Eli Watson and Jason Hewlett’s Kickstarter project has just recently been released into the world. Their investigation of Lake Okanagan’s Ogopogo is just about as up to the minute as you can get in the world of film. It documents an expedition to the lake in May of 2023, and takes a somewhat different direction than the monster documentaries I’ve written about through the chapters of the Bestiary.
Mostly these documentaries give us some history, interview witnesses, speculate as to what the creature might be, and try various experiments to prove or disprove its existence. Watson and Hewlett do the history and the interviews and show us some of the evidence, including a brand-new viral photo taken in October 2022. They have opinions as to what the monster is or isn’t.
There are no cool tools. A Kickstarter budget basically allows interviews, location shots, and boat rentals. The evidence is old school: photos and videos, books and various forms of reportage.
They do one thing that most of the other monster hunters have not done, and that for me is what makes the film work. They talk to Coralee Miller, a docent at the Century Heritage Museum. Miller is First Nations; she’s thoroughly versed in the history and culture of the people miscalled the “Okanagan.” Their correct name is Syilx, and the lake’s name is a butchered—her word—version of Suknaqinx.
The being called “Ogopogo” after a dance-hall ditty is more accurately and correctly “N-ha’a-itk”: Sacred Spirit of the Lake. Miller emphasizes that the two are completely different concepts. One is a tourist attraction. The other is a complex cultural icon.
Watson is a cryptid guy, and really wants a real animal. He keeps emphasizing that Ogopogo is not a plesiosaur, in apparent contrast to the Loch Ness Monster. He doesn’t mention that the plesiosaur theory has been out of vogue for a while, or that the one-hump theory of Nessie is only one of many; she’s often seen with three or more humps.
Lake Okanagan’s monster, he says, is a serpentine creature, very large—as much as 60 feet long—with a horselike head, a long, flexible neck that’s not much narrower than the sinuous body, and a long tail. It has paddlelike fins and a whale-like fluke at the end of its tail, and it moves with an undulating motion, with as many as four or five humps rising and falling in the water. It’s dark in color, may be lighter on the underside, and sightings often mention a pair of Shrek-like horns.
What exactly it is, he doesn’t specify. Could be a mammal. Probably not a reptile. Probably not unique to Lake Okanagan: other lakes in British Columbia and Canada in general also have legends of serpentine monsters.
There may be a reason for that. He takes to the lake with longtime Ogopogo hunter Bill Steciuk, who subscribes to the idea of underground channels connecting all the lakes in the region. A small but viable population of these creatures could be living and breeding all over the place, staying away from humans and motorboats.
Watson would like to think that the horns/no horns issue is sexual dimorphism. Like deer or moose, Ogopogo males have horns, but females and young don’t. The sightings of what look like groups of them powering across the lake must be mama and babies.
It’s a nice theory.
He is thrilled with the 2022 photo, taken by a woman with her phone while she out boating on the lake. It was October and the vacation crowds were gone; the lake was quiet. She and her companions saw a profoundly strange orange object with pointy hornlike protuberances poking above the water and a triangular, somewhat wolflike face right below the surface. It didn’t bob with the waves; it was completely stationary.
She only took the one photo, which went viral online. Some viewers claim to see a serpentine body below it. I think that’s wishful thinking.
As to what it is, I suspect it may be some form of human flotsam, a large toy (the witnesses say it was about three feet across) or a mask or an art object. One of the film’s experts, John King, dismisses it out of hand. It’s a large dead crayfish floating upside down, he says. The “horns” are its claws poking out of the water. The “face” is its underside.
He doesn’t speculate as to why it’s not moving with the water. It’s highly unlikely to be anchored to the bottom. It’s out in the middle of the lake, at a depth of around 700 feet.
It’s a mystery, like so much else about the Ogopogo. It doesn’t look anything like the statues and plushies and murals in the towns around the lake. Those show a green cartoonlike dragon creature, kind of silly, kind of cute. Harmless and friendly.
Lake Okanagan’s monster is for the most part a peaceable creature. The one documented case of aggression is one of the earliest sightings by a non-indigenous person, in the 1850s. A man named John McDougall was crossing the lake in a boat, as one did then, with a string of horses swimming behind him. Something seized one of the horses and sucked it down into the water, then the others were sucked down with it. He had to cut the rope before whatever it was took his boat as well as his horses.
He claimed that he had been attacked by the demon of the lake. There had for years been a story among the settlers that the lake was dangerous; that what lived in it had to be propitiated with sacrifices, and armed guards had to patrol the shores to keep the settlers safe. Colonizers were afraid, and they passed that fear on from generation to generation—until the twentieth century, when a silly song finished the job of replacing the fear with a flood of tourist dollars.
It’s all a misunderstanding, says Coralee Miller. First Nations peoples were not sacrificing domestic animals to a monster in the lake. When men were seen to drop a small piece of meat into the water, they were not trying to propitiate a dangerous beast. They were offering respect to the spirit of the water.
Water is sacred, she says. We begin in the waters of the womb. Everything we create has its origin in water, from painting to building to cooking. Water cleanses us. It connects us—we travel on and in it. It teaches us to be mindful: whatever happens upstream affects everyone downstream.
N-ha’a-itk is the essence that is water. In its spiritual form it’s long and serpentine and dark in color, with a head like a horse and antlers like a deer. It undulates as it moves. If it’s going up and down in a series of humps, says Miller, “they’re lying to you.” N-ha’a-itk moves from side to side like a snake.
It’s a shapeshifter, a dimension walker. It’s everything that clean water is. Want to capture it? “Here’s a cup. Go to town.”
I love Miller’s wry humor. As she explains, settlers either don’t listen or don’t understand what they hear. They mangle words and miss the point of concepts. They see a monster where the First Nations see the living essence of the water.
In First Nations culture, with spirits, what’s given is what’s returned. If you come looking to dominate and conquer, spirits will conquer you. That’s likely what happened with John McDougall. He didn’t understand the water, and the water took his horses and nearly took him. (Miller notes in an aside that he was not a nice man. “He was a player,” she says.)
It wasn’t anything unnatural that swallowed McDougall’s horses and nearly swallowed him. Spirits are as natural as it gets. Most likely, says Miller, he wasn’t familiar with the currents in the lake, and got caught in a strong one.
Her culture subscribes to the belief in underwater caverns and channels. All the lakes in British Columbia are connected, she says. The same water flows through them all. The same spirit is in them.
Near the end of the investigation, Miller and her cousin travel with the crew to Rattlesnake Island, where N-ha’a-itk is said to live. Rattlesnakes are the spirit’s protectors. They guard it and watch over it.
In a boat off the shore of the Island, Miller offers tobacco to the spirit and shows how to address it properly. “It’s important to introduce yourself and let yourself be known. The land becomes accustomed to you and gives you what you need.”
N-ha’a-itk is a straightforward being. Respect it and it will respect you. “It likes tobacco, it likes sage, it loves to be sung to, and the only flesh it partakes of is kokanee salmon.”
