The Kraken: Ancient Sea Monster or Real Giant Squid?

Cryptid Files · Jul 15, 2026 · 33m · transcript

For centuries, sailors and writers described the Kraken as a huge creature of the northern seas, linked especially with Norway, Iceland, Greenland, and the wider North Atlantic. It was said to rise like an island, draw fish above it, make dangerous currents when it sank, and later, in art and fiction, wrap enormous arms around ships. This episode follows the documented trail from early northern sea-monster traditions through Erik Pontoppidan’s influential eighteenth-century account, Pierre Denys de Montfort’s dramatic cephalopod imagery, and the nineteenth-century physical evidence that…