'The Loch Ness monster' was photographed for second time in less than week

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The legendary Loch Ness monster was reputedly spotted by a second person the same week a shutterbug snapped what have been hailed as the “most exciting ever’’ photos of it.

Young Charlotte Robinson, a 12-year-old from Leeds in the UK, had already reported seeing the monster Aug. 17, 2018, from about 50 feet away, with her claim recorded in believers’ official sightings register.

Her accompanying photo was heralded at the time as the “best” of Nessie that had been seen “for years.”

It now turns out that Charlotte’s reputed sighting five years ago occurred the same week shutterbug Chie Kelly, 51, also reportedly took amazing photos of the legendary creature.

The photog’s “most exciting ever” snaps only just came to light this week because she said she previously feared ridicule if she went public with them.

She said she put her worries aside and allowed them to be published as hundreds of researchers and monster hunters gathered at Loch Ness last weekend in the biggest — and ultimately futile — search yet for Nessie.

“It was some extraordinary week,” said Gary Campbell, the keeper of the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, of the 2018 sightings, adding that the incidents are proof of the creature’s existence.

“These pictures by Ms. Kelly and Charlotte are the best of Nessie ever taken and are totally baffling,” he said. “It all adds to the evidence that is definitely something unexplained in Loch Ness.”

Charlotte said the creature she saw had “a neck, and [its] head was in the shape of a hook,” according to The Telegraph.

It quickly disappeared before re-emerging elsewhere, she said.

At that point, Charlotte decided to pull out her cellphone and take a photo showing what was emerging from the Scottish lake again, she said. 

“I just took what I saw,” the girl said. “It was black – I just don’t know how far it was out in the water. I’m not good at judging distances.”

She said that when the creature re-emerged from the loch, or lake, “It was up for less than a minute.”

Her sighting came just four days after Kelly had snapped what she believed to be the beast.

Charlotte was on a family trip to Loch Ness Highland Lodges at Invermoriston at the time of her own picture-taking and had been excited to see if the legend was real for herself.

“I kind of believed in Nessie, but I wanted to see the proof,” she said, noting: “I always imagined her as having a long neck and flippers.”

When she told her mom, Kat, that she did wind up seeing something on their first day of the trip, her mother did not believe her.

“Charlotte said she had taken a photo of a creature in the loch, and I said, ‘Right, sure you have!’ ” Kat, a business intelligence data analyst, told reporters at the time. “For weeks, she’s been going on about seeing the Loch Ness monster.

“But when I saw the picture, I couldn’t believe it — something’s there.”

She said she is now a believer in the legendary monster herself.

“With all the sightings over the years, there must be something in the loch,” Kat said.

As for the photographer Kelly, she and her husband Scott were having lunch at the Dores Inn on the banks of the loch the day she snapped shots.

“I was just taking pictures with my Canon camera of Scott and our daughter Alisa, who was then 5, when about 200 meters from the shore, moving right to left at a steady speed, was this creature,” Kelly recently told the Telegraph. 

“It was spinning and rolling at times. We never saw a head or neck. After a couple of minutes, it just disappeared, and we never saw it again.”

While she couldn’t get an image clearly showing the beast’s length, she estimated that the two parts that were visible were less than 2 meters long combined.

“At first, I wondered if it was an otter or a pair of otters or a seal, but we never saw a head, and it never came up again for air. It was making this strange movement on the surface,” she told the outlet.

“We did not hear any sound. There were these strange shapes below the surface. I could not make out any colors — the water was dark.”

Kelly said she witnessed the monster moving at “steady speed” when she photographed the rare moment and shared the snaps with Steve Feltham, who has dedicated more than 30 years to searching for Nessie ever since quitting his job and selling his Dorset home in 1991.

“I don’t know what it was, but it was definitely a creature — an animal, said Kelly

At the time I did not want to face public ridicule by making the photographs public,” Kelly said.

She added that she’s long believed in the Loch Ness creature’s existence, “but I don’t know what it is.

“What I saw looked like a serpent. It was definitely a creature, and it was moving.”

Campbell of the register said, “It appears that the creature was moving between Dores and Fort Augustus.”

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