Nebraska: The Thing in Alkali Lake

From Backwoods Bigfoot Stories by Backwoods Bigfoot Stories-Bigfoot Encounters

August 23, 2026 · 53 min

About this episode

The episode explores the strange monster stories surrounding Alkali Lake in Nebraska, including historical accounts and local encounters.

This week the road trip leaves the timber and runs into the Nebraska Sandhills, where there's nothing to hide behind for 100 miles and the only thing you can't see into is the water. A few miles southeast of Hay Springs sits a 50-acre lake the state renamed Walgren Lake decades ago and that nobody local has ever stopped calling Alkali Lake. In the early 1920s it produced one of the strangest monster stories in American newspapers, a 40-foot alligator-shaped animal with a single horn and a smell that could turn a man's stomach, reported in the Omaha World-Herald in 1923 under the initials J.A. Johnson and carried from there to Chicago, New York, and by some accounts London. Brian walks through the Hay Springs News items that started it, the wire-service telling that made it famous, and the Chadron newspaperman John G. Maher (1859–1939), a man Nebraska historians remember as the state's most accomplished hoaxer, whose fingerprints a lot of people see on the whole affair. Then the episode goes to the people who lived on the lake and never went near a reporter, from a homesteader's daughter who found a calf torn up on the shore in 1922, to a county road worker on the dam in 1954, to…

People in this episode

Host: Brian

Topics covered

monster stories
local legends
historical accounts
Nebraska folklore
lake encounters

Keywords

Alkali Lake
Nebraska Sandhills
monster stories
J.A. Johnson
John G. Maher
local legends
historical accounts

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Omaha World-Herald

Places: Nebraska, Alkali Lake, Hay Springs, Walgren Lake