1933, July 22: Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer’s Loch Ness Encounter

On the afternoon of July 22, 1933, Mr. & Mrs. George Spicer were driving along the east side of Loch Ness in Scotland. It was around 3:30 or 4:00 PM, and the couple were somewhere about half-way between Dores and Foyers. They were climbing a slight hill when an extraordinary creature crossed the road in front of their car, from left to right. It was only in view for a couple of seconds; and it practically took up the whole road as it crossed.

        The location on the body where the Spicers presumed would have been a head was across the road before they had time to take in the whole shape properly. The skin was a greyish color, "like a dirty elephant or rhinoceros." The body of the creature was large and thick, and moved across the road in a series of jerks... a long tentacle, which was presumed to be a neck, stretched towards the right of the road in the direction of the lake, which was about forty feet down the slope from the road. This 'neck' undulated up and down, twisting in a series of half-hoops, and vanished into the shrubbery on the side of the road. There were no visible legs of any sort, nor a tail; but where the body sloped down to the start of the 'neck' -- about 4-5 feet above the roadway -- the Spicers saw something "flopping up and down" which Mr. Spicer later thought was the end of a long tail swung around the body; Mrs. Spicer felt the object was an additional small animal or such, slung or riding on the creature.

Rupert Gould's impression of what the Spicers' saw. [Larger version here]

        Mr. Spicer described the creature as looking overall like "a huge snail with a long neck," which can be seen in the illustration above, produced under Mr. Spicer's direction while being interviewed about the sighting in 1933 by Rupert T. Gould, who wrote the first book about the monster. The road is at least 12 feet across with a grassy verge on each side. The creature had fully crossed the road and vanished down the slope by the time the Spicer's car reached the spot; and the trees between the road and the lake blocked any good view of the shoreline itself. They slowed down as they passed the spot, but didn't stop. The grass on the side of the road looked trampled down, and on the side away from the lake, which climbed away from the road some, there appeared to be a "sort of track."

        At the time of the sighting, neither of the Spicer's had heard anything about the relatively new reports of a monster being seen in Loch Ness; and when they stopped a man on a bicycle a short time later to tell him what they saw, he was the first person to inform them of the reports that were just starting to be circulated.

The Letter to the Inverness Courier

        The first public notice of the Spicer's odd sighting was a letter that Mr. Spicer sent to the Inverness Courier, a local newspaper, which was published on August 4 of the same year. When later interviewed by Gould, Mr. Spicer had to admit that the original letter was written in "haste and an endeavour not to exaggerate." In his attempts to not overdo the details, Mr. Spicer actually underestimated the size of the creature he saw as only 6-8 feet long; but a later re-inspection of the road made clear to him the creature had been much, much larger... closer to 25 feet in length.

        The Spicer's encounter remains a key -- and controversial -- report of a creature in or near Loch Ness. It does not match up with the popular idea of a dinosaur-like creature, and it shows that theories must also consider creatures that can leave the lake. At the same time, no other sighting has ever reported anything similar to the slug-like creature the Spicer's encountered.