The Altamaha-ha

A river monster the Muscogee knew about first

The Altamaha-ha, Altie to its friends, is Georgia's river monster, said to haunt the channels, marshes and abandoned rice fields near the mouth of the Altamaha River in McIntosh County, especially around Darien and Butler Island. The estuary suits it: vast marsh, twisting river channels and the canals of 18th and 19th century rice plantations. So does the town. Darien was founded by Scottish Highlanders recruited at Inverness in 1735, who first called their settlement New Inverness, and there is a certain logic to a Loch Ness town keeping a monster of its own.

Descriptions vary. Sceptics say floating logs, mats of vegetation or known animals; believers describe a creature up to 30 feet long with flippers like a seal's. It made national news in 1981, when Larry Gwin, a former newspaper publisher, said he had seen it while fishing with his friend Steven Wilson: two big humps about five feet apart and a wake like a speedboat's. Others came forward. Harvey Blackman of Brunswick said he had seen a snake-headed animal 15 to 20 feet long at a spot called Two Way in the 1970s, and Frank Culpepper said its wake rocked boats.

The sightings run much further back. A dispatch from Darien dated 18 April 1830 told the Savannah Georgian of a sea monster seen by Captain Delano of the schooner Eagle off St. Simons Island, south of the river's mouth, about 70 feet long, as thick as a sugar hogshead, its alligator-like head held about 8 feet out of the water. A sloop sailing from Darien's wharves in 1826 was named the Sea Serpent. The Brunswick News traces the legend to Muscogee tradition, and the Creek Indians of Georgia certainly told early explorers of giant snakes in their rivers.

The Altamaha-ha has its hoaxes too. In March 2018 a man and his son found a strange, decomposing carcass on a beach in the Wolf Island National Wildlife Refuge near Darien, and the video went around the world. Marine biologists thought it a normal creature decomposed past recognition; it turned out to be a stuffed shark and papier-mâché, the work of the New York performance artist Zardulu, who later claimed it. An alligator gar has been suggested as the culprit behind more recent sightings.

Darien makes the most of its monster. A sculpture of it by the paleoartist Rick Spears stands at the Darien-McIntosh County Visitor Center, and visitors with binoculars still watch the water. The 137-mile Altamaha is one of the last great wild rivers of the South.