Every country has its unexplained beasts, or cryptids. Scotland has Nessie, the Pacific Northwest has Bigfoot, the Himalayas have the Yeti. South Africa’s contribution to the world’s cryptid canon is less famous internationally, but no less colourful: a trunked sea monster that fought killer whales, a storm serpent that lives behind a Midlands waterfall, and a red-furred, cave-dwelling “water baboon” that farmers in the North West have been reporting since the 1880s.

None of the three has ever produced a body, a bone, or a clear photograph. All three have survived a century or more of retelling. Here is what actually happened, and what almost certainly didn’t.

Trunko: the Margate “Polar Bear”

On 25 October 1924, farmer Hugh Ballance and a group of beachgoers at Margate on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast reported watching an extraordinary battle in the surf: two killer whales apparently attacking a huge white-furred animal, which fought back for roughly three hours, at one point rearing up out of the water on its tail to a height of about 20 feet.

The creature eventually washed ashore. Witnesses described something like a giant polar bear, roughly 47 feet long and 10 feet wide, with eight-inch-long white fur, a 10-foot tail and, strangest of all, a trunk-like appendage about five feet long and 14 inches thick, attached to its torso with no visible head. The animal was nicknamed Trunko.

The carcass sat on Margate beach for ten days. Nobody with any scientific training examined it, and it was never dissected, measured properly or preserved. No photograph of it was published until 2010, nearly 90 years after the sighting, when a picture surfaced that showed a shapeless white mass on the sand, consistent with a great many things and conclusive of none.

That photograph is largely what settled the matter for science. British palaeontologist Darren Naish examined the case and concluded Trunko was almost certainly a globster: the badly decomposed carcass of a large marine vertebrate, most likely a whale, whose blubber and connective tissue had rotted and bleached to the point of being unrecognisable. What witnesses took for a trunk and a shaggy white coat, Naish argued, was ordinary decomposition dressed up by unfamiliarity with what a rotting whale looks like.

Inkanyamba: The Storm Serpent of Howick Falls

Inland and a world away in folklore terms sits Inkanyamba, the best-known of South Africa’s indigenous monster legends. The name, from Zulu and Xhosa tradition, is usually translated as “snake in the sky” or “snake cloud”, and it refers to two things at once: a literal tornado, and the spirit believed to cause it.

Inkanyamba is described in Zulu belief as a serpentine, dragon-like being whose body is said to stretch from the heavens to the earth, associated with storms, water, and hail. Descriptions of its physical form vary wildly between tellings: a horse-headed serpent, a winged dragon with horns and dorsal fins, a two-headed river creature, even a cow-headed, bird-like eel. The one constant is a fish-like tail and an unmistakable temper.

The legend is anchored most strongly to Howick Falls on the Umgeni River in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, where local tradition holds it lives in the pool beneath the falls and is known affectionately as “Howie”. One version of the story gives it seven heads. Another has it making occasional trips to visit a partner at nearby Midmar Dam. Shiny corrugated-iron roofs are said to catch its eye, since it mistakes them for water from the air; when it discovers the deception, its anger is blamed for the destructive summer hailstorms and tornadoes the Midlands is genuinely prone to.

Reported “sightings” of a physical animal are rarer than the storm lore itself. A game ranger named Buthelezi said he saw a horse-headed, serpentine animal basking on a sandbank in the Umgeni River in 1962, and further local reports followed in 1974, 1981, and 1995. Sceptics have generally attributed these to misidentified crocodiles or eels, or to stories aimed at tourists.

Waterbobbejan: South Africa's Bigfoot

The least internationally known of the three, but arguably the most intriguing, is the Waterbobbejan, or “water baboon”. Reports describe a roughly six-foot-tall, baboon-like animal with reddish fur and unusually long, powerful arms, said to be shy and solitary and to favour caves, riverbanks, and the areas behind waterfalls. Sightings cluster in North West, with reports going back to the 1880s.

The best-documented case dates to 1965, on the Leeufontein farm between Koster and Swartruggens, where two boys reported an encounter with the animal. Farmers in the area have periodically blamed it for raiding livestock, in between its more usual reported diet of wild fruit.

The zoological problem with the Waterbobbejan is straightforward. South Africa’s genuine primates, the chacma baboon and the samango monkey, top out at around 2.5 feet, nowhere close to the six feet routinely reported. In at least one case, a farmer’s claimed specimen was identified afterwards as nothing more exotic than a samango monkey. That has not stopped the legend earning its “South African Bigfoot” nickname, or being linked in some tellings to East Africa’s Nandi bear, another large unidentified beast said to haunt the region’s forests.

None of these three cryptids have produced physical evidence that would satisfy a sceptic or a zoologist. But all three, in their own way, have outlived every attempt to explain them away.