Florida locals have been petrified of a ‘four-legged, horned’ beast that’s supposedly been lurking in the murky depths of St John’s river for best part of two centuries

Many have dubbed the creature the US version of ‘Nessie’ (Image: Getty Images)

For decades residents of a Florida town have been enthralled by the mystery of a 35-foot-long creature allegedly lurking in the nearby waters.

The first reported sighting of the so-called ‘St. Johns River Monster’ happened in 1849 when a sea captain was quoted in a local newspaper called the Examiner claiming “his own and the attention of the crew was riveted upon an immense sea monster which he took to be a serpent”.

Since then the beast, nicknamed ‘Johnnie’ because of the river it supposedly inhabits, has been a mainstay in the imagination of the residents of Astor, a town which neighbours the haunted waters.

The murky waters of the St. Johns River could be home to a monster (Image: Leonard J. DeFrancisci/Wikimedia Commons)
Over the years, boaters who claimed they spied the monster have described it as “grey, horned and four-legged”, with a weird appetite for hyacinths. Some witness accounts include both seeing skulking among the Florida waves or, more alarmingly, crawling around the riverbanks.

Some have theorised that ‘Johnnie’, often spoken about as America’s answer to the Loch Ness monster, is a prehistoric creature that’s survived to modern times.

The biggest swathe of sightings occurred in 1953, when loads of people jumped on the ‘river monster craze’ at once. During that year, the Orlando Sentinel spoke to Astor man and river guide Buck Dillard, who told reporters he spotted the creature’s head pop out of the water while he was taking a couple fishing in Lake Dexter.

A sketch of the Florida monster, from the Tampa Tribune, January 18, 1976
“He looked at us for about a minute, then he went under the water and swam underwater away from us,” Dillard said. “We waited about two hours in that same spot to see if he would come up again, but he didn’t.”

A creature with the same description was later reported in Blue Creek and then the Astore Bridge. Then-President Homer Wright said at the time: “That thing has been seen by many reliable persons. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in the wilds of Florida, there weren’t some creature like that monster.”

However, some naysayers claimed the beast was probably just a manatee that had been “exaggerated” by witnesses.

Many naysayers think the animal is a cow, or a manatee (Image: Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF)

One of the main arguments was that there was a noticeable drop in the amount of hyacinths that lined the water’s edge, but many claimed this was just the work of a standard, every day cow.

”If you’ve ever been up in that country and have seen a cow come up with eelgrass and weeds all over its head, you might imagine it was a monster,” said former Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commissioner John Dequine. “They stick their heads under the water to get the eelgrass.”

Regardless, the myths about ‘Johnnie’ still persist to this day. These are mostly kept alive by “amateur cryptozoologist” Simon Smith, who lives near to the river and is convinced not only that the beast exists, but that it’s also a “girl”.