Mysteries of Lake Tahoe

[thunderw21]

An interesting article, even if there's no truth to it. Anyone in the area know about this?


------------------------------

Mysteries of the deep at Lake Tahoe
Tom Stienstra

Sunday, July 25, 2004

If you own a small deep-water submarine -- or know some eccentric big-bucks diver who does -- drop me a line. I'd like to borrow the thing.

Once and for all, I'd like to prove or bust the legends or myths that hide in the depths of Lake Tahoe.

The way this idea came about is that I was told another crazy, unverified story this past week about Tahoe's darkest legend of all. As the story goes, a fisherman snagged something for a moment in the deep water just offshore of the South Shore casinos, but it easily broke free. When he reeled up his line, to his shock, on his hook was the top of a human ear.

This might sound crazy, but in the past 25 years, I've heard different versions of this story at least a dozen times. In one account, a fisherman snags up, gets it loose, and reels up a partial hand where two of the fingers had been lopped off Mafia-style. It is a tale passed around called "The Legend of Three-Fingered Tony."

Many have told me that, if you were to take a submarine down 900 feet just off South Shore, you would see hundreds of bodies suspended in the water, preserved perfectly like an underwater wax museum, most wearing clothes from the 1920s, '30s and '40s.

The legend is that this is where the Mafia killers dumped bodies after executions. Some fishermen even call the spot The Grave. At Tahoe, many locals talk as if everybody knows about this, that there are lots of gangsters down there, wearing pinstriped suits, with sneers on their faces and bullet holes in their foreheads.

This makes sense. It has long been verified that Tahoe is a lake that does not give up its dead. That is because the lake is so deep, with an average depth of 989 feet, and so cold, with the temperature hovering just above freezing. So that prevents the creation of gases that would otherwise bloat and float corpses to the surface as in other waters.

This reality brings bizarre possibilities.

Lake Tahoe, as first theorized by the famed geologist Josiah Whitney, was created by a colossal earthquake where a center block of land collapsed between two faults. It might be possible that another massive earthquake here would disrupt the underwater currents and suddenly float all the suspended corpses to the surface at once.

Another possibility is that the bodies will remain submerged for eons of time, just as the woolly mammoths were preserved in glaciers from the last ice age 14,000 years ago.

Even famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau is said to have had a brush with something horrific in a deepwater dive in the mid-1970s. "The world isn't ready for what was down there," is the quote most commonly credited. Cousteau never released any photographs or data from the dive, adding to the mystery and legend.

Some believe Cousteau was talking about a Loch Ness monster-like creature that locals call "Tahoe Tessie." Unlikely. But if I could get a loaner sub, maybe I could find out.

Apart from Tahoe's maximum depth of 1,645 feet, another legend is that there is a hole somewhere on the bottom of the lake that is linked to an underground river system that feeds into Pyramid Lake north of Reno. This would explain how drowning victims at Tahoe have floated up at Pyramid. Or would it? Others say it just means that bodies floated over the spillway at north Tahoe could be carried via the Truckee River to Nevada and Pyramid Lake.

So this past week, I went submarine shopping. I found a personal submarine called the Gemini, "the family submarine," available for $845,000, but it would only go 150 feet deep. Plus, my boss said the paper probably wouldn't spring for it. So I went to EBay to see if a better deal was available. Nope.

A little more searching led to the Phoenix, "a 213-foot personal luxury submarine," but it was priced at $78 million. That's a little on the high side.

A Bay Area engineer, Graham Hawkes of San Anselmo, has invented a glider- like submarine that he says is certified to 1,600 feet deep. This could be ideal for Tahoe, but the price is well over $1 million. So I contacted his agency on Friday and suggested Hawkes take me on a demo dive at Tahoe. Together we could solve the legend of Tahoe.

Or perhaps you own your own submarine as a great little hobby and would like to take part in this expedition. So, like I said, drop me a line -- just not a line off Tahoe's South Shore with a hook on it.

Point Reyes Top 10: The Point Reyes Lodging innkeepers have announced their top 10 hikes: 1. Arch Rock via Bear Valley; 2. Tomales Point Trail; 3. Sky Trail/Bear Valley Loop; 4. Coast Trail/Laguna Loop; 5. Mt. Wittenberg/Sky Camp from Limantour Road; 6. Bolinas Ridge. 7. Abbotts Lagoon; 8. Mt. Wittenberg Loop; 9. Chimney Rock; 10. Limantour Spit; www.ptreyes.com.

Duck season ditto: The recommendations for this fall's duck season and limits in California and on the Pacific Flyway will be virtually identical to last year, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Abalone redux: The abalone season along the Sonoma and Mendocino county coasts reopens on Aug. 1.

Something's gotta be done: After a recent column on the high accident rate with Jet Skis, WaveRunners and other personal watercraft, I received a slough of e-mails detailing personal stories of outrageous behavior by drivers of personal watercraft, with most incidents occurring at Berryessa, Camanche and Shasta.

King of the coast: Scott Marran of Yuba City landed a 49-pound, 3-ounce king salmon that measured 48 inches long. In a letter with photographs, Marran said he was fishing in his own boat out of Bodega Bay just south of Elephant Rock (one of former 49ers coach George Seifert's favorite spots), trolling 35 feet deep in 55 feet of water with an anchovy in a Franko Bullet Rotator.

E-mail Tom Stienstra at tstienstra@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page C - 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/07/25/SPGV17SQ7K1.DTL&type=printable

 

[dhermann1]

Maybe they'll find Fredo . . . . .

 

[Diamondback]

Or Hoffa.

If it's currents, one good depth-charge oughtta shake things up down there nicely... lol

 

[Barbigirl]

After 22 years in Reno

I lived in Reno for 22 years (1979-2001) and I never heard the deal about this Mafia Grave thing. It seems to me that if anyone actually did reel up and ear or a hand there would have been photos of it in the newspaper.

It is very common for people to drown and them not be able to locate the body.

As far as the underground tunnel from Lake Tahoe to Lake Pyramid, that story is told by every school kid. Again I have never seen evidence to that but the possiblity of a body floating from Lake Take to Pyramid is NIL. It goes right through the center of downtown and through a large number of parks. Surely someone would spot a body in downtown Reno.

Now what about the story of the underground tunnel from Pyramid Lake to Lake Titicaca in South America? Heard that one?

Everyone is required to take Nevada History in school and the party line on Lake Tahoe is it was created by glacial melt.

Just my 2 cents

An interesting article, even if there's no truth to it. Anyone in the area know about this?


------------------------------

Mysteries of the deep at Lake Tahoe
Tom Stienstra

Sunday, July 25, 2004

If you own a small deep-water submarine -- or know some eccentric big-bucks diver who does -- drop me a line. I'd like to borrow the thing.

Once and for all, I'd like to prove or bust the legends or myths that hide in the depths of Lake Tahoe.

The way this idea came about is that I was told another crazy, unverified story this past week about Tahoe's darkest legend of all. As the story goes, a fisherman snagged something for a moment in the deep water just offshore of the South Shore casinos, but it easily broke free. When he reeled up his line, to his shock, on his hook was the top of a human ear.

This might sound crazy, but in the past 25 years, I've heard different versions of this story at least a dozen times. In one account, a fisherman snags up, gets it loose, and reels up a partial hand where two of the fingers had been lopped off Mafia-style. It is a tale passed around called "The Legend of Three-Fingered Tony."

Many have told me that, if you were to take a submarine down 900 feet just off South Shore, you would see hundreds of bodies suspended in the water, preserved perfectly like an underwater wax museum, most wearing clothes from the 1920s, '30s and '40s.

The legend is that this is where the Mafia killers dumped bodies after executions. Some fishermen even call the spot The Grave. At Tahoe, many locals talk as if everybody knows about this, that there are lots of gangsters down there, wearing pinstriped suits, with sneers on their faces and bullet holes in their foreheads.

This makes sense. It has long been verified that Tahoe is a lake that does not give up its dead. That is because the lake is so deep, with an average depth of 989 feet, and so cold, with the temperature hovering just above freezing. So that prevents the creation of gases that would otherwise bloat and float corpses to the surface as in other waters.

This reality brings bizarre possibilities.

Lake Tahoe, as first theorized by the famed geologist Josiah Whitney, was created by a colossal earthquake where a center block of land collapsed between two faults. It might be possible that another massive earthquake here would disrupt the underwater currents and suddenly float all the suspended corpses to the surface at once.

Another possibility is that the bodies will remain submerged for eons of time, just as the woolly mammoths were preserved in glaciers from the last ice age 14,000 years ago.

Even famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau is said to have had a brush with something horrific in a deepwater dive in the mid-1970s. "The world isn't ready for what was down there," is the quote most commonly credited. Cousteau never released any photographs or data from the dive, adding to the mystery and legend.

Some believe Cousteau was talking about a Loch Ness monster-like creature that locals call "Tahoe Tessie." Unlikely. But if I could get a loaner sub, maybe I could find out.

Apart from Tahoe's maximum depth of 1,645 feet, another legend is that there is a hole somewhere on the bottom of the lake that is linked to an underground river system that feeds into Pyramid Lake north of Reno. This would explain how drowning victims at Tahoe have floated up at Pyramid. Or would it? Others say it just means that bodies floated over the spillway at north Tahoe could be carried via the Truckee River to Nevada and Pyramid Lake.

So this past week, I went submarine shopping. I found a personal submarine called the Gemini, "the family submarine," available for $845,000, but it would only go 150 feet deep. Plus, my boss said the paper probably wouldn't spring for it. So I went to EBay to see if a better deal was available. Nope.

A little more searching led to the Phoenix, "a 213-foot personal luxury submarine," but it was priced at $78 million. That's a little on the high side.

A Bay Area engineer, Graham Hawkes of San Anselmo, has invented a glider- like submarine that he says is certified to 1,600 feet deep. This could be ideal for Tahoe, but the price is well over $1 million. So I contacted his agency on Friday and suggested Hawkes take me on a demo dive at Tahoe. Together we could solve the legend of Tahoe.

Or perhaps you own your own submarine as a great little hobby and would like to take part in this expedition. So, like I said, drop me a line -- just not a line off Tahoe's South Shore with a hook on it.

E-mail Tom Stienstra at tstienstra@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page C - 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/07/25/SPGV17SQ7K1.DTL&type=printable

 

[FedoraGent]

Maybe they'll find Fredo . . . . .

Thank you for this, I laughed so hard the soda I was drinking went down the wrong pipe.

FG.

 

[Mojito]

Sounds like some of the Great Lakes shipwreck legends. Tales are told in diving circles along the lines of those about a steamer sunk in the 1920s. It was reported that the bodies in the engine room are so well preserved that you can still see the expressions on their faces. Never seen the ship named.

I'm skeptical. I've heard of skeletal remains found on older wrecks, and even heard of some hair and even a bit of soft tissue remaining (some have even suggested that there were photos of bodies on the Edmund Fitzgerald that, while not perfectly preserved, were still in a condition that would enable them to be identified by sight). And there have been some bodies - including the odd murder victim - that have been found in the Lakes after going through the saponification process and turned into "soap mummies." But these were only a few years old - not decades. I'd be interested in any information on older bodies that have been found in deep fresh water in a state of excellent preservation.

 

[LocktownDog]

There are drownings there every summer, and the bodies aren't always recovered. Ain't no mafia graveyard ... always too cold there for those mob boys. The last underwater footage I've seen showed an old conestoga-type wagon out in the deep water ... still fully laden with goods and rotting slowly.

If you want eerie and deathly, especially at night, then head to Mono Lake. The only thing living there is the wind.

Richard

 

[thunderw21]

Sounds like some of the Great Lakes shipwreck legends. Tales are told in diving circles along the lines of those about a steamer sunk in the 1920s. It was reported that the bodies in the engine room are so well preserved that you can still see the expressions on their faces. Never seen the ship named.

I'm skeptical. I've heard of skeletal remains found on older wrecks, and even heard of some hair and even a bit of soft tissue remaining (some have even suggested that there were photos of bodies on the Edmund Fitzgerald that, while not perfectly preserved, were still in a condition that would enable them to be identified by sight). And there have been some bodies - including the odd murder victim - that have been found in the Lakes after going through the saponification process and turned into "soap mummies." But these were only a few years old - not decades. I'd be interested in any information on older bodies that have been found in deep fresh water in a state of excellent preservation.

Interesting, I read a book (can't remember the title) about Great Lake ship wrecks and it mentions the steamer ship from the 1920s with the perfectly preserved crewmembers inside.
Wish I could remember the title.

 

[Twitch]

A well written, entertaining article. I realize much of the submarine business is tongue-in-cheek but any serious exploration would be started with remote-controlled submersibles at a fraction of the cost.

 

[Brad Bowers]

I read an article many, many years ago, about a train loaded with either gold or silver bars that rolled off a dock and into Lake Tahoe. Seems like it was in the 1880s or 1890s. Wish I sitill have the article. I have yet to see another reference to this legend.

Brad

 

[Hondo]

Good laugh folks, the high sierra cascades are dormant volcanoes (well not so dormant, one day it will awaken, they say maybe in 100 or 200 years from now) something could be way down under, Captain Nemo lol

 

[Mike Hammer]

Supposedly there is a B-25 Mitchell bomber at the bottom of Tahoe. Seems they ditched her in the lake while on a training mission.
I know they pulled a P-47 Thunderbolt out of an icy mountain lake, similar to Tahoe, in Austria last year. Aside from damage sustained in the crash (her pilot got just *that* much too close to the water, bounced off the surface of the lake, then bellied in to stay) the bird was remarkably well preserved-even the nose art and markings were intact.

 

[Lincsong]

Well, they never found Jimmy Hoffa in Lake Tahoe.

 

[Twitch]

The 1st white travelers that got to Tahoe found the whiskey had proceeded them. Anyhow they asked the Indians the name of the lake and one guy kept saying, "Tahoe, tahoe.".....the tribes' word for whiskey.

 

[Lincsong]

The only mystery of Lake Tahoe I find intriguing is; "why do I always win on the craps tables there, but not in Las Vegas?"

 

[renor27]

B29 in Tahoe

First I head of a B29 in the lake.
I do know of a Sierra lake east of Kings Canyon that has a B17 sitting in it.
Tahoe was not on the flight path of the bombers they went over the Sierra to the south. Fighter pilots were trained in Stead just north of Reno that field is now home to an Army Guard Unit, USMC reserve Recon unit and the Reno Air Races.
David in Reno

 

[Ecuador Jim]

Get the "Deep Sea Detectives" from the Discovery Channel on this one; they'd love it!

Cold fresh water has the same effect as refrigeration. I would imagine a human body would bleach and remain in a pretty good state. Several years ago, an expedition searched for the Everest climbers Mallory and Irving. Photographs of George Mallory showed his body to be in a remarkably well-preserved state, despite being exposed to the extreme weather since the late 1920's.

No one will know until they send the robotic cameras to the bottom.

Maybe the Mythbusters would be in the mood for a road trip if the Deep Sea guys are busy?

 

[dostacos]

well there are bodies in the lake, they have had several race boats do an endo at speed and went under so fast the driver did not get out and it was so deep they could not recover anything, so hooking a body part is possible, not sure HOW possible, but possible

 

[John in Covina]

Why buy when you can rent

Why is it in this type of article, they always talk of buying a sub, why not rent one? If you could sponser some oceanographic society that has one maybe they could truck it up and try it out there for a lot less than buying a sub.

 

[Jerekson]

This is fascinating. I'd love to hear some news on this.