Last night, on a stroll through the Fenway neighborhood after the Sox-Yankees season opener, as I crossed the bridge to Mother's Rest, I turned and saw to my shock and horror what to my mind had always been an urban legend — the Monster of the Muddy River!  I reached for my night-vision camera and snapped this picture —


 — undeniable photographic proof that the monster known to locals as Nelly is alive and well.  And apparently hungry after months in hibernation!  It turned and snarled at me as I snapped this shot, and then, as quickly and stealthily as it had appeared, it was gone.

The history of the creature is steeped in mystery.  Unexplained occurrences in the reeds.  Strange sounds.  Disappearances. The old timers in the Victory Gardens say that this time of year, as activity in the park, and particularly in the reeds, picks up, Nelly stirs from her nest and starts making appearances.

Rumor has it, the long-necked beast is the carnivorous cousin of Nessie, aka The Loch Ness Monster, and stowed away as a tadpole on a boat from Ulster to Boston during the Great Potato Famine.  Originally sighted in the Charles River, as captured in this rare, surviving photo —


— cryptozoologists conjecture Nelly traveled up the Muddy River at some point in the mid-Twentieth Century, when the Charles was too choked with pollutants for it to survive, in search of fresh prey.  They believe the creature became stranded in the Fens, where it has nested ever since, getting fat off an endless, all-you-can-eat buffet of derelicts, drug addicts, and sexual thrill-seekers.

Oh, yes, that's right.  While Cousin Nessie is mostly harmless, feeding on fish like her ancestors, the Jurassic-age plesiosaurs, some speculate Nelly, unable to find fish in the Charles, and mutated by toxins that have seeped into the Muddy River, has turned into a man-eater!

And in recent years, if you believe the chattering classes, she has only gotten hungrier, snapping up tourists like popcorn shrimp, gorging on tweekers who've ventured too far into the man-nests amongst the reeds in the wee hours after the bars have let out, and wolfing down businessmen looking for a quick thrill during a power lunch.  Nelly has, by some counts, ingurgitated up to two-hundred hapless visitors to the Fens in the last half-century alone.

Venture in at your own risk.  You have been warned.