Things in the Lakes When I was a boy, I was sure that a horrible monster lived in Lake Eufaula. It was a bloated, leechlike form with tentacles surrounding its mouth. I finally used the creature in a story called "Treasure of the Tsundigewi" (1986):
Yet now there was this Thing pushing itself up slowly out of the water, thick as a tree trunk and tall as a chimney. . . I saw that its upper part ended in a mass of hanging lobster-red coils, like the bodies and tails of eels. . . They parted like the petals of a flower from around the end of the Thing, and nestled amongst them I could see a black, circular patch wide as a bushel basket. Triangular shark teeth lined the round patch, forming circles within circles, all the jagged tips bending in toward a dark, glistening throat. [7]
The wildest fantasy, right? Yet to my amazement, Native American writer Russell Bates mentioned something like this in his letter-turned-article, "Legends of the Kiowa," in the INFO Journal:
I have only heard that the Caddo people once camped near small lakes that spring literally out of sandstone cliffs some ten miles north of here [Anadarko]. This would have been some two hundred or more years ago. They would never let their women go for water without being accompanied by an armed man because something lived in those lakes that would snare and drag a human deep underwater into caverns carved by the springs. What little I know of them is that they are about the size of a horse, have several arms or tentacles and very tiny eyes. Oddly, they are reddish-brown, look leathery, and make no sound at all, much like some kind of snail or slug that has no shell.
A resort built on one of these lakes, Salyer's Lake and Camp "on the highway between Binger and Cogar," had the highest drowning rate in Oklahoma. It was closed down as a public hazard in the 1960s. Bates adds: "Unexplainably high drowning rates exist at Tenkiller Lake, Lake Thunderbird, and Lake Oolagah. I know this as well: you could not get me to either fish or to go swimming in those lakes if you offered me gold." [8]
How it changed my life:didn't
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