From the World Turtle to the Beast of Busco, join Seth, Heather and Aaron for a deep dive on all things giant turtles.

Email - Monsteropolis@smalltownmonsters.com

SHOW NOTES:

Monsteropolis - Turtle Town

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Monsteropolis: Turtle Town. A sub neighborhood of Monsteropolis, like Ape Street, Octopus Alley and Thunderbird Boulevard. Let’s do these the whole show instead of the show. Bigfoot Borough. Turtle Town is a quaint little (big) neighborhood. And it’s gotta be big, because it’s full of real big turtles. Not Ninja Turtle big, those guys were big but like size of a bus big, eat your house big, ride across the ocean on their backs if you forged an unbreakable bond with them by saving their home land from a dragon big, stuff like that.

TURTLES are REPTILES. They live in the WATER, but they breathe AIR. They have SHELLS. What a WEIRD ANIMAL.

If you think about it, turtles are almost like their own cryptid already. Not as weird as the Platypus but still pretty weird. I mean. Shells? Some of them live to be super old too, like 100 years or so.

Intrinsic weirdness aside, there are a lot of legends and cryptid encounters associated with turtles.

THE WORLD TURTLE - Present in a lot of mythologies. Basically the idea is that the WHOLE WORLD sits on top of the back of a giant turtle. Turtle world. Turtle Planet.

The oldest version we know about seems to come from Hindu mythology. The god Vishnu appears in the avatar of a giant turtle named Kurma, which had a mountain on its back.

It also popped up, seemingly independently in First Nations lore, such as the Iroquois and Lenape, who portray it as a giant sea turtle.

It’s cool to think of ancient societies observing the world around them and going, “Oh yeah, all this is on a turtle.” If you think about how they would have observed turtles in the wild, you know, algae and stuff growing on their backs, they kind of look like little models of earth.

Historians and scholars also talk about themes that would likely have been in play, such as longevity and continuation, which were important to some of the First Nations tribes and really have been important to human societies for most of history. People would have noticed that turtles lived a long time and also kind of represent security and strength. That’s cool.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/world-turtle-cosmic-discworld

THE BEAST OF BUSCO - A big old turtle legend from Indiana. Local to Churubusco, Whitley County, Indiana, also referred to by the nickname Turtle Town, which I did not know when I tentatively named this episode. According to one online source,

the nickname originally stems from ‘Little Turtle,’ the name of a sagamore (chief) of the Miami tribe, but it’s later become associated with the giant turtle sighting at Fulk Lake.

First sighting is said to come from 1898 by a guy named Oscar Fulk who spotted it on a large lake on his property. Like, really large, 7 acres apparently.
FIFTY YEARS went by. Then in 1948, two men named Ora Blue (that’s a name right there) and Charley Wilson were fishing on the same lake, when they reported seeing a similar creature - just a huge, huge turtle, which they described as looking like a snapping turtle with huge spiky shell “the size of a dinner table,” and now all I can think about is Bowser from Mario Bros.
Gale Harris, who owned the property at the time of the second sighting, got really into the whole thing, and launched multiple expeditions to try and capture it, including one wherein he drained the 7 acre lake. They tried nets and damming streams and all kinds of stuff. They never found the turtle and it nearly bankrupted him.
The local media picked it up a few months after the Blue/Wilson encounter, and it became another Cryptozoological staple. Thrill seekers, monster hunters and now internet weirdos (like us!) became fascinated with the story, and it hangs around in the new millennium.
Turtle Brother is supposed to be around 500 pounds. Adult male alligator snapping turtles (the ones we know for sure exist) can hit over 200 pounds, so maybe Busco Boy was just a really really big turtle, but you gotta wonder how he got that big. By the same token, alligator snapping turtles aren’t supposed to live in Indiana, so if it were one of those, it would represent its own anomalous encounter on par with Phantom Big Cats and other out-of-place animals. Some natural historians don’t think they ever lived there at all, though specimens have been seen as close as the White River in Morgan County, as recently as 1991, but experts posit that this was likely an escaped or released domestic specimen based on its growth pattern. So, shrugging emoji.

https://www.iflscience.com/the-beast-of-busco-the-mystery-of-indianas-500-pound-turtle-sightings-75278

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/could-citizens-of-this-indiana-town-have-seen-a-500-pound-turtle-180984659/

The Ogua - Another big old turtle guy but this one has two heads (sometimes)! Two head turtle, Turtle Two Head, Turtle Tim and The Two Headed Ogua, I don’t know, this would make a great kids movie though. A lot of cryptid stories would make good kids’ movies.

Anyway though, this guy shows up in Virginia and Pennsylvania and Ohioooooo, right near you guys. Aleghenny and Monongahela rivers apparently.
Did you, did you check for turtles? Turtle check? When you went outside today? Watch out for this guy because he’s-
Twenty feet long! That’s longer than cars. 500 pounds. Does this seem too long? Like shouldn’t something that long weigh more? Unless he’s like a really slim cigar shaped turtle? I dunno, I’m not good at math, maybe somebody can figure out what a twenty foot long thing that’s also 500 pounds would look like and draw it.
Story goes that in 1745 (before the Revolution) a giant two headed turtle jumped out of the river and ate a 12 year old boy who was fishing. Which is kind of how alligators and predatory turtles hunt you know, like hiding right under the surface. Bummer.
There are supposed to be sightings “all over Marion county” according to online sources but specifics are spotty. Did you guys SEE the Ogua when you were children? Were you WARNED not to get EATEN by two headed turtles?

So could any of these guys actually exist? Maybe not the world turtle one unless we’re just gonna decide that that’s real. I like it so I’m good with it.

The biggest turtle ever known to exist was the Archelon Ischyros, a sea turtle that grew up to 15 feet long and was believed to weigh up to three tons.
See that’s what I was saying earlier - something 20 feet long would need to weigh more than 500 pounds.
BUT an especially large Alligator Snapping turtle could, maybe, possibly, be MISTAKEN for weighing 500 pounds, or maybe actually weigh close to that much. There are people who are way taller than the average person so it probably happens with turtles.
It could be a whole thing where there just were some really big turtles hanging out in these areas and witnesses mistook them for being 20 feet long.
What they’re doing in Indiana and Ohio though is another mystery.
Ultimately it’s not a question of whether turtles this size/near this size existed - it’s a question of whether or not one matching the anatomy of a snapping turtle could get this large, and if it could/did ever exist in some of these northern parts of the country, AND if they could still be hanging around in the modern day. We’re essentially talking about dinosaurs here - should the “turtle cryptids” be thought of the same way we think about Plesiosaurs and other “surviving dinosaur” stories? Is this just too many questions?
We’re also talking about behaviors really closely associated with gators/crocs (the ambush hunting) so maybe there were some stories about alligators that got mixed up and turned into stories about turtles, but that seems like a stupid guess now that I’m typing it out. And also alligators aren’t supposed to be in Ohio or Indiana either.

SOME POP CULTURE REFERENCES - Plenty of giant turtles in Pop Culture. There’s that Gamera guy, and the smaller Toho kaiju Kameobas from the cult film Yog: Monster from Space (Kameobas also shows up in Godzilla: Tokyo SOS, 2004). There’s the giant turtle from Aladdin and King of Thieves, always liked that guy. The Pokemon Torterra is pretty clearly a take on th...

Episode 190: We Like Giant Turtles