De-arming the Myth of the Oklahoma Octopus

by Jim Whitehead

Have you ever heard a rumor based on nothing that just refused to die? This is the case of the much-publicized Oklahoma Octopus. Nearly a decade ago I tracked the rumor to its source online. The first appearance of the Oklahoma Octopus was on a website for The Travel Magazine back in 2001. Sadly the website has long since disappeared, and my original write up has also been eradicated. It was on the MABRC forums, but the old forums were lost when a rather nasty hacker attacked them; and notes and E-mails with the writer from the magazine were lost when the computer I was using at the time (from 2003 to 2008) was fried when my home was struck by lightning. I never bothered to back my data up at the time, but I do now, having learned this lesson the hard way. I know this may make this story sound like hearsay, but this is the truth, whether you choose to believe it or not. Having gotten to the bottom of the matter, I never felt the urge to retrace my digital tracks. While I no longer have the original article, or have been able to find it online again, I do remember essentially what it said. I will try to reproduce it for you to the best of my recollection.

"The quiet waters of three lakes deep in the Ozark Mountains of Oklahoma hide a terrifying secret. The secluded lakes of Lake Thunder Bird, Lake Oolagah, and Lake Tenkiller have been home to what can only be described as a giant man eating octopus. The lakes have dozens of unexplained drownings, and the local tribes have legends going back thousands of years in the area about a black monster with many arms living in the waters that could eat a horse."

While this might not be exactly accurate, this is basically what I remember reading. Naturally I instantly saw some major problems with this story. First off, Lake Thunderbird is nowhere NEAR the Ozarks. It is virtually in the center of the state at the edge of the metro Oklahoma City area. Second, NONE of the lakes in the state have been around for thousands of years. All of the lakes in the state are artificial, made in the early to mid-twentieth century. Finally, all of the tribes around the lakes in question are not indigenous to those areas. The Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Delaware, Shawnee, and Pottawatomie were all relocated to the area during the removals of the 1830s. It is really hard to have thousand year old legends about lakes that have not existed for a full century coming from people whose ancestors weren't there at the time.

I tracked the articles down until I found the travel site. It was posted in the middle of October in 2001 as part of a "spooky story a day". The magazine was based out of Vermont. Several of the other entries looked equally outlandish, such as one about a ghostly chariot in Maryland being pulled by fire breathing horses, and a creature that looked like a stegosaurus covered in shaggy orange fur attacking miners in Colorado. I emailed the writer and asked him about it, not telling the individual that I was a lifelong resident of the Sooner State. He responded by saying that the article was made up, and intended to be taken rather tongue in cheek. In other words...a joke. He had never even set foot in Oklahoma. He simply did a quick search for names of places in Oklahoma, wove them into his yarn, and created the Oklahoma Octopus.

Satisfied with what I had learned, I never desired to learn anything more about the "cryptid". After several years of floating around on the web, someone asked the folks at Phantoms and Monsters about it in an email. They in turn posted an article about it. Shortly after the T.V. Show "Lost Tapes" came out. The show took the story from the article and transformed it into a 30 minute "found footage" horror show. The problem is that people didn't seem to realize the footage on the show was fake, much like the controversy surrounding the "Blair Witch" movie when it came out. And the legend of the Oklahoma Octopus took off like a fire that just had gasoline poured on it. The story has evolved over the years, the lakes have changed, and people started claiming sightings of the creatures. I have heard people describing it as being red in color, having a shark's head, or having a giant snail shell. Hell, one website even goes so far as to claim they have gleaned all sorts of biological data on the fictional creature, as if they had read it in a nature magazine. I have often wondered if the father of the Oklahoma Octopus sometimes Googles his imaginary eight armed child just see how far the madness has spread and chuckle to himself about it.

So much more "information" has emerged since the Oklahoma Octopus took on a life of its own, having grown from a few simple sentences in a single post to a veritable trove of "sightings" and "data" as the people poured their spare time into it. With that having been said, some have looked to other resources to try to validate the reports, such as Native American legends in the area, and there appear to be several Indian legends that seem to have influenced the evolution of this myth. The first is a Caddo myth of a giant leech that lived in the spring fed waters that attacked people who waded into the streams. The second myth is a Creek legend from the early 1800s from the Lake Eufaula area about a huge black snake coming out of a hole (in some versions the hole is in the creek bank, in others it is in a log along the creek bank). The creature grabbed a young boy and took him to a watery grave. Some enterprising individuals, desperate to prove the case of the Oklahoma Octopus, have tried to interpret the snake attack as a tentacle. The creatures that inspired these myths may very well be actual flesh and blood creatures. The snake story sounds very much like what is now called a tie snake or boss snake, an anaconda sized cryptid snake that is reported to live in the southern waterways. And unlike the cephalopod in question, the tie snake actually has a long history of reputable sightings. I have investigated several of them myself. We'll get back to the super leech type creature shortly.

Over the years there have been a lot of drownings and bodies in the lakes. Some folks REALLY want to attribute these to Octopi. The lakes usually associated with the stories are typically party lakes. People go to them to do all of the normal aquatic activities of the summer. Unfortunate accidents happen. But all drownings in the lakes in question do have more mundane explanations. There were also quite a few bodies pulled from the lakes, as a result of nefarious human activities. Occasionally, several bodies pulled from some of the lakes have possessed sucker marks. There is a very real explanation for these as well. Remember the Caddo story of the giant leech monster? As it turns out, there are two species of ancient blood suckers that are not opposed to scavenging from dead animals native to Oklahoma: the Chestnut Lamprey (Ichthyomyzon castaneus) and the Southern Brook Lamprey ( Ichthyomyzon gagei). The wounds left by these ancient creatures are sucker marks. Officially they are restricted to the eastern third of Oklahoma, but I suspect that the range of the lampreys may extend much farther west into the state than we realize.

Another possible inspiration was a 2009 article by News OK about Lake Eufaula. The lake does not mention the presence of an octopus, but compares the actual shape of the lake to a "giant sprawling octopus with tentacles that reach in all directions." Some browsers in earlier versions of Windows cut part of the text, so you were left with a bit talking about the lake.....and a disembodied segment about an octopus. As a strange note, however, there actually have been two octopus caught in Lake Thunderbird. They were both barely alive, and in the shallows near a public fishing area. Both were a known species, from Indonesia if I remember right. The Octopus were dying of a salinity imbalance created from the salinity of their bodies changing, destroying their vital organs in the process. In other words, in both cases somebody had dumped the poor creature into the lake, and it almost instantly went into shock and died, only to be caught at the last second by someone fishing nearby. Lake Thunderbird is on the east side of Norman, a major city in Oklahoma, and exotic fish turn up in it all the time. Multiple piranha have been pulled out of the lake, as have snakeheads, armored catfish, and pacus. People dump exotics in there all the time, and the two octopus, one in '88 and the other in 2009 shared the same fate.

So there you have it folks. The actual story of the Oklahoma Octopus.