“In Kempenfelt Bay a dog-faced shape surfaces, blinking at the cottagers before slipping back down.”
Igopogo is the resident mystery of Lake Simcoe, Ontario — a lake ringed by cottages, marinas, and more than a century and a half of newspaper sea-serpent stories. Its portrait is the oddest in the Canadian lake-monster family: where its cousins are serpents, Igopogo is repeatedly described with a dog- or seal-like face on a neck 'like a stovepipe' — a mammalian monster, surfacing to look at the boaters before it sinks.
The name is a layered joke — Ogopogo of British Columbia crossed with the 1952 Pogo comic-strip slogan 'I Go Pogo' — and depending on where you meet it the beast also answers to Kempenfelt Kelly, Beaverton Bessie, or Simcoe Kelly. Behind the whimsy sits a genuinely long record: an alleged sighting from 1823, Victorian newspaper flaps, a First Nations chief among its witnesses, and a sonar contact logged in 1983.
The Legend
The record opens in 1823, when early settler David Soules, tending sheep by the lake, reportedly watched a long creature leave a wake in the water and a trail in the mud. By the late nineteenth century the 'sea serpent' was a running item in the local press: the Orillia Times tracked it 'circumventing our lake' in July 1880, and The Northern Advance announced 'The Sea Serpent Captured' in August 1882 and 'The Sea Serpent Appears Again' in May 1900.
The modern era belongs to Kempenfelt Bay, the deep arm of the lake that reaches into Barrie. In 1952 four witnesses, among them Wellington Charles, chief of the Georgina Island First Nation, reported the creature; in 1963 Charles gave the legend its defining description — 'a neck like a stovepipe with a face like a boxer dog'. Odder variants exist: one early account credited the beast with antennae and octopus-like arms.
Documented Sightings
A photograph was claimed in 1976, and in 1983 sonar operator William W. Skrypetz recorded a contact he read as a large animal with a long neck — sceptics answered with a school of fish. In 1991 came the case's best-known footage: a video showing what its takers described as a large, seal-like animal in the lake, the closest the legend has come to matching its own peculiar dog-faced description.
The prosaic candidates are strong. Lake Simcoe held lake sturgeon — Canada's largest freshwater fish, capable of reaching two metres and more than 180 kilograms, with ridged, prehistoric-looking backs — while otters and out-of-place pinnipeds fit the dog-faced descriptions almost embarrassingly well. The Simcoe County Archives, which keeps the clippings, treats the serpent with the affection due a long-serving local character.
The Lore
Igopogo's dog face is its taxonomy. Canadian lake monsters are, almost without exception, serpents in the Ogopogo mould; Simcoe's is a mammal-shaped anomaly, and the explanations mirror the difference — a lake that hosted sturgeon below and swimming mammals along its shores produced a monster that looks like both at once. The borrowed name marks it as a late, knowing entry in the '-pogo' dynasty of Canadian lake beasts.
Barrie embraced the creature outright. In 1967 businessman Arch Brown commissioned a cartoon of the serpent, christening it Kempenfelt Kelly, and in 1990 Kelly became the City of Barrie's official mascot — a civic seal of approval few cryptids ever receive. Sightings have thinned in recent decades, but the beast keeps its posts: a waterfront historical marker, archive retrospectives, and the standing invitation of a deep, busy bay.
Field Notes
- ✦ Mid-century sightings, a 1976 photograph, and a 1991 video anchor the modern legend.
- ✦ The dog- or seal-like face sets it apart from most Canadian lake serpents.
- ✦ Reports cluster around the populated Kempenfelt Bay area near Barrie.
- ✦ In 1963 Chief Wellington Charles described 'a neck like a stovepipe with a face like a boxer dog'.
- ✦ Cartoon alter ego Kempenfelt Kelly, commissioned in 1967, became Barrie's official mascot in 1990.
Case File
- Classification
- Lake creature
- Category
- Lake/Sea Monster
- Territory
- Lake Simcoe, Ontario
- First Sighted
- First alleged sighting in 1823; newspaper reports from the 1880s
- Habitat
- Freshwater Ontario lake
- Reported Size
- Around 12 m long
- Also Known As
- Kempenfelt Kelly · Lake Simcoe Monster