On June 4, 2026, cryptozoologist Gary Cunningham reported seeing a long shape in the water of Lough Auna, a small lake near Clifden in Connemara, County Galway, at about 10:15, according to a post on the Centre for Fortean Zoology’s U.S. blog. No photo or further description has been widely shared.

Lough Auna has one of the longest monster records of any Irish lake. Folklore tells of a huge animal breaking through the ice in the 19th century. In the 1960s a local man and his mother reported a creature around 30 feet long with humps and a bristly mane. Around 1969, a group at a lakeside cottage watched a shape about five feet long move across the water at walking pace, and a Dutch air commodore reported a creature with a pointed back. That same year, researchers fresh from Loch Ness strung nets across Auna and two neighboring lakes. They caught nothing.

The creatures in these accounts are usually called horse eels, a Connemara tradition of large, eel-like animals in small bog lakes.

Skeptics note how small Lough Auna is, under a mile long and shallow, and too small to support a breeding population of anything large. A 2006 field trip by a British Columbia cryptozoology club concluded the sightings were probably otters passing between lakes, possibly with a stray seal from the nearby coast.