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The mystery monster of Montauk

Joye Brown

July 31, 2008

"If this could be certified as the Suffolk version of the Loch Ness monster," County Executive Steve Levy said, "we'd sell tickets and get a lot of revenue."

Levy was talking about the Montauk Monster, a fresh fable of a beast with the hue of a boiled lobster, the beak of a dinosaur and jaw crammed with pointy, white teeth.

Is it real? Or suburban legend?

Two locals swear it's real.

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And swear that they saw - and photographed - the beast sometime after rough surf pitched it up to Ditch Plains beach on July 12. "We were looking for a place to sit when we saw some people looking at something," Jenna Hewitt, 26, of Montauk, said yesterday.

She and three friends, including Rachel Goldberg, 29, also of Montauk, walked over to see what was going on.

"We were kind of amazed," Hewitt said, "shocked and amazed."

She said she borrowed Goldberg's digital camera, aimed and fired off two shots.

"We didn't know what it was," she said. "We joked that maybe it was something from Plum Island."

It didn't take long for East Hampton to start buzzing about the reported find. Quickly, skeptics and believers alike offered up - and continue to offer up - myriad theories.

"We kept hearing it from everywhere," said Rick Murphy, editor of The Independent, an East Hampton newspaper.

"I'd pick up the phone and somebody would say, "It's a sea turtle without its shell," he said. "It's a dog; it's Satan; people can't stop talking about it."

On July 23, The Independent published a story by Kitty Merrill under the headline, "The Hound of Bonacville."

And a photograph, that editors decided to run in black and white because it's too disturbing.

"Flies cavorted upon the naked corpse," Merrill wrote.

"The once-robust figure, covered with soft and pettable fur, was, witnesses noted with dread, utterly absent its coat, save the occasional individual strand sticking out, as if it had been skinned by an evil tormentor."

By Tuesday, the beast - now morphed into full-fledged Internet viral monster, lumbered onto Gawker.com, under a headline: GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR HELL DEMONS.

Hell demons?

In the Hamptons?

Larry Penny, the town's resource director, doesn't think so. (At least about the Montauk Monster.)