Back in 1902, a fisherman named Charles McVane — who lived on Long Island in Casco Bay — is said to have barely survived a midnight encounter with a huge lobster.

After a long day of fishing and hunting among the small islands nearby, McVane pulled his 16-foot dory onto a sandy spit and hunkered down for a well-deserved night’s sleep, according to an account in The Chicago Tribune.

During the night, though, the water rose unexpectedly high and McVane felt cold water rising around him, followed by a sudden wave that carried both him and his dory off. Knocked unconscious by driftwood, he said he found himself lying on a different stretch of sand.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

He felt like a huge vise had clamped across his throat as he struggled for air.

As he reached for his neck, he felt “the cold shell of a monster lobster,” as the story put it.

McVane seized the claw and tried to pull the creature off.

But “the giant crustacean clung with all the tenacity of its nature and the strength its unusual size gave it,” the story said.

McVane rolled over, trying to pin the beast beneath him and “force the cruel jaws apart.”

The competition went on for five minutes, the story said, with neither gaining the upper hand.

Finally, though, the lobster released its grip.

McVane instantly grabbed the lobster behind its head, a safe hold known by many Mainers, and carried it far up the beach, away from the water’s edge. He spent the rest of the night whittling wooden pegs from driftwood to drive into the creature’s claws to render them useless.

He tracked down his dory and rowed back to Portland, where McVane had a taxidermist mount the 4-foot-long lobster, a permanent reminder of his midnight struggle, the story said.

But was it true?

Well, two years earlier, the Portland Evening Express mentioned under the headline “Water Front Yarns” that McVane had been entertaining friends with his “famous stories.”