THE REYNOLDS LAKE MONSTER: During the 1960's, Reynolds Lake, near LaGrange (Oldham County), was said to be home to a giant snake that one eyewitness described as being "about two feet around, with the biggest head you ever saw, and large beady eyes." The snake was accused of stalking the livestock of nearby residents after having devoured all the frogs and fish in the lake. The snake became so ravenous that in 1968 it reportedly made off with the catch and expensive fishing gear of a Nashville fisherman. No recent sightings of the creature have been reported.
THE HERRINGTON LAKE MONSTER: On August 7, 1972, the Louisville Courier-Journal featured this article:
(Lexington, Ky.) Prof. Lawrence S. Thompson, who teaches classics at the University of Kentucky, keeps a second house on Herrington Lake, about 30 miles south of here.
And sometimes, in the quiet stretch of water between Chenault Bridge and Wells Landing a few miles down the lake, he sees a "monster" taking a leisurely swim in the early morning hours.
As the professor describes it, it's not a particularly fearsome monster. In fact, in the four years he's lived on the lake and felt there was "something out there," he's come under the impression that the creature is quite shy.
All he's ever seen of it is a snout - not unlike that of a pig, moving along just above the water at about the speed of a boat with a trolling motor - and a curly tail, similar to that of the same animal, coming along about 15 feet behind.
He's explained - in a recent interview marked by its scholarly approach and multisyllabic vocabulary - that "it's a monster only in the sense that you'd call an alligator or a crocodile a monster if nobody else had ever seen one."
Actually, he said, he has no idea what it is. But he knows there are no fish that big in Herrington Lake, and he leans toward a theory of his own - that it might be a type of creature that has somehow escaped observation by men since its prehistoric ancestors swam up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers millennia ago.
Herrington Lake was formed in 1924 when the Kentucky Utilities Co. dammed the Dix, and Thompson thinks it possible that a monster - actually, many generations of monsters - could have survived in a cave submerged when the dam was built, to venture forth when the new avenue became available.
