Photograph by Damien Maddock.  (Image not to be used without permission of photographer.)

Easily one of the most popular cryptozoological books ever written, Peter Costello's In Search of Lake Monsters succeeded in taking the theme of lake monsters out of Loch Ness and properly presenting the mystery on a global scale.  With his thorough examination of traditions and reports involving freshwater monsters throughout the world, readers became familiar with sightings taking place in North and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia as well as Scotland's lesser known Highland beasts and of course the elusive peistes of Ireland. 
    
As an active Dublin writer Costello's published works are far from limited to matters of cryptozoological interests.  Amongst one of his more recent titles is The Dublin Literary Pub an acclaimed guide through the capital's cultural, political and religious history.   As a biographer Costello tackled the tormented life of the great Irish writer James Joyce and in a separate biography covers James's more fortunate brother Stanislaus Joyce.  Besides his biographical and historical works, Peter Costello is also a literary scholar of the Piltdown Man hoax.
    
After the famous 1960 Lough Ree sighting by three boat-going priests, Peter Costello's interest in lake monsters struck home in many ways.  The Costello family had enjoyed cruising Lough Ree in their own barge appropriately named "The Snark" after Lewis Carol's fictitious water monster.  Already equipped with lore of Lough Ree and its local communities, Costello was able to  document the developing saga as further stories and testimonies came  forward in wake of a sighting by three priests; along with the almost comical attempt to discern the monster mystery by the townsfolk under the guidance of Colonel Rice.
    
Presently in the works for Costello is a second book on lake monsters, this time focusing on past and present cryptids of the Celtic world. 

In June of 2001 Peter Costello was invited to return to Lough Ree to appear on a segment for RTE news during their coverage of GUST's Operation: Horse-eel.   

A few days prior to Op. Horse-eel I had the fortune of conducting an interview with Peter Costello in Drogeda:

Could you tell us a little about your background?

Well I was born in Dublin, and had Jesuit education, went to the University of Michigan, and then returned to London and then to Ireland, and have basically been a professional writer since I left the University.  I first became interested in this particular subject when I was 14 or 15 when I was reading the first books by Tim Dinsdale and Bernard Heuvelmans' - in fact I can remember seeing on television, in the Panorama programme on the BBC, the famous film straight from Loch Ness Tim Dinsdale took in 1960.  That was really the beginning of the whole thing.  And then I got in correspondence with Tim Dinsdale, which rather petered out; and then with Bernard Heuvelmans, with whom I'm still in touch.*  Originally I was supplying with him with materials and whatever then we corresponded and cooperated.  

(* Dr. Heuvelmans, "the father of cryptozoology", passed away later that year.)

You actually supplied Dr. Heuvelmans?

Yes with photocopies of English and Irish sources that were not available to him in France, photocopies of articles, extracts from books, and things like that.

And at this point how far along were you as a writer, how many books had you published prior to In Search Of?

 I hadn't published any book at all because the book your interested in, [In Search of Lake Monsters] was started at school.  I continued to work at the material at college.  And after I had left college I sent it out to publishers and it was eventually published in London in 1974.  It began as sort of an escape at having to do schoolwork!

So this was the first book you had done at anything?

This was the first book I had written on anything, but all writers have unpublished false starts. But then at the University I studied anthropology and then English literature and my other first book, the book that followed the lake monsters, was a book that I also began at the University. This was on the revolution of Irish literature from Parnell to death of Yeats, which deals with the Irish literary revival and the political events in Ireland between 1890 and 1939, what you would call the Troubles now I suppose.  And then out of that there were several other books, at a later stage books on James Joyce, of which I did a two biographies of him covering different parts of his life, and a book with a friend of mine, on his father John Stanislaus Joyce. And I also did a biography of Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, and a book on Liam O’Flaherty, and several set books on historical Irish cultural subjects. The most recent ones were last year a book about Dublin Castle and the history of Ireland, because that's where the rulers of Ireland at one time used to hold court. And most recently in the Spring of this year a book on Simon and Schuster on the 100 most influential Irish people in history. About 32 publications of one kind or another. I also wrote The Magic Zoo, which is about the natural history of fabulous animals, beasts of myth and legend, and contributed to The Unexplained series, and to a book edited by Karl Shuker for Readers Digest.
    So a part of the situation is that lake monsters is only one part of my output so to speak.  Some of these other books are 400 or 500 pages long, so there's not been a lot of time for a long time since that 1974 for monsters.

You said you began the book in school.   How would you define its beginning; what were you doing compared to when you actually got into it more seriously or rather when you knew you were in fact going to make a book out of it?

Well I think partly I always intended to make a book out of it.  The thing is I started collecting material, basically sort of Irish reports initially, because in the early 1960s there were a lot of Irish reports, like the priests in Lough Ree and the Lough Dubh incident.  Then it seemed I really collected everything that came to hand and after a while a lot of people were so concentrated on Loch Ness most of the expeditions, most of the newspapers and most of the media attention but it was quite clear from a lot of the material that had been collected that these reports were coming in from all around the world, and had been accumulating from all around the world for centuries, so there was a need to pull them all together into one book and see what kind of pattern could be made out of both the sort of reports and the folklore, and also to put in something about the analogous sea serpent reports.  But the thing was the sea serpent reports were to be only the ones that related to the long-necked seal type that was distinguished by Bernard Heuvelmans, so basically it brought together material that people half knew about but hadn't really been arranged until then. Much of what I gathered was quite unfamiliar I think to those who concentrated only on Loch Ness.

So basically, prior to your book there hadn't been any effort centered on lake monsters like that?

No, I think that all the books that had been published would sort of allude to other Scottish lakes, they'd allude to things such as Ogopogo or something, but the main concentration of people like Rupert Gould or Tim Dinsdale or Maurice Burton or whoever, was on Loch Ness. They probably thought the problem could be simplified if you concentrated on one place, and tried to get the answers on one place. But that wasn't going to really answer anything. You'd still be left with other reports to investigate. Were they the same kind of thing or were they different so to try to see what the global pattern seemed to be.  This was a way forward out of just a purely kind of localizing effort.

When you began what were your expectations compared to the book’s end result?

Two things, as you go along you learn how to do it!  I think initially, I'm probably happier doing archival research, getting things out of newspapers and books and whatever and less happier mucking around in the field, though, of course, there are lots of people happy doing that.  But the thing about it is, as you progress the research you learn how to find out things in 19th century or provincial newspapers, and you'll find exactly how reports go onto be published.  As I was explaining to you, what appears in the national newspaper quite often originally appeared in the local papers, so if you go back to the local paper you'll find a longer article – or the revelation that it was a hoax or a mistake.  But this is how you learn the technique of research as you go along and some of the techniques are the same things people would learn doing an MA or a PHD. Because it covers a whole range of academic subjects in some ways: history, folklore, mythology, biology, cultural history and so on.

How did your perception change as you went along?  Did you develop different theories?

I think part of the thing was when one, in a way, accepts the theories that other people had, and of course there had been a number.  And you sort of try out everybody's theories, but in the end it seemed to me you couldn't have something in these largely high mountain lakes unless they were some kind of mammal. So it had to be basically some kind of animal that was related to, lets just say, the seal in a sense one of those mammals adapted to a marine or aquatic environment, so that's basically what I finally followed up on. It seems similar to a plesiosaur because both occupied the same ecological niche.

Did you think that this same animal was responsible for reports globally or how did you make your distinctions with the various creatures reported?

That was in a way was where the book ended, with the idea that the same animal was responsible for them.  I'm not necessarily so sure of that now, having come back to the problem, so many years later, I've began to sort of look at it again.  But I think that it may be that what we're really dealing with is reporting of different kinds of unusual animals that they get back at the under the general rule break of "lake monsters" and that some of the confusion in the subject arises from the fact that different things are being described.  And people in the media assume that its the same thing being described everywhere.
    I think now today, with the research I'm now doing, I'm a great deal more interested in not just the question of the reports and the question of what these might be, but in the whole process in how animals are treated in myth and legend and folklore - that kind of cultural aspect would be of more interest to me.

Just for fun:  when going through all the materials you had collected was there any particular sighting or description that captivated you or stood out as being especially “unique” from the others?

I don't know that actually one was more impressive than any other, because I think what you feel is that maybe your getting is like a jigsaw, and you're getting just a little part of the puzzle.  And that is that one piece will echo another piece.  And to pick out one report as being the best or most interesting, may be a distortion.  I remember this had been brought home to me when I said to Bernard Heuvelmans that I wanted to add a sea serpent chapter with a selection of sea serpent reports and he got very cross. He said "Oh this will undo all my decades of work", going back to this sort of take out the best kind of thing.  A lot of the sea serpent books before his had been this kind of "20 best reports" sort of book, and as a result no body had any clear picture of what the true dimensions of the problem were because the reports in some ways couldn't be made to match up.  You'd have a big large bodied animal in one report and something with a short neck in another report or something with a long neck in another report.  So in quote "best sea serpent reports" actually I'm going to guess a lot of them, out of the 600-800 as he did, turn out not to be the most interesting or relevant and some miner reports which had a particular detail it.

How would you describe Irish loughs compared to the other lakes, do you think its similar to the rest of the phenomena or unique in its own special sense?

One of the things was, that in the other book, a pattern seemed to emerge that we were dealing with generally lakes in high mountains in the two temperate regions of the world.  One of the problems about Ireland is only a small number of the lakes are actually in mountains some of them are in low areas in general and this would then relate them to different kinds of folklore reports from England or parts of France in Europe. Where you have obviously other tales of water monsters, water beast and water demons and its this aspect of it, you can't solve a problem by neglecting one area of information, just keeping yourself to one route.  The thing is one has to see it in a larger context and with this 'contextual' research, I'd like to look beyond the high mountain lakes and more towards the areas I haven't explored before in England and Europe and where you have "plain monsters". 
       Also, the term "monster" has been imposed retrospectively over the materials, and that in the ancient stories they don't actually use this word. They use "bestia" or "bellua", something that means just a large animal or a beast.  Certainly, something slightly over-colored but not a monster in the same sense that monster understood by the Greeks or the Romans or the people of the Middle Ages, as something dreadful or teratological- monstrous in a medical sense.

Such as a “demon"?

Yes, but something actually not demonic, but a portent of some terrible danger to come or some great warning to people.  Or just an aberration of nature.  I'd be the same way that somebody in Africa may mentioning a very large lion, they know the lion is a very large animal, its not a monster, its a beast. Its a “bestia” rather than a "monster.”   So that's the thing I think that we have to be very careful about imposing our ideas backwards. But that we should draw our ideas out of the material and see what's suggested by the material itself. We should research with an open mind, with no solutions in mind, until we see what the material suggests. 

Finally, what advice would you extend to today’s researchers who are actively in search of lake monsters?
             
I wrote an article in Fortean Times for its 10th anniversary, in which I quoted Francis Bacon, from his philosophical writings, and it has a passage, which I'll paraphrase now, about how one should go about investigating scientifically.  Nowadays people sometimes start with a theory and test the theory.  But Bacon wanted a different approach. He was suggesting people collect observations of nature, and he actually refers to unusual events and phenomena as being a thing that should be specifically investigated.  And its that sense of collecting the phenomena and then trying to explain them that is the way you should go about this problem.  Rather than having a theory that they are dinosaurs, or lampreys, and this and that. 

LINKS:

RTE NEWS: Lough Ree Expedition

©Nick Sucik 2003