Washington State Lake Creatures

Washington State appears to be the home of many lake monsters over the years.

Omak Lake

Omak Lake is eight miles long, two-thirds of a mile wide and about 325 feet deep at its deepest point. The Okanagan people once believed that Omak Lake was inhabited by spirits, and avoided the area.On Aug. 27, 1944, M.L. Little, a Tonasket man, wrote a letter to the editor of the Spookane Newspaper relaying the tale of a sea serpent in Omak Lake.

Little said he was traveling to Omak with Fred Howard and saw “what appeared to be two large long logs lying close to shore. Seconds later, another look showed one of these to be swinging around and heading out into the lake.”They were 12 to 16 feet long, 2 feet in diameter and submerged just under the water’s surface.“The rough blotch of the body remained quite visible and the water in turmoil during its passage,” Little wrote. The head broke the surface a few times, and it was the size of 30-gallon drum. The men “easily followed its progress the entire distance to the cliffs at the far end of the lake where it splashed for a very few seconds, then disappeared from view.“I should be greatly pleased if any who may have seen this creature would write me,” he wrote, and included his mailing address.

There are no modern sightings however some believe caves and tunnels beneath Omak Lake lead to Okanagan Lake over the border in Canada.

Lake Okanagan in Canada is said to be the home of a water monster called Ogopogo The lake is approximately 120 kilometres long; 3.5 kilometres wide and is 235 metres at its deepest point. Indigenous people have legends about a monster in the lake. Sightings are reported of a creature 20 to 50 feet long, with a horse shaped head and an undulating serpent like body. The first recorded sighting was by John Allison in 1872.Sightings continuing to this day.

Rock Lake 

A decade later, on May 15, 1956, another letter to the editor, this one from C.F. Dement, brought up the storied monster of Rock Lake, a deep, cliff-lined lake in the Scablands, also in Washington State.

Dement’s grandfather purchased some land near the lake in 1890, and Dement spent several summers on the lake as a child.“It was during these visits that I heard stories of a huge prehistoric monster which lived in Rock lake, and it was said that the Indians shunned the location,” he wrote. “My sis owns property on one of the lake’s points,” a local landowner and hobby historian of the area anonymously told the paper. “One evening, she was rounding the point into a bay when she saw something huge on top of the water suddenly splash and go under. I asked her how big it was. ‘It was as big as a tree and stretched further across than my living room,’ she said. I think it was a sturgeon myself.” Monster or no, the article quoted a scientist, leaving a more harrowing note on the notoriously dangerous lake.“Once a body gets down 200 feet or so, it will just stay there,” said Bob Peck, a Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife fisheries biologist, describing the potential fate of careless boaters on Rock Lake. “I hear they stay in a pretty good condition too, until someone pulls them up – then they just fall apart.”

In 1995, The Spokesman-Review profiled the lake, mentioning the “Indian and urban legend” that the lake is home to a monster.

So are all these lake creatures related or the same  creatures or family of creatures roaming from lake to lake perhaps because of food sources or the weather? There are probably more lakes with sightings of strange creatures .An interesting question for someone who lives in Washington State to investigate. Do we have any volunteers?