Gelatinous Cube of London Bridge

The two brothers who were now hurtling towards becoming the witnesses to a quite possibly unique cryptid thought they were simply in store for an amicable walk along London Bridge, gazing down at the grey waters of the River Thames gently lapping beneath them. It was as they were looking into the dark water that they caught sight of something odd which was seemingly moving against the tide, and this observation would result in their excursion taking a sudden turn towards the cryptozoological.

## A Different Kind of Box Jellyfish

Whatever it was appeared to be slowly swimming along in the murky water to the left of the bridge, and was described as having a '*slightly elongated*' head - square in shape and greyish in colouration. It lacked any recognisable features on what the brothers had assumed to be its head. There were numerous '*green tentacles or tassles*' around the lower quarters of the creature, and overall it was said to be roughly 5ft long and as thick as the average man's body. Strangely, one of the brothers said that he thought that there was something '*metallic/mechanical*' about the entity, but felt the need to clarify that he was certain that it was biological in nature. The brothers stood there in what was presumably a dumbstruck state, watching the creature as it submerged and resurfaced for roughly one minute, before it vanished from sight completely.

Although the brothers (one of whom was apparently named Loz) wrestled with their camera-phones to try and capture some evidence for what would otherwise surely be an utterly unbelievable story, but they found that the quality of their cameras and the distance from which they were trying to take a photo got the best of them, and that their images would be '*ineffective*' as a result. However, their story is supposedly not entirely uncorroboratable - seeing as the brothers claim that there was a small crowd of people gathered around the site of the sighting, and that they all saw the creature and discussed in excited tones what it might've been after it had vanished.

## The Watcher in the Water

One year later, Loz took his son mudlarking beneath London Bridge. He might've even almost forgotten about his encounter with the unknown - but this blissful ignorance wouldn't last. Loz's son is normally a very '*calm and confident*' child, but on this specific occasion he suddenly became nigh-hysterical with fear and demanded to leave the area. He said that he could feel something watching them from the water. Loz clarified that his son was not aware of the previous experience shared by the boy's father and uncle.

Now, if we are to assume that these incidents were actually the result of the presence of some unknown jellyfish or cephalopod - we are actually faced with some interesting precedents for interesting marine invertebrates turning up in British fresh water. A giant Bell Jellyfish was photographed in a Cornish river in May of 2014, and a giant squid washed up on the banks of the Humber in Withernsea Beach in 1925. Then again, the research from which I am sourcing this article (Andrew McGrath) admitted that he could find no examples of creatures which resembled the entity described by the two brothers. There also seem to be no paranormal reports which describe a similar entity to the London Bridge Gelatinous Cube either. Here we have a unique critter.

Or do we even have a critter at all? McGrath's book contains a beautiful illustration of the creature in question, and just looking at this picture I immediately concluded that the entity in question could potentially be an errant tree-stump. While this may seem like a good explanation at first, it quickly falls apart when you consider that the anomalous animal seemed to be moving against the tide. Maybe a tree-stump was stuck to the back of something bigger? I doubt this as well - seeing as grey and gelatinous is not normally how tree-stumps are represented...