Beautiful Water - prelude (Patreon)

From the field journal of Dr. Aurora:

Legends of lake monsters are as old as dirt, and ones of sea monsters as old as time. It makes sense to start this off with a lake monster. Ontario is named for its lakes after all, from the Iroquoian word meaning “great lake” or “beautiful/sparkling water”.

Ontario’s lakes were formed during the end of the last Ice Age when the receding glaciers carved into the earth and filled the scars with its melted ice. This left behind thousands of freshwater lakes across the province.

Excluding the Great Lakes, Lake Simcoe is the fourth largest lake in Ontario. Before it was named after first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada in the nineteenth century, it was called Lac aux Claies ("Hurdle Lake") by French fur traders. Before that, it was called Lac de Taranteau ("Lake Taronto") in maps made by French Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And before European colonization, the Wyandot (Huron) people knew it as Ouentironk, meaning “beautiful water”. Carbon dating on the ancient fishing weirs located at the Narrows between lakes Simcoe and Couchiching show that humans have inhabited the lake's region for at least the last 4,000 years. Needless to say, these waters are old.

The Foundation became aware of the creature that dwells within the lake back in 1991 after news of a local civilian captured footage of a “lake monster” began to circulate. When it was discovered that there had been reported sightings of the creature dating back to 1952 and possibly even earlier, an investigation took place to determine why it hadn't been looked into sooner. To our surprise, the question answered itself - while the creature began to make minor mentions in the outside world on Parawatch message boards and the cryptozoology community, the people living in the surrounding counties continued on with their lives blissfully unaware and disinterested in the creature's existence. 

Upon doing some research in RAISA’s archives, I found the creature had been briefly mentioned in documents from His Majesty's Foundation for the Secure Containment of the Paranormal (a precursor to the SCP Foundation) in 1823. It appears to be some sort of subtle anti-memetic affect surrounding the entity that causes locals living in the region to largely forget, ignore, or become disinterested in the creature’s existence. There exist no urban legends, folktales, or myths surrounding the entity. There aren't even any corny roadside tourist traps or souvenirs, and yet evidence suggests it had always been there in those beautiful waters. Continuously unnoticed for thousands of years.