Quite dug, with a grain of proverbial salt, this fun youtuber doc, Monster in the St. Lawrence River?
Admittedly, it uses too much re-hashed waterway footage about giant sea serpent sightings in the St. Lawrence, but the accounts are interesting, if a little repetitive. Many lack opposing arguments (for example, an elk in the water can appear bizarre, huge, and with horns and humps), with the exception of a McGill university professor easily exposing a purported specimen as a hoax in 1895).
Still, there's a fine Indigenous storytelling connection to ground the whole works, the traditional Kahnawake Mohawk belief regarding the giant water snake of the St. Lawrence. The doc recounts lots of sightings near Saguenay and Gananoque, Quebec.
I grew up not far from the St. Lawrence. You can see it from Second Street, which runs somewhat east to west along the southern edge of my old neighbourhood. The idea of sea serpents in those waters and sea serpents as a concept fired up my imagination early on, when I was a grade school kid. I drew it. I might have dreamt about it. One of the stories in my book Fear Itself includes such a creature lurking that very river.
And I knew it! I recalled a sea serpent story I heard when I was growing up. In this mini-doc, at about the 40-minute mark, there is a reference to a 1936 sighting of a sea serpent near the Long Sault Parkway, about 15 klicks from my hometown of Cornwall. The narrator mispronounces "Massena", but their (cryptozoological) heart is in the right place. Locals affectionately nicknamed the purported creature "Oscar". Oscar!
Some horned serpent sightings in the doc sound a lot like they could be elk. Before the Seaway was built, creatures could enter the river from oceanic waters. There's an early 1900's Mohawk story, the Legend of Sa’ronkwa’sen, about a kid, Kahnawake, who piggy-backed the serpent and was spotted later near Cornwall Island by Akwesasne Mohawks. I am more inclined to believe Lake Ontario has older creatures, being in the Monster Belt, the same latitude around the world where many witnesses have spotted purported sea serpents. It corresponds to roughly between 45 degrees and 60 degrees north latitude.
That said, I still like the idea, however improbable, of something being in the river, or that at least used to be.
Anyhow, I am courageous enough to admit it—I still adore sea serpents. I might dream about them, still. The Plesiosaurus is my favourite dinosaur, as an adult. Dinosaurs remain proof that monsters, great creatures, roamed this big blue marble for many, many moons before we appeared and for far longer. And I consider this discovery marvelous—synchronicity at its most startling.
Documentary text is here, too.
https://mysteriesofcanada.com/quebec/monsters-of-the-st-lawrence-river/
