The Beast of Busco

The giant turtle that emptied a lake and vanished

Gale Harris farmed two and a half miles east of Churubusco, in northeastern Indiana, and the seven-acre lake on his land was named for the farm's earlier owner, Oscar Fulk. Fulk had claimed to see a giant turtle in it in 1898. In July 1948 two fishermen, Ora Blue and Charley Wilson, reported a large turtle in the same water and put it at about 500 pounds. Harris, along with others, said he saw it too.

Early in 1949 a UPI reporter from Fort Wayne put the story on the wire, and from March to October the turtle ran on front pages across the country and even in Europe. It was dubbed Oscar, after Fulk, and the Beast of 'Busco. Reporters and radio people came from Chicago, Indianapolis and all over, crowds of sightseers descended on the farm, and the state police were called in to manage the traffic. Oscar grew with every telling until he reputedly weighed 400 pounds, double the size of any known snapping turtle.

Harris and his helpers tried boats, planes, rafts, nets and cages, underwater telescopes and finally deep-sea diving gear. A search with a diver in March 1949 was abandoned when the wrong equipment was delivered. A Life magazine photographer, Mike Shea, took 299 photographs, all of them deemed unusable. With Orville Bright and Kenneth Leitch, Harris tried pumping the lake into an area behind a dam, and when the lake was nearly empty the dam broke and the water came back. As a last resort he ran a pump off his tractor and brought the lake down to a one-acre pond. Oscar was never found.

Jim Guiff, Oscar Fulk's nephew, had lived beside the lake since 1927. At 97 he told the Associated Press he had always been suspicious about the turtle being that big; he hunted snapping turtles as a boy and never saw one that size. "I never disputed them, though, because maybe I was wrong," he said.

Churubusco kept the beast anyway. Its Turtle Days festival, held every June in the town park, has a parade, a carnival and turtle races, and it is billed as the longest continuously running festival in Indiana. For the 60th anniversary of the hunt, Crunch, a 170-pound alligator snapping turtle, went on show in a 700-gallon aquarium. A small concrete turtle sits on the sidewalk at the main intersection, and a shell labelled "Beast of Busco" is on display at the Two Brothers Restaurant in Decatur.