Igopogo: the Lathangue and Williams cruise sighting on Lake Simcoe

Lake Simcoe, in southern Ontario, has its own monster. Locals call it Igopogo, a name borrowed from Ogopogo and from the 1952 book I Go Pogo. Others know it as Kempenfelt Kelly, Beaverton Bessie or Simcoe Kelly. Reports reach back to the nineteenth century, with stories in the Orillia Times, the Northern Advance and the Elmvale Lance. In 1952, Chief Wellington Charles of the Georgina Island First Nation was one of four people who reported it.

Monday, July 22, 1963. About 6:30 in the evening. Neil Lathangue, who ran the Bradford funeral home, took a 26-foot cabin cruiser up the river to Lake Simcoe. Aboard were the Lathangue family and the family of Rev. Williams, a Protestant minister. One account puts nine people on board. The lake was calm. "Just like a mirror."

In Cook's Bay, at the southern end of the lake, something appeared far off. It was coming toward the boat. The minister's first words have come down in two versions. "It's a sea monster!" in one. "Great Scot, it's a lake monster" in the other.

Lathangue put its length at about 30 to 70 feet. It had a "blunt head which the water was just rolling over." About 10 feet from the head were three or four sets of dorsal fins, sticking out of the water about 10 inches. About eight feet behind them was another set of three or four fins. The body looked charcoal and scaly. "At the tip of the tail, it left a wake."

"It was moving toward us from a long distance, passed us, went a couple of hundred feet beyond us, then disappeared." From first sight to the end, about ten minutes.

At first, the group said nothing. They feared ridicule. Then Rev. Williams gave a radio interview, by one account on a Barrie station the next day, by another on a Toronto station. On July 24, 1963, the Barrie Examiner ran the story under the headline "Igopogo Looms its Ugly Head." John Slykhuis wrote it up for the Bradford Witness. In 1976, Lathangue told it again to the Barrie Examiner.

The accounts do not all agree. One version puts the time around 7 p.m. The minister appears as Leslie B. Williams, a Presbyterian minister, and as Rev. Bill Williams, formerly of Mount Albert. The Simcoe County Archives places the boat near Jackson's Point. Later websites moved it across the lake to Kempenfelt Bay, probably in error. None of the sources doubts that the sighting took place. No hoax claim has been made against the witnesses.

Sceptics point to the lake sturgeon, which can reach 2 metres and more than 180 kilograms. Seals, sea lions and otters have been suggested for other Igopogo reports, above all a 1991 video. Neither idea easily accounts for an animal 30 feet long or more, with repeated sets of fins. No photograph or film of the 1963 encounter is known. A photograph from 1976 is a separate claim, and its own reliability is disputed.