Ponik: the 1957 sightings at Lac Pohénégamook and Father J.-Léopold Plante's "overturned canoe"

Lac Pohénégamook lies in the Notre Dame Mountains of Quebec's Bas-Saint-Laurent, just north of the Maine border. Its iron-rich water is rust-coloured and murky, about 135 ft deep. On its shore sat the parish of Saint-Éleuthère.

The stories were old. Oral tradition dates sightings back to about 1874. In 1944 a young R. Nadeau saw the creature strike a hay rake with its tail, leaving the steel teeth twisted. Then came 1957, and dynamite. Crews were blasting along the shore to rebuild Route 289.

May 1957. Philippe Gagné and his wife were fishing on the nearby St. François River. They saw a creature "15 feet long with the head of a fish." Then came the parish priest, Father J.-Léopold Plante, curé of Saint-Éleuthère, fishing near his church. He saw "this big, black thing floating," which "was like two pieces, with a depression in the middle"; in another telling, it was "a long overturned canoe crossing the lake, leaving a wake behind."

Others came forward. They described a brown or black animal, 12 to 35 feet long, with a sawtooth fin down its back. Hairless and shaped like the bottom of an overturned canoe. A professional camera is said to have filmed it in the late 1950s: "une bête avec une bosse sur le dos et deux cornes dorées", a beast with a hump on its back and two golden horns. No copy has been found.

By October 1957 the newspapers had the story. Worried visitors brought it to the National Assembly. The Quebec Department of Game and Fisheries issued special permits to people trying to catch the creature. News outlets offered $100 for a photograph that would settle the mystery.

The province sent biologist Vadim D. Vladykov to Saint-Éleuthère. Vladykov learned that a former parish priest had tried to farm sturgeon in the lake for caviar. The fish, residents said, had escaped. Vladykov drew no conclusions, and the report has never been found. In January 1958, Fisheries Minister Camille Pouliot offered a different verdict: « la publicité du monstre a été très profitable à la région de Saint-Eleuthère ». The monster's publicity had been very profitable for the area.

Sturgeon remain the favourite answer. Giant eels and large muskellunge have been suggested too. Others look to the lake itself: underground gas, springs welling up beneath the surface, or waterlogged dead trees up to 15 m long that break free from the bottom, surface briefly and sink again. That last one fits the overturned canoe well. The dynamite work was blamed for stirring things up.

Folklorists Claude Gagnon and Michel Meurger took another path in their 1982 book, Monstres des lacs du Québec. "We weren't interested in finding lake monsters," Gagnon said. "We were interested in the sighting of lake monsters by people."

In 1974, at Saint-Éleuthère's centenary, the creature got its name: Ponik. A local artisan built an effigy and a summer festival followed. The sightings went on, and in 1990 former mayor Guy Leblanc watched a "big big fish" beside the boat for about ten seconds. Leblanc thinks it is probably a giant sturgeon. Sonar later recorded an underwater mass about eight metres long.

In 2015 a viral video seemed to show Ponik again. The City of Pohénégamook admitted it had commissioned the 3D animation to launch its new brand. No such claim was ever made against the witnesses of 1957. What Father Plante saw crossing the lake has never been explained.