I had come to the Temiskaming Lake area via by canoe during the summer of 2000 CE. During the past years, I have learned a lot about the history and the people of this area. One of the most intriguing stories or local legends I have heard deserve to be told. No doubt you have heard about the Loch Ness monster called "Nessie", which dwell in the deep waters of Scotland. There has been sighting of various unexplained creatures like sea monsters off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and around Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. There have been sighting of strange creatures in the Geat Lakes and in Lake Erie at Kingston, both located in Ontario. There has even been sightings at Harrison Lake where there are hot springs, and Lake Okanogan in BC. Saddle Lake, Alberta where local natives believe a monster is lurking there. But very little is known about the monster reported to lurk in the deep waters of Lake Temiskaming. A lake monster known around here as "Mugwump." The first time I ever heard about a Mugwump monster was when I was warned by some of the local people while traveling about on Lake Temiskamung in my canoe. There seems to have been enough eyewitness who claimed to have seen this Mugwump, which only adds to the many legends one hears about monsters lurking in the sea or large, deep lakes. In the case of Lake Temiskaming, it is a large, though narrow body of water which is around eighty miles long and seven miles at its widest part. The lake has extremely deep water all along the Ontario shoreline. Deep enough to give any self respecting monster plenty of room for it to maneuver and exist. The Temiskaming Speaker had reported that in 1978, Ernie Chartrand and his wife, who lived in the town of Haileybury, were seated at a table in The Matabanick, a local Hotel, where they had a good view of the lake. Their attention was drawn to "something" that was moving shoreward at a very fast pace. As it was nearing the shore, it did a sudden and complete turnabout and headed out back to deep water. Both Mr. and Mrs. Chartrand had noticed that this "thing" had a large humped back, and they noticed that it had no fins along its side or back, as this thing swam away. According to The Speaker, Ernie stated that it must have been 15 feet long. He further stated that he will go on record anytime as to his sighting of the Lake Temiskaming monster. In the Peeper Report, in the February 17,th 1982 issue, "The Speaker" carried a story entitled; Lake Temiskaming monster sighted again, which was written by Alice Peeper, who was a Speaker Correspondent. The story read as follows; Ice fishermen with their ice-fishing huts out on Lake Temiskaming have sighted the legendary lake monster again. According to Roger Lapointe and Dan Arney of Cobalt, it will be a long time before they go ice-fishing again. The two men decided to try their luck at ice-fishing so they managed to borrow a friend's ice-fishing hut for a night, and what a night it turned out to be! It seems that they had just settled in, when their tip-ups started to agitate in an alarming manner. Hauling the lines in, they discovered their bait and lines were missing. It looked like they were sheared right off, the men had reported later. Resetting the line, they settled back with a brew and were wondering what was stirring in the depths below the fish-hut, when in about 20 minutes, or perhaps half an hour, their tackle flew right up in the air and then vanished down the hole. The men were dumb-founded! "To hell with this," Lapointe relates, "Let's pack it in", and Arney agreed. They were donning their parkas, when Arney said he could feel the small hairs on the back of his neck stiffen (this sixth sense had served him well in the RCMP back a dozen years). Arney said he just knew that something was watching them as he reached out and put a silencing grip on his partner's arm and they began to survey the half-dark interior of the hut. Looking downwards at the fishing hole, they saw a black, glistening head with protruding eyeballs, and one of these eyes was staring fixedly at the men "like it was sizing us up for a snack", Lapointe remarked. When Arney shouted, "Let's get the hell out of here", he lost no time in following him out the door. They leaped aboard their snow machine and revved the Big Cat into action. It spun its tracks as they swerved and raced for shore. When contacted about their experience, both men agreed there was "something" out there in the lake, alright. Another sighting of the Lake Timiskaming monster has been made by John Sheur of New Liskeard, who claims he saw the monster quite recently. Mr. Sheur says he was locking up his ice-fishing hut for the night, when he heard a crunching noise. Knowing he was the only fisherman still out on the lake, he decided to see what it was about. Thinking it was probably a dog, he almost walked into a long, dark animal, that seemed to be wrapped about several of the ice-fishing huts and was chewing something, said Sheur. What did its head look like? the reporter asked. Something like a dinosaur, said Sheur, "but I didn't stay for a second look." Sheur had dashed for shore on his snow machine and, rushing into a local hotel, tried to get several men to go out and investigate. Two men finally decided to go take a look, but all they found was a rather snake-like trail in the snow. They also noticed that one of the fish-hut doors was wide open. Someone had forgotten to secure it, so the men closed it against the drifting snow. Mr. Harmon of Haileybury, who has an ice-fishing hut near where the incident occurred, said it was the darndest thing that he had been losing line and fish left out in the snow. He presumed it was stray dogs, but now he's not so sure! Following up on another lead, The Speaker's roving reporter called upon Mrs. Kate Ardtree, who lived for many years in a cottage on the shore of Lake Temiskaming. Now a resident in a local nursing home, Mrs. Ardtree was delighted to hear "old Tess"' has been seen again. "Sure I know about it, or should I say them?" Ardtree smiled. "I well remember my daddy talking about the monster". Mrs. Ardtree also remembers her Dad bringing home one of its scales when she was just a girl. The scale was as big as a saucer and the family had it around the house for years, she stated. "Asked whether she had ever seen the monster herself, Mrs. Ardtree said she was glad that she hadn't but she states they used to say it was much like a big sturgeon, except its head was different and that it was long -- about the length of two canoes put end to end. "Mrs. Ardtree says she wouldn't be surprised if there was more than one monster, perhaps a family of them, and she "suspects" they must live off Dawson's Point. Seems her Dad use to say there was a crack in the lake bed there and a deep subterranean river flowed through. "But you just tell folks to keep their eyes on those air-holes and pressure ridges," she warned. "That's where Tess used to come up in the old days". In a following issue of The Speaker, Haileybury council made a tongue-in-cheek comment about a letter he received from a resident who said the monster should be treated with the same compliance as other Haileybury residents if it should wander onto its streets. In The Speaker's youth pages of that same issue, another tongue-in-cheek look brought up the speculation that Lake Temiskaming's "Mugwump" could be related to Loch Ness, "Nessie." In a subsequent issues of The Speaker in 1982, there were inside reports of school children drawing pictures of what the Lake Temiskaming monster could look like and poems were published about it. One variety store in Cobalt was apparently selling miniature replicas of the lake's monster and the local cable channel carried a greeting to the monster, welcoming it to the Tri-Towns. During the1990's a proposal was made to operate some kind of tourist attraction based on "Mugwump" was kicked around, but nothing really came out of it. The three separate communities of New Liskeard, Haileybury and Dymond had amalgamated on January 1, 2004, which is now known as the City of Temiskaming Shores.