The Mystery of TRUNKO | Real Sea Monster or Misidentified Globster?

On the 25th of October 1924, the quiet town of Margate in South Africa became the stage for one of the strangest stories in maritime folklore. Eyewitnesses standing on the beach claimed to see two whales engaged in a violent battle with an enormous snow-white beast.

The creature, they said, was covered in what looked like fur, with a long trunk-like appendage extending from its body. The whales hurled it high into the air, and the fight raged on for hours. From the shore it appeared as though a living monster had risen from the sea, only to be set upon by giants of the deep.

In the days that followed, the body of the mysterious creature reportedly washed ashore. Locals described a pale, shaggy mass, fourteen metres in length and nearly four metres wide, with a two-metre trunk protruding from its body. Its appearance was unlike any known marine animal, and in time it was given a name: Trunko. For ten days the carcass lay upon the beach, drawing crowds and filling the air with an unbearable stench, until the tide eventually carried it away again. No scientist examined the remains, no samples were taken, and all that survived were newspaper reports and witness testimony. For more than eighty years, the story lingered as a piece of maritime mystery—half folklore, half cryptid tale.

Then, in 2010, a breakthrough occurred. Cryptozoologist Karl Shuker, alongside researcher Markus Hemmler, uncovered forgotten photographs taken in 1924 by South African photographer A.C. Jones. These images had been published once in Wide World Magazine in 1925 before vanishing into obscurity. When rediscovered, they revealed the truth about Trunko’s corpse. Far from the hairy beast described in sensational reports, the photographs showed an amorphous white mass, ragged in texture, and lacking any distinct features of a living animal. What the witnesses had seen was not a monster, but what zoologists now recognise as a globster—the strange, fibrous remains of a decomposing whale.

Globsters are created when a whale’s skeleton and blood decompose, leaving behind tough connective tissue. The result is a pale, shaggy mass that can resemble fur and, when deformed by the sea, appear almost creature-like. Without modern knowledge of globsters, it is easy to see how witnesses in 1924 could have mistaken the carcass for a cryptid. The so-called “trunk” may have been nothing more than protruding blubber, connective fibres, or even a piece of exposed bone encased in tissue.

Theories soon emerged to explain the earlier claims of a battle at sea. Researcher Lance Bradshaw proposed that the whales were never fighting a living creature at all, but rather tossing around the carcass of another whale. Orcas, in particular, are known to play with their prey, even hurling dead animals into the air. From a distance, this could easily have appeared to horrified onlookers as a furious battle between giants and an unknown beast. This explanation also resolves the curious detail that witnesses saw no blood during the supposed fight—because there was none. The body was already lifeless.

Later discoveries of additional photographs only strengthened the globster identification. One image even showed a fan-like projection that may explain why newspapers described Trunko as having a tail resembling that of a lobster. The evidence, when considered together, leaves little doubt: the legendary beast of Margate was not a cryptid, but the decomposed remains of a whale, misunderstood and sensationalised by those who saw it.

Yet the story of Trunko endures, not because it reveals a monster, but because it shows how the sea can trick the human eye and imagination. Shock, distance, and unfamiliar behaviour from whales may have convinced eyewitnesses that they had seen a battle with a living creature. Over time, memory and retelling only added to the legend. Nearly a century later, Trunko remains a haunting example of how myth can spring from misinterpretation, and how the boundary between fact and folklore is often shaped as much by wonder as by truth.