Montauk Monster

About

The Montauk Monster was a modern urban legend the surfaced online in the summer of 2008, generated a lot of “news of the weird”-style buzz, and spun-off into an exploitable image macro fad.

Story Behind the Montauk Monster

In the summer of 2008, a mysteirous glob of mammal flesh washed ashore upon the northern coast of Long Island. Dubbed “Montauk Monster” by Nicky Papers, one of the eyewitnesses on site and blogger of montauk-monster.com, it soon attracted attention from the media as well as speculators and cryptozoologists on the web.

The story was first reported in the local Montauk magazine The Independent on July 23rd, 2008. The article mentions that both the Town Natural Resources Director Larry Penny and Doug Johnston of Bandit Trappings and Pest Control concluded that the carcass was that of a raccoon missing its upper jaw.

This angle did not satisfy most, and alternate theories abounded. New York Magazine, boingboing, Gawker covered the story, with mixed details from other supposed eye-witnesses.

After much hype around the blogosphere, montauk-monster.com revealed that the monster was a prop from the upcoming film Splinterheads starring Lea Thompson, and that the monster was a publicity stunt.

On June 4th, 2009, blogger Drew Grant posted information he claimed was given to him by an unnamed member of a group of people who were responsible for the Montauk Monster, claiming that it was a raccoon that they had given a Viking Funeral.

The following text is copied from Drew’s archived blog for the sake of preservation since the original blog is no longer online. Unfortunately, the photos were not archived.

BY DREW GRANT

Some of the greatest unsolved mysteries have to wait 50 years before they’re revealed. That’s what Snopes is for. Sure, we still don’t know where Hoffa’s body is buried, but we do know that the ghost in the amusement park was just old man Withers with a projector and a mask. Um, what?

It was with this kind of Scooby-gang luck that I happened to be sitting at a cafe yesterday, talking to an old friend who I hadn’t seen in a year or two. After casually mentioning that I was in the business of media gossip, he off-handedly let this little bomb drop, “Oh yeah? I was one of those guys behind that Montauk monster thing last summer.”

My friend (who wanted to remain anonymous because he’s an animal rights activist and apparently hates being behind the greatest P.T. Barnum con in the 21st century?) told me that last summer, he and two friends were goofing off 15 miles west of Montauk, on a beach on shelter island. It was the weekend before July 4th, and the trio were making a raft and putting all sorts of debris on it, just for fun: watermelons, scraps of cloth, plastic swimmie duck, etc. When suddenly one of the guys finds a dead raccoon half-buried in the sand.

Now, my friend isn’t the type to take dead animals and set them on fire and float them off in the sea (he’s vegan), but, in his words, “this creature was honored with a viking funeral, not merely exploited for crass entertainment.” Basically, though, they were just being dumb. “In the interest of full disclosure,” he admits, “this did happen shortly after a waterboarding endurance competition, and just before a clothespins-on-your-genitals challenge.”

Three days later, what was left of the carcass drifted up on Montauk beach, and the rest is history. Luckily, to back up his story, my friend kept documentation of the incident, including photos which clearly show the scraps tied to the dead raccoon’s feet that were seen in the later photographs of the heinous beast.

Now a lot of you may be thinking, “Wasn’t that thing supposed to be um, monster-size?” As animal scientists pointed out last summer, the picture of the “monster” showed it in relation to the size of a fly, making it not-that-large, or approximately “vole-sized.” I’ve included the google image search of “decayed raccoon skull” for reference, fyi, and all the images come up in relation to “Montauk Monster.” And now we know: It wasn’t a viral marketing stunt at all, but just some kids setting fire to a dead animal and then pushing it off to sea with a watermelon and some floatie wings.

Fox News commented on the blog entry, saying that it provided “helpful photographic evidence of said raccoon Viking funeral.”

Google Insights

The vast majority of searches for “Montauk Monster” turn up in August of 2008, just after the story’s first publication in late July.

The second little peak in searches occurred when Animal Planet placed the Montauk Monster at #4 in their Top 10 Animal Stories of 2008.

The next peak came when news of another unidentified animal carcass turned up on the coast of Long Island, stirring the imaginations of writers who framed it as “the return of the Montauk Monster.”