Dawn Dumont's "black humps" sighting at Scotch Creek, Shuswap Lake

Shuswap Lake, in the interior of British Columbia, has a monster of its own. Locals call it Shuswaggi. In February 2019 the Salmon Arm Observer retold the legend. A Secwepemc hunter was said to have killed a "Ta-zam-a," a "Water Bear," in 1904, and its hide was reportedly sold at Enderby for $60. Sightings followed in 1948, 1970 and 1984. Cryptozoologist Karl Shuker theorized that a Basilosaurus could be hidden in the lake. Researcher Adam Benedict offered his views too.

Then, in March 2019, two fishermen near Murdoch Point by Sicamous, Brodie Blair and Les Loren, watched waves with no visible source circle their boat, "with black humps periodically rising." Loren filmed it. Two months later, the same words would come up again.

Tuesday, 14 May 2019. Dawn Dumont, a Scotch Creek resident, had already seen a disturbance on the lake that day while driving her son to an appointment in Salmon Arm.

At about 10:30 a.m. she was on the public beach near Captain's Village Marina, on her morning walk. "I just got comfortable and all of a sudden I heard some splashing around off in the distance there."

She looked out. A disturbance in the water. She took out her phone and filmed. "I had seen it twirling around a bit and then it went under." On the video her own voice remarks on the size. The thing surfaces and goes under, again and again, and she says "there it goes again."

"Whatever it was, it was big. It looked like there were some kind of black humps."

Dumont posted the videos to Facebook, where they spread. On 15 May, Cameron Thomson of the Salmon Arm Observer told her story, and sister papers carried it. Five days later, Coast to Coast AM, George Noory's paranormal radio show in the United States, ran it as "Watch: Lake Monster Filmed in Canada?" with her fuller line: "whatever that is, it's huge." That write-up placed the sighting "last weekend." The Observer's date of 14 May is the primary one.

Dumont said she planned to go back to the beach to try to see it again. No report of a return visit has been found.

Only one ordinary explanation was offered at the time. Friends and co-workers of Dumont's husband pointed out that there are "big sturgeon in the lake." Yet the waves showed "way too many humps," and the article leaves it unclear whether that remark was theirs or Dumont's. White sturgeon do live in the Fraser system, where the Upper Fraser population is listed as Endangered by COSEWIC. Their presence in Shuswap Lake itself has not been confirmed.

No fisheries, conservation or police inquiry followed. No one has suggested the video was staged.

Dumont's report was one of several on the lake that year. In June, at Eagle Bay, Kenton McRae thought "a whale had surfaced" before it dove, and his relatives filmed fast ripples moving toward shore from about 300 m out.

The original Facebook clips have not been located since. What survives is a single frame grab, credited "Dawn Dumont photo," and a phrase that keeps returning on Shuswap Lake. Black humps.