All You Need to Know About the “Canadian Loch Ness Monster”

Deep in the Okanagan Lake lurks a mythical beast – or so the legend says. Here’s what you need to know about the Canadian Loch Ness Monster.

Ogopogo: The Lake Spirit

Southern British Columbia hosts Kelowna – a city, through which Okanagan Lake passes. The 84-mile long lake resembles a serpent in shape and carries its own legend of a mythical monster inhabiting its deepest parts.

Ogopogo – that is the name that the whole of Kelowna, as well as many in the world, recognize as that of the legendary unidentified creature. A multi-humped serpentine creature with greenish-black skin and a head resembling a horse, snake or sheep, depicted like a coiling sea dragon by artists. It’s become a staple of the town and its attraction, having its own cream-coloured statue, as well as the honor of being the mascot for the local WHL hockey team.

Although despite the legends, statues, plushes and everything the town has made in relation to the creature – it is yet to be seen and its existence remains unconfirmed. Ogopogo however, has greatly helped tourism in the region, with interest peaking around the 1980s, when a $1 million reward was offered to anyone who proved the creature exists, although Greenpeace intervened, naming it an endangered species and demanding that it is only filmed or photographed and not caught like a fish.

It turns out, however, that the creature and its legend came about as a misinterpretation of another legend. The early European settlers in the region seem to have miscommunicated with the Okanagan Valley’s original inhabitants – the syilx.

Westbank First Nation’s Pat Raphael told BBC that in syilx mythology, the creature that the settlers and now residents of the valley refer to as Ogopogo, is actually a “spirit of the lake,” and its true name is actually n ?x?ax?aitk? (n-ha-ha-it-koo) in the syilx language.

The syilx believed that the being had both a spiritual form and a physical form, which was the lake itself, although on rare occasions, the spirit would reveal itself from within the lake. One thing that matches the new settlers’ vision, however, is the creature’s appearance – in both stories it is dark in color with a horse head.

As for the misunderstanding between European settlers and the syilx, it likely came from the fact that the syilx fed the water spirit symbolically with herbs like sage and tobacco, and occasionally meat, giving birth to the legend of a mythical monster that feeds on animal sacrifices to be appeased.