🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº6501
ACTIVE
Tahoe Tessie
Tahoe Tessie is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Lake Tahoe, California/Nevada, US. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.
Where and when was Tahoe Tessie sighted?
- Location
- Lake Tahoe, California/Nevada, US
- Date sighted
- Unknown
- Coordinates
- 39.097, -120.032
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
What is Tahoe Tessie?
Tahoe Tessie is the nickname of a supposed serpentine creature in Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada line. The nickname is documented and recent: Bob McCormick, a resident of Kings Beach, said he invented it after reading a newspaper item about serpent sightings off Tahoe Vista, had the character drawn by the cartoonist Eileen Gay in December 1979, registered the name as a trademark and published it in 1985 through a company called Tahoe Tourist Promotions. What is usually offered as the legend's deep past does not survive checking. The Washoe do hold Cave Rock, De'ek wadapush, on the eastern shore, as their most sacred place, but the belief recorded there in the Forest Service files and in the 2007 Ninth Circuit opinion that upheld the climbing ban is about water babies and a confrontation at the creation of the landscape, and about a site to be avoided by everyone except practitioners called to it. It is not a lake monster. George Wharton James's 1915 compendium of Tahoe lore names the Washoe tellers, places the water babies at Emerald Bay and contains no lake serpent at all. This file tells that story instead, and dates the sightings it can date.
What is the history of Tahoe Tessie?
Lake Tahoe lies on the California–Nevada state line, high in the Sierra Nevada. The modern map of its floor comes from a multibeam sonar survey run in August 1998 and published by James V. Gardner, Peter Dartnell, Larry A. Mayer and John E. Hughes Clarke of the U.S. Geological Survey as Water-Resources Investigations Report 99-4043. The lake bottoms out at about 1,645 feet (501 m), which the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center gives as the second greatest depth of any lake in the United States, after Crater Lake. That depth is the engine of every story ever told about this water, including this one.
The oldest documented belief attached to the lake is Washoe, and it is not about a serpent. On the eastern shore stands Cave Rock — De'ek wadapush, "standing grey rock" — a volcanic plug through which U.S. 50 was tunnelled twice, in 1931 and again in 1957. When the climbing organisation The Access Fund sued to overturn a federal ban on sport climbing there, the Ninth Circuit set out what the administrative record actually contains. Cave Rock, the court wrote, is "the most religious feature within the Washoe religion"; the Washoe "believe the rock is the location of an epic confrontation that occurred during the creation of the Tahoe landscape between water babies who figure prominently in Washoe mythology and a small weasel brother (a mythological ancestor of the Washoe)"; and "traditional Washoe assert that Cave Rock is to be avoided by all people, except Washoe practitioners who have been called to 'seek power or knowledge at the rock'". Two Washoe doctors, Welewkushkush and Big Mike, are recorded as visiting after Euro-American settlement, and Henry "Moses" Rupert — named in the opinion as the last known traditional practitioner at the rock — went there until his death in 1965.
Water babies, then, and a creation fight. Not a lake monster. The same tradition reaches print in 1915 in George Wharton James's compendium The Lake of the Sky: Lake Tahoe, whose title page advertises the "legendary lore" of the lake. James printed four Washoe stories collected by Bertha Price of Fallen Leaf Lodge — he credits her only as "Mrs. W. W. Price" — from two Washoe informants he names as Jackson and his wife Susan. Their water baby is at Emerald Bay, on the Californian west shore: a sleeping creature with "sunshine-golden-hair" that Little Brother scalps, after which the offended lake rises behind him. James then added a fifth item, "A Legend of Lake Tahoe", and said where it came from: it "was published some years ago in Sunset Magazine. It was written by Miss Nonette V. McGlashan, who heard it from a Washoe squaw." That is the story of the Ong, a man-eating bird whose nest lies at the centre of the lake. Sunset was the Southern Pacific Railroad's promotional magazine and ran the piece in August 1905; McGlashan was the daughter of the Truckee newspaperman Charles Fayette McGlashan, and the Washoe teller was, according to the Sierra Sun's account of the family papers, Elizabeth May, a Washoe girl fostered by the McGlashans.
James did not print the Ong story approvingly. In the same chapter he wrote that the Washoe stories from Jackson and Susan "are wonderfully different from certain stories recently published in current magazines, professing to be Legends of Lake Tahoe. These latter are pure fiction, and to those familiar with Indian thought, reveal their origin in the imaginative brain of white writers who have but faint conceptions of Indian mentality." Bertha Price added her own warning: "I do not vouch for these legends. The modern Indian too often tells what he thinks you want to know."
The monster in the water is a separate, and much later, tradition. The earliest first-person account usually offered is that of I. C. Coggin, who described a serpent with a head fourteen feet across and a body over six hundred feet long — but he published it in the San Francisco press in 1897, some thirty years after the sighting he claimed. The name arrived later still. Bob McCormick, a resident of Kings Beach on the north shore, said he coined "Tahoe Tessie" on a kayak-camping trip after reading a newspaper item about serpent sightings off Tahoe Vista; the cartoonist Eileen Gay drew the character for him in December 1979. His illustrated book, The Story of Tahoe Tessie: The Original Lake Tahoe Monster, was issued in 1985 by a publisher named Tahoe Tourist Promotions, of P.O. Box 986, Kings Beach — the imprint printed inside the book, next to a registered trademark symbol on the name itself. He ran a Tessie gift shop and museum in Kings Beach for about seven years; by 2001 he had sold 66,000 copies, and by 2018 the figure quoted was around 110,000.
Timeline: the documented record of Tahoe Tessie
- 1897 I. C. Coggin publishes in the San Francisco press a first-person account of a serpent with a head fourteen feet across and a body over six hundred feet long, seen in the Tahoe country roughly thirty years earlier. It is the earliest first-person monster narrative usually cited, and it appears three decades after the event it describes.
- August 1905 Sunset, the Southern Pacific Railroad's promotional magazine, publishes 'The Legend of Tahoe' by Nonette V. McGlashan: the story of the ong, a man-eating bird nesting at the centre of the lake. According to the Sierra Sun's account of the McGlashan family papers, the teller was Elizabeth May, a Washoe girl fostered by the family.
- 1915 George Wharton James publishes The Lake of the Sky: Lake Tahoe. He prints four Washoe stories collected by Bertha Price from Jackson and Susan — water babies at Emerald Bay, not a serpent — and warns that the magazine 'Legends of Lake Tahoe' are 'pure fiction… the imaginative brain of white writers'. He then reprints the Sunset ong story as the last item in the chapter.
- 1965 Death of Henry 'Moses' Rupert, identified in the federal appellate record as the last known traditional Washoe practitioner at Cave Rock. The tradition attached to the rock is about water babies and a creation confrontation, and it is a practice, not a monster sighting.
- December 1979 The cartoonist Eileen Gay draws the character of Tessie for Bob McCormick of Kings Beach, who says he invented the name on a kayak-camping trip after reading a newspaper item about serpent sightings off Tahoe Vista. Sources differ on whether that trip was in 1975 or 1979.
- June 1982 Two off-duty Reno police officers, Kris Beebe and Jerry Jones, report a large dark object passing close to their boat while water-skiing; one of them was in the water at the time. It is the sighting that revived local interest and that McCormick himself has always separated from his own invented character.
- December 1985 The Story of Tahoe Tessie: The Original Lake Tahoe Monster is published by Tahoe Tourist Promotions, P.O. Box 986, Kings Beach, California — the imprint printed inside the book, beside a registered trademark symbol on the name. The nickname now belongs to a company as well as to a lake.
- August 1998 A U.S. Geological Survey multibeam sonar survey maps the floor of Lake Tahoe; the results are published as Water-Resources Investigations Report 99-4043. The deepest sounding is about 1,645 feet (501 m).
- 1999 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark's Cryptozoology A to Z prints the sentence 'Washoe Indian legends spoke of monsters inhabiting the lake'. A full-text search of the Open Library book corpus returns that phrase exactly once. It is the earliest printed statement of the Washoe–Tessie link that this file has been able to fix.
- 5 August 2003 The Forest Service's Record of Decision on the Cave Rock Final Environmental Impact Statement bans all rock climbing on Cave Rock and orders the bolts and the masonry floor inside the cave removed. The Ninth Circuit upholds the ban on 27 August 2007.
- April 2005 Ron Talmage, of Rocklin, and Beth Douglas, of Sacramento, tell the Tahoe Daily Tribune that they watched a shape with three to five humps about a hundred yards off Tahoe Park Beach. No photograph was taken. In the same period Charles Goldman is quoted noting that Tessie witnesses never report a head or a tail.
- 5 September 2025 The remotely operated vehicle Deep Emerald, built by the Restoring the Lake Depths Foundation and funded through the Tahoe Fund, is flown to about 1,570 feet and livestreamed. The limnologist Sudeep Chandra describes a silty, sediment-covered bed. No creature and no bodies are seen — the first time anyone has looked with a camera.
Is there a rational explanation for Tahoe Tessie?
The most quoted piece of evidence for Tessie is a sentence Jacques Cousteau is supposed to have said after diving Lake Tahoe — usually "the world is not ready for what is down there", or "for the horrors I have seen". It cannot be anchored to any text, dive log, film or interview, it circulates in several mutually incompatible wordings, and the local press has been dismantling it for years: Moonshine Ink concluded flatly in April 2012 that "Cousteau never explored underneath Lake Tahoe and there are no floating tombs", and KQED reported in August 2011 that no record exists of his ever visiting the lake at all. Because it cannot be fixed to a source, the quotation does not appear anywhere in this file. What can be documented is that the motif is older than Cousteau's career: the Sunset legend that George Wharton James reprinted in 1915 ends on the line that the ong's "nest remains, and the drowned never rise in Lake Tahoe".
The claim that the Washoe told of a lake serpent is equally hard to anchor, and here the archive can be measured. The 1915 James compendium — the fullest early collection of Tahoe "legendary lore" — runs to some 878 kB of digitised text. It mentions the water babies six times and Cave Rock seven times, and every one of those seven is about the carriage road, the steamer route or the view; the word "serpent" appears exactly once, in a rhetorical passage about the primordial Sierra where "not even a frog croaked, a cicada rattled, or a serpent hissed"; "monster" appears twice, once for the ong bird and once for a "monster log" in a lumber chute. Searching the same file for terms that must be there gives 13 hits for "ong" and 80 for "Wash-", so the search works. There is no Washoe lake serpent in it.
The origin of our own error is traceable. The earliest printed statement of the link that this file could fix is a single sentence in Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark's Cryptozoology A to Z (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1999): "Washoe Indian legends spoke of monsters inhabiting the lake." A full-text search of the Open Library book corpus returns that phrase exactly once — in that book — and it has been copied outward ever since, picking up Cave Rock on the way. The same encyclopaedic drift also produced the widespread claim that Cave Rock is a Washoe burial ground, which is not what the Forest Service record or the court opinion describes.
For the sightings themselves there is a named sceptic rather than an anonymous consensus. Charles Goldman, the UC Davis limnologist who founded the Tahoe Research Group, pointed out in January 2004 that Tessie reports share one feature: witnesses describe a dark object, never a head and never a tail. He produced photographs imitating Tessie using splashes off rocks and wave patterns, and has offered wind-driven waves, boat wakes and the optics of very cold, very clear water as sufficient explanations; the alternative he and others have floated is a large sturgeon, a fish not documented in Tahoe. Commercial incentive belongs in the same list and is unusually well documented here: the name is a registered trademark, the first book carries the imprint of a company called Tahoe Tourist Promotions, roughly 110,000 copies have been sold, Tessie fronted the "Don't mess with Tessie" anti-litter campaign, and in 2023 an ECHL ice-hockey franchise took the name Tahoe Knight Monsters.
Negative claims about the lake bed have a date now. On 5 September 2025 a remotely operated vehicle named Deep Emerald, built by the Restoring the Lake Depths Foundation and funded through the Tahoe Fund, was flown to roughly 1,570 feet and livestreamed. The limnologist Sudeep Chandra of the University of Nevada, Reno described what the camera showed: sediment, six to seven per cent organic, drifting in gentle currents. No creature, and no bodies. That is a statement about one dive on one day, not about the whole lake — but it is the first time anyone has looked with a camera, and it is the state of the evidence as of 2026.
Can you visit Tahoe Tessie?
There is nothing to visit that belongs to Tessie herself. Bob McCormick's Tahoe Tessie gift shop and museum in Kings Beach closed years ago and the building that housed it was demolished; Moonshine Ink reported it gone in 2018. The books, mugs and plush toys are still sold in gift shops around the lake.
The place that does exist, and that this file is careful not to confuse with a monster, is Cave Rock, on U.S. 50 on the Nevada shore between Zephyr Cove and Glenbrook, in Douglas County. The shoreline strip is run by Nevada State Parks as part of Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park (775-588-7975). The grounds are open sunrise to sunset; the boat launch runs 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. from 25 May to 4 September and 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. the rest of the year. Day use is $10 per Nevada vehicle and $15 per out-of-state vehicle, the boat launch $20 and $25 respectively, $2 to bike in, and $2 for a fifteen-minute photo stop. There is a double ramp with a dock, over forty trailer spaces, three picnic areas with tables and grills, and a small beach where swimming, snorkelling and kayak launching are allowed. No glass on the beach, dogs leashed and off the sand, no overnight camping or parking, no drones. Check current fees before travelling: these are the published figures as of 2026.
The rock itself is federal land, and rock climbing on it is prohibited. The Forest Service determined in 1996 that Cave Rock was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, the Keeper of the Register confirmed it in 1998 as a traditional cultural property, an archaeological site and a historic transportation corridor, and the management plan adopted in the Record of Decision of 5 August 2003 banned all climbing and ordered the bolts and the masonry floor inside the cave removed. The Ninth Circuit upheld the ban on 27 August 2007. A short trail climbs to the top of the rock from a pull-out just north of the tunnels, and the view is one of the best on the east shore — but bear in mind what the Washoe say about the site, which is the one thing on this page that is not folklore: it is to be avoided by everyone except practitioners called to it. Visit the shoreline park and the overlook, and leave the cave alone.
Sources consulted
- M. Margaret McKeown (ponente), Tribunal de Apelaciones del Noveno Circuito, «The Access Fund v. United States Department of Agriculture, 499 F.3d 1036 (9th Cir. 2007) — opinión completa, con la descripción del expediente washoe de Cave Rock» — United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 2007 report
- George Wharton James, «The Lake of the Sky: Lake Tahoe — cap. IV, «Indian Legends of the Tahoe Region»» — J. F. Rowny Press, Pasadena, 1915 book
- Jim Porter, «A Washoe tale: The Legend of Tahoe — sobre la publicación de Nonette V. McGlashan en Sunset (agosto de 1905) y la narradora washoe Elizabeth May» — Sierra Sun, 2013 newspaper archive
- Ronda Sluder, «Legend of Lake Tahoe sea monster is growing — Bob McCormick, el origen del nombre, Eileen Gay y las cifras de venta» — Tahoe Daily Tribune, 2001 newspaper archive
- Keith Sheffield, «Dark shapes in the lake: Tahoe Tessie legend remains alive for visitors» — Tahoe Daily Tribune, 2005 newspaper archive
- Cherie Louise, «Who is Tahoe Tessie? — Charles Goldman (UC Davis) y los testimonios de Gene St. Denis» — Reno News & Review, 2005 newspaper archive
- James V. Gardner, Peter Dartnell, Larry A. Mayer y John E. Hughes Clarke, «Bathymetry and selected perspective views of Lake Tahoe, California and Nevada (Water-Resources Investigations Report 99-4043)» — U.S. Geological Survey, 1999 report
- Suzie Dundas, «No Tahoe Tessie, No Mafia Victims: What a Camera Really Found at the Bottom of Lake Tahoe — la inmersión del ROV Deep Emerald del 5 de septiembre de 2025» — Matador Network, 2025 newspaper archive
- Alta Journal, «Read This Before You Swim in Lake Tahoe — el relato de I. C. Coggin publicado en 1897 sobre un avistamiento de treinta años antes» — Alta, 2021 newspaper archive
- Loren Coleman y Jerome Clark, «Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras & Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature — entrada «Tahoe Tessie»» — Fireside / Simon & Schuster, 1999 book
- Moonshine Ink Staff, «Cadavers, Cousteau and Lake Tahoe — «Cousteau never explored underneath Lake Tahoe and there are no floating tombs»» — Moonshine Ink, 2012 newspaper archive
- Moonshine Ink Staff, «Tahoe myths: Tessie and the man-eating lake bird, Ong… — el museo de Kings Beach cerrado y demolido, y las ~110.000 copias vendidas» — Moonshine Ink, 2018 newspaper archive
- Nevada Division of State Parks, «Cave Rock — Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park: horarios, tarifas y normas» — Nevada State Parks, 2026 web
- Tahoe Fund, «Deep Dive ROV Livestream Questions Answered — Sudeep Chandra sobre lo que la cámara vio en el fondo» — Tahoe Fund, 2025 web
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-14 · How we verify our content
📎 Source: Enigma Atlas
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