Storsjöodjuret

Storsjöodjuret is a creature said to live in Storsjön, a lake in Jämtland. The earliest written hint of it dates from 1635, and in 1894 a company was set up in Östersund to catch it.

Nationalencyklopedin calls Storsjöodjuret a folkloric, or perhaps cryptozoological, phenomenon connected with Storsjön in Jämtland, first hinted at in 1635. Writing in Svenska Dagbladet, Dick Harrison says that in that year a parish priest, whom he names as Mogens Pedersen, wrote down a tale about two trolls, Jata and Kata. Harrison says the tale took its inspiration from the well-known runestone on Frösön. In his summary, an odd serpent sprang out of the trolls' cauldron, disappeared into the lake, grew enormous and started biting its own tail, and the tale says that image was then carved on the stone. Harrison points out that the same stone records the conversion of Jämtland to Christianity under Östman Gudfastsson, and that, like many runestones, it sets its runes inside the body of a serpent.

Wikipedia dates the first wide public interest to the 1890s. Following a number of sightings, local people formed a company in 1894 to catch the creature and won the backing of King Oscar II. The hunt failed, and Albert Engström mocked it in a cartoon in the magazine Strix. Jamtli, the Jämtland county museum, gives the creature its own exhibition, where visitors can hear people describe meeting it, learn about the 1894 company and read about its protected status from 1986.

The protection later came before a court. Håkan Strömberg reported in Populär Historia in 2004 that in November 2002 a man asked the Jämtland county board for permission to collect the creature's eggs and breed it. The board said no, since the creature had been protected since 1986. He appealed to the environmental court in Östersund, which also refused, on the grounds that the creature is a species science has not verified. Strömberg wrote that the Parliamentary Ombudsman then stepped in to ask whether officials should have to spend time on it, and whether laws that cannot be applied should exist at all.