Russell Bates

Nobody did, but a towboat that's been in New Orleans a week before is a thing that turns up in Catoosa, and so is whatever's on it.

Five years later, in nineteen eighty-seven, a Kiowa writer named Russell Bates published an article in The Info Journal, which was a magazine for people interested in unexplained things, and the article was about legends from his part of Oklahoma around Anadarko.

Most of it was about other creatures, but near the end he wrote a few paragraphs about water.

He said he'd heard secondhand that the Caddo people had once camped near a set of small spring-fed lakes north of Anadarko two hundred or more years back, and that they wouldn't let their women go for water without an armed man along because something in those lakes would snare a person and drag them down into caverns the springs had carved out of the sandstone.