Lake Monster Mysteries

by Benjamin Radford

  Canada’s Lake Simcoe, some forty miles north of Toronto, supposedly holds a monster known as “Igopogo” (after its more famous relative Ogopogo), among other names. Residents of Beaverton, on the eastern shore, call it “Beaverton Bessie,” while others refer to it as “Kempenfelt Kelly,” after Kempenfelt Bay, which has the lake’s deepest water and claims the most sightings. Sources refer vaguely to early Indian legends of the monster and sporadic reports of a “sea serpent” in the lake during the nineteenth century. Important sightings occurred in 1952 and 1963 (Costello 1974, 229), and a “sonar sounding of a large animal” in 1983 was followed by a videotape in 1991 of “a large, seal-like animal” (Eberhart 2002, 242–45). Significantly, according to John Robert Colombo in his Mysterious Canada (1988, 153), “No two descriptions of Kempenfelt Kelly coincide.” Nevertheless, cryptozoologist George M. Eberhart (2002, 244) attempted a portrait:

  Physical Description: Seal-like animal. Length, 12–70 feet. Charcoal-gray color. Dog- or horse-like face. Prominent eyes. Gaping mouth. Neck is like a stovepipe. Several dorsal fins. Fishlike tail.

  Behavior: Basks in the sun.

  In August 2005, supported by Discovery Canada’s TV program Daily Planet and by the tourism department of the city of Barrie, we went in search of the elusive creature, conducting interviews and searching Kempenfelt Bay using a boat equipped with sonar and an underwater camera. Our first stop, however, was the home of local retired businessman Arch Brown, who told us that he had coined the name Kempenfelt Kelly and had seen the legendary monster himself. He acknowledged that his background made him predisposed to believe in the beast; his Scottish father had told him of the Loch Ness monster, and Brown had once resided in British Columbia, so he was familiar with Okanagan’s Ogopogo. When he moved to Barrie many years ago, he said, he was prompted by local reports to be “on the lookout” for the monster, spending many hours at the task. Over the years, he has had no fewer than four sightings—all from a distance, unfortunately. Once he saw the creature from an estimated quarter of a mile away but nevertheless described it as being ten feet long and having a dark gray, serpentlike body and a doglike head. It swam, he told us, with an undulating, up-and-down motion. Less seriously, he added that it had “an impish look” and a kind disposition that kept it from frightening children (Brown 2005).

  Like many of the other sightings, Brown’s could reasonably be explained by otters swimming in a line, diving, and resurfacing. Our boat captain, Jerry Clayton (2005), specifically mentioned otters as a likely explanation for some sightings. Brown (2005) himself acknowledged that there are otters—as well as beavers, minks, and other animals—in the vicinity, although he did not believe that any of these were responsible for his sightings.

  As to the 1983 sonar report, Clayton showed us on his sonar screen what were clearly individual fish, as well as occasional larger forms that he attributed to schools of small fish being “read” by the sonar as a single unit. The underwater camera showed only nonmonstrous fish. Clayton (2005) told us that he had been on Lake Simcoe for eighteen years. “I’ve dragged a lot of line for a lot of miles here on this lake, and—nothing,” he said.

  Elsewhere in Canada, Quebec is apparently a hotbed of lake monsters. French researcher Michel Meurger found well over fifty lakes in the province said to have some monster or another. In addition to Lake Champlain and Lake Memphremagog (discussed in chapters 2 and 3, respectively) those lakes that connect to the St. Lawrence Seaway include Massawippi, Aylmer, St. Francois, Williams, and Trois-Lacs. What struck Meurger (1986) most about the results of his investigation was the widely varying descriptions: “Refreshingly, some witnesses spoke of animals possessing hair and scales at the same time! .… Because the descriptions in the reports vary so much, it is impossible to make any definite identifications.”

  In the United States, Lake Tahoe’s “Tessie,” a humped dark or brown form between twelve and twenty-five feet long, had a heyday of sightings in the mid-1980s. In 1984, an organized but fruitless search was conducted for the monster. Investigators speculated that some of the sightings may have been of a giant sturgeon. A popular recreational area, Lake Tahoe continues to report occasional sightings.

  The Great Lakes are said to harbor a few monster mysteries as well. The creature in Lake Erie, known as “South Bay Bessie” (a.k.a. “Lake Erie Larry”), has been described as a giant snake. Like most monster descriptions, those of Bessie vary widely; the skin has been characterized as black, brown, or copper, as either smooth or with silver-dollar-size snakelike scales. Many of the sightings date back to the 1800s, when interest in the monster was high and fueled by outlandish (and almost certainly hoaxed) newspaper stories. One article, published in the Pultneyville (N.Y) Commercial Press in 1867, states that a local “sea serpent” was in fact owned by a local fellow: “Mr. Henry Stowell, of Oswego, says he owns the animal of which so much has been said, having imported him at great expense from the Humbug (!) Islands. … [Stowell] has him boarded during the hot weather, and as soon as the weather becomes cool he intends to skin him and have it stuffed.… [The monster] has occasionally stolen away and visited different localities about the lake, and when he has been seen, has made hideous noises in imitation of the parties present” (quoted in Palmer 2001.) Only a few modern reports exist, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s. Lakes Ontario, Superior, and Onondaga also have resident lake monster mysteries.

  EUROPE

  Lake Seljordsvatnet in Norway supposedly contains an unknown creature in its depths called “Selma.” Sightings go back hundreds of years, although it seems that Selma’s heyday was in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was a handful of accounts. Most reports claim that the creature has one to five humps and an equine head. The best-known effort to find the monster was a 1998 expedition led by UFOlogist Jan-Ove Sundberg and featured in a Discovery Channel documentary. Though a fairly well-equipped and well-funded effort, the search turned up no monster and no real evidence, but it generated some controversy. Several members of the team resigned, believing that Sundberg was too quick to tout ambiguous evidence and apparently more interested in profit than in truth. One team member, Kurt Burchfiel, complained, “As soon as there’s any sort of big blip on the echosounder Jan is parading around with it and insisting that it’s evidence.” Burchfiel resigned, telling Sundberg, “I have very different goals in this. I came here genuinely interested in pursuing this in an intelligent and educated way.… It strikes me that you’re here more for the money and for the publicity and the hype” (for more, see Walsh 1999, 48).

  Not far away, a “snakelike animal with a dog’s head and fins,” named “Storsjoe,” lives in Sweden’s fifth-largest lake, Storsjoen. Like a few other lake monsters, Storsjoe is a protected species; a 1986 court ruling declared it illegal to “kill, hunt, or catch” the creature, as well as “to take away or hurt the monster’s eggs, roe, or den.” In 2004, local resident Magnus Cedergren planned to hatch the eggs, raise monster babies, and turn them into a tourist attraction. The intrepid entrepreneur may have counted his eggs before they hatched, however, because he was denied permission by the provincial government to even search for the monster’s eggs. Sightings allegedly date back to 1635, and since then, around five hundred people have seen the beast.

  “Teggie” is the celebrated denizen of the deep in tiny Lake Bala, North Wales. Recorded sightings of the creature date back only to about 1975, when former lake warden Dafydd Bowen saw an unusual form in the water: “It was grey, about eight feet long, and looked like a crocodile with a small hump.” In March 1995, two fishermen reported seeing a creature raise its fearsome head ten feet above the lake’s surface; two years later, a man filmed some video footage of what appears to be a moving head and hump.

  Ireland’s Lough Ree monster, ten to thirty feet long with a large, horselike head, has been sighted occasionally in the small lake. One of the most prominent sightings occurred in 1960, when three priests claimed to have seen a snakelike creature swimming near their boat, its eye
s, long nose, and ears rising out of the water.

  Scotland is riddled with lochs, and Loch Ness isn’t the only body of water boasting beastie sightings. Loch Morar, on the west coast, is also the site of some monster mysteries, with some sources dating the first sighting to 1887 or 1895. In 1996 a diver on an expedition to the bottom of the loch found six large bones sixty feet under the surface. This finding generated speculation that the remains were of the “Morag” creature, but the bones were later identified as belonging to deer.

  Ulrich Magin, a German investigator, examined reports from continental Europe, although most of his findings are in rivers and are not, strictly speaking, lake monsters. He does mention the 1982 sighting in Poland’s Lake Zeegrzynski of a twenty-foot beast sporting a “slimy black head, with rabbit-like ears.” In a 1986 article in the magazine Fortean Times, he discusses a monster mystery in Switzerland’s Urner Lake. On August 25, 1976, a group of about sixty people near the resort town of Brunnen saw a monster twenty to twenty-five feet long surface three times. The long-necked beast, described as looking like a dragon, was quickly dubbed “Urnie.” A German photographer snapped a photo, and the sighting was reported by newspapers worldwide. A week later, Urnie was revealed as a hoax: it was a constructed model created for a Swiss television program and had actually been in the lake for a week before being noticed.

  SOUTH AMERICA

  Argentina’s Nahuel Huapi is reportedly home to a giant creature described as thirty-three feet long, multihumped, and green. The beast, called “Nahuelito,” has at times been supposed to be a plesiosaur (as have Champ, Nessie, and others) or, oddly enough, possibly even a pterodactyl. One investigator suggested that some of the sightings might actually be of a large duck native to the area. These ducks have a reptilian appearance, and a photograph of one looks “for all the world like a submerged monster hump throwing up fountains of spray” (Magin 1996, 28).

  ASIA

  Turkey’s Lake Van is supposedly home to a slimy, black, fifty-foot horned beast. Reports date back only to 1995, and in 1997, a man claimed to have captured “Vanna” on videotape.

  “Wenbo,” a lake creature in Tibet, was seen most notably in 1980. It is one of only a handful of lake monsters blamed for murder, reportedly responsible for the disappearance of a missing villager and a yak.

  A so-called Chinese Nessie is said to exist in northeastern China’s Tianchi Lake. In 2002 hundreds of tourists reported a horse-headed object with a black body in the water about thirty feet from shore. One witness said that the creature looked just like the model on display at a nearby tourist museum.

  “Issie,” of Lake Ikedo-ko in Kagoshima, is one of Japan’s best-known lake monsters. It is black, possibly striped, and sixteen to ninety feet long with two humps. Issie was first photographed in 1978; in 1998 a long, dark object was videotaped in the lake.

  THE PACIFIC

  Belief in the “Migo” monster of Lake Dakatua on New Britain, an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, was boosted in early 1994 when a Japanese television crew visited the lake in search of the creature. The team interviewed eyewitnesses, dispatched divers, and employed video and sonar equipment. These efforts paid off when videotape captured an unknown creature (or creatures) displaying unusual movements and characteristics. Several video clips were analyzed by such researchers as Karl Shuker, Darren Naish, and Ben Roesch, and despite early pronouncements that seemed to confirm a mystery creature, the scenes were later determined to be of known animals: dolphins in one case, and mating crocodiles in another.

  AFRICA

  Several of Africa’s many lakes are said to contain fearsome and unknown creatures, including Lake Victoria. “Lukwata,” as the monster is sometimes called, is twenty to thirty feet long with dark, smooth skin and a distinctively round head. Lukwata is reportedly unusually aggressive (for a lake monster, anyway) and has been known to attack fishermen and boats. Other lakes in Ethiopia and Chad have their own beast, “Auli,” which is said to be sheep sized; researchers suspect that a manatee might account for some of the sightings. The mokele-mbembe is a dinosaurian monster with elephantine feet and a long, snakelike head said to inhabit some of Africa’s remotest areas, especially the lakes and rivers in Cameroon and Congo. Stories have circulated that pygmies at Lake Tele killed and ate one of the creatures—a fatal mistake, since the flesh is terribly toxic. Thus, sadly (and conveniently), no eyewitnesses live to tell the tale.

  REFERENCES

  Brewer, Jacqueline. 1973. Famous Fredericton frog dates back to city’s founding. Daily Gleaner (Fredericton, N.B.), March 30.

  Brief history of the Magaguadavic. N.d. [St. George, N.B.]: Magaguadavic Watershed Management Association.

  Brown, Arch. 2005. Interview by Joe Nickell.

  Clayton, Jerry. 2005. Interview by Benjamin Radford.

  Coleman frog. N.d. Vertical files, York Sunbury Historical Society Museum and Fredericton Public Library.

  Colombo, John Robert. 1988. Mysterious Canada: Strange sights, extraordinary events, and peculiar places. Toronto: Doubleday Canada.

  Costello, Peter. 1974. In search of lake monsters. New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan.

  Eberhart, George. 2002. Mysterious creatures: A guide to cryptozoology. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO.

  Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1960. S.v. “Taxidermy.”

  Gaudet, Sam. 1999. Interview by Joe Nickell, June 27.

  The Guinness book of records. 1999. N.p.: Guinness Publishing, 122.

  Magin, Ulrich. 1986. A brief survey of lake monsters of continental Europe. Fortean Times 46 (spring): 53.

  ———. 1996. Duck! It’s a plesiosaur. Fortean Times 92 (November): 28.

  Martinez, Lionel. 1988. Great unsolved mysteries of North America. Secaucus, N.J.: Chartwell Books, 6–7, 12.

  McKinney, Mary. N.d. Canadianecdote. Clipping from Maclean’s. In vertical files, York Sunbury Historical Society Museum and Fredericton Public Library.

  Meurger, Michel. 1986. The jabberwocks of Quebec. Fortean Times 46 (spring): 41.

  Murray, Jan. 1999. Interview by Joe Nickell, June 27.

  Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, spirits, demons, and other alien beings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 241–43.

  ———. 1999. The Silver Lake serpent. Skeptical Inquirer 23, no. 2 (March–April):18–21.

  Palmer, Richard. 2001. Did sea serpents once inhabit the Great Lakes? Crooked Lake Review 120 (summer).

  Phillips, Fred H. 1982. Coleman frog a fake? Daily Gleaner (Fredericton, N.B.), April 22.

  St. George, New Brunswick, the granite town. 1999. Brochure published by town of St. George.

  Sansom, E. W. 1961. Letter to J. Winslow, November 20. In vertical files, York Sunbury Historical Society Museum and Fredericton Public Library.

  Walsh, Dave. 1999. A monstrous farce. Fortean Times 117 (December): 48.

  Wilson, Kelly. 1999. Interview by Joe Nickell, June 27.

  Wilson, Tony. 1999. Interview by Joe Nickell, June 27.

  CONCLUSION

  As our investigations have made clear, the existence of lake monsters is doubtful, for a variety of reasons. We often speak of Nessie, Ogopogo, Champ, and other lake monsters as single creatures, but for some hitherto unknown species to reproduce, there must be a sizable breeding herd. This means that each lake should hold not one but perhaps a dozen or more creatures—presumably making a verifiable encounter more than ten times more likely than if there were just one individual. Loch Ness, for example, is a little more than twenty miles long; how can a dozen giant creatures share the same lake and somehow escape decades of extensive sonar searches? A floating or beached carcass should eventually be encountered; none has. Clear and convincing photos or video should exist; none do. Sightings, legends, and ambiguous photos only serve to whet the investigator’s appetite for the main meal, the real proof—which never comes.

  Hundreds or even thousands of lakes have been reported to hold monsters at one time or another. Even if only a small numbe
r actually do, that is still hundreds of mysterious creatures somehow managing to avoid leaving a shred of hard scientific evidence of their existence. It also seems unlikely that there would be some multimillion-year-old creature—such as the plesiosaur—in lakes that, like America’s Lake Champlain, are only about ten thousand years old.

  Often, the “lake monster” label is simply a catchall term for “something strange” in the water. Although many sane and sincere people report seeing lake leviathans, in all likelihood they are encountering something that they misperceive as such. We have given many examples in this book, including otters, eels, logs, and beavers. These eyewitnesses are not foolish; they are subject to the same psychological and perceptual errors that plague all of us from time to time. And of course, there will always be a few cranks, wags, and hoaxers who muddy the truth about lake monsters.

  The lure of the unexplained is powerful, especially in a shrinking world where so many life-forms have gone extinct. Like Bigfoot, lake monsters—if they exist—could provide a tangible link with the remote past, just as extraterrestrials may provide a connection with the future. For some people, apparently, imaginary creatures are better than none at all.

  This wishful thinking helps explain certain cultural aspects of the lake monster phenomenon that we observed. For instance, Ben calls attention to the many similarities between two relatively nearby lakes, Lake Champlain and Lake Memphremagog, that we investigated. The two mysteries developed “almost in parallel,” he points out, with both dating back a century or more. Moreover, at each lake the respective monster’s description evolved with the changing public concept of what such creatures should look like: the “sea serpent” model morphing into the more “scientific” one of a prehistoric aquatic creature (as I discussed in chapter 2).

  In part because of Lake Champlain’s larger size and greater accessibility, “Memphre is a poorer cousin to the more famous Champ,” Ben says—a “Champ Lite,” so to speak. He notes that after Sandra Mansi published her famous photo of Champ, there was an upsurge in sightings on Lake Champlain, with some interest spilling over to Lake Memphremagog. Just two years later, Barbara Malloy—like Mansi, a middle-aged Vermont woman—would make her first sighting of Memphre. Lake monster sightings almost invariably correspond with the public’s interest in the creatures, suggesting a social and cultural engine (not necessarily a group of unknown beasts) behind the reports.