Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: Ogopogo – British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake Monster

Nessie, Champ and Normie are all well and good in that 20th century third-hand account, blurry Polaroid sort of way. Ogopogo, though – Ogopogo demanded animal sacrifices from anyone wishing to cross over its lake. The Ogopogo of today seems a gentle giant, keeping to itself, and surfacing only for oblivious tourists and hopelessly unskilled videographers. But there was a time when the camera shy beastie trolled Okanagan’s waters with a ruthless vigilance and a bridge troll’s business acumen.

Aboriginal Salish people called the monster N’ha-a-itk, which supposedly means “lake demon” (lake demons – research that before you start thinking tribal tattoo). In the 1800s when the Europeans came barreling into the area, land-claim flags all a-thrust, it was these Aboriginals who warned the settlers about N’ha-a-itk’s strict lake toll, its supposed lair on the already-unenticing Rattlesnake Island, and its hunting grounds at Squally Point, where the Salish feared to fish. The Europeans took the news in stride, assigning armed guards to nightly lakeside patrols (not a bad idea any way, seeing as how they’d just, you know, stolen a bunch of land) and ensuring that the demon got his nummy blood tribute. It was these settlers who offered the first physical documentation of the monster – an engraving of the creature printed in the “Canadian Illustrated News” on November 30, 1872. That’s more than 60 years before the first recorded Nessie encounter.

With a paper trail of hearsay and sightings spanning back that far, one might think that Ogopogo would be eligible for a better name. N’ha-a-itk is as authentic as it is unmemorable, and other erstwhile monikers, like Snake-in-the-Lake and Wicked One, seem to serve the monster-wary namers more than the fearsome, aquatic named. But still – Ogopogo?! According to Mary Moon, author of “Ogopogo: the Okanagan Mystery” (1977), this amateurish palindrome that’s, depending on who you ask, a racist send-up of aboriginal dialect or a wacky homage to the just-introduced Pogo Stick, was supposedly coined by Bill Brimblecomb, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Canadian predecessor. In a 1924 parody of a popular British Music Hall song, “Barmy Bill” Brimblecomb sang:

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

Two years later, 30 carloads of beachgoers watched the monster surface into the open air and then dive back down into the depths of Okanagan. In the wake of the mass sighting, “Vancouver Sun” editor Roy Brown penned an article that more or less championed the existence of the beast, and the local Board of Trade met to decide on the animal’s Official Name. Guess what they chose.

Over the decades, more than 200 sightings of Ogopogo have been reported. Proponents of the legend enjoy pointing out that most witnesses describe the creature similarly – 15-20 feet long with a horse-like head. Many accounts also liken the creature’s appearance to that of a floating log. If it looks like a log and floats like a log, it’s probably a surviving Basilosauraus. Or so concludes British cryptozoologist Roy Mackal, who, in his book “Searching for Hidden Animals,” claims that Ogopogo resembles this prehistoric snake-like whale to a T.

The Jim Henson Creature Workshop had a different take on the Snake-in-the-Lake’s appearance. When asked to design puppets and CG models of the creature for the Lake Okanagan-set (New Zealand-filmed) family adventure movie “Mee-Shee: the Water Giant,” they decided to model Ogopogo after Walter Matthau. Had he been alive to see it, I’m sure Matthau would have been honored: “Ogo – Wha? I’m a muppet now? I thought I was already those other two muppets in the balcony. Ugh. Just make sure they pay my blood tribute.”

Wednesday: Russia’s Mongol-terrorizing, Nazi-eating Brosno Dragon

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