Forbidden History - The Mystery of Lake Erie’s Serpent Shipwreck

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

A mysterious shipwreck at the bottom of Lake Erie could be the oldest wreck in America's most notorious ship graveyard. In this episode, we follow experts as they investigate new leads in this 200-year-old cold case. Cast List: Tom Kowalczk: Underwater Explorer David Van Zandt: Underwater Explorer Carrie Sowden: Marine Archaeologist Brent Gardner: Lake Erie Diver Eric Meyers: Narrator The Happiness Experiment: Start your journey to a happier, healthier you today – visit this link to begin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Shipwreck hunters on Ohio's Lake Erie come across an unexpected blip on their radar. Narrow the range on the side scan it, oh my gosh, you know, this is something. And there really wasn't supposed to be anything right there. Could this discovery be the oldest wrecked?

ever found in Lake Erie? And could it explain the 200-year-old riddle of two men who washed ashore? Where did they come from? Where were they going? There was a tragedy that had happened, so there could be anything out there. In an area notorious for fearsome storms

and a graveyard for hundreds of ships, can this team use their maritime expertise to identify and solve the puzzle of this wreck sinking? The Great Lakes of North America, are one of the world's natural wonders. Superior, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Erie span 750 miles from east to west, wider than the state of Texas.

We're really here in the capacity that we're here today because of the Great Lakes. The lakes hold a fifth of the entire world's fresh water supply, which at six quadrillion gallons, is the largest on the planet. But the lakes are also the final resting place to a staggering 6,000 shipwrecks. And for decades, it's kept Lake Erie local Tom Koalc

coming back underwater. I lived here my whole life, just being around the water. The scuba diving kind of started the shipwreck stuff because shipwrecks became the interest to look at when you were scuba diving. Tom has been researching and identifying wrecks on Lake Erie as part of Cleveland Underwater Explorers.

On a day in July 2015, Tom's boat was trailing a side-scan sonar in the continuing long-term effort to locate and identify shipwrecks in the waters of Lake Erie. Unexpectedly, a faint signal appeared on his screen. On the side-scan, there was just a tiny little abnormality on the bottom that was different than the rest. And I first looked at it and I thought, well, that's unusual, but I didn't really think it was a shipwreck because it was so small. And when I turned around and narrowed the range on the side scan and ran over it the second time, I said, oh my gosh, you know, this is this is something. What at first seems to be a small anomaly has the potential to turn out to be something far more significant. And Tom is someone with the experience to know.

Obviously it was a boat of some kind, pointed at one end. You could see the beam work. The stern was squared off in the shape of a boat. The question now was, which wreck was it? And how old was it? We found the ones that are well-known and well-documented. documented, but there was a lot of them that are still out there, shipwrecks, that have been undiscovered. So we have to cover all the areas of the lake.

The further back you go, the earlier in the time cycle you look at becomes more and more interesting. They were out there on the edges of civilization and just starting development of the country. If you're a history buff, the older it is, the more interesting it becomes. The most important thing now was for Tom to identify it, and in a lake system containing thousands of wrecks, it would be no easy task. To help him, Tom looked to David Van Zant, a NASA engineer and a fellow founding member of the Cleveland Underwater Explorers,

also known as Clue. The first thing it was, I think Tom called me, so I started doing a little research on it, research on it. And then it kind of got to the point where, okay, you know, I really want to go do this. Everybody thinks when you're going at searching for wrecks, you can just go by a size scan and go throw it off the back of the boat and drive off and you'll find a wreck. Well, you will. Maybe 10 years later if you don't know what you're doing, but, you know, if something's lost, a lot of the excitement is finding it.

Tom also contacted Carrie Soudin at the National Museum of the Great Lakes. As there are Archaeological Director, Carrie collaborates closely with local shipwreck hunters and coordinates efforts to locate and scientifically map sunken ships in Lake Erie. Tom, I believe, emailed me, sidescan son our image and just said, there's something exciting here to go look at. And there really wasn't supposed to be anything right there. There are some really interesting shipwrecks in terms of their history, HMS Ontario, which, which sank in 1780, the oldest discovered shipwreck to date. Moving forward into the late 1800s, the Cornelia B. Windiott, which sank in Lake Huron. Everybody had assumed that it had sunk in Lake Michigan.

So just this, that's more interesting to me because of the story of the finding of it. One of the great things about being a shipwreck researcher in the Great Lakes is that we are cold fresh water, which means we get amazing preservation. Next to this delay in deterioration beneath the water's surface, the lake's shipwrecks have remained mostly intact, providing fascinating historical insights, dating back decades, and sometimes centuries. But in Lake Erie, nothing is straightforward. You go from no waves to six feet to eight feet in on an hour's time. It gets dangerous quick.

To uncover more, Tom Koalcic is planning to start. survey the vessel with fellow divers, David Van Zandt and Carrie Soudin for the National Museum of the Great Lakes. As well as being a hardy, highly experienced diver, Carrie knows very well the lake water conditions and hazardous local weather problems. You're looking at this beautiful, gorgeous day and you think, oh, okay, great, we're going to go make this thing, and half a day later, you could be in the middle of a terrible storm, or it could be dead calm. When the wind blows for an extended period of time,

it actually moves the whole lake. So when that happens, you can't traverse through the western basin of Lake Erie. While you might get bigger waves, heavier waves out on the ocean, in the Great Lakes, you're gonna get them, they're gonna be closer together, they're actually harder to navigate.

Lake Erie is known as being one of the most treacherous of the lakes, because of it's, it's shallow. It doesn't take much for a storm to come up and you go from no waves to six feet to eight feet in on an hour's time. It gets dangerous quick. Although it's currently a clear day, Carrie has a plan in place to coordinate the team to move quickly should treacherous weather suddenly appear.

But whatever the weather, teammate David will be leading the way underwater. He knows diving an unknown wreck. is always dangerous. When you get to a wreck for the first time, you don't know whether it's got nets on it. You don't know what kind of lines are on the wreck. You've got to be meticulous on how you go there because if you get snagged, you get trapped

and it couldn't get back to the surface. You may come along and you may grab a hold of something that's barely held on, and then it falls on you and traps you. Armed with essential equipment and wearing thick wetsuits to protect against the freezing water, the team get ready to go. On entering, it soon becomes apparent how poor the conditions are. Not only is it cold, but in this muddy water, clarity is also challenging.

David uses a shot line to guide himself to the bottom. It's his foolproof method of return, should his exit point not be clear. And when diving into the unknown, it's essential. The murky waters are making it difficult to see, and with only three feet of visibility, reaching the wreck is taking much longer than expected. David finally reaches the site. With the wreck heavily silted and visibility at almost absolute zero, the best course of action is for David to take measurements and sketch details of what he can see.

The findings will be assessed back on dry land. With the cold, difficulty of navigation and a storm on the horizon, the team can do no more but returned to the surface. It was a little disconcerting because about half of the vessel is buried below the surface of the lake. So it doesn't look like a ship laying down there. It's just a bunch of sections of wood and opening and pile of lumber that you have to put back together

to make sense of. That's all we can confirm it. That it was wood. It wasn't a metal shipwreck. You know, it wasn't a paddle wheel steamer. It was a sailing ship and that was about it, and the rest of it was buried. The number of ships crossing in the exact same areas

over and over and over again leads to the possibility of more and more shipwrecks. The Great Lakes are full of shipwrecks from all the way back to 1679, but the majority of ours really you see are post-1850, probably between 1850 and 1920. Finding earlier ones, You know, it's a little bit, little exciting.

In the early 1800s, 1820s, traveling on land was virtually impossible because there were no roads, there weren't super highways. So the lakes basically became the super highways. Lake Erie was such an important step in moving west. The ability to move people and cargo easily on vessels before the railroad is what created the things that we know today, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, they're there because the Great Lakes were here to help

them get started. How is Tom going to distinguish between the schooners, freighters, steamships, and tugs that have come to rest on the lake bed to work out where this latest wreck has come from? It may be a difficult task, but it's a compelling prospect. In 2006, Tom had a hand in one of the Cleveland Underwater Explorer's biggest finds. It was very exciting, especially for Tom, because right now he's got Anthony Wayne, which is the oldest steamship on Lake Erie, and having the old assailing ship on Lake Erie would be another feather in his cap.

Tom discovered the wreck of the P.S. Anthony Wayne, which met its demise in 1850, after a boiler explosion. Tom wants to find out more about this latest wreck in the hope it can tell us something about our past and the beginnings of a man. The shipwreck would be the only available physical evidence that we have to construction methods, to design, building, cargo carrying methodologies. There wasn't a catalog of how to build a ship. These were the forerunners. These were the pioneers. An integral piece of this jigsaw is in the measurements Tom took of the wreck on the dive.

Compared alongside the scan images picked up from the initial sonar, the size of the wreck is more of a head start in solving this puzzle than at first thought. From the detailed images I took, it gave me enough information to know that it was about 50 feet long. 50 feet on Lake Erie's very early vessel. Most of them started out about that size, and then they increased in length. So I knew it was very old just from the length. You used to dealing with these late 19th century 200, 300 footers, and all of a sudden you're talking about 50 footer perhaps,

and it's definitely pre-1850. There's not a lot of those out there. So using that information, I took my records and I searched on length of vessel. And I narrowed it down to three possibilities. Tom's three possibilities are all pre-1850, and are believed to have disappeared within the search area in which Tom was trailing his side sonar. The fair play, it was a two-masted schooner. It was built in 1817 in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was 47 feet long. And it was broken from its anchor, and it drifted away in the lake, and it was never seen again.

The victor, it too was a two-masted schooner. It was built in 1828, 51 feet long, and it was last seen in Detroit heading for Buffalo, which would have been the opposite ends of the lake, and somewhere in the middle of the lake area disappeared. The third possibility is the lake serpent. It was also a two-mast schooner. Built in Cleveland in 1821, it was reported lost in 1828. which would make it the oldest known wreck in Lake Erie. We're heading back to Cleveland and a storm came up.

And there's no Coast Guard, there's no help, totally on your own. This confirms the general area of where we found the shipwreck. Tom already has an idea of the wreck's length, but the measurements taken could match all three of his possibilities. This boat's only 47 feet long. Very important that you get the exact length of the vessel. The most positive way to identify a vessel is to match the number carved into its beam with the number that went on the enrollment that would identify it. But that didn't start until the mid-1800s.

This is 1820, so they didn't have to do that. With so little to go on, how are the team going to come to any conclusion about this mystery vessel. How far can they go to confirm if the ship is the oldest wreck ever discovered in Lake Erie? Coming up after the break, a team of experienced divers are on a quest to identify a mystery vessel that could be the oldest in Lake Erie. Their initial dive was hampered by almost zero visibility and an impending storm, but Tom Koalcic has matched the length of the wreck with three possibilities from the hundreds of ships that lay at the bottom of the lake. Tom's already found the oldest steamship wreck in Lake Erie.

What can he do to pinpoint if he's found an even older wreck? In the early 1800s, boats on Lake Erie, especially schooners, were made to order. Is there a detail on Tom's wreck that would make it distinguishable from other ships? There typically are not blueprints or drawings or any kind of reference. These were built by carpenters that did them from a model or as they went along. So they might have constructed this in a way that was required because of the resources they had available to them. Anything that may have distinguished one ship from another, for example a carving or figure, would have been a rare and distinctive feature in the 1820s.

Tom has found that at least one of the three long-loss ships, Long-loss ships has a key feature. The Lake Serpent is recorded as having a uniquely shaped figurehead that was said to sit proudly on its bow, representing a beast that long plagued these parts. For over 200 years, reports cite a snake-like creature, 30 to 40 feet long, stalking the shoreline. describe a fierce, ugly, coiling thing. But nobody seems to have ever captured this lake monster. The lake serpent was described as being a serpent's head.

And it's the only document that I've ever seen that said serpent, rather than scroll or figurehead. So that was pretty unique. And we figured that would be positive identification for the boat. But with the wreck, laying under 45 feet of water, for almost two of 200 years, how well would this special figurehead have stood the test of time? You know, what's on the bottom of Lake Erie? That's very easy.

It's mud. It's all silt because all the Great Lakes filter through Lake Erie and Lake Erie is just a settling pond for it. If you've ever excavated a shipwreck, especially in zero-vis once a pump start, it's not for the faint-hearted. The focus is going to be uncovering what remains of the wreck's figurehead. confirming if the wreck is indeed the lake serpent. David once again hooks his line down to the ship.

A two-inch pump will sift sediment through a hose carefully, away from the wreck, making what remains easier to see. We excavated with a water dredge that was set up on the back of the boat with a pump so we could suck the silk off of the wreck, try to sit down see for a distinguishing feature. And it turned out that there was a very interesting boughsprit on earth. You know, the head. And when we were down there excavating there, we found a stone down there so we know it had a stone cargo.

We dug across to the port side and actually kind of dug down into the cargo area just a little bit to see what we could find. We're able to find some boulders, stones. And I say stones, not stones, like stones. Finding the rocks was not what they expected. This is a cargo manifest of the school. Lake Serpent on August 9th of 1821 when it went to Mackinac Island in Upper Lake Huron. This is a list of all the cargo that was aboard the vessel. One barrel of fish, two containers of butter, four bags of salt, three bags of sugar, 15 tons

of plaster and most importantly 17 barrels of beer. Though eight years before the Lake Serpent disappeared, this cargo manifest suggests a very different kind of cargo to what the team have found. Should they rule out the Lake Serpent? On closer inspection, Tom finds a report that explains the Lake Serpent did disappear with cargo that may have been instrumental in the development of Lake Erie's shorelines The last trip the Lake Serpent made was from Cleveland, and this is a report of the loss of the vessel. And it says here on the 14th day, the Schooner Lake Serpent sailed from the islands with a cargo of stone.

We found out that they were using this stone to build a breakwater in the Cleveland area so as to keep the harbor entrance clear of the sandbar so they could get in and out. Cleveland in the 1820s was one of any number of cities along the lake shore. If you had lake shore and you had a river, you had a city. I think a lot of the raw materials that you see moving like stone are headed to help grow these cities like Cleveland. The Lake Serpent had begun carrying cargo that was integral to the development of the shoreline. Kelly's Island is known for its limestone quarry, so it made sense for the the Lake Serpent to have been collecting its cargo there.

But there was a problem. The boulders discovered on the wreck were not from a quarry. Limestone is thin, flat, usually two or three inches thick or block-shaped stone that is cut out of, out of the ground. These were round boulders. They're definitely not quarried stone. It's definitely pre-quiry time from the Lake Erie Islands. Though the wreck has a consignment of limestone from the Lake Erie Islands, why is the stone

not quarried? Tom thinks he has cracked this conundrum and can explain what the ship was doing at the islands. Being a boater and being on Lake Erie and knowing how quickly storms can develop and come up and how violent the lake can get, I don't think I would want to put my boat right up on the shore in an exposed area where there was no protection from any kind of. kind of weather that might possibly come up. So maybe the islands do make sense that they had an area that that was somewhat protected and is conducive to having all kinds of rock available to them.

That would be safer than it would be just to go locally around Cleveland to try and gather up the stone. So they didn't go to Kelly's Island to go to the quarry. There are multiple quarries in the area. in the area. I found out that the first quarry on Kelly's Island wasn't started until 1834. That was five years after this boat sank. At the time of the ship sinking, the pioneers were blazing a trail westward across America. Movement across the Great Lakes was in flux, and the Lake Serpent's crew also recognized

the need for a better life. The people, where did they come from, where were they going, why were they on the ship? The schooner switched from carrying perishable goods to carrying stone, which would be to the benefit of many who were involved in the advancement of the Lakeshore cities of that time. But despite their best efforts to work as safely as they could with their cargo of stone, the crew met their demise. The ship may have been taken down by a violent storm that suddenly whipped up. With its heavy cargo, it may not have had the full power to battle hazard. in October 1829, the bodies of Captain Ezra Wright and his brother Robert were recovered in Lorraine County, just west of Cleveland.

Unfortunately, their bodies were found washed up on the beach, on the shore. Weeks later, that confirmed, obviously, to the people that there was a tragedy that had happened, and these people all lost their lives, you know, just trying to better themselves and do things, you know, in that time frame. timeframe. The team have put together their findings and come up with the same answer. They are sure the men who drowned 200 years ago were crew on this shipwreck. They have identified the size of the vessel. They have found stone cargo.

Dating the wreck's age to pre-1834 before the quarries were open. Everything points toward it being the Lake Serpent. But there is one last piece of evidence still missing, the figurehead of the serpent. This was from the second dive when we were doing our excavations. It was the only chance I had to bring the camera gear down and get any kind of decent images. This is the deciding piece of evidence needed to identify the wreck and confirm that they have discovered the oldest shipwreck in Lake Erie. But over time, the wreck has been impacted not only by nature, but by man.

It's going to have battled storms, other vessels coming by, all kinds of things. Lots of fishing. We found fishing nets and fishing weights, actually very old fishing nets and weights. So it has definitely seen some degradation. It is not a whole and complete shipwreck hull. The sands of Lake Erie shift with all that movement of sand. It's really going to start to wear down on the details of what this figurehead may have had, the carved details.

Finding a carved figurehead among the wreckage seems a tall order. But as David studies the photographs, something catches his eye. The actual head of the shipwreck that we found, it's purposely carved, and it resembles a lake serpent in its shape and form. A lot of shipwreck identifications are probably at that 99% level. You're never going to be 100%. There is no doubt that on this image here, there are areas that have been shaped and carved that have physically been altered into trying to make it look like something.

And the more I look at it, the more it looks like a serpent. It is the oldest shipwreck that exists in Lake Erie that you can actually go and touch and feel and measure and document information. So this is the first one. This is the oldest shipwreck. The team are satisfied that they have discovered the Lake Serpent, a ship that went missing almost 200 years ago, and from which two bodies were recovered. In its final resting place, it can now be regarded

as the only physical example of Lake Erie's shipbuilding from the 1820s, and a large missing piece in the canon of Ohio history. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out where did everyone go, histories of the abandoned,

a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places. Available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.