No list of monsters would be complete without the beastie said to inhabit Scotland's Loch Ness. While Nessie is the world's most famous lake monster, it is far from the only one. In fact, there are hundreds (by some counts thousands) of lakes across the globe said to harbor monsters.

The earliest eyewitness account of the Loch Ness monster dates back only to May 1933. Since that time, the monster — real or not — has been a major tourism boon for Inverness and other towns along the lake. People have repeatedly searched Loch Ness for over 70 years, trying to verify the occasional sightings, photos, and videos. In 2003, a team from the BBC scoured the lake using 600 separate sonar beams and satellite navigation; they turned up no monsters. Still, the public's interest in Nessie remains high: A film about the monster opened Christmas day in 2007 and earned $2.4 million.

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