Our Local Monster

Eric A. Cheezum. Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024. 288 pp. Paperback $22.95.

You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of Chessie, the sea monster allegedly first spotted in the Chesapeake Bay in the 1970s. I was not acquainted with the legend prior to reading Eric A. Cheezum’s Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster. Little wonder: the serpent-like phenomenon, spotted a handful of times in the 1970s and 1980s but never conclusively proven or described, is a decidedly local celebrity. But Cheezum’s book is much more than a bit of late twentieth century nostalgia for residents of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware, which border the bay.

The best cultural histories take phenomena that, without context, might seem confusing, arbitrary, or even silly, and use them to open doors into the surrounding history.¹ By the end, such work explains not only the history of the thing itself—how did there come to be a costumed sea monster representing conservation efforts, for instance?—but also uses an unexpected subject to introduce readers to historical depth. Famed National Park Service interpreter Freeman Tilden once wrote that “interpretation should capitalize mere curiosity for the enrichment of the human mind and spirit.”² Cheezum’s book is an excellent example of Tilden’s belief. Chessie serves as a stealth vehicle for Chesapeake Bay environmental, labor, and economic history. A reader who would never pick up a book titled An Environmental and Labor History of the Chesapeake Bay might reach for one that promises sea monsters.

Chessie is about more than a mysterious serpent, but Chessie is still the star of the story. The first, and largest, part of the book focuses on the emergence and development of the Chessie mythology, the publicity it provoked, and debates over what might actually be swimming in the bay. Beginning in 1978 and continuing into the 1980s, observers began to see a creature they could not identify in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Sometimes described as moving side to side, other times undulating up and down, the details of the phenomenon, eventually dubbed Chessie, were not always agreed upon by those who claimed to have seen it. They insisted, though, that it was not a line of otters, a log, or any of the other suggested explanations. And, at least according to later sightings, it seemed “friendly.” This was an interesting assertion, “backed by virtually no proof whatsoever,” Cheezum writes, that developed with the aid of an enthusiastic newspaper reporter and allowed Chessie to be embraced as a potential asset by a growing tourism industry, rather than a threat.³

Cheezum takes the observers’ claims seriously, but he is more interested, thankfully, in understanding why Chessie became such a phenomenon than in adjudicating its existence. Underlying these sightings and the debate over their validity is the identity of the observers themselves, and the question of whose knowledge matters in a changing region. Most of the Chessie sightings were by recent arrivals to the Chesapeake Bay, part of an influx of tourists and residents of new suburban developments. The fishers, locally known as watermen, who had long been part of the region’s dominant industry were pushed aside by those who saw the water as a site of leisure, rather than labor. Cheezum argues that the Chessie sightings took place against this backdrop of the bay environment’s changing identity. Who had a stronger claim to know whether there was a mysterious creature in the bay: the blue-collar workers who had spent lifetimes working there, or the newcomers who boasted professional credentials and spent leisurely hours watching the water?

The region’s newspapers, including the Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun, the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Kent Island Bay Times, play a significant role in this history. Although it is not central to Cheezum’s argument, Chessie also tells a story about the role of local media in creating or discrediting legends, one that seems as threatened as Chessie’s aquatic environment by the current disappearance of local news media. Local reporters took the Chessie story and ran with it, sometimes as much out of boredom than actual interest, and in the process helped secure Chessie’s place in regional lore and even, briefly, gained national attention.

Unfortunately for both the press and Chessie’s true believers, convincing evidence of the sea serpent was hard to come by. Observers rarely managed to capture the creature on film and, when they did, it was hard to tell what the viewer was seeing. The scant evidence of Chessie’s existence nonetheless drew the attention of the cryptozoology community. Culminating with a conference to evaluate the most promising videotape footage of Chessie, the visual evidence was ultimately inconclusive. A longshot attempt to persuade Maryland politicians to pass legislation protecting the monster from harm fizzled. But the story of the Chesapeake Bay Phenomenon was not over. As Cheezum puts it, Chessie proved to be “an incredibly versatile metaphor.”⁴

The second part of the book, primarily in chapters 6 and 7, turns to Chessie’s fate in the wake of diminishing sightings. Despite Chessie’s seeming disappearance from the water, Cheezum reveals that its status as part of the region’s ecosystem became arguably more secure. Chessie’s nebulous identity and lack of historical baggage made it perfectly positioned to serve as a conservation mascot for local environmental advocates. In the 1980s, searching for a symbol to help promote and educate children about the Chesapeake Bay environment and the need to fight pollution, officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service latched onto Chessie as the perfect fictional guide to speak for its real-life aquatic friends. Chessie gained a new prominence as the star of a popular coloring book and a costumed mascot at local events.

Chessie’s last two chapters, 8 and 9, turn to the unexpected arrival, in 1994, of a Florida manatee in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, and to the continued legacy of the sea serpent. Drawing an outpouring of attention during its spontaneous tour of the bay–a region that had only rarely recorded such appearances–the manatee was dubbed Chessie in honor of the sea serpent. Its arrival offered not only a potential explanation for what observers had once spotted but also continued to draw attention to the aquatic environment. Like its namesake, Chessie the manatee served as symbol of the bay: as Cheezum writes, “the manatees spotted in the bay followed a similar arc in the press, going from exotic alien interlopers to providing an easy shorthand for the region and its environmental worries.”⁵ Wildlife officials and reporters used the opportunity to demonstrate that conservation interventions were improving the bay’s aquatic environment–why else would a manatee be willing to visit?–and that continuing to fund these efforts was essential. The sea serpent, in the meantime, cemented its status as a bay icon, even if its cryptozoological origins were largely forgotten. Chessie now graces the name of local businesses, ferries tourists on popular paddle boats, and stars in everything from hamburger shop logos to children’s books.

Cheezum’s tale is animated not only by his extensive archival research in personal archives, the Smithsonian Institution Archives, legislative records, and newspapers in Maryland and Virginia, but also by interviews with many of the key players in the Chessie phenomena. Among them are the co-founder of the Enigma Project, which championed further investigation into the Chessie phenomenon; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official who oversaw Chessie’s transformation into a conservation mascot; and even one of the people who saw–and sketched–Chessie in 1980. These recollections provide a welcome dose of personality, balancing the occasional times that the first part of the book gets mired in details about nuances of the Chessie debate. I sympathize with Cheezum’s desire to include all that he has learned in two decades spent studying the creature and its environs, and this is a small quibble for an otherwise excellent book. Readers will find themselves swept up in Chessie’s mystery and get an indelible environmental history lesson in the process.

1. Cultural history is a capacious field that often resists definition. Emerging out of intellectual history and sharing some of its practices with anthropology and social history, cultural history focuses on how individuals or groups of people understood their historical context and what motivated their thinking and behavior. In his book What is Cultural History? (Polity Press, 3rd ed., 2019), Peter Burke suggests that all cultural histories have in common “the symbolic and its interpretation.” In addition to Burke’s book, American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction by Eric Avila (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a good starting point.
2. Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 4th ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 33.
3. Eric A. Cheezum, Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), 139.
4. Cheezum, 3.
5. Cheezum, 196