Down the rabbit hole
Water Monster · Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania · 1845
6 documents · 1 independent account
6 documents tell this story. They trace back to 1 independent account.
The route
- One encounter the reported sighting this case is about
- 6 documents that tell it, as we collected them
- 1 independent account behind those documents
- 5 copies reprints or cross-posts of the same text: not extra witnesses
Copies are not confirmations: thirty papers printing one story is still one account.
Each shape is one document; open it to go to where we found it. The same graph as a list is below.
Why these records are connected
- 5 copies: the copy detector found the same words in a later document, so it sits in the same row as the account it copies.
- Why these documents are one case. The case matcher joined them because:
- The Kalida venture & Jeffersonian Republican: the copy detector found the same text in both; their quoted passages are nearly identical; they describe the same details; same year (though they were placed far apart)
Every document, as a list
- Account 1 6 documents
- Earliest found Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, D.C.) Newspaper · Sep 2, 1845
- Reprint Jeffersonian Republican (Stroudsburg, Pa.) Newspaper · Sep 4, 1845
Image 2 of Jeffersonian Republican (Stroudsburg, Pa.), September 4, 1845 - Reprint Boon's Lick Times (Fayette, Mo.) Newspaper · Sep 27, 1845
- Reprint The Kalida Venture (Kalida, Ohio) Newspaper · Sep 30, 1845
Image 1 of The Kalida venture (Kalida, Ohio), September 30, 1845 - Reprint Burlington Free Press (Burlington, Vt.) Newspaper · Oct 3, 1845
- Reprint The Ripley Advertiser (Ripley, Miss.) Newspaper · Oct 11, 1845
How to read this
- Time runs left to right by publication date. Very long empty stretches are cut short (the axis shows how many years were skipped); undated documents sit in their own column.
- One row per independent account. A reprint, re-upload or cross-post carries the same text, so it stays in its account's row and never counts as a second witness.
- Earliest found (ringed) is the earliest document we hold for that account. It is not proof of the first telling: an earlier one may exist that we haven't collected.
- Arrows run from a document to a source it names. A dashed shape is a source a document cites that we haven't found yet; its link searches a public archive for it, and a hit there is a lead, not a confirmation.
About the numbers
- Only documents we've collected are counted; retellings elsewhere on the web aren't counted yet.
- Documents are matched by shared text and by the sources they name, by plain rules with no model in the loop. A match can be wrong; tell us.
Where next
- Back to the case
its summary, sources and discussion - Back to the map
opened on this case - Water Monster · Washington, District of Columbia · 1854
Another trail, same creature: 5 documents · 1 independent account - Mermaid · Saint Augustine, Florida · 1890
The next-deepest trail: 6 documents · 1 independent account
Every rabbit hole → · How we tell copies from independent accounts