Stock Ness Monster

It's... kind of hard to take it seriously.

"Old Moses smelled like the river at noon: swampy, steaming, and pungent with life. To say I respected that awesome beast would be quite an understatement. But right at that moment I wished I was anywhere else on earth, even school. But I didn't have much time for thinking, because Old Moses's snaky head began to descend toward us like the front end of a steam shovel and I heard the hiss of its jaws opening."

—Boy's Life

Ah, Nessie, Nessiteras rhombopteryx^note The specific name of the Loch Ness Monster, Nessiteras rhombopteryx ("the monster of Ness with the diamond shaped fin") was devised in the 1970s by the naturalist Peter Scott. It's an anagram of 'monster hoax by Sir Peter S', though Scott denied this was intentional and fellow Nessie researcher Robert H. Rines (who took two supposed pictures of the monster) pointed out the anagram could also be read as: 'Yes, both pix are monsters, R.' However, according to the rules of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, the name cannot be considered official because there is no specimen for it to be attached to. , the Loch Ness Monster. Its mysterious allure and continuous camera shyness has led the Loch Ness Monster to inspire many other myths and urban legends of lake-dwelling cryptids, as well as having legends of other lakes sneak back into its own. Many lakes around the world have had local stories about the secret monster that lives at the bottom, and as the world was getting ready for the moving pictures, a lot of these separate myths consolidated into one shared stock trope about hidden lake creatures waiting to be found by open-minded zoologists.

The creature is prone to travelling around the surface like an iceberg with a small section peeping out at the top (often making it cunningly indistinguishable from a log when seen by a Caledonian drunk) while its main body lies hidden beneath the surface. Explanations often revolve around its being some ancient or long-lost creature found miles away from where it would be expected, locked in by changes of geography, in an ecology often far too small actually to support it unless it devoted itself to eating once a year and never breeding.

There is also often a plot that goes along with these beasts that decks the halls of Syfy Originals. Some idiot starts the plot by becoming kelpie chow. Some low-paid fringe scientist, with fewer peer-reviewed papers and far better looks than any normal scientist, will go or be forced out there to investigate alongside a gruff, no-nonsense local and a wacky comedy sidekick, daring to find the truth while being threatened with ridicule and/or group buggery by the other locals.

The earliest written mention of Nessie may be in a 7th century biography of St. Columba who saved a swimmer being pursued by a "water beast" in Loch (river) Ness by making the sign of the cross. Alternatively, one could consider the first organized reporting on Nessie started in the '30s after the original King Kong with a description that matches up to a certain scene where a Brontosaurus emerges from the water.

A number of myths also have their creatures as helpful or at least sufficiently beautiful to not want to kill, so there's also a softer side to the trope where the creature will be friendly. The myths of Nessie being a plesiosaur help play into that, being a slightly more friendly-looking form than a giant eel or a floating turd.

These creatures may sometimes be linked to Sea Serpents. When this is so, either kind may be modelled after the other, either with lake serpents being portrayed as more snakelike than they usually are or sea serpents gaining features such as flippers and plesiosaur-like necks.

Occasionally, the monster will turn out to have been something completely different.

Is not in any way related to the name of an RPG protagonist.

For other rumored-to-be creatures in the "Nessie" vein, see Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious. For slightly less implausible mysterious lake dwellers, see The Catfish. For another long-necked, elusive aquatic holdout of the age of the dinosaurs, see Mokele-Mbembe.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Doraemon: One strip (that guest-stars Doraemon's sister, Dorami, with Doraemon absent for some reason) has Nobita making a bet with Suneo and Gian about proving the Loch Ness Monster's existence. After Nobita's research evidence get debunked, he asks for Dorami's help, who then produces a drilling underwater gadget to create a tunnel all the way from Japan to Scotland to lure the monster in. To Nobita and Dorami's surprise, it works, and the actual Loch Ness Monster ends up in Japan, but they have to quickly take it back to avoid being spotted by local authorities.
• Doraemon: Nobita and the Kingdom of Clouds: Nessie herself — the original — reappears in this film as one of the endangered earth animals collected by the Sky People from Scotland before initiating Project Noah. Doraemon and Nobita meets Nessie face-to-face, and finds out she's actually a Gentle Giant who willingly gives them a ride when they need to cross a lake.
• In the first Galaxy Angel AA special, the cast participates in the Shine! You Chicken Bastard contest, in which they're required to fly over a lake. Unfortunately, the lake is inhabited by a huge, cartoonish serpent called the Loch Bro Monster, which bats them out of the air.

Card Games

• The kaiju-themed TCG Pachimon have various dinosaurs, including Nessie herself, featured on the cards.
• The "Danger!" archetype in YuGiOh is themed around cryptids, so naturally one of the cards in it is "Danger! Nessie!"

Comic Books

• Superman:
  • In Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #144 shows up the Loch Trevor monster, an oranged-scaled, long-necked dragon-like aquatic beast created by Darkseid's evil science.
  • The Legion of Super-Heroes!: The sea monster manipulated by Saturn Girl is a long-tailed, four-flapped, scaly green reptilian beast.
• Disney Mouse and Duck Comics: Used constantly, whether in the form of an expy or the original. Carl Barks already did it, but that didn't keep everyone else from doing it, too.
• The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers: In one episode, Franklin is attacked by whole swarm of Loch Ness Monsters. "Only an inch long, but icky as Hell!"
• Asterix: Nessie's Roman-era ancestor makes an appearance in "Asterix and the Picts". With the heroes visiting Scotland, it was inevitable that the Loch Ness monster would show up in some form. Here, Nessie lives in Loch Androll and is the totem animal of Macaroon's clan. He playfully attacks the boat the protagonists are in and takes the gourd with Macaroon's elixir. Macmini later leads Asterix and Obelix to Nessie's cave in an attempt to get the gourd back. In the climax, the monster attacks one of the Roman boats, thus preventing the legionaries from assisting the Maccabees. When Asterix and Obelix leave for Gaul again, Nessie shows up one more time to give Asterix back the Gourd, but since he no longer needs it, Asterix throws it back in the lake. A final panel states that Nessie's descendants keep looking for it to this day, hence why they sometimes show themselves.
• In Billy The Kids Old Timey Oddities, Nessie turns out to actually be an alternate form of the shape-shifting Dracula.

Comic Strips

• U.S. Acres: Near the end of the run, there was a week-long storyline involving Wade discovering that a giant, crazy sea serpent is living in the water trough. Naturally, Wade is the only one who sees him. (The storyline can be seen a Platypus Comix article about the comic here.)
• Phoebe and Her Unicorn: Ringo is a Nessie-like monster that lives in the lake near a summer camp Phoebe attends. He also happens to be friends with a Creepy Child named Sue, and Marigold develops a crush on him (in spite of her being a unicorn) though he is Oblivious to Love.
• Safe Havens: Samantha theorizes that plesiosaurs were what ancient merfolk looked like, as she noticed, between the half-human merfolk on Earth, and the half dodo merfolk on Mars, that she believes merfolk's top half reflects the dominant species of the time. Hence, plesiosaurs in the time of the dinosaurs.

Fan Works

• In The Confectionary Chronicles, Jörmungandr the World-Serpent spends most of his time these days living in Loch Ness, occasionally letting himself be seen in his monster form and joining the subsequent searches in his human form for a joke.
• In A Thing of Vikings, Hiccup has visited Loch Ness during his trips to Britain to investigate rumours of a Tidal-class dragon living there, but so far he has found nothing to confirm or deny the theory that such a creature exists.
• A.A. Pessimal's Discworld-themed fic Fishing in the Streams of Time suggests that Nessie on our world is down to the time-and-space-manipulating efforts of the History Monks on the Discworld. "Nessie" being translocated across space and time is an unintended side-effect of other activities, and the reason why no Earth-based researcher can find her in Loch Ness is that she doesn't live there.
• Vow of Nudity: One story ends with Haara tied-up on a lifeboat while the villains attempt to feed her to a Giant Plesiosaur.

Films — Animation

• The Ballad of Nessie tells the story of how Nessie ended up at Loch Ness after her home was paved over to build a miniature golf course. By the end of it, you'll probably want to give her a hug.
• The Curse of the Were-Rabbit has a loony reverend with a book about monsters and such, opened to a chapter about the Loch Ness Monster, which has the scientific name, Touristus Trappus, which sums it up.
• Missing Link: The opening scene to the movie has Cryptozoologist/adventurer Sir Lionel Frost trying (and failing) to get photographic evidence of the Loch Ness Monster while saving his assistant when the creature grabs him in its jaws.
• According to Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc., Nessie was actually banished to the human world along with Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman.

Films — Live-Action

• Lake Placid had a giant crocodile, which was raised by a surprisingly foul-mouthed and sociopathic Betty White, and was running amok eating people. As it turns out, there's actually two of them. And they had babies. At least 10.
• Lake Tianchi Monster / Monster of Lake Heaven is a 2020 Chinese film revolving around an expedition to Lake Tianchi — supposedly the "Loch Ness of the East" due to sightings of a prehistoric monster living in it. As always, the legend turns out to be real and the titular monster quickly goes on a rampage.
• In Monster Trucks, once scientists discover the underground lake hosting Creach and his species, the creatures are compared at least once to the Loch Ness Monster.
• The Shaw Brothers film, Dragon Swamp, has the titular swamp being inhabited by a lizard-like monster, who pursues the heroine while she attempts to cross the lake on a boat.
• The 1996 film Loch Ness in which an American scientist (played by Ted Danson) trying to disprove the existence of the Monster, only to later disprove his own evidence when he accidentally finds it.
• The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep posits that the titular creature is a dinosaur-like beast which reproduces by laying a single egg and dying, so only one is in existence at a time.
• Beyond Loch Ness is a Syfy Channel B-movie about the titular creature... in Lake Superior. Yes, you read that right. Granted it's explained Nessie migrates between the oceans and various lakes, she just happened to be in Loch Ness when she was seen in the first part of the film.
• Amazon Women on the Moon reveals that Nessie was also Jack the Ripper.
• And speaking of Amazon Women on the Moon, its Nessie prop is originally from the 1981 Loch Ness monster movie directed by Larry Buchanan — The Loch Ness Horror.
• The Librarian: The third film depicts Nessie as a plesiosaurus, which is being held in The Library.
• Incident At Loch Ness is about Werner Herzog making a documentary about why people believe in Nessie, only for production to go wrong when the real Nessie appears. We don't really see much of the monster however, only a few glimpses of its back and flippers, but it is depicted as rather belligerent towards the humans.
• King Kong (1933) has a scene where the crew are attacked by an aggressive aquatic sauropod that reaches into a tree to eat one of the sailors. ^note  The same year that the first widely reported modern sighting of a creature in Loch ness. Some suspect that the film was actually responsible for implanting the modern idea that the Loch ness monster is a plesiosaur or sauropod-like creature.
  • In The Son of Kong, an Elasmosaurus appears briefly to eat the villain.
• Magic in the Water: Ashley Black and her father and brother visit a Canadian town called Glenorky, "Home of Orky". Though her brother dismisses it as nonsense, it turns out Orky is very real, vaguely resembles a plesiosaurus (albeit with a much thicker, more manatee-like head and neck, rather than a serpentine one) and has the power to temporarily switch bodies with humans, leaving them with memories of swimming in the lake and physical markings on their body. Unfortunately, a couple of men are dumping toxins in the lake to try and kill him after he supposedly leapt out of the water between them and took an arm off each of them years ago. There's also a fake monster built by the pair to travel around in the lake and fake sightings of Orky.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Although it is unseen in the film itself, a map showing the various Titan locations across the world lists one named “Titanus Leviathan” living in the Loch Ness.
• Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!: In the film, Mothra's first appearance is in Lake Ikeda, said to be home to the lake monster Issie, the implication being that Mothra in her larval form is Issie. This is lampshaded by even showing a billboard in a news report after Mothra kills a group of teenagers containing Issie on it.

Jokes

• A tourist had decided to visit the Loch Ness lake, in the hopes of seeing the famous monster. Looking for information, he asks a local:
  Tourist: Tell me; when does the monster usually appear?
  Local: Usually after the sixth glass, mister.

Literature

• Alice, Girl from the Future had a dragon from The Time of Myths say that Nessie is probably his niece; she was very lazy; so once she met Archimedes and learned from him that anything submerged in the water loses a lot of weight, she decided to live in the water so as to avoid carrying that weight.
• The Amazing Dr Darwin: Erasmus Darwin had an encounter with this critter.
• Anthill A Novel by E. O. Wilson mentions one. It's probably just a myth.
• Bigfoot and Littlefoot: In the first book, Hugo and Boone decide to go out on the river in Boone's boat to search for the Ogopogo. After some time, they do indeed spot one.
• The Blackbury Monster in "The Blackbury Monster" by Terry Pratchett, one of the early stories collected in Dragons at Crumbling Castle. This may or may not be related to the time Johnny Maxwell claimed to have found Nessie in his goldfish pond.
• The Boggart by Susan Cooper mentions in passing that the Loch Ness Monster is another boggart (a kind of shapeshifting trickster spirit), explaining its longevity and its ability to avoid being found when people go looking for it. In the sequel, The Boggart and the Monster, the protagonists of the first novel help Nessie, who has become stuck in the giant lake-monster form, evade a scientific expedition.
• Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster, twelfth novel in the series, has Danny and his friends go searching for a lake monster in central Africa, thinking it might be a dinosaur. It turned out to be (no, really!) a giant electric walking catfish.
• Dinoverse: When Janine's sent back in time and encounters an Elasmosaurus she immediately nicknames Nessie. Nessie's a big time Prehistoric Monster here, going after pterosaurs and using its neck like a constrictor snake to attack a Tyrannosaurus rex that was wading in the shallows.
• Event Group Adventures:
  • Some odd, turtle-shelled plesiosaurs show up in a lagoon in Brazil in book 2.
  • According to book 4, the Loch Ness Monster used to be real, but the species went extinct during World War II.
• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them explains that the Loch Ness monster is actually a shapeshifting lake monster (a kelpie) that turns into an otter when Muggle tourists are around.
• Hattie & Hudson: Hudson is a lake monster that resembles some type of plesiosaur.
• Hometown: Shady. An odd and suspicious case, since all sightings (and attacks) report a creature far too large to survive and stay hidden in the bodies of water where the sightings took place. And yet the bodies, mauled by an unknown but appropriately-sized animal, keep turning up.
• Illuminatus!: Nessie makes a brief cameo.
• InCryptid, utterly unsurprisingly, has a number of these. The first that the reader sees is the Michigan Lake Monster, which features prominently in the short story "Loch and Key." A second plesiosaur appears in the Cold Open of Chaos Choreography, the pet of a trio of archaeology students from a Portland-area community college, whom Verity and her husband Dominic move from a city reservoir to a much more secluded lake high in the mountains. Specifically noted as not being sea monsters, as these are freshwater beasts and will quickly die if introduced to the ocean.
• The Loch, by Steve Alten, deals with the Loch Ness Monster. In a twist however, Nessie isn't a peaceful plesiosaur (it's pointed out that Nessie couldn't be a plesiosaur since if it was an air-breathing creature there'd be a lot more sightings of it) but a giant eel with a taste for tourists. Turns out it and several like it were put there by an ancient Scottish order, then trapped and brain-damaged by construction and pollution. That caused them to grow to an unnatural size, broke their normal food chain, and turned them savage.
• Mirabile: The Loch Moose Monster. The protagonist finds out what it really is early on, but takes inspiration from the original Nessie and encourages her friends at the Loch Moose Lodge to play it up as a mysterious tourist attraction, complete with deliberately fuzzy photographs and the like, because the people of Mirabile tend to be nervous around new species (with good reason in many cases) and she doesn't want anybody panicking and wiping it out before it has a chance to get established.
• "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie", 1899 short story, provides an Unbuilt example: Two scientists discover an Elasmosaurus living in a lake high in the Wyoming mountains and one manages to kill it. Shortly afterward his friend commits suicide, and the surviving scientist decides to perform a Brain Transplant, putting his friend's brain into the creature’s body.
• Ology Series: Monsterology includes lake serpents, immensely long-lived plesiosaur-like animals found all over the world, in its chapter on water-dwelling animals. Since only one is known to live in any given lake, no one knows how they manage to reproduce.
• Outlander: Due to her time travel adventures, Claire actually sees the Loch Ness Monster, which she believes is a plesiosaur. In the third book, Voyage, she tells her husband that she thinks there's a similar "time passage" under the loch to the one she uses, letting the creatures travel back and forth in time and thus explaining the infrequency of its appearances.
• Supplementary material for Rainbow Magic suggests that the legend originated as one of Scarlett the Garnet Fairy's practical jokes.
• Redwall: High Rhulain features the reptilian Slothunog. It's only on one page, but it makes up for it by being the most awesome page in the book. There's also the Deepcoiler in Salamandastron, a giant carnivorous eel that lives in a great inland lake. The shrews thought it was a myth. They were wrong.
• Thomas Thiemeyer's sci-fi novel Reptilia deals with the "African Nessie" Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, said to be a sauropode in Real Life though in the novel is more similar to Nessie and is an alien.
• Star Trek: Stargazer: According to the novels, the trope isn't just confined to Earth. The Kandilkari have "The Lake Dweller That Roars", though it's unclear as to whether it's real or not. Nol Kastiigan seems to think so, but it's not certain.
• The Underland Chronicles has the serpents, sea monsters that inhabit the Waterway, which are essentially blind plesiosaurs.
• In Voyage of the Basset the sea serpent looks like this. In a variation on the "monster" bit, he's actually a good creature.

Live-Action TV

• The Andy Griffith Show: In the reunion movie Return to Mayberry, some locals (including Earnest T. Bass) try to convince people there's a lake monster to boost tourism. It's just a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax though, using fake footprints and a prop monster head and neck in the lake.
• Bewitched: In the episode appropriately titled "Samantha and the Loch Ness Monster", it's revealed that Nessie is actually Bruce, an old flame of Sam's cousin Serena—when he kept pursuing Serena despite her not being interested, she transformed him into the beast as revenge. Sam convinces Serena to lift the spell when it seems that Bruce is in danger of being captured, and he takes revenge by transforming her into a mermaid. In the end, though, Bruce reveals that he likes all of the attention he gets from being a tourist attraction and willingly goes back to his monstrous form.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Skarasen (a.k.a. the Loch Ness Monster) from the 1975 serial "Terror of the Zygons". Much later on, Sarah Jane was able to namedrop the Loch Ness Monster during an argument with Rose as to which Companion endured the most incredible "space stuff". Rose couldn't trump it. ("School Reunion")
  • In a case of Negative Continuity, the Borad becomes the Loch Ness Monster in the Sixth Doctor serial "Timelash".
    • The paradox was cleared up in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Taking of Planet 5, when the Borad is eliminated just after his arrival in the past by a Time Lord clean-up crew.
• The Goodies get hired to capture the Loch Ness Monster in the episode "Scotland". They return with a man in a Nessie costume. And a real Nessie egg. Which hatches.
• The Lost Tapes episode "Monster of Monterey" contemplates that one or more elasmosaurs (carnivorous marine reptiles of the plesiosaur order) may inhabit Monterey Canyon and are responsible for many of the mysterious disappearances amongst sailors in those waters, with the ominous shadow that twice glides past the boat looking very much like the plesiosaur silhouette. The creature itself was based on the Zuiyo-maru carcass, aka "New Nessie", the remains of a dead sea creature which bore an uncanny resemblance to a plesiosaur.
• On an episode of Married... with Children in which Al claims to have been visited by aliens, daughter Kelly tells him, "And by the way, the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot wanted to know if you're still on for poker at Darth Vader's house tomorrow night."
• In the first episode of Monster Quest, the suggestion that "Champ", or "the American Loch Ness Monster" could be a plesiosaur is bandied about. In another episode, they were searching for "Ogopogo", and they found what they believed was a dead baby Ogopogo... and it turned out to be a decomposed salmon or trout fillet.
• Mystery Hunters: One of Araya's investigations sees him going to Scotland and see whether there is evidence that the Loch Ness Monster exists.
• Some of the giant fish pursued on River Monsters have a reputation for bumping boats or dragging fishermen into the water, feats often attributed to the scarier versions of this trope. Jeremy Wade eventually did a two-hour episode devoted to Nessie. He didn't catch her, obviously, but he explored various possibilities of the creature's identity and eventually concluded that a Greenland shark was the most likely suspect.
• Prehistoric Planet features a number of appearances by plesiosaurids, but they are much more scientifically grounded than the other entries here listed. Nevertheless, a few of these sequences do play up the sense of mystery associated with these animals, featuring strangely mystical music and with David Attenborough describing one such genus — Mortuneria — as one of the most mysterious and secretive animals on Earth.
• Ultra Series: Well, of course! It's a kaiju show.
  • Jirass from the original Ultraman was loosely based on the Loch Ness Monster, a dinosaur-like creature living in Lake Kitayama whose existence is a myth to the locals. But later in the episode, it turns out to be the creation of one monster-obsessed Dr. Nikaidou who, after his obsession with the Scottish legend, decide to make one of his own. Said monster is notable for being a modified Godzilla suit (loaned from Mothra vs. Godzilla), making the episode's penultimate battle the closest Ultraman ever gets to fighting Godzilla.
  • A similar incident is observed in Return of Ultraman with Leogon in Lake Asahi, created by a scientist named Dr. Mizuno by splicing animal and plant DNA, making it a Planimal version of the Stock Ness trope.
  • Ultraman Max has an oriental dragon-based monster called Natsunomeryu, who lives in a lake and was worshipped centuries ago in the past by superstitious locals. Unfortunately, as time goes on and the monster's legend gets forgotten, Natsunomeryu ends up going on a rampage when its old shrine gets desecrated.
• The X-Files: In the episode "Quagmire", Mulder and Scully investigate reports of missing people connected with a lake serpent and find a surprisingly ordinary (albeit still deadly) alligator to be the culprit. This being The X-Files, however, after they've left, a The End... Or Is It? ending shows that there really is a serpent in the lake as well.
• A few of the "Unexplained" segments in Unsolved Mysteries featured searches for varying versions of these; New York/Vermont/Quebec is believed to have one inhabiting Lake Champlain (which is bordered by the two states and the province), appropriately named "Champ"

Music

• The Police's "Synchronicity II", besides singing about an emasculated frustrated man living in a suburban family hellhole, makes vague mention of a mysterious creature in a Scottish lake "many miles away" (possibly referring to the Loch Ness Monster).
• "Loch Ness Monster" by Big Dipper, where the narrator's boat is bumped into by the title creature, and he becomes obsessed with making a second encounter and getting evidence. The lyrics are also a deliberately silly metaphor for unrequited love — Nessie is referred to with feminine pronouns, and in the bridge the narrator laments "It's a mystery / why she left me".
• They Might Be Giants have a song called "Lake Monsters" that questions whether such creatures might exist: "Is this a different world? Are they really there?"
• Seanan McGuire has a song, "Cryptid Cafe" about Nessie, Manipogo, Isshii, Champ, and several other lake monsters meeting at the titular cafe to discuss the lack of belief in them across the world.

Mythology

• Nessie is the most famous of the lot. Interestingly, its fame is a fairly recent phenomenon, largely resulting from alleged sightings in the 1930s: before that, it was just another local legend like many, many, many others. Many of the "imitators" were already recorded in local folklore long before Nessie became famous.
• Canada has several, including Lake Okanagan's Ogopogo (which is actually protected under provincial legislation in British Columbia, just in case) and its cousin Manipogo (who lives in Manitoba), Igopogo (also known as Kempenfelt Kelly, who lives in Lake Simcoe, Ontario), and Memphre; (in Quebec/Vermont, the first recorded North American monster). All of them were recorded in local legend long before the 1930s; as far back as the 1810s for Memphré. There is also Winnipogo (Lake Winnipegosis) and Igopogo.
• There are many, many, many others:
  • Champ is probably the most famous American one, dwelling in Lake Champlain. Champ was noted to have a horse's head and a serpent's body... And yes, it was recorded in local folklore several decades before Nessie became an international star.
  • The Storsjö Monster or "Storsie" in Jämtland, Sweden, the earliest sightings of which go back to the 17th century. Along with its hypothetical nest and eggs, the monster was officially a protected species until some smartass asked for a license to collect its eggs and the authorities had no choice but to declare the protection frivolous and repeal it.
  • See also the Bear Lake Monster of Bear Lake, Idaho.
  • Central Africa's lake monsters tend to overlap with Living Dinosaurs, such as the Mokele-Mbembe, which is purported by some to be a surviving sauropod, although local descriptions indicate it may actually be an undiscovered species of semi-aquatic, long-necked rhinoceros.
  • The Iliamna Lake Monster, supposedly said to occupy Lake Iliamna in Alaska, although eyewitness accounts and Native American legends related to them suggest they're some sort of gargantuan sturgeon-like fish, not plesiosaur-like creatures.
  • The Other Wiki, as a matter of fact, has a rather impressive list of reported lake monsters from all over the world.
• Australia has the Hawkesbury River Monster in the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. Further north, there have been sightings of the Mooloolaba Monster off the coast of Mooloolaba, Queensland.
• Issie and Kussie are Japanese lake monsters, described as similar to Nessie.
• Rumor has it that deep within Lake Tahoe is its own resident lake monster, Tessie.

Pro Wrestling

• Martin Ruane (1945-1998), while better known in his native England as Giant Haystacks, also competed as Loch Ness in Stampede Wrestling and was in WCW for a month, debuting in February 1996 before the SuperBrawl VI PPV as a member of the Dungeon of Doom before he left the group in March. His last appearance saw the Giant (The Big Show) defeat him at the Uncensored PPV on March 24. His run was cut short due to health problems.

Sports

• Lake Champlain, near Burlington, Vermont, is purportedly home to the lake monster Champy, who lends his image to the Vermont Lake Monsters, a minor league baseball team that is the state's only professional sports team.

Radio

• Parodied in the Hamish and Dougal episode "The Monster of the Loch". First, Hamish and Dougal are fishing, when they're attacked by a monster with bark like skin, and twig-like claws, and branch-like arms, and leaf-like scales. Then, when they've discovered it's actually a log and used it to start a fire, the Laird complains that now they don't have a log that looks like a monster, there's nothing to attract gullible tourists to the Glen. So he spends a week in his lab while watching Frankenstein and Godzilla and creates ... another log. And then the monster turns out to be Real After All, but the Laird is so infuriated by it eating his log that he shoots it.
  Dougal: So we did have a monster ... and you killed it. And now we don't even have a log.
• That Mitchell and Webb Sound: As a result of a Kickstarter joke Gone Horribly Wrong, a group of scientists drain Loch Ness to find Nessia... and determine it did indeed exist. Of course, as a result of their actions, they killed the creature, rendering the entire endeavour pointless. Also, re-filling the Loch is going to take several thousand years.

Tabletop Games

• The Champions supplement Kingdom of Champions (which deals with superhero adventures set in the UK) has several pages on "Nessie", offering four different optional explanations (Fake, Wildlife, Supernatural, and Alien) for game use. The book also has brief notes on sea serpent stories, and a supervillain group (the Shark Squad) whose minisubs look like sea monsters.
• GURPS:
  • The 3rd edition supplement Places of Mystery has a brief entry on Loch Ness (one of the few non-man-made locations in the book) which points out the problems with attempting a "realistic" treatment of the monster (it would probably have to be a large sturgeon), but notes that a supernatural monster might have been the result of some typically dubious behaviour by Aleister Crowley.
  • In the Transhuman Space setting, the secret Society for Applied Teratology (detailed in the Toxic Memes supplement) recreates famous cryptozoological species by advanced bioengineering, mostly to make the world a more interesting place. Their Nessie (covered in more detail in Bio-Tech 2100) isn't doing so well, but is an ongoing project; they may create further monsters for other lakes (some of which may be more hospitable for the purpose).
• In Magic: The Gathering, there's the Gitrog, a monstrous froglike beast that appears in the short story Sacrifice, haunting a mountain lake next to a village. The heroine thought it was a myth, the villagers worshipped it. The villagers got eaten anyway and the girl ended up worshipping it too.
• Pathfinder's Bestiary 2 includes stats for them under the name of Water Orm. It works as an all-purpose lake monster, but it's a little bit more magical than a regular old plesiosaur, notably having the ability to turn into water to avoid being spotted. The supplementary book Mystery Monsters Revealed offers advice on how to keep it, and other monsters like The Mothman, sasquatch, or yeti still reclusive and mysterious.
  • Plesiosaurs also exist in the setting, but amount to little more than a large animal, no more exotic than an alligator. The Water Orm's powers help to maintain the aura of mystery that a simple plesiosaur just can't command in a setting that includes dragons.
• Ravenloft has an undead lake monster, named Agatha or Aggie. One assumes it was a living lake monster at some previous point. There's also a still-living one, the Avanc, in another lake, who turns out to be a human victim of a Forced Transformation Curse from an evil shadow fey. Unsurprisingly, the two Domains where they're found (Forlorn for Aggie, Tepest for the Avanc) are Celtic-themed.

Rifts, as a Fantasy Kitchen Sink, of course has those, but also has a major subversion in the Ogopogo, as they're actually an almost-extinct (as in, it's possible the only ones left in the entire Megaverse are a single mated pair and their small-ish brood) breed of serpentine water dragons, who like many other extradimensional lifeform on Rifts Earth are simply refugees trying to live in peace; fortunately for them, they're gentle and very intelligent, and their little corner of the planet is one of the less dangerous locales in the setting, so they've easily ingratiated themselves with the few locals.

• Shadowrun: Lake serpents are reptilian creatures with long tails and necks, pronounced humps and plesiosaur-like flippers. They're generally considered to be lesser relatives of dragons, and are closely related to Sea Serpents, from which they're distinguished by their smaller sizes and herbivorous diets. Some speculate that they've been around all along and that things such as Nessie and Ogopogo are examples of early sightings; certainly, the Loch Ness pods are the most well-known lake serpents in the setting's modern day.

Theme Parks

• Busch Gardens Williamsburg has a roller coaster called Loch Ness Monster that's naturally themed around the beast.

Video Games

• The Spellcasting Series: The Lok Pik Monster. It serves as the You Shall Not Pass! guardian of the first game's final chapter.
• Psychonauts: While not quite a sea serpent or plesiosaur, the game nonetheless has its own lake monster — the Hideous Hulking Lungfish of Lake Oblongata, who is... an enormous, mutated lungfish who lives at the bottom of Lake Oblongata. Her real name is Linda. She's pretty nice when she's not being brainwashed by the Big Bad into kidnapping kids.
• Ace Attorney: "Gourdy" is a monster of unknown attributes that supposedly lives in Gourd Lake, appearing with a loud popping sound. Lotta Hart's attempts to get a picture of him become a key plot element in case 1-4. While the canon presents Gourdy as ultimately being a hoax resulting from Larry Butz losing a Steel Samurai balloon attached to an air canister, a piece of official fanart shows the cast enjoying a picnic by the lake while a dark Nessie-like shape is seen poking out of the lake in the far background.
• Pokémon:
  • Lapras is a plesiosaur, the sort of creature Nessie is often explained as being, and its production name was Ness. Draw your own conclusions.
  • Gyarados is based on legends about magic carp jumping over the dragon gate and becoming dragons, but its abode being in lakes seems to be inspired by lake monster myths.
  • Dragonair is a serpentine mon said to live in pristine lakes.
  • Similar to Gyarados and Dragonair above, Milotic is a sea serpent-esque creature that resides at the bottom of deep lakes.
• Monster Rancher has the Lesione, which is like a cross between a plesiosaur and a trained sea lion. In the advanced games, one Lesione plays the role of a lake monster.
• Monster Quest has for its third mission El Monstro, which is in the fictional lake in Mexico Lago verde (meaning Green Lake in Spanish), which is said to bring good luck and chase off evil spirits. The mission is based around invesigating fishermen seeing the monster and the photo they took of it, as well a neclace made from its scales and a skeleton of its baby both owned by a curio shop owner. It turns out the former was merely a log they mistook for it and decided to make money off the photo, the scales were from garfish and for the same purpose, and the skeleton was forged to attract tourists.
• EarthBound (1994) has the gentle and friendly Tessie, the Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of the Loch Ness Monster. Mother 3 follows up both of these with the Oh-So-Snake, in the well beneath Osohe Castle. Tessie also makes a reappearance, though she's stuffed and mounted in Porky's tower.
• Shadow of the Colossus features the wading lake monster, which is rather more frustrating.
• There's also Sally, the Lake Salamanca monster in City of Heroes. Sally is peaceful, though, and dives below the water if you attack her. And attacking her was the only way to get the Believer badge.
• Mega Man Star Force 2 involves the legend of Messie, a sea monster supposedly found in (say it with me) Loch Mess. People have been seeing it recently, but it turns out to be a fake. There is a real Messie, though — and its elusiveness is explained by the fact that it's an EM being, invisible to most people. It ends up fusing with the guy who created the fake Messie to become a rather nasty boss, Plesio Surf. Incidentally, something funny went on in translation here. The character's English name refers to the longstanding theory that the "real" Loch Ness Monster is a plesiosaur. But the original Japanese name is Brachio Wave — referring to the Brachiosaurus, which did sorta look like a plesiosaur from the neck up, but didn't live underwater. Between this and its incredible size (40 feet tall and twice as long, making it one of the most colossal creatures ever to walk the Earth), a Brachiosaurus couldn't hide in Loch Ness if it wanted to.
• World of Warcraft has an underground tram running from Ironforge to Stormwind. In the middle, the tram runs between two humongous aquaria. One aquarium contains a plesiosaur named "Nessy".
• Nancy Drew: In Danger on Deception Island, Nancy has to assemble a model of the local legendary sea monster as one of her Solve the Soup Cans tasks. It naturally resembles a plesiosaur, although the actual creature never appears in the game until the end in a photograph. Said creature is also a "real" cryptid called the Cadborosaurus a.k.a. Caddy.
• Zoo Tycoon: This is one of the animals available in the original game's Complete Collection re-release. It's basically a palette-swapped Plesiosaurus from the dinosaur expansion pack that lives in fresh water rather than salt water and prefers water lilies. It's the game's only prehistoric animal which lacks the geological time period classification in the menu and is considered in the same group as the other 4 mythical animals (the Unicorn, Yeti, Bigfoot and Mermaid).
• In Professor Layton and the Last Specter, the titular specter is both Loosha, a Stock Ness Monster and a giant robot entangled in fight. Loosha is actually defending the village of the attacks of the robot as well as protecting its only friend Arianna.
• Lemmings Taxing Level 14 is titled "Hunt the Nessie", and takes place on the back of a serpentine lake monster.
• Resident Evil 4: While not the plesiosaur type, the game has the Del Lago, a man-eating mutant salamander that inhabits the village lake.
• The Sims: Occasionally, one of these swims down the river in the Neighborhood view. It's a random event, and not in any way related to any of the games going on in the households. They make a return in Get Together, where it can be seen in the waters of Windenburg, and is a female (her name is Emily).
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario 64 has Dorrie, found swimming in the underground lake in Hazy Maze Cave. Signs leading up to the area warn of a terrible monster, but it turns out to be completely harmless, and in fact even friendly and helpful to Mario.
  • Super Mario 3D World introduces Plessie, another friendly lake monster type that lets the characters ride on its back and dash through river levels.
• Mass Effect 3: Mentioned in the DLC Leviathan, when Shepard sees a plesiosaur skeleton hanging from the ceiling of a lab.
  Shepard: Loch Ness Monster?
  EDI: Plesiosaur.
  Shepard: Loch Ness Monster is more interesting.
  EDI: Interesting and nonexistent.
• The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang has a friendly one named Sid living in the castle moat.
• The graphical adventure text adventure Cryptozookeeper features a mission to bring the Loch Ness Monster into the game.
• Transarctica has a bridge over a lake in the north-western part of game map guarded by this monster. Crossing it without the unique harpoon car, which can obtained in only one location, is definitely a bad idea.
• The Touhou Project game Urban Legend in Limbo has Nessie as Nitori's urban legend theme. She and the rest of the kappa have built a Nessie-shaped robot based on the legend, so they can easily make "evidence" of the monster, and profit off of it. Due to the nature of Gensokyo, however, Nitori is eventually stalked by a real Loch Ness monster.
• In The Darkside Detective, the "Loch Mess" case revolves around one living in one of the lakes that gives Twin Lakes its name.
• Commander Keen: in the third game, a Nessie-like creature called Messie can be seen swimming in the seas of Vorticon VI. It is actually possible for Keen to hop on it's back and hitch a ride, which is the only (non-cheating) way to reach this game's Bonus Level.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV, some of the residents of Milsante report seeing a monster called "Gallie" in the lake by their village. Given the lake's unusual appearance, the sudden appearance of an ancient shrine by it and the fact that you fight actual monsters, throughout the series, the idea of there actually being a creature like this isn't necessarily farfetched. It's just that there's no photos or confirmed sightings of it so far. As players of the game already know, cryptid monsters are a real thing in the world of Zemuria. If you do one of Juna's bonding events, you get to see the creature and later you are given a quest to fight the monster: Galliosaurus.
• Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep contains a hidden example, a Sea Serpent (actually a living plesiosaur) that you can find within Ciceros Strait if you ever get hints to its existence. It's entered in your Marine Encyclopedia, but you can't interact with it at all, let alone stick it in a tank at the Aquarium.
• Jitsu Squad: One stage has you crossing a moat to enter Hellstorm Castle, and a gigantic Nessie-like aquatic monster is seen in the background, but that is just Monstrous Scenery that doesn't pay any attention to your player characters.
• Loch Ness: The game is about a group of people (depending on how many people join a session) out on Loch Ness looking to gather evidence that the Loch Ness Monster exists. However, this iteration of Nessie will attack the boat the players are in if they get too close to her.
• Horizon Forbidden West: Tiderippers are huge plesiosaurid machines that are deceptively more agile than you'd think on land. Morlund and his crew help Aloy take one down beneath the ruins of Las Vegas, and an Apex variant serves as the boss of Cauldron Kappa.
• In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Injun Joe rides a plesiosaur named Mishie.

Webcomics

• George the Dragon features a trope namer in his comic. And apparently her name is Gladys Vanessa of the Loch. She eventually (marries the main character and moves out of the Loch) which is why no one can find Nessie.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: Generictown recently became the Loch Ness Monster's new home. It's very cute.

Web Original

• Ducktalez 7: Ogopogo shows up in Vegeta's Mushroom Samba and Vegeta joyfully rides on him.
• Millsberry had Sylvie, a green reptile who lived in the local lake.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-3934:. This version of Nessie is artificial, having been bred (through unknown means) as an exotic pet by Marshall, Carter, and Dark, a company that sells SCP-related objects on the black market.
  • SCP-1933-ex was attempted to be filmed by a Foundation scientist, only to induce a memetic effect that made everyone in the Foundation believe he was a charlatan. The scientist's corpse was found in the lake later, having seemingly been eaten alive.
• TierZoo: An April Fools' Day episode discusses the Loch Ness Monster during its look at cryptid builds. It's assumed to be a plesiosaur build that managed to survive the massive balance patch that banned most prehistoric reptile players. Plesiosaurs were top-tier builds prior to the patch thanks to their long reach proving useful for catching schools of fish, and Nessie would fare just as well in the current metagame as an S-Tier animal. In fact, there's no way that the Loch Ness server could ever support a build as overpowered as Nessie, which is a point against its very existence.
• TREY the Explainer did a three-part video series on Nessie. While it's ultimately deemed a myth, Trey speculates that, if it were a real animal, it would be a freakishly large species of cold-water leech^note some have theorized before that Nessie is in fact an invertebrate, but a huge leech is a new candidate.

Western Animation

• A Scottish nessie in Aaahh!!! Real Monsters who calls himself Lochie is a scarer in his myths, and a professional singing and dancing bagpipist. He gets on the nerves of others, including the Gromble, whose room he kilts up — he even has another head which comes alive later.
• Camp Candy: The kids make a lake monster called the Katchatoree Creature so that Robin can win a journalist award.
• The Grand Finale of CatDog features a lake monster named "Bessie".^note Interestingly, there actually is an alleged lake monster in Lake Erie with that name.
• The Count Duckula episode "The Ghost of McCastle McDuckula" sees the Count holidaying near the loch to prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. He doesn't see any, but one sees him at the end and is told by another that vampire ducks are just as improbable.
• Danger Mouse and Penfold encounter a Loch Ness Monster in "Who Stole the Bagpipes?" It's a mechanical beast sent by Greenback to destroy the heroes who are staying at the hotel of Greenback's accessory Amos McNasty.
• Denver the Last Dinosaur does this in "Monster Maze", with a local bad guy trying to convince people that there's a monster in the lake, the 'Lost Lake Monster'.
• Doug has Doug and Skeeter investigate the existence of the Lucky Duck Lake Monster on occasion. Said monster is a featured character in The Movie.
• In Extreme Dinosaurs Nessie is found to be a plesiosaurus, and a mommy.
• The Fairly OddParents! features the spoofing "Loch Dimmsdale Monster" (with the loch also spoofing), in one scene after Timmy Turner lost track of Poof, he went searching in the loch and mistook the monster's ball-shaped tip of the nose as Poof.
• The non-human cast of The Family-Ness are a family of Loch Ness Monsters.
• In the Franklin episode "Franklin's Pond Phantom", there's a stir among the kids of Woodland about one of the local ponds supposedly containing a Stock Ness Monster called "Michiochi".
• Gargoyles: In the Avalon World Tour episode "Monsters", Goliath, Angela, Elisa and Bronx help save a family of Loch Ness Monsters from Dr. Sevarius.
• The Gobblewonker in the Gravity Falls episode "The Legend of the Gobblewonker". Nobody really believes it exists except for the main characters and Old Man McGucket, the town loon. It really doesn't; McGucket built a robotic monster for attention... except that the final shot shows a real Gobblewonker in the lake.
• An episode of Godzilla: The Series features a mother Loch Ness monster teaming up with Zilla to save her baby.
• Happy Ness: The Secret of the Loch has a whole world of Nessies, all of whom live up to their names.
• An episode of Inspector Gadget centers around this. In the end it turns out to be a Mechanical Monster created by MAD.
• The Loud House: The episode "Washed Up" has Plessy, who turns out to be a dragon.
• Molly of Denali: In "Bubbling Up", when the trio research lake monsters, they find a website about lake monsters in Scotland, likely referring to the Loch Ness monster.
• In the PB&J Otter episode "Come Back, Little Monster", when Jelly is trying to convince her friends that the really is a monster, she takes a blurry picture of Pippin (a manatee, and the supposed "monster") that bears a resemblance to typical photos of the Loch Ness Monster.
• The Phineas and Ferb episode "The Lake Nose Monster" has the boys building an exploration sub to find the titular Lake Nose Monster. The monster turns out to be real, but gets angry when anyone tries to take a picture of it.
• Polly Pocket: The aptly named episode "The Locket-Ness Monster" features Nessie-like lake monsters in Lake Ness.
• Junior befriends a Nessie expy (albeit a marine one) in the Popeye and Son episode "The Sea Monster".
• The Raccoons: One nicknamed "Evy" (short for Evergreen Lake Monster) appears in the episode "Monster Mania", prompting an avalanche of tourists until is discovered that it was Cyril Sneer's latest hoax to make money.
• Scooby-Doo and friends have encountered the Loch Ness monster or similar lake monsters on a regular basis, but always seem surprised to learn they're fake:
  • In The New Scooby-Doo Movies episode "Loch Ness Mess", the gang encounters a lake monster that was compared to Nessie but was actually a large remote controlled inflatable used to keep people away from a sunken ship thought to contain treasure.
  • In the Scooby's All-Stars episode "A Highland Fling with a Monstrous Thing", alongside a bagpipe playing ghost, Scooby and the others deal with Neesie, who is actually a disguised submarine used to smuggle Swiss goods by the supposed ghost.
  • The direct-to-DVD movie Scooby-Doo! and the Loch Ness Monster revolves around Nessie, but naturally it's revealed to be a scam (with two versions of it to be precise: one on land and another in the Loch), but with a more benign motive, namely trying to convince a Nessie nonbeliever. The end of the film, however, shows there's a real creature in the Loch.
• The Secret Saturdays never features Nessie herself, but plenty of lesser-known lake monsters make appearances, like the one-horned Alkali Lake Monster of Nebraska and Turkey's Lake Van Monster.
• The Simpsons: The episode "Monty Can't Buy Me Love" is actually about Mr. Burns, Homer, Groundkeeper Willie and Professor Frink travelling to Loch Ness and attempting to capture the Loch Ness Monster.
• The Smurfs (1981): "The Loch monster" from the Season 9 episode "Hefty Sees a Serpent".
• In South Park, Chef's parents (who live in a castle in Scotland for some reason) insist that they keep having run-ins with Nessie, who keeps asking for $3.50. We don't see the creature, but they describe it more than once as an 80-foot-tall crustacean, suggesting it doesn't look much like the stock design.
• In the Spongebob Squarepants episode "ScavengerPants", Squidward assigns SpongeBob and Patrick in bringing back the Loch Ness Monster, as an excuse for them to get lost. To his astonishment, the duo manages to bring Nessie back using bagpipes. However, Nessie turns out to be enraged by bagpipe music, and eats Squidward when he inadvertently plays the bagpipes the two used to lure the monster.
• One episode of The Venture Bros. features two henchmen debating about who the better lake monster is; "Champ" or the Loch Ness Monster. Then Henchman 21 enters the debate. Turns out Ogopogo wins.
• The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: The final episode "The Monster O'McDonaldland Loch" involves the McDonaldland gang searching for the titular monster, who is a blatant Loch Ness Monster pastiche and revealed to be named Simon.
• Xiaolin Showdown: According to Dojo Kanojo Cho, the Loch Ness Monster is actually his cousin.

Other

• Brickly, the Lego Ness Monster who inhabits the lake at Downtown Disney outside the Lego store. While Legoland already has a pair of dragon mascots (Ollie and Allie), when they began building a Legoland in Florida, enough people asked if Brickly was going to be the mascot for Legoland Florida that they decided to make it canon-and released a special edition set just for him.
• Minne the Lake Creature, a (statue, sadly) monster who "lives" in the lakes around Minneapolis.
• A number of them are also proven hoaxes, like the Silver Lake Monster of New York, which was an inflatable dummy created by a hotel owner as a tourist trap (although Native American legends from the region suggest the creature is Older Than They Think).

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Stock and Loch don't rhyme? Well, for God's sake then, don't tell anyone else.