The Mystery of TRUNKO | Real Sea Monster or Misidentified Globster?
- Sep 24, 2025
- 11 min read
Updated: Apr 25
For nearly a century, whispers of a strange sea monster haunted the margins of cryptosological law. The creature became known as Trunco, a name that sounds playful, almost harmless, but behind it lies one of the strangest, most bewildering mysteries ever to wash ashore.
What was this thing? A new species, a grotesque misidentification, or a story so exaggerated, so distorted over time that truth itself was left behind on the tide.
To understand how the legend of Trunko took hold, we need to return to South Africa in the 1920s. Here in the small seaside town of Margate, Natal drama unfolded that would leave monster hunters and skeptics arguing for decades. And at the center of it all, a single report in the Daily Mail that sparked nearly a century of speculation.
It was December 27th, 1924 when readers of the Daily Mail encountered a headline unlike any other. The article described a bizarre sea creature and an even stranger battle that had taken place weeks earlier. The account came from a man named Mr. Hugh C. Bolins of Margate who had written to the paper with his story.
On October 25th, 1924, Bolins claimed two whales were seen locked in combat with a massive unknown animal just over half a mile offshore, roughly 1,300 yd away. Using binoculars, he got a closer look. What he saw was nothing like a whale. Instead, he described something resembling a giant polar bear, roughly the size of an elephant. It lunged out of the water, attacking the whales again and again. Its body was covered in thick snow white fur glistening under the sun. And strangest of all, it had a long trunk-like appendage protruding from its face.
For hours, the battle raged. Locals gathered on the beach, watching this spectacle play out at sea. Finally, the creature vanished beneath the waves. But this was not the last anyone saw of it. Days later, the body of the monster washed up on the shore of Marget. Witnesses claimed it was enormous, 47 ft long with a 10-ft tail and a trunk-like snout stretching nearly 5 ft. It was covered head to tail in dense white fur.
The carcass remained there for 10 days and then mysteriously it was gone. The Daily Mail headline captured the public imagination. Escape after 10 days sleep. It implied that the creature had not been dead at all. That after resting on the beach, the thing had somehow slipped back into the ocean alive. Some locals even claimed they saw it moving along the coast after its supposed death. Though interestingly, Bolins himself made no such observation. But the idea took hold. A monster, a survivor, a thing unknown to science. Not everyone was convinced.
In 1931, Charles Fort, the American writer famed for collecting oddities and unexplained phenomena, took note of the Trunko story in his book, Low. Fort however dismissed the account almost immediately. He called it a worthless yarn. Fort went further, writing to South African newspapers, seeking any local confirmation of the supposed creature. None replied.
The silence spoke volumes to him. If something this large and strange had truly washed ashore, where was the evidence?
Where were the photographs, the scientific reports, the detailed observations?
Instead, there was nothing but a single article built on the claims of one man retold by others who hadn't even been there. And yet, despite his dismissal, the legend didn't fade away. For decades, the story of Trunko lingered on the edges of cryptosological writing, a curiosity, an unsolved oddity.
Then in 1968, the case was resurrected by none other than Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans's often considered the father of cryptozoolology in his influential book in the wake of the sea serpents. Heuvelman revived the tale, but with changes. Unlike Fort, Heuvelmans believed the creature was worth studying, but the version he presented did not entirely match the original Daily Mail account.
In Heuvelmans telling, the event occurred not in 1924, but in 1922, the size and proportions of the creature shifted slightly. Crucially, there was no mention of it escaping. In his version, the animal was lifeless when discovered, and just as in Balance's letter, the strange trunk-like appendage remained even stranger. Heuvelmans emphasised that no scientists had examined the carcass. It had been left to rot unstudied before disappearing. These changes introduced confusion.
Was the event in 1922 or 1924?
Was the creature alive or dead when it lay on the sand?
Had it fought whales to the death or had it been found floating afterward, but few questioned the discrepancies. Heuvelmans authority as a cryptozologist gave weight to his account. Writers repeated his version. Books cited it as fact. Online databases carried his dates, his descriptions, his narrative. And so what began as a single contested letter in the Daily Mail transformed into a widely accepted official biography of Trunko.
Over the decades, the story became more dramatic. In some later retellings, Trunko wasn't just attacked by whales. It was the killer of Wales, a sea monster so powerful, it had dragged the giants of the deep into battle. This was never part of Balance's account. But as the legend spread, details were exaggerated, inverted, or invented entirely. What began as an already unlikely description of a furry trunked white giant became something closer to mythology. Each new version moved it further away from verifiable truth.
For 80 years, this was all anyone had. A shifting story, a handful of names, a vanishing body, no photographs, no scientific record. A creature said to be 47 feet long, said to have thick snow white fur, said to have a trunk like an elephant, said to have battled whales, said to have washed ashore, said to have vanished, but never truly proved.
The story endured precisely because it could not be proven or disproven. Like the best mysteries, it thrived in the shadows left by unanswered questions. No one could say for certain. Not yet. For decades, the legend of Trunko remained locked in this strange limbo. Some dismissed it as fantasy. Others embraced it as evidence of a sea monster hidden in the depths.
The strange carcass of Margate should have been a fleeting mystery, a curiosity lost to the tide, but what followed was stranger than the beast itself. In 1979, South African writer Penny Miller published Myths and Legends of Southern Africa. She too retold the story, borrowing heavily from Heuvelmans, but adding her own flourishes. Her account described the carcass rotting in the heat. Its stench so foul that no one could approach it. She wrote that 32 oxen had tried and failed to drag the body away. And when the tide finally reclaimed it, she said the town was left in relief, saved from the reek, but haunted by the mystery.
Miller's telling brought something new. Not just words, but images. Her line drawing of Trunko, a white furred trunked colossus became the most widely circulated depiction of the beast. For many readers, this sketch was not art, but evidence, a picture that brought shape to an impossible monster. And from then on, when people imagined Trunko, they did not picture a vague carcass. They pictured Miller's beast.
By the late 20th century, the myth had stabilized into something almost solid. Ask cryptozoologologists about Trunko and they would tell you it appeared in 1922. It fought whales. It washed ashore dead. It lay rotting for 10 days. It was never studied. It was swept back to sea. This was the official biography repeated in articles, encyclopedias, and databases. But in truth, every part of it came from contradictory sources.
Balance's 1924 letter, Heuvelmans rewritten account, Miller's dramatic embellishments. The beast lived. Yes, but only in the way stories live, twisting with each retelling. And so by the dawn of the internet age, Trunko was less a creature of flesh and blood and more a chimera of misremembered details, misstated sightings, and mythmaking imagination. And yet, buried beneath all these retellings, there was one account almost entirely overlooked.
In August 1925, a South African photographer named AK Jones published his own report in Wide World magazine. Unlike others, Jones had not merely heard of the creature. He had seen the carcass himself. He had touched it. He had photographed it. And for reasons no one fully understands, his testimony and his photographs slipped through the cracks of history, forgotten for more than 80 years. Had they been remembered, the story of Trunko might have been very different. But instead, cryptozologists built their house of mystery on shifting sand, weaving a legend from contradictions. It would not be until 2010 that Jones's account and his photographs would be rediscovered and with them a new question arose.
Had the world been chasing a monster for decades when all along it was chasing nothing more than a rotting carcass. By the turn of the millennium, Trunko had become the perfect cryptid, not because it was real, but because it was unprovable. Eyewitnesses disagreed. Dates conflicted. Descriptions contradicted one another. There was no skeleton, no specimen, no physical trace. only words. And yet those words were enough. Enough to keep Trunko alive in books, in sketches, in whispered speculation. A creature that never had to be proven because its contradictions made it untouchable. But all legends, no matter how strange, eventually face their reckoning. And in September 2010, nearly 86 years after it first appeared, Trunko would face its own. Because with the rediscovery of Jones's forgotten photographs, the mystery was about to shift again. not toward confirmation, but toward revelation.
In 2010, the puzzle shifted dramatically when new evidence came to light. Evidence that suggested Trunko's legend wasn't what it seemed. It began innocently enough. Researcher Marcus Himmler drew attention to a curious page on the website of the Margate Business Association.
At first glance, the information seemed familiar, little more than recycled accounts of the 1924 Margate monster cited. Yet buried within were two extraordinary pieces of evidence that would transform the case.
The first was a short excerpt from a letter by photographer Jones, who had been on the beach during Trunko's supposed appearances. The second was something no one had ever expected to see, a photograph, a stark black and white image of the fabled carcass itself. The picture showed a pale, elongated mass washed ashore. Its form both monstrous and strangely featureless. Beside it stood the silhouette of a man, arm outstretched, dwarfed by the enormity of the thing at his feet.
For decades, this image had gone unseen by the wider world. To many, it was the missing piece of the puzzle. But for others, it raised even darker questions. The shock deepened when researchers compared the photograph to an illustration printed in the London Daily Mail back in 1924. That sketch, simply labeled a sea monster, bore an uncanny resemblance to Jones's photograph down to the horizon line, the posture of the human figure, and even the angle of the outstretched arm. The only explanation was that the sketch had been copied directly from Jones's original photograph, which meant that the Daily Mail had almost certainly seen it. But if so, why had the photo itself remained hidden for over 80 years?
The trail led to another South African publication, the Rand Daily Mail. Evidence suggested that Jones's account along with his photographs had been printed there first before the story ever reached London. If true, it meant the Daily Mail had essentially borrowed the South African report and created their own version, swapping the real photo for a sketch.
Whether this was an act of sensationalism or convenience is anyone's guess. What Jones's photograph revealed was unsettling, but also familiar to those who had studied similar mysteries. The mass on the beach bore striking similarities to so-called globsters, mysterious, blubbery carcasses that had been washing up on shores across the globe for centuries.
At first glance, globsters look like sea monsters, vast hairy lumps of decaying flesh with no recognisable features. But modern science has demystified many of these cases. DNA analysis has shown that most globs are actually the remains of whales. When a whale dies and decomposes, the body can break apart, its bones sinking into the abyss, while its thick hide and blubber balloon into grotesque hairy forms, fibrous tissue exposed to the elements can give the illusion of fur. To the human eye, such a sight is indistinguishable from some monstrous crypted, especially in the early 20th century, when marine biology was far less understood. Jones's photograph, along with others that later surfaced, confirmed what skeptics had long suspected. Trunko had been a globster.
Its infamous trunk, often described as long and elephant-like, may have been no more than a stretched piece of blubber, or perhaps a single bone wrapped in tissue distorted by decomposition. But that explanation created another problem. How could a lump of decayed flesh, explained the dramatic spectacle reported in 1924?
Eyewitnesses swore they saw a living creature covered in white fur locked in battle with two massive whales offshore. The answer came from an unexpected source years earlier. An American cryptozologist named Lance Bradshaw had proposed a theory. What the witnesses actually saw was not a sea monster fighting whales, but whales themselves playing with a carcass. Killer whales in particular are notorious for such behavior, tossing seals, dolphins, and even dead whales into the air. If onlookers at Margate had been far away, their perspective could have created the illusion of a strange beast thrashing in combat. The reality, it was the whales themselves throwing Trunko's already dead body around like a toy.
This theory not only explained the so-called battle, but also the mystery of why the carcass showed no blood despite allegedly sustaining mortal wounds. The truth was far less sensational. Yet somehow just as chilling, witnesses had watched the ocean's greatest predators play with the corpse of a fallen giant.
Now with Jones's photographs and Bradshaw's theory, the story seemed to collapse into something far more mundane, yet no less eerie. Even so, the case refused to die, for while Trunko was identified as a globster, more photographs kept surfacing. After Jones's original shots were rediscovered in 2010, additional images came to light in the following years. One unearthed by researcher Bianca Baldi in the Margate Museum revealed a new angle of the carcass, further supporting the Globster theory. Another found in 2022 by Marcus himself showed what looked like a fan-shaped appendage extending from the mass. Eerily reminiscent of a lobster's tail, could this strange feature have been what fueled early reports that the creature had lobster-like qualities?
The photographs, five in total, paint a consistent picture. A massive white formless globster washed ashore, decayed and grotesque. Yet the persistence of these images raises an unsettling thought. If five photographs survived nearly a century, could there be more still hidden in attics, archives, or forgotten boxes of family belongings?
How many people snapped images of the Margate monster only to dismiss them later as worthless oddities?
And beyond the photos, there remains the troubling matter of human testimony. Why did witnesses describe the creature as furred, alive, and moving?
Could the play of sunlight on wet blubber, the motion of whales, and the excitement of the crowd have blended into a collective illusion?
Or is it possible that something truly unknown was in the water that day?
Something real, fleeting, and never seen again. Even if science dismisses Trunko as a globster, the legend endures for another reason. The unanswered details, reports, conflict, timelines don't always align. Some accounts suggest the carcass returned to the sea under its own power. A claim impossible if it was truly just decomposing flesh. Were these exaggerations, misremembered details or deliberate fabrications added by newspapers hungry for sensational stories.
Today, the Margate beach where Trunko appeared looks no different than any other stretch of South African coastline. Waves roll in, gulls cry overhead, and beachgoers go about their day. Few realise that nearly a century ago, the sand beneath their feet was the stage for one of the strangest maritime mysteries ever recorded. And though science insists the case is solved, the legend refuses to fade. Because the truth is, even if Trunko was only a globster, the spectacle that unfolded in 1924 remains one of the most bizarre maritime events in history.
Two whales, a decomposed corpse, and a crowd of astonished witnesses. Together created a legend that has endured for generations. In the end, Trunko may not have been a living cryptid, but in the minds of those who saw it, it was something far greater. Proof, if only for a fleeting moment that the ocean still holds secrets we cannot explain. After nearly 100 years, Trunko has been exposed as little more than a decomposed whale carcass, a globster mistaken for a monster. Yet the mystery lingers in photographs, eyewitness reports, and unanswered questions. Were the witnesses truly deceived by an optical illusion?
Or was there more to the spectacle?
Why did newspapers choose to illustrate the story with sketches instead of publishing the real photographs?
And perhaps most chilling of all, how many other trunkos have washed ashore, mistaken for monsters, their stories lost to time?
The sea keeps its secrets well, and sometimes those secrets wash ashore, if only long enough to haunt us for the rest of our lives.
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