However, the southern New Brunswick lake was actually named with tongue firmly in cheek by newly-arrived Loyalists who were thoroughly unimpressed to discover the land in Canada they’d been promised was located underneath said lake.
Loch Stalking Peril
Sightings of an enormous eel-like creature approximately 12 to 15 metres (40 to 50 feet) long in Lake Utopia pre-date the arrival of Europeans. The local Maliseet Nation tell an early tale of two canoeists who were chased across the lake by an angry giant serpent but, apart from a mid-1800s report of the creature busting though the ice in an attempt to feast on an ice fisherman, most reports are of a relatively benign creature that simply likes to bask in the sun. The most recent reported sighting was in 1996 by local retirees Roger and Lois Wilcox, also out canoeing at the time.
Lake Utopia is around seven kilometres long and only three kilometres at its widest, which hardly seems like utopian confines for a good-sized monster, but then again lake is connected to the Magaguadavic River and, from there, to the Atlantic Ocean by one of the deepest natural canals in the world.
Giant Eel Theory
One theory that may have some legs to it is that the monster (or perhaps generations of monster) is actually a species of giant eel since eels spawn at sea but always return to their native lake, a bit like salmon only in reverse. Seasonal spawning patterns could also explain why Old Ned sightings are always a few years apart and why a similar creature has been reported in the nearby waters of the Bay of Fundy.
Although the Magaguadavic (a Maliseet word meaning, interestingly, “river of eels”) passes through a waterfall and a hydroelectric station in the town of St. George on its way to the sea, there are a series of underwater tunnels beneath the town that could conceivably be used by a savvy sea monster to return home again.
Loch Ness Monster Connection
The premise that lake monsters are actually sea monsters that travel through subterranean passages has also been floated to explain the existence of the most famous of them all: Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster. Both lakes share a proximity to the ocean and both lie between the 45th and 50th parallels—a circle of latitude that forms a beltway of lake-monster sightings around the globe that includes Ogopogo of British Columbia’s Lake Okanagan.
References
Huyghe, Patrick, The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep (Tarcher-Penguin, 2003)
Andrew Fleming - Andrew Fleming is a freelance writer based in Vancouver and the author of several alleged humour books. He has a perfectly sensible BA in ...
