Mystical places in Canada
8 legends · 3 cities
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Country Road Creature
Another of Henderson's: a gaunt figure the height of a telegraph pole, caught apparently by accident through a car window on an empty road between fields. Nothing is formally known about it — no habits, no origin, no name beyond the descriptive one. That is the device: the caption under the picture is shorter than a caption normally is, and the rest is left to you.
Bridge Worm
Henderson posted it on 14 August 2019. A long segmented body, apparently assembled from human skulls and vertebrae, wound around the underside of a bridge span. The mechanism is the one all his work uses: the creature does not chase and does not attack, it is simply already there — under a structure you drive over daily and have never once looked beneath.
Long Horse
A rare thing in Henderson's bestiary: a creature that means no harm. A horse's skull on a neck tens of metres long, hanging down from somewhere above. In the mythology that accumulated around it online, Long Horse warns of danger — its appearance is a sign rather than a threat, and the only thing that hurts is the sound it makes, which it cannot help. Of the whole late-2010s internet menagerie it is the one that grew the friendliest fandom.
Cartoon Cat
Henderson drew it in August 2018, days after Siren Head. The creature is done in the visual language of 1930s American animation — rubber-hose limbs, saucer eyes, a permanent grin — but stands two storeys tall and has teeth a cartoon cat should not have. The trick is a single one and it works every time: take an idiom an entire generation associates with safety and childhood, and scale it up until it stops being funny.
Siren Head
A forty-foot figure of rusted metal with two loudspeakers where a head should be. The Canadian illustrator Trevor Henderson posted the first drawing in August 2018 and nothing happened for a year and a half — by his own account it got a couple of likes and was forgotten. It went off in the spring of 2020, when a clip of the thing towering over a city spread everywhere, and within four months it was the most recognisable monster on the internet. Its voice is playback: air-raid sirens, fragments of other people's conversations, calls for help.
Cadboro Bay and Caddy
The bay off Victoria that gave its name to the sea serpent Cadborosaurus — "Caddy". Accounts run from the 1930s: a long neck with a horse's head, a humped body, and a speed witnesses call impossible for a seal. In 1937 a carcass about three metres long was taken from a sperm whale's stomach at a whaling station, photographed, and then lost. The photograph is still argued over.
Harrison Lake, Where 'Sasquatch' Came From
The valley of this British Columbia lake gave the word itself: in the 1920s the schoolteacher J. W. Burns collected accounts of forest giants from the Sts'ailes people and rendered their local name as "Sasquatch". In 1957 the council of Harrison Hot Springs seriously voted on funding an expedition to catch one. Sightings are still logged here.
Okanagan Lake and Ogopogo
A lake in British Columbia where the creature was known long before Europeans: the Syilx called it N'ha-a-itk and carried a small animal as an offering when crossing the water. Settlers began reporting a long dark humped body in the 1870s. The name Ogopogo comes from an English music-hall song of the 1920s and stuck so firmly that it displaced the original.