Welcome to Gaia! ::

In Scandinavia, the brook horse was a transformation of the Nix, a water spirit in the shape of a man. It was often described as a majestic white horse that would appear near rivers, particularly during foggy weather. Anyone who climbed onto its back would not be able to get off again. The horse would then jump into the river, drowning the rider. The brook horse could also be harnessed and made to plough, either because it was trying to trick a person or because the person had tricked the horse into it.

The kelpie sometimes appeared as a rough hairy man who would grip and crush travellers, but it most commonly took the form of a beautiful tame horse standing by a stream or river. If anyone mounted it, it would charge into the deepest part of the water, submerging and taking the rider with it. They would sometimes interbreed with humans' horses, and the foals were said to be fine fleetfooted horses. The kelpie was also said to warn of forthcoming storms by wailing and howling. Rarely, kelpies could be benign. The folktale The Kelpie's Wife tells of one in Loch Garve, Ross-shire, who had a human wife.

According to the Swedish naturalist and author Bengt Sjögren (1980), the present day belief in lake monsters in for example Loch Ness, is associated with the old legends of kelpies. Sjögren claims that the accounts of lake-monsters have changed during history. Older reports often talk about horse-like appearances, but more modern reports often have more reptile and dinosaur-like-appearances, and Bengt Sjögren concludes that the legends of kelpies evolved into the present day legends of lake-monsters where the monsters "changed the appearance" to a more "realistic" and "modern" version since the discovery of dinosaurs and giant aquatic reptiles from the horse-like water-kelpie to a dinosaur-like reptile, often a plesiosaur.

-from Wikipedia

Well I'm not sure whether the scientific names are real or not. I'm getting most of the info from this book that claims to be by the Cryptozoological Society of London, but there apparently is no such society. smile It's full of a lot of "case files" which I'm trying not to use because, since the society isn't real, I don't know if they are real or if the author made them up. That's why I got the info from wikipedia for this one, though used the stuff from the book for the poll. smile