In November 1954 a decomposing carcass washed ashore on Canvey Island, described by those who found it as roughly two to three feet long, with a bulbous head, a fin along its back and what several witnesses insisted were stubby hind legs. It was an odd enough combination that local press coverage settled quickly on "monster." A second, larger carcass turned up on the same stretch of shore the following August, reportedly around four feet long, and received the same treatment from newspapers already primed by the first find to expect something strange.
Neither specimen survived for expert examination in any rigorous sense. By the time anyone with relevant training saw them, decomposition and, in at least one case, the attentions of souvenir-hunters had left little to work with. The consensus explanation offered since, by marine biologists asked to comment on the reported features, is an anglerfish, a genuinely bizarre-looking deep-sea fish whose pectoral fins, when a carcass is sufficiently decayed and bloated, can be mistaken by an untrained eye for legs. That identification cannot be tested against the original material, which was disposed of in both cases before anyone thought to preserve it.
The "Canvey Island Monster" nonetheless became a fixture in British cryptozoological writing and local memory, helped along by the coincidence of two separate strandings in consecutive years rather than any consistency of description between them. The two accounts do not agree closely enough to obviously describe the same species, let alone the same individual animal. As with most twentieth-century sea-monster reports, the case now rests entirely on newspaper description rather than physical evidence, which is exactly why it remains open rather than settled.
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