Spotted something massive in the creek behind my property last night - definitely not a beaver

West Virginia here so this hits close to home. Creek sightings are seriously underreported compared to woodland encounters and I think that's a massive mistake - these things follow waterways. Always have.

Few questions before jumping to conclusions:

What time roughly, and was there any moon cover?, Did it submerge or move along the bank?, Any smell? That sulphur/musky combo is a dead giveaway around here, Approximate size compared to something familiar?

I run a Reconyx HP2X along my lower creek boundary and caught something interesting back in spring - massive displacement wake, reeds absolutely flattened on the far bank. Never got a clear image but the scale was wrong for anything native.

The creek corridor thing is massive for me. I've been mapping ley line intersections across the county for years and three of my best trail cam spots sit right on water crossings. Not a coincidence imo.

Don't dismiss the beaver comparison too quickly either - people underestimate how big a large male can look at night on water, especially with adrenaline involved. That said, if your gut says different, your gut is usually onto something.

Get back out there with a good torch and check the bank mud for prints while it's fresh. Plaster cast anything you find - I use Hydrocal over regular plaster, holds detail much better.

What creek system are you on roughly? Wondering if this connects to other reports in the area.

@HarryEntity you're completely right about waterways being underreported and I've been banging this drum for years. There's a pretty solid correlation in the cryptid literature between creek/river systems and sighting clusters - not just in WV but across the British Isles too, which is interesting given how different the ecology is. My working theory is they're not aquatic but they use waterways as navigation corridors, same logic as deer tracks. The creek masks their sound, gives them a scent advantage, and most importantly humans generally dont linger near waterways at night. What were the dimensions you're estimating? The "massive" qualifier is doing a lot of work here and it matters whether we're talking 4 feet or 8 feet because that narrows the candidate species considerably.

Solid observation about the waterways @HarryEntity - we've got Cascade foothills creeks here in the PNW and I've logged three separate large unidentified animal reports along the same half-mile stretch over about six years. The pattern is really consistent once you start mapping these things. What were the movement characteristics when it crossed? Lateral undulation or more of a galloping gait? That detail alone narrows things down considerably.

Dartmoor's got rivers and bogs everywhere and yeah the amount of big cat sightings we get near water vs inland is genuinely skewed toward the waterways, so @HarryEntity is onto something real here. Whatever it was you saw, creek currents make ideal hunting corridors - easy prey, cover, the lot.