Status: Unverified — the legend developed from Indigenous water-spirit stories and later lake-monster lore; no body or clear evidence has been found.
About the pin: The lake is about 84 miles long; pinned at Kelowna.
Credit: Hamedog (English Wikipedia), cropped by Beyond My Ken / Wikimedia Commons · Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Source
Ogopogo is a lake monster said to live in Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, Canada. Some scholars trace its development from First Nations folklore and from widespread water-monster motifs, and today Ogopogo is part of the region's tourism and commercial branding.
Susan Allison's 1872 report is considered the first detailed account from a white settler. According to the historian Mark Orkin, the creature got its colonial name on a night in 1924 when an English music-hall song was heard in Vernon, BC, although other sources suggest the name was in use earlier. In 1968, Art Folden filmed a large wake moving across the lake from Highway 97, and the footage has been analysed with computers.
Ogopogo remains a legend and a symbol of the valley, with a statue in a Kelowna park. The film shows a wake, which can have natural causes, and no animal has been recovered.
Sources: Wikipedia: Ogopogo
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