“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
Albert Einstein penned these words in 1930. A century later, the statement remains just as true.
Perhaps that’s why people seem to crave the mysterious. We’re fascinated by ghosts, unexplained phenomena, and monsters. Count me among those intrigued by these tales. That’s why I was thrilled to write Canadian Monsters and Mythical Creatures and to have the opportunity to include a monster from my own figurative backyard — Lake Simcoe’s Kempenfelt Kelly.
Unlike many legendary beasts, this lake monster has some historic provenance to it.
In 1823, settler David Soules witnessed something in the water of Lake Simcoe that profoundly shook him. He and his brother, James, were tending sheep by the shore of Kempenfelt Bay when he saw something surface in the water.
“It was a huge, long thing that went through the water like a streak,” he later noted.
Soules went on to describe it as “having huge fin-like appendages and being very large and very ugly looking.”
This was the first detailed sighting of the lake creature that would later come to be known as Kempenfelt Kelly. It should be noted Soules was no newcomer to the wilderness; he had a distinguished record serving as a soldier on the frontiers in the War of 1812 and had extensive nautical experience on the rivers and lakes of Upper Canada. This was not the type of man who might easily mistake a beaver or a moose for a sea serpent.
Perhaps this was the same creature First Nations peoples had long believed inhabited the depths of Lake Simcoe. Their name for it was Mishepeshu. According to First Nations lore, Mishepeshu sometimes appeared as a horned sea serpent and other times as a horned lynx.
Soules was the first to record his sightings of the Lake Simcoe monster, but he was hardly the last. There was a flurry of encounters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Newspapers reported several Innisfil farmers believed the monster was responsible for the mysterious death of sheep grazing along the shore of Cooks Bay.
In 1903, a beast with a “head as big as a dog and with horns” startled a pair of railway detectives who were boating on Lake Simcoe.
The creature, as described by Soules and dozens of witnesses, since defies easy classification. It is almost always brown in colour, smooth skin, with a long, almost serpentine neck topped by a head resembling that of a dog in shape and features. Similar creatures have been reported in bodies of water across the nation.
The name Kempenfelt Kelly emerged in 1967 when Arch Brown, a native of Oro-Medonte Township, apparently saw the creature four times. He copyrighted the name Kempenfelt Kelly and donated it to the City of Barrie for tourism promotion.
Regardless of whether an undiscovered beast lurks within the depths of Lake Simcoe, October is the ideal time to contemplate the chilling possibilities.
