The Bear Lake Monster Was a Hoax — and Utah Has Loved It Anyway for 150 Years

The Bear Lake Monster is a serpent-like lake creature said to live in the turquoise water on the Utah–Idaho border, and it started as a deliberate hoax. In 1868, a young settler named Joseph C. Rich wrote a newspaper dispatch describing a monster the local Shoshone supposedly knew well, dressed it up with eyewitness accounts, and sent it to the biggest paper in the territory. He made most of it up. Twenty-six years later he said so plainly, calling the whole thing a “wonderful first-class lie.” The legend never cared. It’s still here, and Bear Lake leans into it harder every summer.

Here’s the real story behind the tall tale — and why a fabricated sea serpent became one of the most durable pieces of folklore in the Mountain West.

One newspaper letter started all of it

In July of 1868, Joseph C. Rich — son of the Latter-day Saint apostle Charles C. Rich, who led the settlement of the Bear Lake Valley — sent a “correspondence” letter to the Deseret News in Salt Lake City. It ran on August 3. The framing was clever: Rich claimed the local Indians had an old tradition of a “water devil” in the lake, and that now white settlers were seeing it too. “A number of our white settlers declare they have seen it with their own eyes,” the article reported. “This Bear Lake Monster, they now call it, is causing a great deal of excitement up here.”

He gave it details a good story needs. The thing moved faster than a galloping horse. It had a serpent’s body and a head somewhere between an otter and a walrus. One account put it at 90 feet of cream-colored coils cutting through the water three miles out.

The dispatch landed like a stone in a pond. Salt Lake City buzzed. When a Deseret News staffer went up to the valley to check the story, he reportedly “found hardly a person who doubted it.” Rich had used a real thing — his position as a trusted correspondent for the territory’s paper of record — to launder a fiction into news.

The whole valley, and the church, took the bait

The monster grew because respectable people repeated it. On preaching tours through northern Utah, Latter-day Saint leaders stopped to ask locals about the creature and came away reporting that so many people had seen it “under a variety of circumstances” that residents considered the story “indisputable.” Even Brigham Young got curious enough to want the question settled — was this “an honest tale of a serpent or only a fish story”? He sent a large rope up to Paris, Idaho, to help if anyone managed to catch the thing.

The capture schemes got elaborate. One resident drew up a plan involving a giant baited hook, a 20-foot cable, hundreds of yards of rope, a buoy with a flagstaff, and a shore anchor — the idea being that once the monster was hauled in, it could be put on tour and out-draw P.T. Barnum’s circus. Nobody ever collected.

Not everyone bought it. The Salt Lake Tribune mocked the creature as “twin brother to the devil,” and rival papers picked apart the sightings. The Deseret News itself printed the story both defensively and skeptically over the next several years. The argument, in other words, was lively from the start.

Then Rich admitted he made it up

Interest eventually cooled, the way these things do. And about twenty-six years after his original articles, Joseph C. Rich publicly came clean. In a piece addressed to the people of the Bear Lake Valley, he confessed the monster reports had been a fabrication — that “first-class lie.” The man who built the legend tore up its foundation himself.

It didn’t matter. By then the monster had escaped its author.

The sightings kept coming anyway

This is the strange afterlife of a debunked hoax. People kept reporting the creature long after Rich’s confession.

In 1907 a letter to a Logan newspaper claimed two men watched the Bear Lake behemoth raid their camp and kill one of their horses. A four-year-old said she saw it in 1937. A Boy Scout leader described an encounter in 1946. The most recent sighting on record came in June 2002, when Garden City business owner Brian Hirschi said that while anchoring his boat at dusk he saw two humps surface, then a serpent-like creature rise out of the water. Hirschi happens to run monster-themed tourism on the lake, which tells you something about how thoroughly the legend and the local economy have fused.

The honest read: there is no Bear Lake Monster. There never was. What there is, is a 150-year-old story people enjoy too much to retire.

Why a fake monster found such a good home

Part of the answer is the lake itself. Bear Lake doesn’t look like it belongs in the high desert. It’s a vivid turquoise — nicknamed the “Caribbean of the Rockies” — and that color is real science, not legend. The lake holds suspended particles of calcium carbonate washed in from the limestone of the surrounding Bear River Range, and those microscopic particles scatter blue light back to the surface. Twenty miles long, eight miles wide, more than 200 feet deep, and possibly hundreds of thousands of years old, Bear Lake is exactly the kind of big, deep, oddly luminous water that makes a person look twice at a shadow.

A deep, ancient, impossibly blue lake is a perfect stage. Rich just wrote the script.

The monster grew up and got a job in tourism

Garden City, on the Utah shore, long ago stopped fighting the story and started selling raspberry shakes next to it. During the town’s annual Raspberry Days festival in 1996, local schoolchildren were invited to name the creature; the judges picked “Isabella,” submitted by an eight-year-old. In other years the Raspberry Days parade has run a float packed with local kids labeled “The Real Bear Lake Monsters.” For years a green, serpent-shaped tour boat gave 45-minute folklore cruises around the lake.

The creature shows up on shop signs, ice cream cups, and cabin names all around the basin. It is, functionally, the valley’s mascot — a hoax that turned into a hometown.

Plan the trip around it

If you want to meet Isabella, summer is the season. Bear Lake’s beaches and turquoise water are the main event from June through August, and Garden City’s Raspberry Days lands in early August — the 2025 festival ran August 7–9, and the 2026 dates typically fall the first or second weekend of August (confirm with Garden City before you book). Come for the lake, the shakes, and a legend everyone’s in on. Just know going in that the best Utah monster story is the one nobody actually has to believe.