The Mast-Head: Montauk Classic
It had been some time since we last thought about the Montauk Monster around the office. But on Tuesday, our memories were refreshed by a query from a National Geographic television program producer looking for images for an upcoming program.
To be clear, The Star does not own the rights to the infamous photograph taken by one of our former interns, the daughter of our Montauk correspondent. It was Jenna Hewitt who snapped the shot of an odd, mostly hairless animal carcass found while she was walking on the beach in July 2008. I passed the message from National Geographic on to her via her mom, Janis.
A funny thing about the whole Montauk Monster business is that The Star did not break the story. The what-is-it! coverage began with The Independent and took off from there. By the time we wrote about it, it had become a full-blown Internet sensation. TV crews arrived and interviewed Ms. Hewitt and other discoverers of the sad beast, Courtney Fruin and Rachel Goldberg. Ms. Hewitt told The Star that by a certain point the whole thing had given her a headache.
“We’ve had invites. It’s fun, but it’s August, and we work in restaurants,” Ms. Hewitt said. Classic Montauk.
By then, we were on the story, though trying to frame it for our readers more as a media frenzy phenomena than a mystery. The Star’s nature columnist, Larry Penny, had taken a look at the photograph and conclusively dismissed the carcass as a dead raccoon a bit worse for wear for having been in the surf awhile.
Things took an interesting turn, though, when the thing went missing. Two men had taken the bloated and stinking thing away and left it in a wooded backyard to decay, apparently intending to salvage its bones to encase in resin and sell as art. As best as I can remember, the remains were never seen after that, as fitting an end to the story as could have been hoped, I suppose.
Of course, on the Internet, nothing really ever ends, and the Montauk Monster will live on in the vast, vast universe of cyber-speculation. Why, it’s even got its own Wikipedia page, and that’s more than I can say.