James A.S. Lee is a folklorist and monster-hunter who has become quite the celebrity around here. Every giftshop stocks his books. He even opened a "Museum of the Paranormal" a few years ago down by the harbor.
"Monsters of Grenhaven" was a small pamphlet that summarized a few of the entries from his book "The Raven and the Devil", which is a pretty engrossing read if you can find a copy. With his permission, I'm posting a few pics of the interior, plus a complete transcript of the text.
Here's the first entry:
THE SANDBAR DEVILS
“What is it? the Devil! The Devil, you say? The very one. Seems he’s tired of leaving his footprints in hopyards and has decided to take a dip in the sound.”
Such was the opening line of the article in the Grenhaven Evening Gazette that first introduced folks in Connecticut to the strange aquatic critters known alternately as Sandbar Devils, Devil-Squids, Ol’ Sandy or, in more recent years, Stego-Squids.
The first Sandbar Devil was sighted in 1896 by local fisherman Burton Hall, who saw it basking at low tide on one of the sandbars that choke the mouth of the Connecticut River. He said it resembled a giant “anomalous shrimp” with a row of spines along its back. Hall also described the beast as being “black as jet, with a pearly sheen like opal.”
Sandbar Devils didn’t really get big until 1901, when multiple students from Grenhaven University on a boating tour of Long Island Sound reported seeing a small school of the creatures frolicking “like otters” amongst the bars. Witnesses described the creatures as having distinctly segmented bodies like lobsters, but with large wings or fins along their flanks. The Devils’ heads were adorned with two thick arms or tentacles, “great appendages,” said witness Archibald Browning, “lined with barbs on the undersides that I don’t doubt could have ripped a man to ribbons.” Perhaps the most unusual features of the creatures, though, were their tails, which bore double rows of spikes not unlike the prehistoric stegosaurus. Thus the more colorful, comic-book name “Stego-Squids.”
The most famous sighting of these beasties came in 1911. On a misty morning in early spring, amateur marine biologist Martin Leeds was out in his boat collecting specimens for his private cold-water aquarium.
“I’d just pulled up a big stone covered with Ciona (intestinalis. A kind of tunicate or sea squirt- ed). As I was pulling it up in the boat, I saw a huge black shape- nearly as wide from wing-tip to wing-tip as I was tall- glide under my keel. I thought it must be a ray of some sort, but then it came back and flipped on its back and extended these long, jointed arms out of the water and grabbed the rock with wicked-looking hooks all along the undersides. I remember them real distinctly. They were white at the roots, staining to amber near the tips, like barnacles on the shore rocks. The thing’s mouth was weird. Like a pineapple ring, or a lamprey’s mouth, you know? I fought it for a bit. It kept tugging and hissing and spitting jets of water from that pineapple-ring mouth. Finally I let go and it took the rock back down, I guess to eat those tunicates. Or maybe, I don’t know- maybe it had laid some eggs on the rock that I’d overlooked, and it was just protecting its young. Anyway, last thing I saw was that sharp, spiny tail slapping the side of my boat. You can still see the scratches it left.”
Stego-squids have been sighted off and on over the decades, usually among the sandbars at the river’s mouth. Though one witness reported seeing one all the way up by Rocky Hill near the historic ferry.
Skeptics have dismissed the sightings as misidentified rays or skates. Perhaps even an errant mantra ray that came in from the Atlantic and got lost. Those who believe the Sandbar Devils are real, unknown animals have suggested that they could be a new species of squid, or perhaps even large swimming lobsters. Famed folklorist and cryptozoologist Paul Brighton believes they may be a type of mantra ray whose “horns” have evolved into long, flexible grasping appendages."
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