What does it mean to belong to a certain place? In this text I will explore what I understand to be a particular way of communicating belonging, namely by stories of observations of cryptids. I focus here on narratives about Storsjöodjuret, or “The Great Lake Monster”, in the province of Jämtland, Sweden. The work is based on my doctoral thesis in Human Ecology (Händén-Svensson 2024a), and I have not explored whether narratives of observing other cryptids function the same way.

In this article I analyse older published narratives of the Great Lake Monster and interviews conducted with observers of it. The analysis and discussion are formed around one central question: In what ways do Great Lake Monster narratives express connections between people, history, landscape and place? In order to understand how this particular cryptid is used as a way of communicating belonging, I start by placing the Great Lake Monster in the Jamtlandic landscape as a genius loci. I then turn to other stories and conversations, which all differ in genre as well as in content, to explore local relationships between the lake Storsjön (Figures 1 and 2), the people living there, and the surrounding landscape, making the argument that the observation narratives discussed here are not merely told to communicate the encounter with the cryptid, but also as a way to make use of the landscape as part of the process of world-making.

Written records of conceptualizations of this lake monster exist from 1643 and into our days, and it has been continually reimagined and recontextualized, while still keeping its core narrative form recognizable. The meanings ascribed to the creature are not fixed; rather, they are shaped by the people who engage with it across different social, cultural, and spatial contexts. Drawing on a range of narrative materials, I have elsewhere discussed the history of the figure, identifying four dominant conceptualizations: (1) as a väsen, a folkloric being embedded in a cosmological order and tied to pre-industrial vernacular ontologies of nature; (2) as a cryptid, positioned within a scientific discourse and treated as an object of empirical inquiry; (3) as a symbol for the region, mobilized for tourism purposes, regional branding, and economic development; and (4) as a figure of popular culture, often rendered in monstrous or fantastical form (cf. Händén-Svensson 2024a). These shifting representations reflect broader transformations in how landscapes are experienced, narrated, and commodified. While focusing on the relationship between the first two identities, this article discusses how folklore operates as a living, adaptive system – one that mediates relationships between people, place, and the more-than-human world (cf. Cruikshank 1994; 1997; 2000[1998]). In doing so, it contributes to ongoing conversations in both folklore and landscape studies about the role of narrative in shaping spatial imaginaries and cultural memory (cf. Schama 1995).

First mentioned in writing by the Danish physician and rune historian Ole Worm (1643:522–523), it was at this time called a “lake serpent”, a folkloric being inhabiting and ruling the lake. In early narratives of this lake serpent, which by and large explain an eleventh-century runestone’s placement by the eastern shore of the island of Frösö in the lake (Plantin 1685), their interconnected relationship is made obvious. In later narratives, the focus is instead shifted to the witnessing of a “hidden animal”, as the understandings of the lake serpent were transformed to adapt to scientific and societal changes. In making room for zoological interpretations of the old narratives, scholars in zoology (as well as archaeology), tried to identify the species of the creature described by witnesses (Lönnberg 1898, 1899a, 1899b; Olsson 1899; Wibling 1903). In this process, the repertoire of stories told about Storsjöodjuret also shifted, from shared legends to individual memorates (for discussions about memorates and individual narratives of experience, see e.g. Dégh & Vászony 1979; Honko 1964; Klintberg 1973; Meurling 2016; Rooth 1979), which also share patterns and motifs (Händén-Svensson 2024a, 2024b).

However, no animal was found that matched or explained what was witnessed, and the once commonly shared folklore, traditions, and beliefs about the lake serpent vanished and gave room for the cryptozoological interpretation present today (Malm 2017; Heuvelmans 1958[1955], 1968, 1983, 1990, 1997, 2007, cf. Händén-Svensson 2024a; 2024b). Contemporary images and uses of Storsjöodjuret, besides its lure for cryptozoologists and believers, can best be described as that of a symbol of the province of Jämtland, Sweden, often used for tourism purposes.

In the following I will focus on the communicative meaning of the stories as expressions of a sense of place and belonging, and I will show how the Great Lake Monster functions as a mediating link between humans, history, the landscape, and societal change. I argue that Storsjöodjuret and the people who care for it belong together, share history in this landscape, and that through this connection a sense of place is constructed.

This article draws on two main theoretical categories: folklore studies and geography. Working together they contribute nuanced understandings of the relationship between people, the phenomenon, and the place.

Theoretically I base the analysis in phenomenological geography, and core concepts such as sense of, and belonging to, place, and that of genius loci (Norberg-Schultz 1980; Relph 1976; Seamon 2018). From this perspective, “one can define place as any environment that gathers human experiences, actions, and meanings spatially and temporally” (Seamon 2018:2, italics in original). They are assigned meaning by individuals but can simultaneously be a shared experienced (Relph 1976; Raymond et al. 2021; Tuan 1977). Place can also play a central role in the formation and communication of identity on both individual and collective levels (Riley 2010:652; cf. Glassie 1995[1982]; Hornborg 2001; Laime 2014).

The older legends about Storsjöodjuret not only established, but also continuously maintain, a tradition of the lake serpent as a genius loci. The concept, used to describe a deeply felt meaningfulness attached to a certain place, entered geography with the phenomenological landscape research in the latter half of the twentieth century. The idea sprang from a Roman tradition around the beginning of our era, where certain sacred locales of significance for a family or cult were said to be protected by place-bound spirits, often depicted as serpents (Flowers 2017; Malm 2017). The architect Christian Norberg-Schultz, in a central study in 1980, used the concept to describe the feeling of or for a place in architectural analysis. Genius loci thus describes a kind of “spirituality” significant for meaningful places (Norberg-Schulz 1980; Relph 1976; Tuan 1977; Vecco 2020), and places can be attributed anything from a long and deep to a weak such sense of “spirituality” (Lewicka et al. 2019; Raymond et al. 2021).

“Some landscapes”, writes Ulrich Magin in 2016 (p. 211–212), citing Charles Fort (1994:12), “contain the necessity of a creature or phenomenon, and because these fit that landscape or the desires and/or fears of their inhabitants, they are not only ‘necessary monsters’, but can also be regarded as an expression of the genius loci.” Fort attributes cryptids the role of handling various feelings people in a particular time or social group experience towards place and argues that feelings of homeliness and belonging to a place or landscape can be embodied in the cryptid as a genius loci.

In the following I will use the early legends of the Great Lake Monster as a way of placing the lake serpent in the landscape, showing how the idea of a serpent body in this water is constructed historically as a shared folk belief and narrative. This idea is then given new meanings in a later interpretation as a cryptid, connecting observers, landscape, lake and monster in historical processes of meaning-making and belonging.

Folklore legends from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are analysed, as well as interviews with witnesses alive today. The interviews, conducted between 2018 and 2023, focused on the informant’s observation as well as other aspects that they brought up in relation to telling me about the time (or times) the lake monster revealed itself to them. Four interviews are cited in this article: Gustav, a man in his seventies, saw Storsjöodjuret in the 1980s; Emma, a woman in her forties, witnessed the lake serpent in the early 2000s; Imbar, a woman also in her seventies, saw it in 2013; and Orvar, a man in his eighties had a very close encounter with the cryptid when it was caught in his fishing gear in the 1990s.

The origins of the older narratives about the lake serpent (here discussed as a background to the idea that later reveals itself in physical shape to the interviewed observers), their age or socio-cultural contexts, are unknown. I stumbled across them in daily newspapers. magazines, books, and archives during the work with my doctoral dissertation (Händén-Svensson 2024a). They are published, with all the scholarly frustrations this evokes; information on provenance, the narrative’s position in the teller’s repertoire, personal and creative addenda, etc., are all missing in the “frozen” written form of each particular narrative. Oral traditions, in contrast, are fluid, in constant adaptation to situation, contexts, inter-personal relations, and motifs of the storyteller (cf. Cruikshank 1994; 1997; 2000[1998]), and we can imagine that these stories once also were “alive”. What follows are thus my interpretations of a very small sample, and I make no claims to have exhausted the possibility that several more narratives – and interpretations – exist.

The older stories are legends, and as such part of a larger set of cosmological beliefs about the world, including the relationship with nature, animals, and magical beings (Klintberg 1972:14). From the late nineteenth century another kind of narrative entered the stage of Great Lake Monster stories: memorates. A memorate about an observation, or of the witnessing of a “hidden animal”, is individual in reference, but analysed in relation to each other reveal that they share common structural and almost formulaic elements (Händén-Svensson 2004a). The observation can within a cryptozoological context be held as proof of the animal’s existence, making the memorate a kind of “eyewitness statement” (cf. Loxton & Prothero 2013:13–16).

The earliest narrative in the material analysed here was published in 1836 in a newspaper article about a trip to the mountain Åreskutan, located in Jämtland, Sweden. Other stories are still in use today, primarily in the contexts of (cultural heritage) tourism. Below I give brief summaries of them. Previously, the archaeologist Stig Welinder (1998; 2004) has discussed the relationships between the monster, local (cultural) history, and the landscape. Of the legends discussed here, the one about the two trolls Jata and Kata is referenced in Welinder’s writings.

There are several origin legends that tell the story of how the creature came into existence. The first one published, as far as I have found, appeared in Jämtlands-Tidning’s supplement Jämten on 29 January 1897. In this narrative the lake serpent appears in the human world as a punishment, motivated by disobedience to the rules set in dealings between trolls and humans. I retell it here in part:

The story continues with a sequence which I believe to have been the most important part in early narrations of this legend, letting us know that the serpent grew until it could coil around the islands in the lake. The locals hurried to contract the well-known Kettil Runske, who bound the unknown animal. The method used to bind the monster differs in the origin legends analysed, but most of them connect to the serpentine motif on the Frösö runestone, thus explaining the presence of this strange stone in the landscape.

Building on shared beliefs, fears, and hopes, folklore serves to shape, communicate, and uphold norms (Arvidsson 1999; Frykman 1977; Skjelbred 1998; Stattin 1984). In this story, a fear of unknown fauna presents itself as a small, unrecognizable animal that rolls from the pot into the lake. Such species were not known in the human world, and therefore a man with magical powers, Kettil Runske, was sent for to keep the otherwise uncontrollable in check, marking the animal as unusual.

An observation of a cryptid can, in its own way, reinforce an individual’s sense of belonging to place. It becomes a memorable event – an “anchor” in their personal narrative – but also a piece in a larger, shared process of relational place-making, and in this next section the article will focus on contemporary expressions and narratives of the relationship between the Great Lake Monster, the people, and the landscape. By examining how these relationships are articulated through legends and other forms of vernacular storytelling, I aim to connect the older narratives with the experience of observing the cryptid, and the narration of this experience. These do more than recount encounters with a cryptid; they embed the creature within a dense web of place-based meanings, positioning it as a protective spirit of place –a genius loci. In this way, the Great Lake Monster becomes a symbolic and affective anchor for both individual and shared senses of place.

“Belonging to a particular locality evokes the notion of loyalty to a place, a loyalty that may be expressed through oral or written history narratives of origin as belonging, the focality of certain objects, myths,” writes the anthropologist Nadia Lovell (1998:1). I argue that the cryptid functions as a “focusing object” of shared history and as a symbol of such connections. The storytelling surrounding this local cryptid acts as a form of cultural inscription, shaping how the landscape is perceived, remembered, and inhabited, and the legends can be viewed as contributing to a shared sense of place that is emotionally charged and socially transmitted. As the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) has argued, topophilia – the affective bond between people and place – is often cultivated through narrative, memory, and embodied experience.

In an interview in 2021, the tourism developer Anne Adsten describes it thus: “The Storsjöodjuret is a part of us, a part of who we are [as Jämtlanders].” An observation of the Great Lake Monster is of course not the only way in which local belonging is communicated in Jämtland. But it is, I would say, a very special way, which is expressed repeatedly in interviews and narratives. In the following I will explore a few of these, using them as entry points to understand how belonging to place is narrated, expressed, and given shape by the observers. The monster observation is rendered meaningful in more than one way, as both confirmation of belonging and as the powerful experiencing of witnessing something extraordinary from the legends.

In my earlier work, which centred on how the intricate web of the social, the cultural, the historical, and the local influenced the shaping of this Swedish cryptid, I interviewed eleven observers about their experiences. The purpose of the study was to demonstrate how this scientifically still unvalidated animal serves as an interesting representative of a borderland between the real and the imagined, and how views of nature, landscape, place, society, history, and culture are woven together with storytelling and scientific exploration to illuminate socio-ecological relationships. Earlier research on cryptids and the regionally grounded history of them have mainly focused on their meaning in local folklore (ethnology/anthropology), investigations of what is observed (zoology/crypto-zoology and environmental history), or the people searching for them (sociology, sociology of religion, and tourism).

When inquiring about an interview, I asked the informants to show me places they thought I need to have visited to understand their observations. This is what happened.

Gustav lives in a small town in Jämtland. This place has been his home for over forty years, and he has witnessed the Great Lake Monster twice. He begins by going back much earlier than the day he “met” Storsjöodjuret and points our driver to the home he built for his family in 1977–78. On our way there he tells me about the municipality’s history and his life here. Only several hours into our drive does he bring me to the shore where he saw the Great Lake Monster. I understand this as a way of connecting his observation narrative to the place, grounding it in the landscape (cf. Glassie 1995[1982]). To understand his observation, I must understand him belonging here. By introducing me to the landscape before giving me his story, he is narrating not just the experience, but also his relationship to this place.

Emma, whom I interviewed online during the COVID-19 pandemic, also uses her observation as reinforcement of her belonging to this place. In her family a chronicle is told that very tangibly connects her and her family to the area and to the runestone, and thereby also to the lake serpent:

The water surface splitting and the hidden animal revealing itself is highlighted in the observers’ life narratives as a humbling event to cherish with gratitude. Emma’s observation becomes a kind of double confirmation of this being her place: she witnesses the monster that, through the legends, relates to the runestone with an inscription significant to her family’s history.

Imbar, with whom I drove though the Jamtlandic landscape in 2019, talking about history, family, her life in the area, and her Great Lake Monster observation, also described the event as a positive and confirming experience. The event took place in 2013, when she was sitting on a warm bus on her way home from work. Years later – this time in cold and windy weather – we walk out on the same bridge so that I may come as close as possible to the site of the original observation.

Standing there beside her, gazing out over the water, allowed me to gain a personal and emotional understanding of the event and its spatial context. The embodied act of returning to the site, even under different conditions, becomes a form of situated knowledge-making, where landscape, memory, and narrative converge. Imbar, who says she never experience anything extraordinary, was on that day in 2013 allowed a glimpse of the cryptid of the lake, and I on this day in 2019, a glimpse of her observation.

Orvar also begins his story with a retrospect revealing feelings of long belonging to this place. Our driver and I have just arrived at his home when Orvar points to a potted plant in a windowsill:

The cactus would, if still alive and thriving (I do not know), be 130 years old now, time materialized, and it functions as a hub where time, place, and kinship run strongly intertwined from his grandmother and grandfather, through the house’s four generations, to himself and his children. He continues by telling us about the very old family line he belongs to. He shares memories from meetings with relatives with us and shows us the family’s coat of arms. The first stop, on our way to the place of his observation, is a church that has a central place in his ancestral history. Orvar’s potted plant, the family’s imprints in the landscape through buildings and farms, which he shows us during our travel in the landscape, point both backward and forward. He has been here for a long time, as in a forward motion initiated long before he was born. A motion that is brought to life when I ask him to tell me about his Great Lake Monster observation.

The informant Fjälla makes a similar connection when we meet for an interview in March 2022. She takes me through the provinces of Jämtland and Härjedalen, and we drive to both her parents’ farm, the home she shared with her husband, and to the summer pasture, where she has lived a seasonal pastoralist lifestyle since she was a little girl. Later in the interview – after arriving at her current farm, feeding her sheep, and when her dog has placed her head in my lap for some cuddles – Fjälla reflects on her relationship with this place as she comments on the shifting socio-ecological dynamics she has observed in the region. Drawing on her lived experience, she articulates a distinction between two modes of engaging with the environment: one rooted in “nature experience,” the other in “land use.” The former reflects an emotionally situated, culturally mediated relationship with place, one she associates with her childhood, while the latter is shaped by instrumental and economic rationalities, materializing in developments such as large ski resorts with “ski-in, ski-out” lodging. These orientations correspond, respectively, to intimate, place-based sociality grounded in shared lifeworlds, and to more abstract, transactional forms of interaction marked by anonymity and detachment.

As a short detour, I will lastly allow myself a comparison with another Nordic lake monster, Selma in Seljordsvatnet in Norway, to accentuate that the processes of connecting the witnessing of a cryptid to the shaping of identities, feelings of belonging to a landscape, and a sense of place is after all perhaps not exclusive to the Jamtlandic region. For over 250 years, stories of this lake serpent have circulated in this Norwegian community, embedding the creature in the cultural landscape and local identity. Bernt Solvoll, cultural consultant in the municipality of Seljord, told The Guardian’s reporter Flora Botsfjord in 1999 how he, some time after commencing his position, began to wonder when Selma would “welcome” him. And then, finally, one calm afternoon, as he is driving along the shore of the lake, the water suddenly begins to stir. For approximately ten minutes he witnesses waves forming and something repeatedly sending up cascades of water, before the lake gradually returns to stillness. He has been approved.

When I ask for an interview regarding Storsjöodjuret, the stories originate from other places than I first expected. The pattern that appears suggests that the experience of witnessing the monster is not an isolated incident, neither in the witness’s life nor in the realm of narrating. The observers relate the monster to other places, events, and parts of life, and when I ask about observations these relations are brought up. I begin to understand that observations of the local lake monster can be viewed as a reinforcement of person’s sense of belonging, and that narrating the observation is a way to share this relationship with others. It peeks into family histories, church history, potted plant cultivation, summer pasture life, lifestyle, heraldry, landscape, and environmental history – and much besides. It becomes clear that the Great Lake Monster connects and influences diverse areas of Jamtlandic society and the lives of people here. Through storytelling, people do not simply describe the landscape, they inhabit it, engage with it, and co-construct its meaning. The local “hidden” lake serpent, in this context, is not just a folkloric figure, nor just an imagined undiscovered species, but a relational entity that mediates human-environment interactions.

This article has traced the evolving uses and meanings of the Great Lake Monster in Lake Storsjön across nearly four centuries, revealing how the figure has served as a dynamic cultural anchor between people, place, and narrative. In conversations with believers, it becomes clear that the belief in a cryptid is embedded within a broader cultural understanding of landscape as affective, relational, and historically situated. The natural environment, often associated with notions of “home”, is not merely a backdrop for these stories but is actively constituted as the Great Lake Monster’s landscape. This landscape is experienced as sentient and responsive, a co-actor in the narrative relationship, and must be taken seriously in any phenomenologically informed folkloristic or geographic analysis.

The older narratives, rooted in pre-industrial cosmologies, offered vernacular explanations for natural phenomena and reinforced moral and ecological norms. In these stories, the lake serpent and the landscape are inseparable, co-constituting a world in which humans, nature, and the supernatural are entangled. The serpent is not merely in the lake; it is of the lake. These tales also converge around the Frösö runestone, where the monster serves as a mythic explanation for a tangible cultural landmark, anchoring oral tradition in the material landscape.

With the onset of industrialization, urbanization, and scientific rationalism, a new interpretive framework emerged. The being was reimagined as a cryptid, an object of empirical curiosity and speculative zoology. Yet even within this modern framing, the observation narrative remains deeply place-bound. The act of witnessing the creature becomes a means of expressing both a sense of belonging and a claim of place. In this way, the cryptid takes on the role of a genius loci, a spirit of place that mediates between personal experience and collective memory.

The continuity between older legends and newer memorates reveals how folklore adapts to changing cultural conditions while maintaining its role in shaping spatial imaginaries. The early narratives were embedded in everyday ecological relationships, while contemporary accounts often reflect more individualized, yet no less meaningful, engagements with the landscape. Together, these stories form a bridge between shared cosmological interpretations and modern, often zoologically framed, understandings of the phenomenon.

In reflecting on the enduring presence of the Great Lake Monster in local storytelling, it becomes clear that such figures are not merely remnants of a mythic past, but active participants in the cultural and spatial life of a region. They offer a lens through which to examine how people make sense of their environments, negotiate belonging, and sustain memory across generations. By attending to the interplay between narrative, landscape, and belief, this study contributes to the inquiries of folklore as dynamic modes of world-making, one that continues to shape how we inhabit and imagine place in an ever-changing world.