The Mysteries of Cobalt
In the desolate heart of the Canadian Shield, the sparsely-populated expanse of boreal forest and Precambrian rock that stretches from the highlands of eastern Labrador to the woods of northern Saskatchewan, lies Cobalt, Ontario, a remote town of a thousand souls. Born out of an early 20th Century silver rush, this isolated enclave of humanity has produced a startling variety of strange stories since its 1906 genesis, which were diligently documented by Canadian writer John Robert Colombo in his 1999 book Mysteries of Ontario. Foremost among these is the legend of Old Yellow Top, a flaxen-headed wildman said to haunt the surrounding forest, spotted in 1906, 1926, 1946, and 1970, which we explored in a previous piece.
The Shadow of the Cross
The oldest story Colombo relates is set back in 1896, seven years before the Cobalt Silver Rush. At that time, the region’s only human inhabitants were Cree and Ojibwa natives; Hudson Bay Company employees of the surrounding Forts Matachewan, Temiscamingue, and Temagami; Oblate missionaries; seasonal lumberjacks; and a few French-Canadian settlers who had begun to take up residence just east of the Quebec border. Legend has it that one of the new arrivals to region was a mysterious young French-Canadian artist named Henri Ault, who established a studio in the area. That spring, Ault painted a daytime scene of Christ standing on the shores of the Dead Sea – a painting which some harsher critics might dismiss as relatively unremarkable were it not for an extraordinary metamorphosis it undergoes in the absence of light. Upon entering his studio one night, one version of the legend contends, Ault was astonished to discover that his painting had assumed a miraculous aspect in the dark. The divine subject had transformed into a statue-like silhouette with lifelike three-dimensional attributes, whose robes billowed as if subject to a gentle breeze. The celestial background had taken on a luminous hue, as of a sky on a moonlit night. Behind Christ’s head was a halo which actually seemed to radiate light, which some witnesses have since likened to the soft glow of moonlight. Perhaps most eerily, the dark shadow of a cross appeared plainly and distinctly behind Christ’s left shoulder, at a spot where Ault had only painted plain blue sky. This sensational and mysterious work of art, dubbed “The Shadow of the Cross,” was subsequently displayed at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. In 1910 and ‘11, it was showcased in the Dore Gallery on London, England’s Bond Street, alongside the masterpieces of French artist Gustave Dore. Here, it was purportedly examined by British chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes, who could find no evidence of phosphorescent or radioactive paint which might account for its baffling luminous characteristic. The painting eventually made its way to Atlanta, Georgia, where it was purchased by a wealthy Texan named Mrs. Herbert Sidney Griffin. Griffin, in turn, donated the piece to the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church, a historic Spanish colonial church in Rancho de Taos, New Mexico, where it remains to this day.
The Musical Cabin
A third Cobalt mystery came to national attention in in the twilight of the Cobalt Silver Rush. In the autumn of 1931, Cobalt miners William Forrest, Frank Wilder, and Tom Powers reported that the eerie airs of a stringed instrument issued at night from an abandoned cabin on the shores of Baptiste Lake, about 63 miles (102 kilometres) northwest of Cobalt, incidentally near the ruins of the old Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Matachewan. Local natives claimed that this ramshackle hut belonged to a chief who had died there in the early 1920s, and who was known to have played the harp in life. Inside the cabin, the miners found a fiddle with broken strings, which the late chief had kept near his bed.
The Hudson’s Bay Expedition of 1686
Of all the mysteries to come out of this remote corner of civilization, one of the most interesting is that of the aquatic monster said to haunt Lake Temiskaming (also spelled “Lake Timiskaming”), a long, narrow body of water which straddles the border between Ontario and Quebec, whose name means “deep waters”, and whose shores lie about four miles (seven kilometers) northeast of Cobalt. Referred to as Lac Temiscamingue by the French-speaking residents of its eastern shores, this middle section of the Ottawa River served as the southernmost stretch of the ancient canoe route connecting James Bay, the southern appendage of Hudson Bay, with the watershed of the Great Lakes.
This aquatic highway was first traversed by whites in the spring of 1686, when the wilderness of what is now Northern Ontario was populated by the members of two competing fur companies. To the north was Rupert’s Land, the watershed of Hudson Bay, on the gloomy shores of which the 16-year-old British Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) built its frozen palisade fortresses. To the south was the Pays d’en Haut, the watershed of the Great Lakes, patrolled by independent French coureurs des bois and agents of the four-year-old Compaigne du Nord. Despite that the British King Charles II and the French monarch Louis IV, at that time, were reveling in what historian Francis Parkman Jr. described as “a time of profound peace,” the French syndicate had waged an aggressive campaign against its British rival since its inception, hoping to stem the flow of furs to the north. After the establishment of a trading post called Fort St. Anne on a now-vanished island in Lake Temiskaming at the mouth of the Montreal River, a company of French marines and French-Canadian militiamen under the command of Captain Pierre de Troyes, Chevalier de Troyes, travelled north up the lake and further north through the bush, launching what historian Peter C. Newman described as “one of North America’s earliest and most successful commando assaults” on the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
At the time of this so-called Hudson Bay Expedition, the route between Hudson Bay and the Ottawa River was an uncharted wilderness in which no portage routes had yet been cut. The trail that de Troyes and company blazed would not be widely used for at least another hundred years, being reopened during the turbulent spell of competition between the HBC and its new arch-rival, the North-West Company. This grueling brigade route continued to be traversed by HBC voyageurs throughout the 1800s, being one of two trails which connected the Great Lakes with the frozen sea for which the company was named. In 1933, decades after this primitive trail had fallen out of general use, on old HBC voyageur who had plied a portion of this path in its waning years penned what might be the first reference to an ancient belief that Lake Temiskaming is haunted by some mysterious entity.
The Memegwesi
In April 1933, a two-part story appeared in the Haileyburian, a newspaper based out of the town of Haileybury, Ontario – now part of Temiskaming Shores. The author wrote under the pseudonym “Sha-Ka-Nash,” a variation of the Algonkian word “Shagonash”, which means “White Man.” The story, entitled “A Canoe Trip to Fort Temiscamingue in ’79,” appears to be a true account of a routine HBC round trip from Fort Matachewan to Fort Temiscamingue, the latter lying on the eastern shores of the narrowest part of the lake, just south of the present town of Ville-Marie, Quebec. This piece offers rare insight into the culture of the HBC in Northern Ontario in the late 1800s, and into the daily minutiae which attended the life of a late 19th Century voyageur.
After chronicling the canoe trip down the Montreal River, the author described his party’s entrance into Lake Temiskaming. “When we came down to the big steep rocks on the west side,” he wrote, “the Indian crews had a great talk in their own language, and everyone who used tobacco, put a little in the water in front of the steep rocks, the writer adding his quote with the rest. I never learned the real significance of the performance, but anyone who passed on the lake with a loaded canoe in front of those rocks will know that it was very advisable to court the favor of the water sprite.”
The ‘water sprite’ supposed to haunt these steep cliffs fronting the southwestern shores of Lake Temiskaming – a vista which French-Canadian bishop Monsignor Narcisse Zephirin Lorrain likened to the famous fjord-like slopes of Quebec’s Saguenay River – was almost certainly a specimen of what local natives called the memegwesi, the subject of a strange native legend shared by First Nations across the continent. These mystical figures were described as hairy dwarves or long-haired sirens, their descriptions varying slightly from tribe to tribe. They were universally supposed to be endowed with preternatural power, particularly the ability to conjure storms and strong winds, and were said to inhabit the rocky cliffs which fringe lakes and rivers. From the Mi’kmaq of New Brunswick to the Interior Salish of British Columbia, native peoples the country over offered gifts of tobacco to these mysterious beings in order to ensure safe passage through their waters. Such concerns were not unwarranted on Lake Temiskaming, where poor weather can have deadly consequences. For example, on June 13th, 1978, thirteen young canoeists from Claremont, Ontario, who had dreams of replicating Pierre de Troye’s 1686 expedition to James Bay, drowned in the frigid waters of Lake Temiskaming about seven miles (eleven kilometres) southeast of the mouth of the Montreal River.
Devil’s Rock
There is another cliff overlooking Lake Temiskaming which is said to have a long association with the mysterious mer-dwarves of native legend. About 11 miles (18 kilometres) northwest of old Fort Temiscamingue, at the section of the lake closest to Cobalt, is a granite escarpment known as Devil’s Rock, or Mani-doo Aja-bikong in Ojibwa. Over the years, Devil’s Rock has borne witness to several uncanny events befitting its sinister appellation. Just east of the cliff, in the middle of the lake, is a piece of land called Burnt Island, or Ile Mann, where two five-year-old children were lost for five days in the wilderness, in the same week of the same month exactly 25 years apart from each other. The first of the children to disappear – namely little Grace Cooper, who wandered away from her family’s campground in August 1913 – declared after her rescue that she had set out to find Devil’s Rock. Predictably, this demonic-sounding landmark attracted the interest of English occultist Aleister Crowley, who suspected that it might be imbued with dark otherworldly power. In 1929, he is said to have climbed the granite face with the aim of finding Ojibwa pictographs, which he believed to be markers denoting a connection with the underworld. In the process, the occultist reportedly lost a chockstone – a piece of climbing equipment – in a fissure in a rocky appendage ironically known as the Finger of God. It should be mentioned that the reality of this alleged pictograph-hunting excursion is called into question by Crowley’s autobiography
There are several stories which purport to explain the origin of Devil’s Rock’s diabolical name. According to the tale apparently favoured by the North Bay Nugget, a newspaper servicing the southerly city of North Bay, Ontario, the cliff’s naming was connected in some way with an old legend in which an Indian princess leapt to her death from the promontory’s heights after being denied marriage to the brave of her choice; how the Manitou features in this legend the Nugget has never deigned to explain. In the summer of 1984, Nugget reporter Gord McCulloch published an old logger’s fable which holds that Devil’s Rock is Satan’s wife, whose infernal spouse turned her to stone on their honeymoon after he tired of her; a French-Canadian version of this story appears in Joan Finnigan’s 1984 book Laughing All the Way Home. Some say the rock owes its name to craggy ledge overlooking the lake which, like New Hampshire’s more famous Old Man in the Mountain, resembles the face of an elderly gentleman in side profile, gazing out over the water. And according to “Backroads” Bill Steer, a professor at Nipissing University and founder of the Canadian Ecology Centre, the Rock was named after the “Memequayshowak” or “rock demons” – almost certainly a variant of the legendary Memegwe – whom local natives traditionally believed dwelled its caves and fissures. “As the story goes,” Steer wrote in an April 12th, 2023 article for the website ‘NorthOntario.Travel’, “the natives surprised the little inhabitants of the many rock crevices and the raiding party captured one of the gnomes and his knife. As the Ojibwe people withdrew, one of the remaining diminutive spirits retreated inside a deep crevice and created such fearsome noises that his captors threw back the stolen knife towards the opening of the crevice they believed was the entry to the underworld.”
The Mug-Wump
On April 20th, 1979, an article appeared in the North Bay Nugget alleging that Lake Temiskaming is home to another sort of monster – a huge creature that lurked beneath the surface. The components of the ‘Tri-Town’ area to which the article refers were the Northern Ontario towns of New Liskeard, Haileybury, and Dymond, which were amalgamated in 2004 into the town of Temiskaming Shores.
“There are rumors circulating throughout the Tri-Town area,” the article began, “that a creature similar to the one inhabiting Loch Ness in Scotland is living in Lake Timiskaming.” The article goes on to explain that this incredible notion was brought to the attention of local journalists by New Liskeard’s mayor, Jack Dent, who claimed to have originally heard the story from a native elder from the Wabi River, which drains into the lake’s northwestern end. The old Indian claimed that the creature was supposed to be as long as four men arranged from head to foot, but had never been seen in its entirety. The legend was later borne out by tales of fishermen getting fishfinder readings of a hulking object moving slowly beneath their boats. The mayor claimed that most sightings of the creature had been made in a “deep channel near Burnt Island and also near Devil’s Rock where the water is reported to be more than 700 feet deep…” Another popular haunt was supposed to be a stretch of water off the town of Ville Marie, not far from the old Fort Temiscamingue. Dent took it upon himself to dub the creature “Mug-Wump”, an old Algonkian word which means “Great One”.
The piece in the North Bay Nugget touched off a series of newspaper articles throughout Northern Ontario, many containing the new report of an old sighting made months, years, or even decades prior, which had presumably been kept private for reasons of social self-preservation. Researcher Craig Heinselman diligently collected these reports and referenced them in his article for the January 2007 issue of the BioFortean Review.
Voyageur Encounters
Perhaps the oldest encounters with the Mug-Wump, which did not make it into newsprint, are the strange experiences purportedly had by HBC voyageurs. In his 2002 book Deep Waters, author James Raffan notes that Lake Temiskaming is bisected by a geological fault line, which runs down the length of the Ottawa River. He proposes that the seismic rumblings which this fracture occasionally produced “gave voyageurs cause for worry… [adding] a certain mystery to the already numinous and at times forbidding character of the lake.
“There are also stories,” Raffan continued, “of mysterious bumpings on the bottom of canoes during the hourly ‘pipes,’ when voyageurs would rest on Lake Temiskaming. Some thought these might have been hermetic drum fish that would congregate in the shadows of the canoes, following them surreptitiously from north to south and back again, piscine agents of the mysterious lake sprites. Others ascribed more sinister origins to the sound.”
Kate Ardtree’s Testimony
The oldest 20th Century Mug-Wump report to make it into the papers was provided by an elderly woman named Kate Ardtree, who gave her testimony to journalist Alice Peeper in early 1982. Although Ardtree was the resident of a local nursing home at that time, she had spent most of her life living in a cottage at the edge of Lake Temiskaming, where her father used to tell her tales of the monster that lurked beneath. The creature was said to resemble a massive sturgeon, with a body the length of two canoes, and with a strange-looking head. In the old days, it would sometimes surface along with air bubbles that escaped from underwater fissures. Its lair was believed to lie off Dawson’s Point, the peninsula which furrows the lake’s northern shore. One day, when she was a girl, perhaps in the 1910s or ‘20s, Ardtree claimed that her father came home with one of the creature’s scales, which was as large as a tea saucer. The elderly woman admitted that she had never seen the monster herself, and was glad that she hadn’t.
Account of a Tugboat Captain
The next-oldest Mug-Wump story comes from John Cobb, a then-83-year-old former tugboat captain who had worked atop Lake Temiskaming for nearly fifty years, who told his tale to reporter Dariene Wroe in August 1995. In the early 1940s, when he was a lowly deckhand, Cobb routinely helped pull timber rafts from the Blanche River, at the lake’s northernmost tip, to the “narrows” just south of Ville-Marie. One night while on duty, he came on the deck of the steam-powered Lady Minto just in time to see a 20-foot-long creature resting just beneath the water’s surface. He recalled that the strange swimmer had a round head and a nose like a land animal. “I didn’t know what it was,” he told Wroe. “When we come up close, it disappeared.”
Sighting Near Devil’s Rock
The Mug-Wump was reportedly seen again in the early 1960s by one Chuck Coull, who gave his story to journalist Mike Pearson in 1979. Coull’s sighting allegedly took place while he and his father were returning home from a boating excursion to Burnt Island, just east of Devil’s Rock. Although Craig Heinselman, in his summary of Pearson’s elusive article, did not specify the location of the Coulls’ home, the destination of their excursion and their Scottish (or, more precisely, non-French) surname hint that the father and son probably lived in Haileybury or New Liskeard, Ontario, placing their sighting at the northwestern end of the lake.
“We were cruising around in the boat, about a third of the way back from Burnt Island,” Coull said, “when we saw what looked like a deadhead. We pulled up to it. It rolled over and swam away… It was the biggest sturgeon you’ve ever seen… I’d been hearing about the thing all my life…” Upon further prompting, Coull estimated the fish to be about eight feet long.
Sighting from the Matabanick Hotel
More than a decade later, in 1978, the monster of Lake Temiskaming surfaced again, this time within view of the bygone Matabanick Hotel in Haileybury, Ontario, on the lake’s northwestern shore. While seated in the hotel dining room, guests Ernie Chartrand and his wife spotted something large in the water, moving towards the shore at a blistering pace. As it neared the water’s edge, the creature did an abrupt about face, revealing a large humped back without a fin. The maneuver also afforded the couple a clear view of the creature’s length, which they estimated to be fifteen feet.
Ice Fishermen’s Reports
In February 1982, Cobalt residents Roger Lapointe and retired RCMP officer Dan Arney allegedly came face to face with the Mug-Wump while doing some night-time ice fishing on Lake Temiskaming. According to an article written by the aforementioned Alice Peeper, Lapointe and Arney were hunkered down in one of their friend’s ice shanties when some huge fish below took both pieces of bait and sheared both of their lines. Baffled, the anglers reset their lines, cracked some beers, and waited for the next bite. About half an hour later, they were rewarded for their efforts by another tremendous jerk, which wrest both of their fishing rods from their holds and pulled them down the ice hole, where they vanished into the black water.
Disgusted by their misfortune, the pair prepared to pack it in for the night, when a peculiar sensation overcame Arney – a sensation that had served him well in the Force. The former Mountie knew that someone, or something, was watching him.
“He reached out,” Peeper wrote, “and put a silencing grip on his partner’s arm, and they began to survey the half-dark interior of the hut.”
Looking down, they saw two protruding eyeballs peering up at them from a glistening black head which had forced itself up through the ice hole. The men beat a hasty retreat to their snowmobile and raced for the safety of the shore.
The last and most incredible Mug-Wump report brought to public attention appeared in the same article as the previous story. At the end of her piece, Alice Peeper included the account of John Sheur of New Liskeard, another ice fisherman, who claimed he heard a crunching sound one night while locking up his shanty.
“Knowing he was the only fisherman still out on the lake,” Peeper wrote, “he decided to see what it was about. Thinking it was probably a dog, he almost walked into a long, dark animal, that seemed to be wrapped about several of the huts and was chewing something…” Sheur stated that the creature looked “something like a dinosaur,” but disclaimed that he did not stay for a second look, instantly fleeing on his snowmobile. Desperate to find someone who might verify his sighting, he paid a visit to a local hotel and secured the assistance of two men, who accompanied him back to the ice. The only evidence of the creature the newcomers managed to find was a snake-like trail in the snow.
Mary Peeper’s Self-Expose
In late February 1982, Mary Peeper published a disappointing article which appears to be nothing less than the tipping of her hand – a cheeky admission that her earlier pieces on the Mug-Wump – which included the testimonies of John Sheur, Roger Lapointe and Dan Arney, and Kate Ardtree – might have been made of more fable than fact. In his article for the BioFortean Review, Craig Heinselman identified “Mary Peeper” as one of several pseudonyms used by Ada Arney, a Cobalt-based author and journalist, whom readers may observe shares a surname with one of the aforementioned ice fishermen. Another nom de plume she affected was the, apparently, Spanish-German-Scottish “Dr. Pablo von McDonell” – a multicultural chimera so outlandish that it must have been crafted for comedic purposes. In an article attributed to Dr. von McDonell, published in the February 24th, 1982 issue of the Temiskaming Speaker, three alleged experts voiced their opinion on the identity of the monster of Lake Temiskaming. The first of these scholars was Dr. Boris Illych Rubiconskubaranov, a professor of psychobiology at the fictional Karl Marx College in the fictional town of Bolshetisk in the fictional country of Russie; he argued that the monster of Lake Temiskaming was probably a Beluga sturgeon, whose ancestors were imported as caviar to Russian ports in Alaska and somehow made their way inland. Another expert was Dr. Johannes Liebig von Brusthalter, a professor of macrobiology at the Max Planck Institute in the fictional city of Eseldorf, West Germany. Finally, there was I. Haggis Campbell, the Director of the Institute for Psychic Studies near Edinburgh, Scotland, who opined that the Mug-Wump is a specimen of Loch Ness Monster, whose ancestors were brought from Scotland to Canada as microscopic eggs. There was a Scottish tradition that endured throughout the Highland Clearances, Campbell explained, in which emigres taking leave of old Caledonia would bring a sample of their native soil with them to their new country. Some of the earth brought by Scottish immigrants to the Lake Temiskaming region, Campbell reasoned, was from Loch Ness, and contained the microscopic eggs of Loch Ness Monsters. Dr. von McDonell concluded his piece by revealing that his real name was, in fact, Mary Wollstonescraft Sheltey – an obvious nod to the author of the 1818 novel Frankenstein – and claiming that he was a “Scientist-in-Residence at the famed Inch Block in Cobalt, Ontario,” the Inch Block being a historic Cobalt multipurpose building.
The same paper contained another article by Ada Arney, this one published under her pseudonym ‘Mary Peeper’, in which she claimed to be in correspondence with an anonymous biologist gracious enough to comment upon the monster of Lake Temiskaming. This nameless expert proposed that the Mug-Wump might be a huge ancient salamander called Ichthyostega. In a later article, published in the March 3rd, 1982 issue of the Temiskaming Speaker, this same biologist proposed another possible identity for the lake monster, namely a long-extinct plesiosaur called Elasmosaurus, which sported a long neck, flippers, and a fishlike tail.
What is the Mug-Wump?
Although Ada Arney’s last two articles on the Mug-Wump diminish the credibility of her work on the topic, the accounts of Ernie and Mrs. Chartrand, who spotted something unusual from Haileybury’s Matabanick Hotel; Chuck Coull and his father, who came upon a huge sturgeon near Devil’s Rock; and respected tugboat Captain John Cobb, who saw a 20-foot-long fish with a bestial head in the 1940s; have no such stains on their character. Taken together, these sightings suggest that there may really be an unusual animal living in Lake Temiskaming, which they paint the picture of being an unusual-looking fish with a length of 8-20 feet.
Most of those who have commented upon the creature, including some of the witnesses, have likened the Mug-Wump to a sturgeon. In spite of this easy solution, it must be remembered that the largest lake sturgeon ever recorded – lake sturgeon, or white sturgeon, being the only freshwater varieties of that species known to live in Canadian waters – was a 15 foot 4 inch long monster hauled from Manitoba’s Roseau River, a far cry from Captain Cobb’s 20-foot-long behemoth. If the Mug-Wump, or ‘Tessie’, as it is sometimes called today, is indeed a lake sturgeon, it appears to be the largest of its species by a wide margin. A potential explanation for this discrepancy, provided by an anonymous local fisherman, appears in a bygone French-language internet article which serves as the introduction to a sub-chapter from Canadian author Joel Champetier’s 1994 horror novel La Memoire du Lac. “It comes around every year in July or early August,” the article claims, referring to the Mug-Wump. “The hypothesis: these two months correspond to spawning time. According to a former commercial fishermen in the region, it is a large sturgeon. According to him, people generally see it on calm, sunny days. As calm water has the physical property of doubling objects, the illusion would be complete. Witnesses would therefore see the fish twice its real size.”
The go-to reference books for unusual and mysterious lake monsters, namely George M. Eberhart’s 2010 tome Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology, and Loren Coleman and Patrick Huygue’s 2003 classic The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep, have surprisingly little to say on the monster of Lake Temiskaming, simply listing the creature as a lake monster supposed to reside in Ontario, Canada. Indigenous folklore is less silent on the matter, having at least one traditional story about an enormous fish which dwelled in a lake in Northern Ontario. It is perhaps fitting that we end our piece with this oldest of Mug-Wump stories – a humorous tale which was told around northern campfires long before the Chevalier de Troyes first dipped his paddle into Lake Temiskaming.
In his 1995 book Sacred Legends, Canadian folklorist James R. Stevens included an Oji-Cree story told to him by elders of the Sandy Lake First Nation in northwestern Ontario about a huge fish encountered by Ja-Ka-Baysh, a legendary Ojibwa hero and trickster figure. According to this brief fable, Ja-Ka-Baysh and his sister once lived beside a lake that was home to a huge fish. Contrary to the advice of his sister, who feared this freshwater leviathan, Ja-Ka-Baysh tested a batch of new arrows he made by shooting them out over the lake. When he swam to retrieve them, the giant fish swallowed him in one gulp.
Ja-Ka-Baysh’s sister, unaware of what had befallen her younger brother, and supposing that he had gone off on another of his adventures, busied herself with catching fish. As fate would have it, she managed to catch the monster of which she had long been afraid, which seemed even a little bigger than usual.
“She took the fish home,” Stevens’ informants told him, “and cut open their bellies to put them in the cook pot. When she cut open the belly of the big fish, Ja-Ka-Baysh jumped out very much alive.
“At first the sister was frightened and then she started to laugh at the dirty Ja-Ka-Baysh. He was covered with fish entrails.
“‘I told you, I told you,’ she laughed. But Ja-Ka-Baysh said nothing and walked to the water’s edge to clean himself.”
Sources
Mysteries of Ontario (1999), by John Robert Colombo
“Cobalt Prospectors Find Cabin of Former Chief is ‘Haunted’, in the November 18th, 1931 issue of The Nugget (North Bay, Ontario)
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https://themiraclespage.info/phenomena/painting.htm
“Mysterious Light: Cross Glow in Old Painting at Rancho de Taos Mission,” by Mickey Toppino in the February 10th, 1958 issue of the Albuquerque Tribune
“‘Problem’ Picture,” in the February 22nd, 1911 issue of the Huddersfield Daily Examiner (Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England)
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Greatest Mysteries of the Modern World (2004), by John Pinkney
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Count Frontenac: And New France Under Louis XIV (1910), by Francis Parkman Jr.
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Worth Travelling Miles to See: Diary of a Survey Trip to Lake Temiskaming, 1886 (2004), by A.H. Telfer, Edited by Lorene DiCorpo
A Canoe Trip to Fort Temiscamingue in ’79, by Sha-Ko-Nash, in the April 13th and 20th, 1933 issues of the Haileyburian (Haileybury, Ontario)
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“Pine Cones: And Still She Waits,” by Gord McCulloch, in the July 31st, 1984 issue of the North Bay Nugget
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Laughing All the Way Home (1984), by Joan Finnigan
“Field Boy’s Experience Like Haileybury Child’s Plight of 25 Years Ago: Nugget Files Tell of Little Girl Surviving Bushland Ordeal: Both Lost Five Days,” in the August 19th, 1938 issue of the North Bay Nugget
Deep Waters: Courage, Character, and the Lake Timiskaming Canoeing Tragedy (2002), by James Raffan
“Devil’s Rock in Temiskaming Shores: A Legendary Adventure with Backroads Bill,” by ‘Backroads’ Bill Steer, in the April 12th, 2023 issue of Northern Ontario Travel
“Mugwump of the Lake,” by Craig Heinselman, in the January 2007 issue of the BioFortean Review
“Son of Nessie Inhabiting Lake Temiskaming?” in the April 20th, 1979 issue of the North Bay Nugget
“‘Old Tess’ or is it ‘Mugwump’: The Story of the Lake Temiskaming Monster,” in the October 18th, 2006 issue of the Temiskaming Speaker
“Haileybury ‘Captain’ Recalls Days of the Tugboat,” by Liz McCulloch, in the March 27th, 1986 issue of the North Bay Nugget
“Species Spotlight: Lake Sturgeon,” in the January 15th, 2014 issue of NatureCanada.ca
Sacred Legends (1995), by James R. Stevens and Carl Ray
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