Cressie of Crescent Lake - Robert’s Arm, Green Bay, the Loch Ness of Newfoundland

The monster surfaced, its skin shiny and slick under the summer sun. Water poured from its gaping mouth. It was long, about twenty feet in length, and it swam silently across the top of the lake before diving down into its cool depths once more. A passenger in a passing car shrieked at the driver, and the two of them watched in amazement as the creature vanished from sight.

The amazing part of the story is that it actually happened in July of 2003 in the community of Robert's Arm, "The Loch Ness of Newfoundland." The creature, known as Cressie, is a long-time inhabitant of Crescent Lake

“I was just screaming, We saw Cressie, we saw Cressie!” the eyewitness later told radio reporters. 

The 2003 cryptozoological sighting was only the most recent in a long list of reports, as sightings of Cressie date back to the start of the twentieth century. One of the first residents of the community, a lady remembered today as Grandmother Anthony, was startled from her berry-picking by a giant lake serpent.

The monster seems to have been fairly active in the late 1990s. In the late spring of 1990, a resident of Robert's Arm saw a slim, black shape rise five feet from a patch of churning water before sinking out of sight. On July 9, 1991, Cressie was spotted once more, and then again on September 5 of the same year. There were several sightings in 1995, and while a summer student crew was working on the boardwalk around the lake in 2000, they too spotted the local wonder.

In a 2003 interview CBC Radio, Robert’s Arm town clerk Ada Rowsell noted that reports of monster sightings had been flooding in over the first week of that August.

“I've had several reportings of sightings - people sighting some kind of a huge monster or sea serpent or some kind of a fish," Ada told CBC radio, following the well publicized July 2003 sighting. 

Locals described the creature as looking long and shiny, and having a fish-like head. It was reported that one man even hit the monster with his boat. Cressie, apparently, chose not to retaliate.

One eyewitness was reported as exclaiming “Oh my, that's big, that could eat four or five people if they were swimming. I wouldn't trust it around kids, I tell ya - no, not tiny kids. I wouldn't say tiny kids could beat it off. I wouldn't say anybody 10- or 12-years old could beat it off either.”