OGOPOGO

Ogopogo Statue in Kelowna,British Columbia

Ogopogo or Naitaka (Salish: n'ha-a-itk, "lake demon") is the name given to a mythical cryptid lake monster reported to live in Okanagan Lake, in British Columbia, Canada. Ogopogo has been allegedly seen by First Nations people since the 19th century. The most common description of Ogopogo is a 40 to 50-foot-long (12 to 15 m) sea serpent. Lake monster investigator Benjamin Radford notes “however, that these First Nations stories were not referring to a literal lake monster like Ogopogo, but instead to a legendary water spirit. The supernatural N’ha-a-itk of the Okanagan Valley Indians is long gone.” 

Appearance:

Descriptions vary, but certain characteristics have been repeated through the decades: Ogopogo is green with a snakelike body about 25 meters long. Some say its head looks like a horse, while others say that it’s reptilian or goat-like. Many even claim to have photographed Ogopogo. The pictures have always been inconclusive.

However, Because the physical evidence for the beast is limited to unclear photographs and film, it has also been suggested that the sightings are misidentifications of common animals, such as otters, and inanimate objects, such as floating logs it's also possible that its a plesiosaur, mosasaur or pliosaur.

Chronology:

In 1926 a sighting is claimed to have occurred at an Okanagan Mission beach. This event was supposedly witnessed by about thirty cars of people who all claimed to have seen the same thing. In 1968 Art Folden filmed what is claimed to be footage of the alleged creature, showing a large wake moving across the water. A computer analysis of the footage concluded it was a solid, three-dimensional object

In 2011, a cell phone video captured two dark shapes in the water. A suggested explanation is that the video shows two logs. Radford analyzed the video forDiscovery News and concluded that “The video quality is poor and the camera is shaky, but a closer look at the 30-second video reveals that, instead of one long object, there are actually two shorter ones, and they seem to be floating next to each other at slightly different angles. There are no humps, nor head, nor form; only two long, darkish, more or less straight forms that appear to be a few dozen feet long. In short, they look a lot like floating logs, which would not be surprising since Lake Okanagan has tens of thousands of logs harvested by the timber industry floating just under the lake's surface.".

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El Sacoman (The Sack Man)

El Sacoman by FAB-Dark

El Sacoman or The Sack Man (also called the Bag Man or Man with the Bag/Sack) is a figure similar to the bogeyman, portrayed as a man with a sack on his back who carries naughty children away. Variants of this figure appear in many Latin countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Brazil and the countries of Spanish America, where it referred to as el "Hombre del costal", el hombre del saco, or in Portuguese, o homem do saco (all of which mean "the sack/bag man"), and also in Eastern Europe, Haiti and some countries in Asia.

Appearance:

The "Sack Man" is envisioned as an impossibly ugly and skinny old man carrying a large sack who wanders the land searching for "naughty" children - whom he is said to capture and stuff in his bag before spiriting them away to a grisly fate (many tales say that the "Sack Man" eats his young victims).The character is not considered as a mythical creature by children.Instead,he is recognized as an insane psychotic murderer that has been accepted by Society.

Chronology:

The "Sack Man" was likely inspired by a very real man who, during the 16th and 17th centuries, was in charge of collecting orphan babies in order to take them to the orphanages: he would put them in a huge bag or in wicker baskets, and carry them all through the province collecting more children. Most of them usually died before reaching the orphanage due to the lack of care and the obviously insalubrious conditions in which he transported them: the lingering memory of this figure may well have inspired the bogeyman as envisioned in modern lore.

In Spain in 1910, a seven-year-old boy was kidnapped to be used as a cure for Francisco Ortega’s tuberculosis. Ortega had been told by a local healer that he could rid himself of the disease by drinking the blood of a child and applying a hot poultice made from the child’s fat on his chest. For a large sum of money, the healer drugged the boy and put him in a sack. He was killed and used as prescribed. Ortega and the healer were both executed.

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Bunyip

The Bunyip is a mythical creature from Australian Folklore.It is said to live in swamps,lakes,waterholes,stagnant blackwater (billabongs) and even wells.It is found in Aboriginal folklore tales and stories.The legend also held that the Bunyip was a aggressive hairy animal with supernatural powers.

Appearance:

There are many different descriptions of what the bunyip looks like. Features that were often reported in newspapers in the early 19th-century included dark fur, a face like a dog, sharp teeth and claws, flippers, tusks or horns, and a duck-like bill.One writer, Robert Brough Smyth, recorded many different descriptions of the bunyip. But he concluded that most people did not really know much about what it looked like or its behaviour, and that they were too afraid of the creature to be able to take note of its appearance. Aboriginal drawings depict a creature with a horse-like tail,flippers and walrus-like tusks or horns.Sometimes the bunyip was enormous, other times the size of a dog.At times it was reported to have a long body and a horse-shaped head.Some researchers believe that bunyip category may have included more than one cryptid.

Traditional Art

Chronology:

In the mid-1800s, an unidentified skull was found along a river bank in New South Wales that seemed to prove the existence of bunyips. Many observers were not convinced, and believed the skull discovery was a hoax. Research was halted because the skull mysteriously disappeared after a few days on exhibit at the Australian Museum in Sydney. Coincidentally, reports of bunyip sightings increased dramatically during this time.

Although legendary bunyip sightings have emanated from throughout Australia, 19th century occurrences centered especially on Lake George and Lake Bathurst. Later reports described the once-carnivorous monster as a harmless grazing herbivore. The first sightings were reported in the early 1800s; the last recorded sighting was in 1890.

The first written account of the Bunyip was in July 1845.A newspaper reported on the finding of some fossils near Geelong. When the bones were shown to an Aboriginal man, he was said to have immediately recognized it as the bunyip. He was asked to draw a picture of the bunyip. The newspaper described it as having a head like an emu and the body and legs of an alligator. Its legs were said to be strong, with thick and short hind legs and long legs in front. It was said to have long claws. When in the water, it was said to swim like a frog, but when on shore it would walk on its hind legs, standing 12 or 13 feet (3.7 or 4.0 m) high.

In January 1846, a weird-looking skull was taken from the banks of Murrumbidgee River in New South Wales. The person who found it said that all the natives it had been shown to had called it a bunyip.The skull was put on display in the Australian Museum in Sydney. Crowds came to see it, and The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that many of the visitors told stories about their "bunyip sightings"

The Skull Displayed in the Australian Museum.

Another early story about the bunyip was written in 1852 by an escaped convict named William Buckley. He wrote that in many of the lakes he had visited, there lived an "amphibious animal, which the natives call Bunyip". He wrote that he only ever saw the back of the animal, which he said was covered in grey feathers. He described it as being the size of a small cow.He claimed the bunyip was believed to have supernatural powers.

Explanation:

Researchers have offered their own possible scientific bases for the bunyip folktales. Depending on the researcher, the bunyip lake monster could be:

• Related to the doyarchu, also called the “Irish Crocodile,” a known aquatic man-killer 
• A giant otter 
• An undiscovered aquatic marsupial 
• An undiscovered variety of freshwater seal 
• A Diprotodon, extinct for some 20,000 years, which is known to have terrified early Australian settlers 
• An Australian Fur Seal, which emits a loud cry similar to the bunyip when it is trapped inland by flooding

• Based on fossilized animal skeletons that the Indigenous Australians came across, such as of the prehistoric giant kangaroo, the Procoptodon, whose fossils indicate they weighed more than 5.8 kg or 500 pounds. 
• Scholars have suggested that the story of the bunyip may have been passed down from a time when megafauna still existed in Australia. Comparisons have been made to extinct marsupials like the Diprotodon or Thylacoleo. Other scholars have suggested that people finding the fossilised remains of such animals would identify them as the bunyip.

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