OGOPOGO - Canada's Lake MONSTER

The origins of the monster

Ogopogo 2 Lake Okanagan Ogopogo Monster.
Photo by Dan Basaraba

Indian legend has it that the large lake creature, Ogopogo, was originally a demon possessed man who had murdered a well known and respected local man named "Old Kan-He-Kan." In memory of this man, his people named Our beautiful lake "Okanagan." To pay for his sins, the Indian gods changed the murderer into a lake serpent so he would forever be at the scene of his crime and suffer eternal remorse. The creature's name became "N'ha-A-Itk" which roughly translates into sacred creature of the water, water god or lake demon.

His mind was full of dark thoughts and the demons spoke to him. His wild eyes and words frightened his people, and he became an outcast, shunned by all. One day in a fury of rage and pain, he attacked old Kan-He-Kan, a local wise man. The demon-possessed man killed the venerable sage on the shores of a beautiful lake near his home, and then ran away, afraid of what the people would do to him when they found out.

This photo of the Ogopogo Monster
was taken in 1964 by Eric Parameter

But the gods had seen the murder and were angry. They captured the demon-possessed man and transformed him into a terrible serpent as a punishment for the murder of the good Kan-He-Kan. Then the serpent was cast into the lake, condemned forever to remain at the scene of his crime. The people living near the lake called the serpent "N'ha-A-Itk" or Lake Demon. They would offer sacrifices to it before traveling upon its waters. But the offerings did not always appease the monster. Many times, a fierce storm would fall upon the lake and N'ha-a-itk would rise from the roiling waters to claim a life. Once a man who was watering his horse at the lake saw the monster rise up from the depths and pull the poor animal under. And so the curse of N'ha-a-itk continued to plague the residents of the lake.

Then the white man came, and they scorned the tale of the Lake Demon. They began taking timber from the land nearby, and floating the logs down to Lake Okanagan. One evening, as a local man worked on the raft of newly-sawn logs, he chanced to look up and saw a long serpent with a horse shaped head and a green, undulating body. It raised its head out of the water and stared deeply into the man's eyes. The man started shaking from head to toe and scrambled backwards toward shore. The demonic eyes of the giant creature gleamed with malevolence, and he scrambled up the bank and ran for his life.

Ogopogo 6 Photo by the Wachlin family
taken in the early 1980's

Indian traditions speak of Timbasket, the chief of a visiting tribe who paid a terrible price for challenging N’ha-a-itk. Historian Frank Buckland tells the story:

Timbasket, the Indian cynic . . . declared his disbelief in the existence of the lake demon. He was told that the Westbank Indians intended to sacrifice a live dog to the water god as they passed Squally Point, but he was quite unimpressed. He knew too much to concern himself with outmoded customs. . . . [Later when crossing the lake] Timbasket defiantly chose to travel close to the rocky headland. Suddenly, the lake demon arose from his lair and whipped up the surface of the lake with his long tail. Timbasket, his family and his canoe were sucked under by a great swirl of angry water (Quoted in Moon 1977, 25).

Ogopogo native pictogram of the creature

And yet, the reality of him is well documented in the verbal reports of those who say they have seen him. The interior Salish aboriginal peoples knew him as Nihaiaiitk - the lake demon - and they appear to have depicted his snake-like image in several petroglyphs etched in the rocks of the Powers Creek area.

Their livelihood depended in significant part on their harvesting the bounty of the lake, but they had a healthy respect for the creature who lived there.

They would carry small animals to feed to him whenever they ventured forth onto the water in their canoes, and they avoided that portion of the lake that was thought to be his home.

Lake Okanagan

Earliest mention by caucasian people

Lake Okanagan map

1870 Mrs Allison watched Ogopogo from Sunnyside, where Vineyard Estates are now. The sun was shining and a strong wind blowing: "As I watched I saw something that looked like a huge tree trunk or log floating on the lake going against the current and not with it. She estimated it was 50 feet long and 3 feet wide and not more than a mile from the shore looking towards the Okanagan Mission, South Kelowna. So  Mrs Allison's sighting of Ogopogo in 1870 may be the first sighting .

In 1854 or 1855, a settler named John MacDougall is said to have neglected the sacrifice. While crossing the lake with a team of horses, a great force sucked his steeds down with a tremendous slurp. MacDougall was terrified, but even more so when he realized that his canoe, lashed to the horses, was about to be pulled down to a watery doom as well. He grabbed a knife and cut the ropes, narrowly escaping with his life.

The McDougal Brothers rowed a 10 foot scow to ferry from the Westside to Kelowna from 1885 to 1905. There were no native canoes ever found on Okanagan Lake. The natives may not have crossed the lake to each other's communities for fear of Ogopogo.

The name Ogopogo was first coined in 1912. In 1924 a local named Bill Brimblecomb sang a song parodying a popular British music-hall tune , That went like this :

I'm looking for the Ogopogo,

His mother was a mutton,

His father was a whale.

I'm going to put a little bit of salt on his tail.

A Vancouver Province reporter named Ronald Kenvyn later parodied a popular British ditty and composed a song that included the following stanza: 

His mother was an earwig;

His father was a whale;

A little bit of head And hardly any tail-

And Ogopogo was his name.

Ogopogo engraving from 1872

Later in 1914 a group of local native folks discovered the decomposing body of an unidentified creature on the shores of Lake Okanagan. It was five to six feet long and was estimated to weigh approximately 400 pounds; it was blue-grey in color. The beast had a tail and flippers, and a local amateur naturalist felt that it was a manatee although no one knew of ant populations of Manatees in the lake. Lake Monster expert Peter Costello has theorized that the carcass was an Ogopogo; he suggested this even though the carcass was badly mangled and the long neck was gone.

In the 1920s Ogopogo appearances were commonplace and the animal was regarded as just another member of the local fauna and not a mystery. Its reality was so strong to Okanagan Lake residents that when they built ferries to take people form Kelowna to Westbank there concern that the ferry needed to be armed with ‘monster repelling devices’ to ensure passenger and crew safety.The government, in 1926 announced that the new ferry being built for travel across the Okanagan Lake would also be equipped with special "monster repelling devices".


On September 16, 1926, Ogopogo was watched by some 30 cars of people along an Okanagan Mission beach.

Michelle and Gilles Beliveau from Westbank took this photo of a form just below the water on Sept. 7/06 south of the Kelowna Mission area on the east side of Okanagan Lake. The photo was taken from their boat at 2:30pm. They estimated the object was about 25 feet long and approx 50 feet from the boa

The early inhabitants of the area saw the monster as a malevolent entity. Indians claimed that Monster Island's rocky beaches were sometimes covered with the parts of animals that they had attacked and ravaged. When crossing the lake during bad weather, the Indians always carried a small animal that they would toss overboard in the middle of the lake to appease the monster, according to material in the files of the Kelowna Archives.

Primrose Upton, in The History of Okanagan Mission, noted that no Indians would fish near Squally Point. When Europeans settled in the area, they too feared the aquatic monster and supposedly continued the custom of offering an animal to appease Ogopogo. According to Ogopogo expert Arlene Gaal, armed settlers patrolled the shoreline in case of attack by the monster.

In 1990, a Canadian postage stamp depicting an artist's conception
of the Ogopogo was issued.

On a typical Okanagan afternoon in the summer of 1932 or 1933 Henry Murdoch was practicing for the Marathon swim at one or other Valley regattas. He planned to swim from the Point where the Maud Roxby Bird Sanctuary is situated to the dock at the old Eldorado Hotel. His pilot boat was being rowed by John Ackland, one of his best friends. Everything was going fine with Henry, swimming about twenty feet behind and slightly to the side of the boat.

When they were off the south end of "Boyce's Field" (Cedar Avenue), John rested his oars and bent down for a few seconds to light a cigarette.

When he looked up, Henry had disappeared!

At first, he thought that Henry was playing a trick on him by swimming up and hiding under the boat. Very soon, he realized there was something wrong so he searched the clear, eight foot deep water, frantically for 20 minutes before rowing to shore and running to the nearest phone to call the police.

Within two hours there was a search party out with several boats dragging for the body and swimmers searching as best they could. The search continued for two days but Henry's body was never found.

Henry had been the lifeguard at the Eldorado Arms Hotel and was considered at the time the strongest swimmer in the Okanagan. All very strange when you consider that the water was very clear and shallow and there was no discernable current in that part of the Lake.

There have been over 200 sightings by credible people including a priest, a sea captain, a surgeon, police officers, and so forth. The fact that the percipients are generally people of good repute is often mentioned in reports of sightings. Photos of Ogopogo are numerous and include the 1964 Parmenter photo; the 1976 Fletcher photo; the 1978, 1979 and 1981 Gaal photos, the 1981 Wachlin photo, the 1984 Svensson photograph.

There have now been half a dozen films and videos taken of an animate object in Lake Okanagan, but none of them are conclusive.

Basilosaurus

British cryptozoologist Dr. Karl Shuker has categorized the Ogopogo as a 'many hump' variety of lake monster, and suggested it may be a kind of primitive serpentine whale such as Basilosaurus. However, because the physical evidence for the beast is limited to unclear photographs and film, it has also been suggested that the sightings are misidentifications of common animals, such as otters, and inanimate objects, such as floating logs.

VANCOUVER - A TV documentary crew has added to the mystery surrounding Ogopogo by finding an unknown biological specimen in the depths of Okanagan Lake.

"I told a radio station tongue-in-cheek I thought it was the baby Ogopogo," monster-watcher Bill Steciuk of Kelowna said Monday after the History Channel completed a nine-day shoot.

"It was all curled up. The features were really hard to see. You could see a little head tucked in and a straight tail with no fins.

"It's a huge mystery. We have no idea what it is," said Steciuk, who helped organize the shooting locations.

The unidentified specimen has been shipped to the University of Guelph in Ontario for DNA tests, but Ogopogo buffs will have to wait until February to find out more, when the Monster Quest program weighs in on the legendary mega-serpent.


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Source(s):  wikipedia, sunnyokanagan