Pepie of Lake Pepin

Sighting reports back to 1871; no evidence, and an unclaimed reward

Lake Pepin is the Mississippi itself, spread up to two miles wide and 22 miles long between Minnesota and Wisconsin, backed up behind a delta of sediment the Chippewa River dropped across the old valley near Wabasha. The valley was cut at the end of the last Ice Age by Glacial River Warren as it drained Lake Agassiz in a catastrophic flood, and green bluffs stand over the water on both sides, with Maiden Rock on the Wisconsin shore and Lake City on the Minnesota side. Ralph Samuelson invented water skiing here in 1922.

Something else is said to live in it. The researchers Chad Lewis and Noah Voss found that Native people feared a serpent in the lake and would only take their largest, strongest canoes onto it; in another telling, they would not go out in thin canoes at all. On 28 April 1871 the Minnesota Historical Society's almanac records a lake monster seen swimming in Lake Pepin, and two men described "a marine monster, between the size of an elephant and a rhinoceros, which moves through the water with great rapidity." In the spring of 1897, according to the local author Goran Pesic, two rafters from St. Louis reported a creature at least 20 feet long. Descriptions since have ranged from an eel or a worm to something like a plesiosaur, and one cabana owner who saw a 30-foot creature with a snakelike head stopped letting his pontoon tours swim in mid-lake.

The monster got its name and its fame from Larry Nielson of Lake City, who owned a lakeside hotel and the paddlewheeler Pearl of the Lake. After watching a documentary on Loch Ness he decided its promoters were simply better at it, and in 2008 he offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove Pepie existed, with a photograph and a sample of fin for the University of Minnesota. He said he had seen it twice himself: once a wake two feet high and 200 feet long on a glassy lake, once a 15-to-20-foot log floating upstream against the current. Lake City sold Pepie Chow and Pepiemint ice cream. A state fisheries supervisor, Ron Benjamin, said there was nothing out there that would eat you.

Lewis, who hunted the lake with sonar and cameras in 2011 and 2013 and found nothing, allows that most sightings are probably logs, waves, sturgeon or gar, but said a neck eight feet out of the water is hard to blame on a sturgeon. After Nielson's death, Pesic raised the bounty to $60,000 in 2026, to be paid only once a panel of biologists rules out sturgeon, gar, a swimming deer, a log or a hoax.