English journalist Fredrik William Holiday in the 1930s became interested in cryptozoology and later devoted his whole life to this business. The 60s and 70s were especially productive for him.
Due to the fact that Holiday was especially fond of fishing, he was most interested in water monsters like the Scottish Nessie or the Canadian Ogopogo. And in 1968 he came to Ireland to study one notable incident that happened the same year.
A man named Stephen Coyne lived in the area of tiny swampy Lake Lough Nahooin, and one evening on February 22, 1968, he went to a swampy area by the lake to collect peat. Stephen took his 8-year-old son and his dog with him.
It was still quite light, and having reached the peat beds, Stephen was about to get to work, but suddenly he noticed something large and black in the water near the shore. Thinking that it was his dog that climbed into the water, the man whistled to her to call to him, but the dog came running from the other side.
“After that, he saw that the creature in the water had a rounded head on a thick neck. The creature swam back and forth, but did not float away from the shore, and sometimes other parts of its body appeared from the water, similar to two humps. Sometimes a flat tail was visible.
The dog ran along the shore and began to bark at this creature, and its dog barking seemed annoying, as it poked its head out of the water even further. A long, elastic and smooth neck became visible, and the skin of the creature was without scales and resembled the skin of an eel.
At some point, the barking of the dog got the monster so bad that it opened its mouth and began to quickly swim to the shore. Coyne saw this and called the dog to him, grabbing it by the collar. After that, the monster slowed down, and then turned around and again began to slowly swim in the same style.
By that time, Coyne's son had been sent to run home and tell his mother about the water monster. After that, Mrs. Coyne came to them and also saw this creature.
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Both Coyne and his wife decided it was at least 12 feet (3.6 meters) long and both could not see the eye on his head. At the same time, the woman saw two protrusions like horns on the same head. Neither Koyne nor his wife could see the teeth in the mouth, and the color of the mouth itself was described by the man as pale.
Then other members of the Coyne family came to the lake and in total seven people saw the monster that evening. Only when it got completely dark did people leave the swampy coast and went home."
The nature of this strange creature remained unclear, and besides, none of the Coins had ever met this creature in the lake. And other people have not met either. The Coins' case itself was only the second and final sighting of the creature in the shallow Loch Nahuin Lake. The first case was in 1948 when the creature was described as a "giant eel."
What could be a mysterious beast? Really huge freshwater mutant eel? However, the existence of such fish has not yet been scientifically confirmed. Sea eels can be large, but freshwater eels never reach this size. And they also don't have any horns on their heads.