San Francisco Sea Serpent: The Real History of Bay Area Sightings

Before the Garden City: The Bay's First Serpents

The famous ferry encounter was not the beginning.

Twenty-five years earlier, the monster was already somewhere beyond the Golden Gate.

In September 1860, a California newspaper reprinted an account credited to the San Francisco Mirror. Ira Burdick, who lived near Half Moon Bay, supposedly watched an extraordinary animal cross the mouth of the bay from roughly a quarter mile away.

If the reported dimensions were even close, this was no ordinary marine animal. Burdick's serpent was said to be roughly 250 feet long but only three feet thick, with an enormous head held as high as twenty feet above the water. For about ten minutes, he reportedly watched it race forward in rapid vertical curves before disappearing around the northern point.

Then the trail ends.

The reprinted story survives, but the original Mirror issue has not been located. There was no second named witness, no specimen, and nothing left behind that could tell us what Burdick actually saw.

One year later, another strange animal appeared in the record. This time it was inside San Francisco Bay, and it was dramatically smaller.

On June 4, 1861, passengers aboard an Oakland ferry reportedly saw a fast-moving creature fifteen to twenty feet long. Its head looked like that of a shark, with fins close to the gills. The Daily Alta California wondered whether someone might finally capture the animal and settle the sea-serpent question.

No one did.

Even the date of that encounter became distorted as the story traveled. The original report appeared June 5 and said the sighting happened "yesterday," placing it on June 4. A newspaper that reprinted the story on June 8 copied the same wording, leading some later lists to turn June 7 into another sighting date.

The serpent had not returned three days later. The sentence had simply outlived its context.

A Century of Bay Area Sea Serpent Reports

The stories did not form one continuous chain of sightings. Decades sometimes passed between them, and the animals described rarely looked alike. What connects them is geography and what later storytellers did with them.

• September 2, 1860, Half Moon Bay: Ira Burdick reportedly watches an enormous serpent-like animal moving across the mouth of the bay.
• June 4, 1861, Oakland ferry: Passengers report a fast-moving animal fifteen to twenty feet long with a shark-like head and fins near its gills.
• March 27, 1885, San Francisco Bay: Passengers aboard Garden City report a black head and neck, pointed teeth, and what they interpret as a sixty-foot tail.
• August 2, 1908, San Francisco newspaper: The Examiner publishes the supposed Prof. Sharpe sea-serpent photograph. The page gives no location for the alleged encounter, so it is part of the legend's evidence history rather than a verified Bay Area sighting.
• August 30, 1976, Agate Beach: Bolinas artist Tom D'Onofrio later describes a large dragon-like animal in the surf. The report enters the newspaper record retrospectively rather than through contemporary 1976 coverage.
• October 31, 1983, Stinson Beach: A Caltrans road crew and other observers report a fast-moving dark form with two, three, or four visible humps offshore.
• February 5, 1985, Marina Green: Bill and Bob Clark report a huge serpentine animal moving beneath the Bay and later produce drawings and notarized accounts.
• 1985 onward, San Francisco Bay: The Clark twins continue reporting serpentine animals and later circulate photographs and video. The surviving imagery remains inconclusive.

Reported San Francisco Bay Area sea serpent locations discussed in this article, spanning the Pacific coast and the waters inside the Golden Gate.

Seen together, the chronology looks less like repeated observations of one animal and more like a regional tradition repeatedly rebuilt from whatever happened to appear in the water.

The Monster Beside the Garden City

When the serpent returned to the newspapers in 1885, it left a much clearer trail.

The original page survives.

On March 28, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a story headed "A Sea-Serpent," with the subtitle "A Monster of the Deep Seen From the Alameda Ferry." It named "J. P. Allen, of the Bank of California" among the witnesses, along with several Alameda residents who were not identified.

The setting was hardly the lonely edge of the known world. Garden City was a real side-wheel ferry, built in San Francisco and placed on the Alameda connection in 1879. It was crossing a busy working bay.

And somewhere in the middle of that ordinary morning crossing, the extraordinary supposedly rose beside it.

First came the black head and neck, rising above the water. Then the mouth, two feet across and lined with pointed teeth. The animal disappeared beneath the surface before another great dark length appeared, beating the water toward the Alameda baths.

The witnesses interpreted that final shape as a tail perhaps sixty feet long.

No one measured any of it. The passengers saw a series of moving shapes and understood them as the exposed parts of one enormous creature. By the time those impressions reached print, the monster had a head, a mouth, teeth, a neck, and a sixty-foot tail.

The Doubt Was There From the Beginning

The Chronicle did something surprisingly useful. It printed the monster and the possible explanation together.

Perhaps the ferry had struck or displaced a floating spar. A long timber could pivot upward, fall again, and churn the water violently enough to create something startling in a few confused seconds.

It was a reasonable idea with one very large problem: a piece of timber does not have a mouth full of pointed teeth.

So the central tension of the case was already there in 1885. Either something remarkable really had surfaced beside the ferry, or a brief and confusing event had acquired sharper edges in memory and sharper ones still in the newspaper.

The rest of the page offers another clue about the atmosphere surrounding the story. Beside the sea serpent appeared a report about Carl Sevening and John Peat capturing a six-foot, 300-pound "bay monster" with green eyes, a white mustache, and two powerful flippers.

That creature sounds considerably less mysterious. A large pinniped fits the description far better than a dragon.

Eight days later, The New York Times bundled the two San Francisco reports together beneath the headline "A Couple of Fish Stories." A Santa Barbara newspaper took the joke even farther, suggesting that a serpent reported down the coast had raced north "to meet an engagement" in Alameda.

The creatures did not need to be related. The stories were already doing that work for them.

The Sea Serpent That Was "Captured" on Film

By 1908, seeing a sea serpent was no longer enough.

The San Francisco Examiner offered its readers something better: a photograph.

The accompanying story was pure Sunday-newspaper spectacle. Norwegian scientists supposedly planned to catch a sea serpent using a pig, an explosive charge, enormous hooks, and miles of steel cable. Beside the scheme appeared an image presented as the first photograph ever taken of one of the creatures.

The picture was credited to "Prof. Sharpe," who supposedly photographed the animal from the steam yacht Emerald while it passed at twenty miles per hour.

But the closer the photograph is examined as evidence, the less there is to hold onto. The page supplies no clear date or location, no surviving original negative, and no traceable history for the image.

Most importantly, nothing on the page establishes that the alleged encounter happened anywhere near San Francisco.

Its connection to the city appears to be the newspaper that published it.

That makes the image useful for a different reason. Legends have a way of absorbing whatever drifts close enough. A picture printed in San Francisco can eventually become a picture from San Francisco, and a sea serpent from somewhere becomes another piece of the local monster.

The Dragon in the Surf at Agate Beach

Before the better-known Stinson Beach sighting, another Marin County story had already begun circulating.

Bolinas artist Tom D'Onofrio said that on August 30, 1976, he encountered something extraordinary near Agate Beach.

In the later account, the animal was described less like the black shapes of 1885 and more like a dragon. It was enormous, reportedly around sixty feet long, and appeared to thrash or play in the surf. D'Onofrio was struck most strongly by the creature's face.

He remembered it well enough to carve it in wood.

Modern interpretation of Tom D'Onofrio's later account of the alleged 1976 Agate Beach encounter.

But the Agate Beach story comes with an important difference from the Garden City and Stinson Beach cases. The report entered the newspaper record years after the supposed encounter rather than immediately afterward.

That does not prove the memory was false. It does mean we cannot compare a 1976 first report with later versions because no contemporary 1976 newspaper account has been located.

D'Onofrio's story became more important in 1983, when another alleged sea serpent appeared only a few miles up the Marin coast.

To him, the resemblance was unmistakable.

The Day a Road Crew Saw Something Off Stinson Beach

Seven years after D'Onofrio's claimed encounter, something strange appeared in the water again.

This time there were binoculars.

It was Halloween afternoon, 1983. A Caltrans crew was working high above the Pacific on Highway 1 when, shortly before two o'clock, a flagman identified only as Gary noticed something moving through the water from the direction of Duxbury Point.

He radioed another flagman, Matt Ratto, and told him to bring binoculars.

By the time they looked, the object was about one hundred yards offshore. The scene around it was alive with movement. The Chronicle reported roughly one hundred birds overhead and two dozen sea lions in the water.

Then the dark shape surfaced.

Modern interpretation of the 1983 Stinson Beach report, where workers viewed the offshore disturbance from Highway 1.

Ratto saw what appeared to be a black body breaking the surface in three bends. A blunt-nosed head rose and lowered again as the humps disappeared into the Pacific.

But not everyone saw the same monster.

Truck driver Steve Bjora counted two humps and thought the thing moved as fast as a car. Safety inspector Marlene Martin's account, relayed through her daughter, contained four.

Two humps. Three humps. Four humps.

The disagreement does not make the sighting worthless. It makes it more interesting. Several people were watching the same patch of ocean, yet the body taking shape in front of them refused to stay the same.

Then the Serpent Met the Press

For a creature seen only briefly, it grew very quickly.

Early coverage turned the Stinson Beach animal into a sea serpent roughly one hundred feet long. When the local Point Reyes Light returned to the story on November 10, Ratto pushed back.

The press, he said, had made the creature too large and too frightening. His own estimate was closer to thirty feet, and his comparison was not to some immense Loch Ness monster but to a large water snake.

By then, the sighting had escaped the road crew entirely.

Reporters surrounded the workers. Their contractor eventually restricted interviews because the attention was disrupting the job. The story reached national television and Paul Harvey's radio broadcast. Near Stinson Beach, one business created a Great Sea Monster drink while another announced plans for a T-shirt.

The monster had been visible for seconds. The legend was already merchandising itself.

Martin remained convinced that the crew had seen something extraordinary. D'Onofrio believed their description resembled the dragon-like creature he remembered from Agate Beach, and his wooden carving appeared with the Point Reyes Light story.

The old encounter and the new one were now sharing the same legend.

One Serpent or Several Porpoises?

The scientists interviewed at the time did not need the witnesses to be lying.

They only needed the ocean to be confusing.

Aquarium biologist Bill Rohrs suggested feeding porpoises. Naturalist Stan Minosian explained how dolphins surfacing one after another could create the illusion of a single rolling body. Seabird specialist Tom Dohl pointed to the mass of birds and marine mammals gathered at the scene as evidence that feeding activity might explain what the crew had witnessed.

Whales, seals, glare, distance, and the difficulty of judging moving objects on open water were also raised.

No ordinary explanation reproduces every detail perfectly.

Porpoises or dolphins do explain one detail unusually well: how the same "body" could have two humps to one witness, three to another, and four to a third.

A Sixty-Foot Creature Beside Marina Green

Sixteen months later, the serpent moved inside the Golden Gate.

On the morning of February 5, 1985, twin brothers Bill and Bob Clark stopped beside Marina Green in their Toyota Corolla station wagon. The Bay water was clear enough that they could watch what appeared to be seals moving below the surface.

Then, according to the brothers, something much larger began moving after them.

The creature's head never broke the surface.

Through the water, the Clarks believed they could make out a short, thick head shaped like a viper's. They estimated the animal at sixty feet or more. As it approached the seawall, it seemed to catch against the rocks and twist like a corkscrew, exposing a cream-colored underside.

Then came the strangest detail of all.

A fin-like appendage opened for several seconds, spreading like an accordion fan.

Modern interpretation of the Clark twins' reported February 1985 encounter near Marina Green.

The brothers did more than tell the story. They made sketches, wrote separate accounts, had those accounts notarized, and brought their drawings to Steinhart Aquarium director John McCosker. He could not identify what they had seen.

After the animal vanished, the twins stayed beside the water for another half hour before calling the Coast Guard.

But no second wave of witnesses appeared.

The Examiner reported that the Coast Guard had received no other sightings. Neither had the harbor master's office nor the St. Francis Yacht Club. One dockmaster noted the obvious problem: a sixty-foot animal swimming around the Marina should have been difficult to miss.

The newspaper records the brothers' claim that they called the Coast Guard, but no surviving institutional record tied to that call has been located.

Whatever crossed the water in front of the Clarks, the twins were left largely alone with it.

What Came After

Bill and Bob Clark did not stop looking.

They reported further sightings on February 28 and March 1, 1985. In December 1986 they said they obtained photographs. Years later, a January 2004 video became the best-known piece of imagery associated with their claims, and additional reports continued to circulate afterward.

None of the publicly available imagery clearly resolves the mystery. The forms are not distinct enough to separate an unknown animal from wakes, floating debris, birds, buoys, or familiar marine life.

That does not mean the brothers were dishonest. People can sincerely misjudge size, distance, movement, anatomy, or even how many animals they are watching, especially through moving water.

Conviction can tell us how strongly an experience was remembered. It cannot tell us what produced it.

One explanation sometimes attached to the case can at least be removed.

Humphrey the humpback whale famously entered San Francisco Bay in October 1985. The Clarks made their first report in February, eight months earlier.

Whatever they saw beside Marina Green that morning, it was not Humphrey.

What Could the San Francisco Sea Serpent Have Been?

The temptation is to find one animal that explains everything.

The reports themselves resist that.

The creature near Half Moon Bay in 1860 was supposedly 250 feet long and raised its enormous head high above the water. There is too little surviving evidence to diagnose it with any confidence.

The 1861 Oakland ferry animal is different. At fifteen to twenty feet long, with a shark-like head and fins near the gills, it could much more easily represent a large known fish or marine mammal seen briefly and imperfectly.

The 1885 Garden City creature presents another problem. The floating-spar explanation appeared in the original report and fits the fact that the disturbance occurred beside a ferry. A whale surfacing awkwardly could also create a confusing succession of dark forms.

Neither explanation deals comfortably with a clearly seen mouth full of pointed teeth, assuming that detail was observed as reported.

The 1976 Agate Beach creature is harder to evaluate because the account was recorded years later. Its dragon-like appearance and enormous size cannot be checked against a contemporary description.

At Stinson Beach in 1983, dolphins or porpoises moving and feeding together offer the strongest ordinary explanation. They fit the apparent speed, the crowded feeding scene, and especially the changing number of humps.

The 1985 Clark sighting is harder to match cleanly. No familiar animal neatly combines a viper-shaped head, enormous length, cream-colored underside, corkscrew movement, and accordion-like fin.

But that does not leave an unknown species as the only alternative. Several animals, wakes, shadows, or moving forms viewed through water can become one body in the mind of an observer.

And then there is the oarfish.

It appears constantly in modern explanations of sea-serpent stories because it is real, spectacularly long, and genuinely strange.

It is also a poor fit for most of the San Francisco reports.

Oarfish are silvery and toothless. They are not known for raising snake-like heads above the surface, forming a row of rolling humps, or chasing seals through shallow Bay water.

There may never have been one answer because there may never have been one creature.

What Survives of the San Francisco Sea Serpent?

Look at the creature across time and something peculiar happens.

It refuses to keep its shape.

In 1860 it stretched for 250 feet off Half Moon Bay.

In 1861 it had the head of a shark.

In 1885 it raised a toothed mouth beside a ferry and vanished leaving what witnesses believed was a sixty-foot tail.

In 1976 it became a dragon-like animal in the surf.

In 1983 it became two humps, three humps, or four, moving through a feeding frenzy of birds and marine mammals.

In 1985 it slipped beneath Marina Green with a pale belly and a fin that opened like a fan.

Those do not look like increasingly detailed observations of the same hidden animal.

They look like different witnesses, in different waters and different decades, trying to give form to something glimpsed only briefly.

And yet the stories kept finding one another.

A serpent outside Half Moon Bay became part of the same tradition as a strange animal beside an Oakland ferry. A monster beside the Garden City became an ancestor to a dragon at Agate Beach. That encounter became part of the conversation around the Stinson Beach creature. The Stinson report, in turn, helped create the world into which the Clark twins' enormous animal emerged at Marina Green.

Piece by piece, the Bay Area built its sea serpent.

San Francisco never produced a serpent that could be dragged ashore, measured, photographed clearly, or placed in a museum.

What it produced was harder to pin down.

For a few seconds at a time, something in the water became strange enough that people stopped what they were doing and stared. Then the shape vanished, leaving witnesses, reporters, scientists, skeptics, artists, and eventually folklorists to decide what had just broken the surface.

The monster may never have possessed one body. The legend unquestionably did, assembled piece by piece from everything that briefly broke the surface.