Lundensaren_dec2018_historisktext

The Associate Professor and the Beast : Peter Olsson as cryptozoologist

On 13 January 1899, the newspaper Jämtlandsposten published a peculiar article, which it described as a “a treatise that will make a stir throughout Scandinavia, if not in the whole of the civilised world”. Entitled The Storsjön Lake Monster: a report on the facts and investigation, it was written by the senior master of science at the secondary grammar school in Östersund, Peter Olsson, and was soon published as an offprint. In the article, senior master Olsson scientifically explains the reports of a mystical lake monster reputed to live in Storsjön in Jämtland that reached an almost feverish intensity in the summer of 1899. Today, such a report would be justifiably classed as “cryptozoology” and pseudoscience, but as far as can be determined it was taken very seriously in its time. And the article becomes even more interesting when you consider that Peter Olsson was not only a secondary grammar school senior master, but also associate professor of zoology at Lund University.

Peter Olsson in academia and Jämtland

Peter Olsson was born in Hörja, a small town north-west of Hässleholm, on 11 December 1838. His father, Ola Nilsson, was a tenant farmer, who in return for rent cultivated land that was owned by someone else. Peter’s mother was called Bengta Nilsdotter. However, the family was not so poor that the family could not send the son off to study, and on 11 September 1858, Peter Olsson was enrolled at Lund University and in the Skånska student nation’s sixth – Kristianstad – section. Peter would spend nearly seven years at Lund University, but on the other hand he gained his degrees in quick succession; he was awarded his Degree of Bachelor in Philosophy on 15 March 1865, publicly defended his doctoral thesis on 31 May with the title Observations on the digestive organs of some species of the mouse family, and his PhD was conferred on June 7 the same year. Olsson’s grades, however, were somewhat mediocre, and his thesis merely gained a pass.

Peter Olsson

As a PhD graduate, there were two natural paths open to Peter Olsson; he could seek a position within academia, or embark on a career as an upper secondary school teacher. Olsson seems initially to have focused on both; in parallel with being an assistant secondary grammar school teacher in Lund, he studied to become eligible for an associate professorship in zoology at Lund University with a thesis on parasites in fish: Entozoa observed in Scandinavian sea fish, flatworms. Having obtained an associate professorship, he became a senior master in science at the secondary grammar school in Östersund in 1869, but this did not impede him from continuing his fish studies – in 1867 he was on Norway’s west coast to study “the Nordic marine fauna” and in 1869 he was in Bohuslän to carry out bottom trawling. In parallel with his research, he was also active in local politics and in several associations; among other things he was the steward of Jämtland county’s archaeological association, a member of Jämtland county’s seed-growing association, a member of Östersund city council, and Jämtland county’s inspector of inflammable oils! To cap it all, he was a prolific writer, who in addition to his studies of sea fish also published articles on subjects as diverse as Jämtland’s prehistory, the distribution of alpine plants, folklore, and the weather in Östersund.

However, the secondary grammar school senior master with the busy association life did not completely give up the idea of a continued academic career. In 1879, he applied for the then vacant professorship in zoology at Lund University, but had to settle for being the Faculty of Philosophy’s third-ranked candidate, and the position went instead to August Quennerstedt. You may perhaps think that the faculty would make a damning assessment of an eclectic researcher who in the future would become interested in the Storsjön Lake Monster, but in fact there was an appreciative response to Olsson’s research publications in the faculty’s assessment; his studies of intestinal parasites in sea fish were considered to be very well executed, but the drawback was the fact that his research publications were too narrow and did not show a sufficient range of subjects for a professorship in zoology.

Peter Olsson retired from his position as a secondary grammar school senior master in 1905 and moved back to Skåne, where he died on 12 January 1923.

The Storsjön Lake Monster and 1899

The Storsjön Lake Monster is an alleged lake creature said to live in Storsjön in Jämtland. The origin of the myth is usually said to be the Frösösten, a rune stone with a serpent coil that stands on the island of Frösön in Storsjön, but from a ethnological perspective, the Storsjön Lake Monster is part of a myth complex of sea monsters that stretches from Norway (which Jämtland belonged to in the past) over the North Sea to Scotland and consequently is part of the same tradition as the Loch Ness Monster.

There have been sporadic reports about this creature since the 1600s, but the frequency increased in the last few years of the 1800s. If you search for “The Storsjön Lake Monster” in the National Library’s database of digitised daily newspapers, you find that from 19 hits in 1897 there is a massive increase to 217 in 1898, 219 in 1899, 224 in 1900, 121 in 1901, and that the frequency in 1902 has fallen again to 24 hits. We can therefore assert that Sweden was gripped by “Storsjön Lake Monster fever” around 1900. Even the Lund newspaper, Lunds Weckoblad, reported on the Storsjön Lake Monster, but somewhat prior to this: in 1894, its appearances had been in a round-up of stories from Sweden, together with news from Växjö and Uppsala.

Lunds Weckoblad reports on the Storsjön Lake Monster, 19 June 1894

There was a widespread response to Storsjön Lake Monster fever in Sweden. As early as 1894, a company was formed with an aim to capture the monster, plenty of hypotheses were put forward to identify the beast, and the newspapers reported on more or less imaginative attempts to catch the creature with a diverse range of traps. In 1901, it went so far that the Aftonbladet newspaper equipped an expedition to solve the mystery of the Storsjön Lake Monster once and for all.

Peter Olsson and the Storsjön Lake Monster

On 28 October 1893, the newspaper Östersunds-posten published an interview with two girls who claimed to have seen the Storsjön Lake Monster. The journalist, who had obviously been captivated by the girls’ story, wrote in the introduction to the article “May senior master Olsson, provincial doctors, lawyers and the city’s public prosecutors, forgive me. I return with the information that the news is largely true”. Olsson had initially been sceptical about the Storsjön Lake Monster’s existence – as far back as 1876 he had put forward the hypothesis that the Storsjön Lake Monster was a colossal pike – but became, presumably because he was a zoologist with a PhD and a special interest in fish, Östersund’s leading authority on the Storsjön Lake Monster, whether he wanted to or not, and he made a complete U-turn from his initial scepticism and became a firm believer in the Storsjön Lake Monster’s existence. This resulted in the publication in 1899 of the text referred to in the introduction intended to provide “the most likely explanation for the phenomena in Jämtland’s Storsjö.”

In his article, Olsson admitted his previous doubts about the existence of the Storsjön Lake Monster, but considered that he had become convinced that it was not possible to “dismiss out of hand these accounts as based without exception on optical illusions, observations tinged with fantasy or even intentional deception. There must be something real as the basis for the stories about the creature, which has been repeatedly seen by fully credible people, at times at close range.” His investigation was based on 22 witness accounts in Jämtland’s daily newspapers, from which he tried to draw conclusions about the creature’s appearance and behaviour, and attempted to classify it scientifically.

Olsson stated in the article that the creature’s length was between 3.5 and 14 metres, with a girth of about one metre. The glossy, shiny or slimy scaly body was of varying colour, but usually dark or reddish. In terms of shape, it looked like an upturned boat or a thick log, even though there were also deviating descriptions of the creature as looking like “two or three barrels after each other”. Its head was like that of a dog, and it had short front legs, or fins, and long back legs with webbed skin between the toes. The creature moved at very high speed and generally appeared in the summer in clear and sunny weather.

After summarising the Storsjön Lake Monster’s characteristics, Olsson went on to discuss possible explanations for the creature. He rejected the idea that the whole matter could be explained by an optical illusion, as the eyewitnesses were “sober, respected men and women”. He could not imagine either that the Storsjön Lake Monster was an inanimate object such as a log or tree trunk; against this argument was the telling fact that the creature was seen to move against the wind. Instead, he considered that it was probably a living thing. He rejected his earlier hypothesis that the creature was a gigantic pike on the basis that many of the observations were at such close range that it would be impossible to confuse a pike with another animal, and he used the same argument against the hypothesis that the Storsjön Lake Monster was simply a row of swimming seabirds.

The front page of The Storsjön Lake Monster: a report on the facts and investigation

As the last “normal” animal, he considered the Wels catfish as a potential explanation, but thought that the high speeds attained by the Storsjön Lake Monster did not match the Wels catfish, which was “an extremely sluggish fish”. Finally, Olsson took up the hypothesis, familiar from lake monster contexts, that it could be a “a giant reptile, related to what are believed to be long extinct marine dinosaurs”. He rejected this plesiosaurus-based explanation as somewhat too far-fetched: “However, there is nothing in the collected accounts that makes it necessary for us suppose that a giant lizard is the Storsjön Lake Monster,” as he expressed it.

Olsson’s explanation for the Storsjön Lake Monster was, however, almost as strange as the giant lizard hypothesis he rejected. In 1893, the Dutch zoologist, Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans, published an article on the “the great sea serpent”, in which he argued that this creature was actually an enormous long-tailed seal, to which he gave the scientific name Megophias megophias. Olsson considered that Oudemans’ “great sea serpent” was similar in many ways to the Storsjön Lake Monster, and that both creatures were therefore probably related. As examples of freshwater seals, Olsson alluded to the Saimaa ringed seal in Finland and the Russian Ladoga and Baikal seals, and argued that if there were freshwater seals in other parts of the world, it was not impossible that Storsjön also contained a previously unknown seal species. He did not explain how this seal, which to judge from Olsson’s description would be bigger than a walrus, had succeeded in remaining hidden until 1899, but asserted in any case that “the animals are probably few in number and that to breathe they only need to stick the tip of their nose above the surface of the water”…

Reactions to the article were mixed, but no-one rejected it as totally unscientific, it was seen rather as a learned addition to the many contributions to the debate. The newspapers Sydsvenskan and Aftonbladet confined themselves to only referring to the article’s content, even though the curator of the Bergen Museum’s zoological division, A. Apellöf, felt called upon to publish an opinion piece in Aftonbladet in which he criticised the stories’ variable observations of the Storsjön Lake Monster’s characteristics, and instead put forward his own hypothesis that the creature actually could be logs that were propelled by gases given off by decomposition. Sydsvenska Dagbladet, which praised the article as a “clear and illuminating investigation of the current standpoint on the matter”, pointed out that they had already proposed seals as an explanation, but criticised Olsson’s one-sided focus on Oudemans’ “strange paper on the large sea serpent”. Only Hallandsposten was disposed to treat the whole matter as a joke and, reviewed the article with the words “‘The Storsjön Lake Monster’ should be interesting. At least it is highly topical. Sixteen illustrations of lake monsters and sea monstrosities, scary to see. Yikes!”.

Epilogue

Now, 120 years later, it is easy to have a good laugh at Peter Olsson’s “explanation” for the Storsjön Lake Monster, and it provides us with some amusement to see a scientist who began to dabble in cryptozoology and pseudoscience. At the same time, it should be remembered that 1899 was still in the age of great discoveries, and Norrland was Sweden’s last “exotic” wilderness. Discovering a previously unknown seal species of enormous proportions in one of these lakes was perhaps not such an absurd scenario as it is today. And regardless, it is not the first or last time that an otherwise respected researcher allowed themselves to be gripped by public enthusiasm and uncritically embark on what was shown to be poor research.

However, the Storsjön Lake Monster continues to fascinate people. In 1986, the Jämtland county council decided to list the Storsjön Lake Monster as a protected animal, making it illegal to kill, injure or capture it, or to ”remove or damage the Storsjön Lake Monster’s eggs, roe or nest”. In 2002, a person applied for an exemption in order to collect the creature’s eggs for rearing purposes. The county council rejected the request, and the matter went on appeal to the Land and Environmental court at Östersund district court. There, the appeal was dismissed on the grounds that that they could not consider a matter concerning the protection of a non-existent species of animal. After adjudication by the Parliamentary Ombudsman, the county council therefore decided to rescind the protected status in 2005. The question, however, is how much did this help the prospective breeder, who is now free to collect the Storsjön Lake Monster’s eggs? As everyone knows, seals, even gigantic ones, give birth to live young.

Henrik Ullstad
Archivist at Records Management and Archives

The author wishes to convey his sincere thanks to archivist Fredrik Tersmeden, who first drew his attention to the Peter Olsson article in reprinted form, as well as to Lukas Sjöström, for valuable comments and suggestions.