In 1948, mysterious footprints appeared on the sand of Clearwater Beach in Tampa Bay, Florida, which convinced many that a prehistoric monster had come ashore.
For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently in Florida for the winter.
Early one morning in February 1948, residents of the sleepy little Florida beach town of Clearwater, just north of St Petersburg, found something strange on the shoreline. The wet sand was covered with a line of enormous three-toed footprints with claw marks, like dinosaur tracks, measuring 14 inches long. Punched deep into the sand and with a stride length that sometimes exceeded five feet, they seemed to be from some large two-legged creature that had emerged from the water, walked around on the beach for almost two miles, and then went back into the Gulf of Mexico and disappeared. The press dubbed it the Clearwater Monster.
For a while, the Monster seemed to have vanished. Then, a few weeks later, new tracks appeared overnight: they went up to one of the lifeguard towers, which had been pushed over. Not long after, another appearance, this time at Indian Rocks Beach, about six miles away—then another at Honeymoon Island. Over the next year, the three-toed tracks would suddenly appear in Sarasota, then along the Courtney Campbell Causeway in St Pete. In October 1948, a string of 240 footprints was found running along the banks of the Suwanee River in Old Town FL—150 miles north of Clearwater and almost 40 miles inland from the Gulf. As a newspaper report noted at the time, “It appears that Old Ugly really gets around.”
“Old Three Toes”, as the Monster became known, was now a local celebrity of sorts. With every new appearance, the local newspapers would announce, “He’s loose again!” Some people declared it was a giant sea turtle; others that it was an immense crocodile, or perhaps bear. One of the cast footprints was sent to the Smithsonian for identification.
Very quickly, though, reports began coming in from people who claimed to have seen the Monster itself. A pair of locals in a boat reported seeing a giant 15-foot long birdlike creature floating on the water just offshore at Dunedin. Another couple from Milwaukee told police they had encountered a large hairy animal with a head like a rhinoceros that was resting on the shore at Tarpon Springs and waddled into the Gulf when it saw them. Some student pilots at Dunedin reported seeing a large animal in the water that looked like a furry log with the head of a wild boar. And one Clearwater resident called the police chief, explaining that he had been “parked at the beach with a girl” when they had seen a large animal spouting water out in the Gulf, and he wanted to borrow a high-powered rifle so he could shoot it.
The odd reports from Florida caught the attention of Ivan T Sanderson. Sanderson was a professional zoologist and author from the British Museum who now worked for WNBC radio in New York, with a particular interest in unknown and mysterious animals (he was the guy who coined the term “cryptozoology”). He would later become known as an “investigator” into subjects like UFOs, Bigfoot, Nessie, and Sea Serpents, but in 1948, intrigued by the reports of the Clearwater Monster, he decided to come to Florida to check it out for himself.
Whenever a new set of tracks appeared, Sanderson went to examine them and make plaster casts. He interviewed witnesses who reported seeing an unknown animal out in the Gulf. When the Suwannee River prints appeared, Sanderson hired a private plane to fly him over the area—and reported seeing a large yellowish birdlike animal with paddles wallowing in the river.
For Sanderson, the evidence was, he judged, overwhelming. The depth of the prints indicated to him that whatever made it had been very heavy, and the stride length meant that it must have been very tall. “The tracks,” he concluded, “could not possibly have been man-made.” And besides, he pointed out, he had seen the Monster himself.
He decided that the footprints and sightings were from a large unknown animal, at least 12 feet tall and weighing several hundred pounds, speculating that, “The imprint is, in fact, very much like that of a vast penguin.” It was already known from fossils that the ancient South Pacific had been inhabited by giant penguins which had gone extinct about 35 million years ago. One of these species, Sanderson now concluded, might have survived to the present time as a relict population, which had now been driven out of its remote habitat for unknown reasons and was wandering around on Florida’s beaches.
The three-toed prints, meanwhile, continued to turn up every once in a while for the next few years. They finally stopped in 1958.
The mystery was not solved until thirty years later, when a Clearwater local named Tony Signorini told his story to the St Petersburg Times and confessed all: he was the “Clearwater Monster”.
Back in 1947, he said, he was working in an auto repair shop when his boss Al Williams, an inveterate practical joker, showed him some photos of dinosaur tracks in a National Geographic and declared, “We could have some fun with this”. The two had already pulled off a series of pranks together: at one time they had managed to sneak a horse into the city jail and leave it locked inside the holding cell, and they sometimes visited the local dance hall at night and switched the hoods from two cars that were different colors. The “monster feet” would be their most elaborate piece of mischief ever.
Using the equipment in their garage, the two made a plaster mold of a giant three-toed footprint that looked vaguely like the dinosaur tracks they had seen. Filling it with cement, they attached the resulting “feet” to a pair of high-top tennis shoes and went to a stretch of sand to experiment. Alas, they found that the cement was not heavy enough to make a good print, so they went back to a friend who ran a machine shop and cast new feet with lead. Each “foot” weighed thirty pounds—enough to punch a clear track into the wet sand. After some practice, Signorini found that he could give the impression of a long stride if he stood on one foot, swung his other leg to build up some momentum, then jumped ahead to land on one foot—which also helped to stamp the footprint nice and deep.
Williams and Signorini would do their work at night. Moving offshore in a rowboat, Signorini would put on the fake feet and wade from shallow water onto the wet sand. Williams would follow along in the water, and when Signorini got too tired from swinging the heavy load, he would walk back into the water to the boat.
The newspaper story came complete with photos of the elderly Signorini posing with the fake feet, which he had kept the entire time.
When Signorini died in 2012 at the age of 91, his son Jeff inherited the “monster feet”. Several local museums have offered to buy them for display, but the Signorinis want to keep them in the family and have declined to sell.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)