The Shuswaggi Humps off Murdoch Point

Shuswap Lake, in the B.C. Interior, has its own monster. Locals call it the Shuswaggi. Adam Benedict says the name comes from a Salish word that roughly means "Water Bear." The stories reach back to 1904, when a Secwepemc hunter reportedly killed and skinned a creature "nearly as large as a grizzly bear with hair covering its wet skin." The hide was sold at the Enderby trading post. In June 1984, Linda Griffiths, the Griffiths children and a family friend watched "a large serpent-like creature with seven humps" pass in front of their boat.

Saturday, March 23, 2019. Les Loren and Brodie Blair were on the water off Murdoch Point, filming another episode of Two Guys With Flies. There were no other boats around. The water was crystal clear.

Then waves appeared. Nothing visible was making them. They circled 180 degrees around the boat. Black humps rose from the top of them, periodically. "Out of the blue from behind us," Loren said. "Almost like the breach of a whale."

Loren kept the camera rolling. "It was really weird like waves… but you could see the shininess of the humps." At its closest, the source of the waves came within about 200 yards. Then it moved toward the beach. "The last sighting was right on the shoreline and it was just spinning and turning the water like a current," Blair said. Loren called it "some sort of feeding frenzy." The two fishermen estimated the creature at about 30 feet long.

Loren had never heard of the Shuswaggi before that trip. Blair had. "The first time I heard about it was two years ago, a friend of mine was telling me a story." That friend had seen something "black and shiny, no scales" chasing two lake otters, which came ashore "huffing and puffing."

The story first ran on April 1, 2019, through Black Press, in the Salmon Arm Observer and its sister papers. In June, after a reported Ogopogo sighting on Skaha Lake, the pair decided to speak up to Global News. On June 21, 2019, Global News published the raw footage, 7:13 long. Loren joked about going back out. "Maybe we'll hook it."

No official inquiry followed, and Global News noted that its report offered no scientific analysis of the footage. It did say scientists now call this kind of wave an "Ogopogo wave." Two months later, Dawn Dumont filmed "black humps… twirling around a bit" near Scotch Creek. Friends and co-workers suggested a sturgeon. Dumont noted it had "too many humps." A later CBC piece on B.C. lake legends reportedly raised otters swimming in a line and large trout. Benedict, speaking to Global News, pointed to a relative of Basilosaurus, an ancient whale extinct for about 34 million years. The Salmon Arm Observer had credited that zeuglodont idea to Karl Shuker instead, and said Benedict disagrees. A 2020 blog post said the footage "could show anything from waves to a monster to birds in formation."

The Shuswaggi has not gone quiet. In 2023 the McRae family reported a line of dark humps surfacing and diving. APTN's Red Earth Uncovered devoted an episode, "Shuswaggin' Tales," to the legend in 2022. Around the lake, the name sells breakfast wraps and dark roast coffee. Not everyone treats it as old lore. Neskonlith Councillor Louis Thomas told the Observer that lake-monster stories are not especially common among the Secwepemc. The footage remains. Black humps, shining, in calm water with no other boat in sight.