Are there alligators in Canada’s Ottawa River? The other day, I was scanning some very interesting folders in the Gary Mangiacopra Archives, which I hope to make the subjects of some future videos, when I came across a shocking article in the November 19th, 1884 issue of the Carleton Place Herald, based out of the town of Carleton Place just southwest of Ottawa, Ontario. This piece describes the work of taxidermist Reverend T.C. Brown, who practiced his craft in that small Ontario town, and whose collection included a mysterious specimen which may shed some light on one of Northern Ontario’s oldest and strangest mysteries.
“One of the strangest ‘freaks’ of nature that we have ever seen,” the article affirmed, “is in Mr. Brown’s possession. It is ‘done up in alcohol,’ and is nothing less than a bona fide young alligator, of exactly the same build and characteristic features as those of the alligators that we have seen in the Southern bayous of the Lower Mississippi valley, near the Gulf of Mexico. The elegant-looking reptile in Mr. Brown’s possession, however, has a peculiar distinction from any other alligator ever known. A gentleman known to Mr. Brown captured his rare alligatorship away up the Upper Ottawa, where nothing of the kind ever before or has ever since been heard of. In fact, the only home of this sluggish and amphibious, repulsive and voracious creature is supposed to be near the tropics. It is of the size that is attained in the first few months by the Southern alligator. Query – how did it reach the Upper Ottawa?”
For those unacquainted with Ontario geography, the Upper Ottawa River winds its way across the Canadian Shield, a rugged expanse of boreal forest and igneous rock famous for its bone-chilling winters which, one might imagine, even the hardiest alligator would be hard-pressed to endure. To make Mr. Brown’s story doubly disturbing, at the lower end of the Upper Ottawa is a long, narrow, and impossibly-deep body of water called Lake Temiskaming which is said to be home to a legendary monster called the Mug-Wump. Since at least the turn of the 20th Century, locals have spotted this large and mysterious creature breaking the surface of the water before slipping beneath the waves.
Incredibly, Mr. Brown’s alligator is not the only member of its species known to have bathed in the frigid waters of the Ottawa. Back in the autumn of 1925, two pet alligators escaped from their owner in the town of Aylmer, Quebec, located on the northern shore of the Ottawa River just west of Ottawa, Ontario. The following summer, two locals spotted what they thought was an alligator swimming in the Ottawa River off what is now Ottawa’s McKellar district, located just west of the historic capital and across the river from Aylmer. The witnesses described the creature as being half as long as a canoe, with a strange flat head that had a circumference of about one foot.
Three years later, in the summer of 1929, an amusement park called Luna Park, established four years prior on the outskirts of Ottawa, Ontario, imported 26 alligators from the Florida everglades, intending to display them in a large aquarium. While park employee Joe Charlebois was in the process of transferring the exotic animals from their crates to their new home, which he did by swinging them by their tails and tossing them unceremoniously over the aquarium’s walls, one cantankerous old alligator broke free of its muzzle and snapped at one of his compatriots who had committed some reptilian offence, inadvertently liberating the object of his irritation from its own encumbrance. This second alligator promptly used its newfound freedom to tear off the leg of a third compatriot. Hissing at Charlebois, the two belligerents proceeded to scurry over to the Ottawa River and plunge headlong into the water. Although one of the two fugitives was captured several days later, the second was never found.
Another Ontario encounter with an alligator-lake monster took place in 1968, documented in John Kirk’s 1998 book In the Domain of the Lake Monsters. This sighting took place on the Snake River, a tributary of Muskrat Lake, which drains into the Ottawa by way of the Muskrat River roughly sixty miles downriver from national capital. Muskrat Lake, incidentally, is said to be inhabited by a monster whom locals affectionately refer to as “Mussie”.
While canoeing on the Snake River one evening in 1968, an outdoorsman named Don Humphries, who hailed from nearby Cobden, Ontario, spotted the ripple of some large animal in the water. He followed the creature’s wake until it swam to shore and crawled onto the riverbank. Humphries claimed that the unusual animal measured about sixteen feet in length, was grey-coloured, and bore characteristics of both a fish and an alligator. The astonished canoeist later gave this monster the name “hapyxelor”.
Is it possible that the Ottawa River is haunted today by some rare variety of alligator, perhaps the progeny of imported escapees whose cold blood, through some genetic mutation, somehow acclimated to the frigid climes of Northern Ontario? This outlandish notion, ridiculous at first glance, seems to be supported by an obscure Inuit legend recounted by American naturalist Edward William Nelson in his 1899 book The Eskimo About Bering Strait.
“A strange crocodile-like animal, known as pal-rai-yuk,” Nelson wrote, “is painted on the sides of umiaks and on the inside of widen dishes… by natives along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwin Rivers. A mask… from the tundra south of the Yukon mouth has this animal drawn down each side of the face. According to the traditions of the people in this district the climate in ancient times was very much warmer than at present and the winters were shorter. In those days the mythic animals referred to were abundant in the swampy country between the two rivers, being more common near the Kuskokwin, where the climate was more temperate than on the Yukon…
At that time the pal-rai-yuk lived in lakes, creeks, and marshes, where it killed man and animals for food. Several of the lower Yukon Eskimo recounted the killing of the last one by a hunter whose wife the beast had caught and devoured while she was getting water from the lake…”
“In the drawings of this animal on umiaks, at intervals along the body are open spaces, inside which are represented parts of a human body, showing the belief in its having eaten such food. It was said to live in the water, where it lay hidden among the grass, whence it suddenly rushed to seize a person on the bank or to attack [kayaks] when crossing its haunts.
The curious likeness of these animals to the alligator, as shown in the accounts of its habits and in drawings representing it, is very remarkable. Nearly all of the umiaks in the country of the lower Yukon and to the southward have a picture of this animal drawn along the entire length on each side of the boat, with the head near the bow, and the figure is common also on wooden dishes in that region. It appears to be a local myth, and can scarcely have been brought to these people since the advent of the whites. The country where this myth is most prevalent is one of the least visited of any along the coast of Bering Sea.”
The legend of the Pal-Rai-Yuk, incidentally, is bolstered by an article written by Curtis Fuller and published in the May 1962 issue of the magazine Fate. Citing an article published in the Daily Colonist, a newspaper based out of Victoria, British Columbia, Fuller described a strange discovery made by a crew of treasure hunters at the bottom of Alaska and Yukon Territory’s Lynn Canal, the historic trailhead of the grueling northern route to the Klondike goldfields. In 1931, while diving on a sunken steamboat rumoured to house a cargo of Klondike gold, the treasure hunters came across the footprints and tail-drag mark of what appeared to be a crocodile, clearly impressed in the muck at the bottom of the sea. “Something was lurking in the gloom,” one of the crew members is quoted as having said, “but suddenly vanished in a flash of phosphorescence… We found afterwards the brute was living inside the wreck but we never got a good look at it. It’s something like a sea crocodile.”
Some say that another variety of alligator haunts the Lillooet Mountains beyond Pitt Lake, British Columbia – a mysterious region wreathed in tales of lost gold, strange lights, hairy wildmen, and unsolved disappearances. This creature is usually described as being relatively small, with smooth black skin absent of the bumpy scutes which typically run along the backs of alligators. This creature has also been spotted in the Cascade Mountains south of British Columbia’s Fraser River, one famous report being the testament of Charles Flood, which appeared in Ivan T. Sanderson’s 1961 book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life.
“In 1915,” Flood wrote, “Donald McRae and Green Hicks of Agassiz, B.C. and myself, from Hope, were prospecting at Green Drop Lake twenty-five miles south of Hope, and explored an area over an unknown divide, on the way back to Hope, near the Holy Cross Mountains.
“Green Hicks, a half-breed Indian, told McRae and me a story, he claimed he had seen alligators at what he called Alligator Lake, and wild humans at what he called Cougar Lake. Out of curiosity we went with him; he had been there a week previous looking for a fur trap line. Sure enough, we saw his alligators, but they were black, twice the size of lizards in a small mud lake.”
In their article in the 1999 issue of the North American BioFortean Review, cryptozoologists Chad Arment and Brad LaGrange described other alligator-like creatures spotted in lakes across Canada, including British Columbia’s Kootenay Lake, and Quebec’s Lake Memphremagog, both of these bodies of water having rich folkloric traditions regarding aquatic monsters. One supposed crocodile sighting, related by folklorist Mary Moon in her 1977 book Ogopogo: The Okanagan Mystery, was made on British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake by a steamboat passenger sometime in the 1920s. Can these sightings all be chalked up to hoaxes and misidentifications, or is the wilderness of the Great White North truly home to some variety of the large ancient reptile that haunts the wetlands of the American Southeast? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Box 2, Folder 34 (Alligators – Misplaced Animals), Item 1 (Newspaper Clippings) of the Gary Mangiacopra Archive
“Alligators Add a Thrill Down on the Ottawa River,” in the July 13th, 1929 issue of the Toronto Star Weekly
“Money, Dance Marathons, and Living in Lion Cages – The Ups and Downs of Luna Park,” by Linda Seccaspina in the May 21st, 2017 issue of LindaSeccaspina.Wordpress.com
“Ottawa’s Amusement Park is Invaded by Florida Alligators: Animated ‘Suitcases’ Interfere with Bathing Pleasure at Luna Park – Five-Foot Saurians Escape From Confinement and Take to Ottawa River – Great Excitement,” in the July 15th, 1929 issue of the Edmonton Bulletin
“Creature Seen in Ottawa River Likely Big Fish: But Canoeist Who Saw It Swimming Thinks It An Alligator,” in the June 22nd, 1926 issue of the Ottawa Evening Journal
“Strange Aquatic Animal Is Seen,” in the June 23rd, 1926 issue of the Free Press Prairie Farmer (Winnipeg, Manitoba)
The Eskimo About Bering Strait (1899), Edward William Nelson
Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961), by Ivan T. Sanderson
“Canadian ‘Black Alligators’: A Preliminary Look,” by Chad Arment and Brad LaGrange in the 1999 issue of the North American BioFortean Review
In the Domain of the Lake Monsters (1998), by John Kirk
Ogopogo: The Okanagan Mystery: From Indian Lore to Contemporary Evidence, the Facts About the Legendary Monster of British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake (1977), by Mary Moon
“I See by the Papers,” by Curtis Fuller in the May 1962 issue of Fate