The Octopus In The Cave: From the Tlingit Monster Devilfish to the Lusca of the Bahamian Blue Holes by Kevin Wikse
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| Kevin Wikse greets the legendary Lusca in an Andros blue hole—a meeting of cryptozoology, Bahamian folklore, and mutual respect. |
The giant octopus is not one of them.
Years ago, I spoke with a man on a bus who told me about something that happened to him as a teenager while diving in Puget Sound, Washington. He wasn't looking for monsters. There was no expedition into the paranormal, no cryptozoological investigation and, as he told it to me, no ambiguity about what attacked him.
It was an octopus.
He was underwater when a long arm suddenly reached toward him and caught his leg.
Then it pulled.
He estimated that the animal dragged him downward perhaps ten or fifteen feet before he felt an intense pain in his calf. The octopus had bitten him, tearing away a chunk of flesh.
What remained especially vivid in his memory, however, was the strength of the animal.
The arm gripping his leg constricted so tightly that he believed it was beginning to cut off circulation. Ironically, he wondered later whether this might have reduced the bleeding from the bite.
He carried a diving knife.
He used it.
He stabbed the octopus until it released him, and he escaped.
The animal, according to his estimate, might have weighed somewhere around one hundred pounds. I have no way of independently verifying its size or reconstructing an event that happened many years before it was related to me. Human memory can be imperfect, particularly where frightening experiences are concerned.
But nothing about the central animal in his story requires a cryptid.
The giant Pacific octopus inhabits the waters of the Pacific Northwest. It is an enormously powerful, intelligent predator that spends much of its life around rocky habitat, crevices, and dens.
What stayed with me wasn't the possibility that this man had encountered some unknown monster.
It was something much simpler.
A large octopus doesn't have to be a monster to become monstrous when you meet it on its own terms.
We are terrestrial primates who possess limited aquatic traits.
Take away the ground beneath our feet, surround us with cold water, reduce our visibility, compromise our ability to breathe, and then introduce an intelligent predator equipped with eight powerful arms, hundreds of suckers, and a hard beak.
One hundred pounds suddenly becomes more than enough.
I thought about that story again when I began looking seriously at one of the stranger creatures of Caribbean folklore.
The Lusca.
And then I remembered something else.
Thousands of miles north of the Bahamas, among the traditional stories of the Tlingit people of the Northwest Coast, there are monsters remarkably similar to it.
They are enormous octopuses.
And some of them live in caves.
HIM OF THE HANDS
The Lusca belongs primarily to the folklore of the Bahamas, particularly the blue holes and underwater cavern systems associated with Andros.
Descriptions vary considerably, as descriptions of folkloric animals tend to do. Sometimes the Lusca is simply an enormous octopus. Other versions transform it into something more fantastic, a creature combining characteristics of an octopus and shark, or some other marine monstrosity.
Its arms become gigantic, and its appetite becomes terrible.
People disappear.
Boats are threatened.
The creature waits below.
Strip away several generations of storytelling, however, and something interesting remains.
A large octopus associated with submerged caves that is considered dangerous to human beings.
That is considerably more interesting to me than another Caribbean Kraken.
Why?
Because the cave is real.
Andros Island is riddled with blue holes and submerged passages. Scientific work describes approximately 175 inland blue holes and more than 50 known submerged ocean caves along the eastern barrier reef. Some marine cave systems contain both vertical shafts and horizontal passages extending beneath the island. Tides force water backward and forward through them. (PLOS)
These aren't little holes in an otherwise uncomplicated seafloor.
They constitute a subterranean aquatic landscape.
Some portions are oxygenated and biologically accessible. Others transition into extreme environments. Research at King Kong Cavern, for example, documented deep anoxic, sulfide-rich water emerging from the cave during ebb tide. (PLOS)
The mapping of the interior of the blue holes is still very much in its infancy.
The existence of enormous unexplored caverns does not automatically mean an enormous animal can live in them. A large octopus still requires oxygen, food, appropriate salinity and temperature, opportunities to reproduce, and an ecosystem capable of supporting it.
But neither does an octopus have to inhabit the deepest recesses of the system.
It could inhabit the biologically productive margins.
The entrances.
The oxygenated chambers.
The cracks connecting one portion of habitat to another.
And this is where the anatomy of an octopus makes the Lusca considerably more interesting.
THE ANIMAL THAT CAN BECOME A CRACK IN THE WALL
An octopus is wonderfully inconvenient for human ideas about how a large animal ought to behave.
We tend to imagine a hundred-pound animal as occupying approximately one hundred pounds worth of space.
An octopus disagrees.
It lacks the rigid internal skeleton that determines the minimum dimensions of most vertebrates. Much of that apparently enormous body is extraordinarily compressible. The hard beak imposes an important limitation, but otherwise an octopus can force itself through spaces that look absurdly small compared with the animal emerging from them.
That changes how we should imagine a hypothetical Lusca.
Don't picture a seventy-five-foot monster wedged permanently at the bottom of a blue hole like a rastafarian Kraken waiting for tourists.
Imagine something much more plausible.
A large, heavily muscled octopus disappears through an opening in the limestone.
Gone.
Behind that opening is another chamber.
Another fissure.
Another exit.
Another hunting ground.
The animal doesn't need the entire cavern system to support it. The cave can function as refuge, den, corridor, and ambush point while the surrounding marine environment supplies much of its food.
And suddenly the blue-hole habitat stops being merely spooky scenery attached to the legend.
It becomes potentially important to the animal's ecology.
There is another feature worth considering.
Tidal movement through these passages can be substantial. Scientists studying Andros describe water being driven in and out of submerged caves by tidal forces. (PubMed Central (PMC))
Imagine encountering that phenomenon without modern hydrology.
You swim above a blue hole.
The water begins moving.
Something seems to be drawing you toward the darkness.
Perhaps you feel turbulence around your legs.
Perhaps somebody disappears there.
Perhaps occasionally somebody really does encounter a large octopus occupying the entrance.
Within oral tradition, geology and biology begin to merge.
The hole itself seems alive.
It inhales.
It exhales.
It swallows.
Its eats.
And something with many hands lives inside it.
SEVENTY-FIVE FOOT PROBLEM
Cryptozoology has always suffered from an unfortunate addiction to size.
Apparently, an ordinary monster is never quite enough.
A twelve-foot animal becomes twenty feet.
Twenty becomes thirty.
Thirty becomes fifty.
Eventually the creature is swallowing schooners, attacking helicopters and applying for zoning permits.
The Lusca has received the same treatment.
Accounts and modern retellings sometimes attribute fantastic dimensions to it, with arms extending dozens of feet.
I don't find those dimensions particularly persuasive.
More importantly, I don't think we need them.
Imagine an octopus weighing 100 pounds.
Now imagine 150.
Two hundred.
Perhaps, at the extreme end of our speculation, something approaching 300 pounds.
Put that animal in open water fifty yards away and I would be fascinated.
Put it three feet from me inside a limestone cavern and suddenly I become considerably less committed to scientific curiosity.
An animal does not need to be capable of sinking a ship to kill a swimmer.
This distinction is important because folklore routinely preserves a kernel of natural observation while exaggerating its scale.
A large snake becomes a dragon.
An unusually large wolf becomes something supernatural.
A dangerous octopus becomes the Lusca.
But exaggeration of the animal doesn't necessarily mean invention of the animal.
Sometimes folklore isn't lying.
It is recalling too loudly.
THE MONSTER DEVILFISH OF THE TLINGIT
This is where the story moves thousands of miles north and becomes considerably stranger.
In 1909, anthropologist John R. Swanton published Tlingit Myths and Texts through the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology.
Among its contents is a section with the wonderfully unambiguous title:
“Stories of the Monster Devilfish.”
“Devilfish” was an older English term commonly applied to the octopus.
The important point is therefore easily missed by modern readers.
We aren't dealing with some vaguely tentacled mythological sea demon that later writers decided resembled an octopus.
The creature in the story is an enormous octopus.
Swanton records a tradition in which people establish a camp for drying salmon near a steep cliff. Unknown to them, a great devilfish lives nearby.
When the hunters leave camp, the creature sees the red salmon drying there.
Then it attacks.
The devilfish casts its tentacles around the camp and sweeps the settlement into the sea. (Wikisource)
Obviously, we're deep inside mythic territory here. An octopus large enough to wrap its arms around an entire settlement is not something I am proposing existed along the Northwest Coast.
But again:
Look beneath the dimensions.
A dangerous giant octopus.
Associated with rocky coastal geography.
Attracted by food.
Reaching outward with long arms.
People being pulled into the water.
That architecture should sound familiar.
Because we've just encountered it in the Bahamas.
WHEN PEOPLE WHO KNOW OCTOPUSES TELL OCTOPUS STORIES
There is a distinction here that deserves considerably more attention.
The Indigenous maritime peoples of the Northwest Coast weren't unfamiliar with octopuses.
These were people whose lives, economies, and survival were deeply intertwined with the sea. Octopuses weren't an exotic animal known through rumor. It belonged to the environment in which generations of people lived, traveled, hunted, and gathered food.
That matters when interpreting folklore.
It doesn't mean every monster story becomes zoological testimony.
It means the people telling the story possessed a baseline understanding of the real animal.
They knew what octopuses looked like.
They knew where they lived.
They knew how their arms behaved.
They knew they occupied rocky dens.
They knew they were strong.
They knew they were edible.
And presumably, occasionally, somebody learned that grabbing the wrong octopus lead to a bad afternoon.
So when traditions from such cultures repeatedly magnify the octopus into a dangerous monster, I become interested not necessarily in the literal monster, but in the folkloric ecological memory beneath it.
What experiences taught people to fear unusually large octopuses?
Were exceptional individuals occasionally encountered?
Were particular dens known to contain unusually aggressive animals?
Were there places people avoided because octopuses repeatedly occupied them?
Could encounters with real animals have provided the skeleton around which the supernatural flesh of the story accumulated?
Those are questions.
Not conclusions.
Good cryptozoology should understand the difference.
THE OCTOPUS IN THE CAVE
The cave is what bothers me.
Not in the frightened sense.
In the investigative sense.
Because the association appears where we would expect a large octopus to find useful habitat.
An octopus doesn't require a cave because it is a monster, per se.
An octopus requires shelter because it is an octopus.
Crevices, rocky cavities, and dens protect the animal and provide a place from which it can emerge to hunt.
Now enlarge the available habitat.
Imagine a marine-connected limestone cavern containing multiple entrances, narrow passages and chambers.
To a human diver, this is an extremely restrictive environment.
To an octopus, it may represent something entirely different.
Infrastructure.
A hundred-pound octopus might enter through an opening that a human observer would never consider a viable passage for an animal of that apparent size.
It could retreat somewhere a shark couldn't follow.
It could hunt from concealment.
It could occupy an entrance temporarily and later move elsewhere.
It could potentially maintain a territory largely inaccessible to direct human observation.
That doesn't prove the Lusca exists.
It tells us something more useful:
The behavior attributed to the core animal isn't inherently absurd.
WHAT IF THE LUSCA ISN'T GIANT?
Here is the hypothesis I find much more compelling.
Suppose the Lusca isn't an impossibly gigantic octopus.
Suppose instead that somewhere around the Bahamian cave systems there exists, or existed, a population of unusually large octopuses displaying behavioral or physiological adaptations to this particular environment.
Not seventy-five feet.
Not boat-swallowing.
Not supernatural.
Just big.
Powerful.
Territorial.
Cryptic.
And exceptionally well adapted to hunting around caves.
There is an important difference between gigantism and specialization.
Perhaps a hypothetical cave-associated octopus wouldn't evolve dramatically greater size at all.
Perhaps the important differences would be behavioral.
Greater territorial aggression.
A stronger tendency to ambush larger prey.
Greater utilization of narrow limestone refuges.
More nocturnal activity.
Different coloration.
Greater tolerance for unusual environmental conditions.
Different patterns of movement between reef and cavern habitat.
Perhaps an animal weighing considerably less than folklore claims could nevertheless behave in a manner capable of generating precisely this kind of folklore.
That possibility interests me far more than trying to find a Kraken.
Because new cephalopod species continue to be described, and difficult-to-access marine environments remain incompletely characterized. That doesn't constitute evidence for a Lusca, but it should inoculate us against the equally unscientific assumption that every significant marine animal has already been catalogued. Recent exploration of difficult deep-reef environments continues to recover organisms potentially new to science. (Vox)
The ocean is not unexplored in the nineteenth-century sense.
But neither is it finished.
THE PUGET SOUND ENCOUNTER
And that brings me back to the man I spoke with.
His story isn't proof of anything living in the Bahamas.
It doesn't need to be.
What it provides is a useful modern comparison.
According to his account, a large octopus concealed underwater reached out, seized his leg, pulled him downward, bit away flesh and maintained a grip powerful enough that he believed circulation to the limb was being compromised.
He escaped by stabbing it.
Now remove Puget Sound.
Remove scuba equipment.
Remove modern biological terminology.
Move the encounter backward several centuries.
A fisherman enters the water near a rocky cavern.
Something reaches from beneath the rocks.
An arm wraps around his leg.
Then another.
He is pulled toward darkness.
Something bites him.
Perhaps he escapes.
Perhaps his companion watches him disappear.
What story does the survivor tell?
And what story does his grandson tell?
And his grandson?
The octopus grows.
The arms become longer.
The cavern becomes forbidden.
Eventually the animal isn't merely an octopus anymore.
It becomes the thing that lives there.
The Monster Devilfish.
Him of the Hands.
The Lusca.
TWO OCEANS, ONE MONSTER
I am always cautious about declaring two geographically separated traditions identical.
Human beings independently invent similar stories because human beings encounter similar problems.
Water is dangerous everywhere.
Caves are frightening everywhere.
Predators exist everywhere.
And tentacles are inherently unsettling equipment.
So I am not suggesting some ancient Tlingit story migrated south and transformed into Bahamian Lusca folklore, nor am I proposing that a single giant species stretches from Alaska to the Caribbean.
The comparison is more interesting than that.
Perhaps similar animals living within similar ecological niches create similar stories.
The Northwest Coast possesses genuinely enormous octopuses and rocky underwater habitat.
The Bahamas possesses octopuses and extraordinary submerged cave systems.
In both places, human beings enter an environment where they are physically disadvantaged.
In both places, the octopus possesses nearly perfect equipment for becoming a monster.
It can hide.
It can reach without exposing its body.
It can grab.
It can constrict.
It can bite.
It can disappear through openings its victim cannot follow.
And it can do all of this underwater.
The monster doesn't require cultural diffusion.
The octopus itself supplies the fuel for the archetype.
AN APEX PREDATOR WE HAVEN'T MET?
Here is where I am willing to speculate, but only while clearly labeling speculation as speculation.
Could an unknown species or regional population of large octopus inhabit portions of the Bahamian marine cave environment?
I don't see anything inherently impossible about the proposition.
That is very different from saying evidence presently demonstrates that it does.
The first thing I would want to know is what cephalopod species have actually been documented around Andros, particularly around marine blue-hole entrances.
Then:
What prey concentrations exist around those entrances?
How often have remote cameras been deployed there overnight?
Are there environmental-DNA surveys specifically capable of identifying local cephalopods?
Do fishermen possess contemporary traditions about unusually large octopuses?
Are certain holes historically associated with attacks?
Do old Bahamian newspapers contain accounts of “scuttles,” devilfish or unusually large octopuses that have never been incorporated into modern Lusca literature?
Are there museum specimens sitting in collections under obsolete classifications?
And perhaps most importantly:
What do the people who actually fish these waters say?
That last question matters enormously.
Both Anthropology and its kooky cousin Cryptozoology has famously made the mistake of parachuting investigators into landscapes where local people have accumulated generations of ecological knowledge and treating them merely as colorful sources of monster stories.
I would reverse that.
Start with the fishermen.
Start with divers.
Start with families whose grandparents worked these waters.
Find out which holes people avoided and why.
Find out whether anybody remembers unusually large octopuses being caught.
Find out whether the old stories distinguish between an ordinary scuttle and whatever was supposed to live in the holes.
Folklore isn't zoological evidence by itself.
But folklore can tell you where to look.
THE MOST INTERESTING LUSCA IS THE SMALLEST ONE
This is ultimately why the Lusca fascinates me.
The seventy-five-foot monster is actually the least interesting version.
I don't expect somebody to lower a camera into an Andros blue hole and discover an octopus large enough to wrestle a sperm whale.
Less T-Rex and more Velociraptor.
A remotely operated camera moves through an oxygenated marine cavern.
Nothing.
Limestone.
Fish.
Crustaceans.
More limestone.
Then something on the wall changes texture.
An eye opens.
What appeared to be rock unfolds.
An arm extends.
Then another.
And eventually a very large octopus emerges from a hole that looks impossibly small for it.
The animal weighs 150 pounds.
Perhaps 200.
Perhaps less.
Genetic analysis later reveals something unexpected.
A distinct population.
Perhaps even a species.
It isn't seventy-five feet long.
It doesn't eat boats.
It doesn't possess supernatural powers.
And yet, in some respects, that discovery would be more extraordinary than finding the monster described by folklore.
Because it would mean generations of stories had preserved something real.
Not accurately.
Not scientifically.
Not without exaggeration.
But faithfully enough that the essential pieces survived:
There is something large in the holes.
It has many arms.
It lives among the caves.
And you should not let it grab you.
MONSTERS ARE SOMETIMES MEMORIES
The Tlingit Monster Devilfish and the Bahamian Lusca arise from different peoples, different waters, and different cultural worlds.
They should remain distinct traditions rather than being flattened into interchangeable “Kraken myths.”
But placing them beside one another reveals something valuable.
Both ask us to consider what happens when humans encounter one of the strangest successful body plans evolution has ever produced.
An octopus doesn't resemble the predators our primate nervous system evolved to understand.
There is no familiar face.
No rigid body.
No obvious front until the animal chooses one.
Its limbs seem partially independent.
It tastes with its suckers.
It changes color and texture.
It disappears against stone.
It pours itself through cracks.
And somewhere behind those arms is an animal capable of learning, remembering and solving problems.
Make it large enough and put it in a cave, and mythology barely has to do any work.
Perhaps there is no undiscovered Lusca.
Perhaps every story ultimately reduces to currents, drownings, known octopuses and the tendency of human beings to enlarge frightening things with every retelling.
That remains entirely possible.
But I don't think the alternative deserves ridicule.
Somewhere beneath the limestone of Andros are submerged passages we have not completely explored. Science has documented dozens of ocean caves and around 175 inland blue holes there, including environments with unusual chemistry and biology. (PLOS)
Thousands of miles away, Tlingit people preserved stories about monstrous octopuses long before “cryptozoology” existed as a word, including a tradition formally recorded more than a century ago in which a great devilfish dwelled near a steep coastal cliff and reached outward with its tentacles to destroy a salmon camp. (Project Gutenberg)
And somewhere between folklore and zoology sits the account told to me by a man who carried scars considerably more personal than mythology.
A teenager.
Puget Sound.
A large octopus.
An arm emerging through the water.
A leg seized.
A terrible bite.
A knife.
And an escape he remembered for the rest of his life.
Maybe the Lusca is a monster.
Maybe it is a misunderstanding.
Maybe it is an ordinary octopus viewed under extraordinary circumstances.
Or perhaps the most interesting possibility is the quietest one:
There may be an octopus in the cave that we simply haven't met yet.
And if there is, I suspect the people who have lived beside those waters longest already know where we should begin looking.
Taking Stock of What Stalks You.
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