Beachgoers were shocked to discover an oarfish -- a creature whose appearance, according to folklore, can be a good omen or a harbinger of doom.

Looking out over the smooth, clear waters of Playa El Quemado this month, a wiggling object caught Robert Hayes's attention as it headed toward the shoreline. Hayes had been walking the beach in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur, and thought he had spotted a small alligator; his wife guessed maybe a little shark.

Neither of them could have guessed it was an oarfish -- a deep-sea creature rarely spotted on the surface whose infrequent appearances have inspired centuries of folklore that the fish are both good omens and harbingers of doom.

Hayes, a 64-year-old from Boise, Idaho, said he was about to walk away after exchanging pleasantries with a Canadian fisherman when he spotted the oarfish with its head raised up from the water by a few inches.

"The water was glassy, so you could see several feet into the water," Hayes told The Washington Post on Wednesday. "My wife's first impression was that it was a small shark coming straight at us, and that's when I started fumbling for the camera. I knew I had to get it on film because it was odd."

The fish seemed confused, Hayes recalled -- and so was he.

"What are you doing?" Hayes said aloud as he filmed. The fisherman, whose name Hayes did not know, told the couple he regularly came down to Baja California Sur to fish and quickly identified the creature as an oarfish.

"He's come up here to die," the fisherman is heard saying on the video before grabbing the fish and eventually trying to coax it back in to the water.

Instead of swimming off, the fish did a "big, 15-foot loop and came back on the beach," Hayes said.

After the fisherman tried to redirect the oarfish, only to have it circle back several times, Hayes said the fish tried to bore its head into the rocks. Figuring the fish was disoriented or distressed, the fisherman collected the fish and announced he was taking it to a marine biologist, Hayes said.

Oarfish live all over the world usually at depths between 660 and 3,280 feet, and tend to be found ashore only after storms or when they are dead or dying, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida.

Though it wasn't captured clearly on video, Hayes said the fish appeared to have a nickel-to-quarter-sized wound on its face that looked raw and possibly infected.

The fisherman told Hayes and his wife he had seen oarfish before and that this specimen was among the smallest -- far shorter than their maximum length of about 36 feet. Hayes had never seen one in person but recognized the species.

"I read a lot of curious stories, and I knew about the oarfish because, like the anglerfish or the devil fish, they live hundreds of feet below the ocean," Hayes said.

This oarfish was just the latest high-profile incident of a deep-sea creature making a splash on the surface: Last week, a black seadevil anglerfish -- which lives at similar depths to the oarfish -- was spotted near the surface off the coast of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This past August, a 12-foot oarfish washed up to the surface in La Jolla, California -- only the 20th time on record an oarfish is known to have washed up in California since 1901, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

Ted Pietsch, a professor emeritus at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington who recently published a paper on oarfish, said the sightings of the deep-sea creatures are probably coincidental, and that it would take the fish washing up in far greater numbers to signal broader distress in the ocean or among the species' population.

"They come up every once in a while. It's called a 'doomsday fish,' because it's supposedly a sign of doom or disaster," Pietsch said of the disproven belief once prevalent in Japan that the appearance of an oarfish predicted oncoming an natural disaster such as an earthquake. "Nobody knows why they do this. It's same as the mystery of why whales beach themselves."

Pietsch did find it surprising that the oarfish captured in Hayes's video was so alive.

The fish left an impression on Hayes, too.

"What was really brilliant was its translucent orange fins," said Hayes, who said he had not seen anything in nature like it before. "It was a beautiful fish."

For now, he's happy the video has drawn so much attention online, and its given him and his wife a special memory on their three-month camping and nature tour around the West. Hayes said he's proud of catching the fish on video -- but next time, hopes to be faster on the draw with his camera.

"My wife and I were attempting this retirement thing," Hayes said. "And we just want to be out of the trail, away from people and see wildlife."