On 5 September 1874, the Coleraine Chronicle ran a short, deadpan item under the headline “Singular appearance of a sea-monster at Portrush.” It was a hoax — and a genuinely well-crafted one.
A monster with a punchline
The story reported that a fictional naturalist, “Dr Snaggleton,” and two lady companions had spotted a merman near the Blue Pool — described with a human face, “perfectly white” skin, a striped blue-and-white lower body, black chin-hair, and a “prominent and well-developed” nose. It was written as gentle satire, lampooning a real local figure the paper carefully never named.
A story that travelled
By the standards of the 1870s, it genuinely went viral: reprinted in the London Evening Standard, the Inverness Courier and the Clonmel Chronicle, illustrated on the front page of The Illustrated Police News, debated seriously as hoax-or-not in the Pall Mall Gazette (which suggested “the Merman may turn out to be a member of Parliament… enjoying his ‘relaxation’ after the arduous duties of last session”), and reprinted as far away as New Zealand months later.
Who was it really about?
A follow-up letter to the Irish Times the following week gave the game away, describing the real target as “a medical practitioner… quite famous as a swimmer of marvellous strength” who performed “singular antics” daily before admiring crowds at the Blue Pool — “possibly intended to shame the bather into decency.” Working from these period clues, later research points strongly toward the Blue Pool Club, a male-only diving and endurance-swimming society formed around 1870 by Dr J.M. Moore, a private physician resident at the Antrim Arms Hotel and, by contemporary accounts, a genuine pioneer of diving at the Blue Pool — the same club whose members documented a roughly 37-minute open-water swim to the Skerries in August 1874, just weeks before the merman story broke. Whether it was Dr Moore himself, or a fellow club member simply recorded as “Knox” of Coleraine, remains genuinely unconfirmed — a properly unsolved footnote to a very well-documented Victorian joke.