Hairy 'Globster' Sighting Raises a Stink at N. Oregon Coast's Rockaway Beach

Published 02/21/22 at 1:22 AM PST
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Rockaway Beach, Oregon) – Taking a trip to the Oregon coast always results in a number of new scents and aromas, to varying degrees of pleasantness (Photos courtesy Rachel Sip).

Just this weekend, Portlander Rachel Sip, her husband Dave and two kids stepped out of their rental in Rockaway Beach and were immediately struck by a new odor. The sands here were offering up something different in the air, and Sip said “it wasn't until we got towards the creek that I saw where it came from. Super odorous.”

They were puzzled. At first Dave thought it was hairy and maybe a dead cow.

When she sent the pics to Oregon Coast Beach Connection, we immediately recognized it: a globster. Passing it on to Seaside Aquarium for verification, manager Keith Chandler confirmed it. And they knew about the smelly once-upon-a-time creature, which always comes across as a stinky mystery cryptid to the uninitiated.

A globster is a long-used yet still somewhat unknown slang for these types of creatures that wind up on the shores, appearing hairy and misshapen to the point of unrecognizability. It can be the remnants of most any creature from the sea, but they're simply so decayed that you can't figure out what kind of beast it is or what part of it.

Around the Oregon coast or Washington coast, it's usually a piece of a long dead whale.

“As for the blobster, it has been there for quite some time,” Chandler said. “It is some sort of cetacean but we really were not sure what kind, other than the really gross kind.”

It is – hands down – the most disgusting thing you can find on the Oregon coast or Washington coast. It's the kind of story tween boys like to tell their friends in a game of who can gross out the other more. The smell is so bad as to be intolerable. And that disgusting hair? Hope you're not eating while you're reading this. That's just rotting flesh: so decayed and so softened it creates that hair-like effect.

These particularly sickening forms of stranded whale corpses have actually spawned paranormal legends in the past. There's an interesting history there, and the whole globster thing has a bit of a niche following on the internet.

In fact, historians believe this is where some mythological sea stories or certainly many sea monster tales have come from in the past, especially since the Middle Ages.

See Ewww, 'Globsters' of Oregon / Washington Coast and Their Paranormal Past 

In many cases, something has been decaying out there along the Oregon coast or Washington coast for a long time and then chunks have fallen apart. One of those pieces winds up on the beach with a completely different shape than ever seen before – and that freaky hairy look. History books and paranormal websites are full of citations about possible new creatures never spotted before, like rotting dinosaur bodies or even aliens, only to be debunked as a chunk of a rotting squid or whale.

In the early part of the 20th century these claims were extremely popular, but they can't all be blamed for their misguided fervor. DNA testing later in the century finally proved what's really going on.

See Warrenton Had an 'Exploding Whale' 30 Years Before Central Oregon Coast

It seems the term “globster” got coined in 1962 by a goofball biologist named Ivan T. Sanderson, who had written outrageous claims about a find in Tasmania with "no visible eyes, no defined head, and no apparent bone structure."

Appropriately enough, he seemed to have left that field and moved on to science fiction for awhile, and becoming involved in the pseudo science of cryptozoology.

If you run across a globster do not touch it – it will likely contain some really bad bacteria. It's doubtful you'll want to go near it, anyway. MORE PHOTOS BELOW

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Andre' GW Hagestedt is editor, owner and primary photographer / videographer of Oregon Coast Beach Connection, an online publication that sees nearly 1 million pageviews per month. He is also author of several books about the coast.

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