Shocking death bed confession over one of most famous 'Loch Ness Monster' sightings in existence
The man who captured one of the most iconic images of the Loch Ness Monster later made a deathbed confession over the whole thing.
While it's certainly possible that there's no such thing as the Loch Ness Monster, would you rather live in a world where you know for sure there isn't, or in one where the chance that something mythical exists that ignites the imagination?
That might be one for the philosophers to decide, but there's a whole load of other people who've put in the work trying to find evidence of the Loch Ness Monster.
Major search efforts with fancy equipment have been launched in the hopes of finding the creature, while there are those whose primary resource to spend on 'Nessie' is time and have dedicated their lives to uncovering the mystery.
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Every now and then, someone reckons they've caught a fresh sighting of something interesting, but there's nothing quite like the 'Surgeon's Photograph' that was published in 1934, and appeared to show a discernible shape breaking through the water.
It looks pretty good as far as sightings go, and for a long time this picture was a cornerstone of belief in the existence of the Loch Ness Monster.
Unfortunately, it was also a total fabrication and nothing of the fabled creature can actually be seen in this image.
The famed 'Surgeon's Photograph' was sold to the Daily Mail by a doctor named Robert Kenneth Wilson who said he'd taken the picture while driving up to visit a friend in Inverness.
People thought a reputable fellow such as a surgeon wouldn't make something like this up and so for decades people thought it was pretty much the closest we'd come to a definitive sighting.
Proof the photo was a fake came from the deathbed confession of Christian Spurling, who admitted that he had built the fake Nessie and put it on top of a toy submarine and the picture was taken by his step-brother Ian Wetherell.
You might be wondering why someone would go to all the trouble of building a fake Loch Ness Monster and then taking a picture of it to send to the papers.
According to PBS, Christian Spurling's step-dad, Marmaduke Wetherell, had been humiliated by the Daily Mail after searching for the Loch Ness Monster and finding footprints that later turned out to have been made by a prankster using an umbrella stand shaped like a hippo foot.
As such, he got his step-son Christian to make the fake Nessie and his son Ian to take the picture of what appeared to be the famed monster rising from the loch.
Marmaduke then passed it to the surgeon through their mutual friend Maurice Chambers, the man the surgeon had been driving to meet in Inverness, with the idea that he'd pass the image off as a picture he took.
As far as revenge pranks go, this one turned out rather effectively.
Topics: Loch Ness Monster, UK News
Joe Harker