siriwut, Gregory Edgecombe and colleagues calls Scolopendra dehaani "the largest centipede in Asia", with a body length given as up to more than 25 cm. The same paper describes a genuinely amphibious species, Scolopendra cataracta, recorded from Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, whose paratype, on being placed in water, "swam powerfully on the bottom of the container with vigorous horizontal undulating motions". A giant centipede that swims is not a myth in this region; it is a 2016 species description. What does not exist is any evidence for one the length of a ship. Finally, the template predates the report by about seventeen centuries. Aelian and Pliny both describe a sea-scolopendra. A sailor who finds an unidentifiable carcass on a Tonkin beach is not inventing a category; he is filling one that has been waiting since antiquity.

Can you visit Con rit?

There is no con rit site. No monument, no museum case, no marked beach — the file consists of one interview and one drawing, and neither is on public display. What can be visited is the seascape the account belongs to, and it is one of the most heavily visited places in Vietnam. Hongay, where the carcass is said to have come ashore, is now Hon Gai, the port and administrative centre of Ha Long city in Quang Ninh province. It is a working coal port and ferry town rather than a resort, and it is the practical gateway to the bay. Along Bay is the old French rendering of Ha Long Bay, and the bay of Fai-tsi-long named in the 1898 Avalanche reports is the Bai Tu Long area to its north-east. UNESCO lists the property as Ha Long Bay – Cat Ba Archipelago, covering 65,650 hectares and including 1,133 islands and islets across Quang Ninh province and Hai Phong city. Ha Long Bay was inscribed in 1994 and again in 2000; the Cat Ba Archipelago, a Biosphere Reserve since 2004, was added by a boundary modification in 2023. It is listed under criteria (vii) for scenic beauty and (viii) as the most extensive example of marine-invaded tower karst in the world. Nationally, Ha Long Bay has been a National Scenic Site since 1962 and a Special National Monument since 2009. Access is by boat and is regulated. Vietnam's national tourism board notes that most visitors take a packaged cruise that includes transport from Hanoi; independent travellers can take a bus to Ha Long city or to Hai Phong and a taxi to the port. A seaplane runs from Noi Bai International Airport, about forty-five minutes, with short scenic flights over the bay also available. Routes, boarding points and ticketing on the bay are set by the provincial management authority and change, so buy through the official piers or a licensed operator rather than on the dock. On timing, the national tourism board describes September to November as cool with clear skies, December to March as misty, April and May as sunny with a breeze, and June to August as unpredictable monsoon season. That last point is not decorative. This coast is genuinely typhoon-prone, sailings are suspended when warnings are issued, and a cancelled cruise in August is a normal outcome rather than bad luck. Build slack into the itinerary. Do Son, which our earlier text wrongly named as the site of the stranding, is a real place worth knowing about but has nothing to do with this story: it is a coastal ward of Hai Phong, south-east of the city, with beaches of its own. If you are travelling to see the con rit's landscape, go to Hon Gai and the bay, not to Do Son.

Sources consulted

  1. Bernard Heuvelmans, «In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents» — Hart-Davis, London (translation of Le Grand Serpent-de-mer, Plon, Paris, 1965), 1968 book
  2. Karl P. N. Shuker, «In Search of Prehistoric Survivors: Do Giant Extinct Creatures Still Exist?» — Blandford, London, 1995 book
  3. Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, «Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature» — Simon and Schuster, New York, 1999 book
  4. Jean-Jacques Barloy, «Serpent de mer et monstres aquatiques» — Paris, 1978 book
  5. Glen J. Kuban, «Sea-monster or Shark? An Analysis of a Supposed Plesiosaur Carcass Netted in 1977» — Reports of the National Center for Science Education, vol. 17 no. 3, pp. 16-28, 1997 academic
  6. Claudius Aelianus (Aelian), «On the Nature of Animals (De natura animalium)» — Greek text of the 3rd century; the sea-scolopendra also appears in Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 220 book
  7. Warut Siriwut, Gregory D. Edgecombe, Chirasak Sutcharit, Piyoros Tongkerd and Somsak Panha, «A taxonomic review of the centipede genus Scolopendra Linnaeus, 1758 (Scolopendromorpha, Scolopendridae) in mainland Southeast Asia, with description of a new species from Laos» — ZooKeys 590, pp. 1-124, 2016 academic
  8. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, «Ha Long Bay - Cat Ba Archipelago, World Heritage List no. 672» — UNESCO, Paris, 2023 report
  9. Tyson R. Roberts, «Systematics, Biology, and Distribution of the Species of the Oceanic Oarfish Genus Regalecus» — Memoires du Museum national d'Histoire naturelle, vol. 202, 268 pp., Paris (record verified in the BnF catalogue, ISBN 978-2-85653-677-3), 2012 book
  10. Vietnam National Authority of Tourism, «Ha Long - places to go, northern Vietnam (weather and transport)» — vietnam.travel, official national tourism portal, 2026 web
  11. Wiktionary contributors, «Vietnamese entry for ret (centipede), with the southern variant rit and the animal classifier con» — English Wiktionary, 2026 web

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-11 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas (folclore)

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