This #LochNessMonster image is doing the rounds on social media. It's a fabulous painting from legendary Italian artist Gino D'Achille and (among other works) appeared in Daniel Farson's 1975 book Vampires, Zombies & Monster Men. It has an interesting backstory (thread) ...

The image depicts the Spicer sighting of August 1933, the first land sighting of the #LochNessMonster. Mr F. T.G. Spicer worked extremely hard to promote his sighting and evidently enjoyed the publicity...

The Spicer monster (redrawn many times in different books) was a grotesque blob with an undulating section at its front, described as undulating "like a scenic railway". A lump at its middle was said to be the head of a "lamb or small deer", but this idea was discarded over time.

Indeed, the Spicer monster changed over the years, increasing in size once Mr Spicer (we don't know the name of Mrs Spicer!) measured the road. The 'deer head' became reinterpreted as the tip of the tail meaning that the animal must have been moving in a U-like shape...

And, yes, they were reportedly observing the #LochNessMonster CROSSING THE ROAD, moving from the woods on the left to the loch on the right. This was the first of the Nessie land sightings -- there are quite a few others! (they describe an assortment of very different monsters)..

Mr Spicer was not exactly quiet and humble about the sighting. He boasted of receiving sackfuls of correspondence from all around the world, of being in demand, and spoke about to the media on numerous occasions. I'm not saying that this means anything in particular.

The Spicers were interviewed by Rupert T. Gould, whose 1934 book (The Loch Ness Monster and Others) was mostly responsible for bringing the Spicer sighting to wide attention...

But Gould's notes (written in the margins of his own copy) show that he wished he'd never included the sighting in his book: he thought they'd seen a group of bounding deer cross the road as a mass (deer are common near #LochNess). I covered this in my 2017 Hunting Monsters...

A popular idea (endorsed in Prothero & Loxton's Abominable Science!, and in my Hunting Monsters) is that the Spicers might have been influenced by their viewing of King Kong, specifically the the Brontosaurus scene [pics: Daniel Loxton]. But...

There's some push-back to this idea (from @CharlesPaxton4), since we don't for sure that the Spicers saw the film _before_ claiming to see Nessie. In other words, the case for King Kong being an influence has likely been over-stated. #LochNess #cryptozoology #Nessie

Finally: the literature on the #LochNessMonster is substantial. Be aware that a lot of it is absolute garbage, written by people with no interest in critical thinking, and who outright reject scepticism. My favourite Nessie-themed books are those by Ronald Binns.