When their error was exposed, the original sightings, it seems, were forgotten. The Gloucester sea serpent faded from memory because the New England Linnaean Society got it wrong, creating a new species based on a snake plagued by rickets. Whatever it was, it was not a hoax or a hallucination. Stephenson’s sea serpent mural, likewise, has become a fixture of the community, perhaps more so than the monster itself. After he retired, he returned to Gloucester and formally began his training as a painter, and became a local fixture until his death in 2013. Robert Stephenson had only graduated from high school when he painted the beast in 1955, before joining the Army. It has four stubby legs, each with ferocious claws, and a long jaw and red sliver of a tongue. On a large boulder that marks the end of the beach, a long, loosely coiled creature that looks a bit like the ampersand on the Dungeons and Dragons logo. Any weekend now, though, the tourists will be back, breathing life once more into Cape Ann.ĭown on Cressy Beach, on a shoal of rocks beneath a promontory, there is a mural of the sea serpent. For months the town has sheltered in place through the winter, like any seaside town-half the houses empty, the businesses with reduced hours. The whole town seems to be holding its breath for the tourist season, just about to begin. A rainy, early spring day in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
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