The Beast of 'Busco: Oscar, the Giant Turtle of Fulk Lake

Fulk Lake is a small lake northeast of Churubusco, Indiana. In 1948 it lay on Gale Harris's farm. It already had a story. In 1898 farmer Oscar Fulk, who owned the lake then, reported a giant turtle there. The creature is usually said to be named after him.

July 1948. Ora Blue and Charley Wilson were fishing on the lake. They reported a massive snapping turtle with a spiked shell the size of a large dining table. "Its head was as big as a child's." "Its body was as big as the boat."

Gale Harris later reported his own sighting. He spotted it mid-lake. The shell was the size of a large dinner table, and the head was "as big as three fists." Retellings added a neck the size of a stove pipe and a weight of about 500 pounds.

Harris built a trap of stakes and chicken wire in about 10 feet of water. The turtle burst through it and disappeared back into the lake. A 300-foot net followed. Oscar broke that too. Harris tried a periscope, a female turtle as bait, and dynamite.

March 1949. A Columbia City paper ran the story, and a UPI reporter from Fort Wayne put it on the wire nationwide. On 14 March about 3,000 people crowded onto the property. By 20 March, 400 cars an hour were passing the Harris home. "People came by the hundreds and would walk right into our home without knocking," Helen Harris said.

Divers went down on 18 March. Walter Johnson spent more than two hours stuck in the muck. Life photographer Mike Shea took 299 photographs. None proved usable.

September 1949. Tractor-driven pumps burned more than 2,000 gallons of gasoline and shrank the lake from 7 acres to 1. Then the dam holding back the pumped water broke. In October some 200 people said they saw Oscar leap from the water. In December a crane tried dredging. Then Harris came down with appendicitis, and the search ended. Nothing was ever caught. Harris sold the farm in 1950. He believed Oscar had escaped to another lake through an underground river.

Local turtle expert Rusty Reed judged the July 1948 report a hoax, noting Wilson's reputation for tall tales. In April 1949 two men from Indianapolis claimed a capture. It was an ordinary sea turtle they had bought. Reed thought the head was large for the body, which inflated size estimates, and that nobody ever saw the whole turtle out of the water. His guess was that Oscar suffocated in the mud during the pumping.

Modern experts are cautious too. Bruce Kingsbury of Purdue notes that "A really big snapping turtle might be around 30 pounds," and calls it "very unlikely" that alligator snapping turtles ever lived in Indiana. A common snapping turtle or a spiny softshell are the likelier suspects.

Churubusco embraced its beast. Turtle Days has been held every June since 1950, with a parade, turtle races and a Miss Turtle Days contest. The town calls itself "Turtle Town, USA," and a statue of Oscar stands in town. John A. Gutowski made the festival the subject of a 1977 Indiana University dissertation. A 1973 student essay at Indiana University put it plainly: "In my mind, Oscar is the ninth wonder of the world; the Lock Ness Monster being the eighth."