THE CANVEY ISLAND MONSTER– England
A possible relative of the Enfield Horror (at least my speculative version of the Horror).
In 1953, the carcass of a strange, amphibious monster washed up on the beach at Canvey Island, England. The monster was said to have an enormous mouth lined with hundreds of small, sharp teeth, as well as a pair of muscular back legs, but no apparent front limbs.
Though it’s claimed that scientists who examined the carcass could not identify it, photographs of the corpse clearly show that it was nothing more than a partially decomposed Goosefish Lophius piscatorius. Like their frogfish relatives, goosefish have fleshy, arm-like pectoral fins which they used to move slowly over the muddy sea floor.
But let’s take the speculative fiction route and imagine that the Canvey Island Monster was something more? What if it, too, was of the same bizarre amphibious fish species as the Enfield Horror? Or perhaps a close relative, since it lacked the stubby arms derived from the pectoral fins. Perhaps it was specialized for moving about in the shallows while it’s Illinois relative was a more terrestrial lineage?
Intriguingly, there are a few (admittedly fictional) accounts of goosefish crawling on land. The Stratford News of Connecticut mentioned an incident on July 18, 1909 in which lighthouse keeper Theodore Judson of Lordship, CT killed a large goosefish that had repeatedly hauled itself out of the sea at night to raid his chicken coop. An earlier article from 1906 mentions a man, also from Lordship, finding a large, wide-mouthed fish– clearly a goosefish, even from the sparse description in the paper- crawling on the shore rocks with a pair of stubby feet. While both accounts are more than likely just tall tales created to drum up newspaper sales, it’s entertaining to imagine that perhaps these land-walking anglerfish were actually live versions of the Canvey Island carcass.
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