Mystical places in Canada
15 legends · 8 cities
Regions and cities
Alberta1
British Columbia3
Manitoba1
Nova Scotia2
Ontario7
By kind of place
All places
The Philip Experiment in Toronto
In 1972 the Toronto Society for Psychical Research ran the experiment backwards: instead of looking for a real ghost, eight people under Iris Owen invented one. They wrote the biography of a seventeenth-century English aristocrat, Philip Aylesford, gave him a castle, a gypsy mistress and a suicide, drew his portrait — and sat for a year addressing a character they had made up themselves. In the second year the raps began, the table moved and rose, and all of it was filmed in front of a studio audience. The point of the experiment was precisely that Philip had never existed: the group obtained the classic phenomena of the séance room from a knowingly fictional spirit.
The Oak Island Money Pit
Oak Island is a small, 140-acre tree-covered island situated in Mahone Bay off the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. The island achieved global renown as the site of the "Money Pit"—an enigmatic subterranean shaft where treasure hunters, syndicates, and media ventures have spent hundreds of years and millions of dollars conducting the longest, most expensive treasure hunt in modern history.
Thetis Lake and the Creature from the Black Lagoon
On 19 August 1972 two teenagers ran to the police in Victoria, British Columbia, to report that a scaled creature with a crest on its head had come out of Thetis Lake and cut one of them on the arm. The description was almost word for word the monster from Creature from the Black Lagoon. Days later a man came forward whose pet tegu lizard had escaped, and the police closed the file; shortly afterwards one of the boys admitted to the RCMP that they had made the whole thing up. The monster is still on the lists of Canadian cryptids.
Carp and the Guardian Letters
Between 1989 and 1991 Canadian journalists and researchers received anonymous letters signed "Guardian", claiming that an alien craft had crashed near the village of Carp outside Ottawa and that the government was running a secret programme. Maps and documents came with them, and later a videotape of a glowing object filmed at night. The researcher Bob Oechsler and others checked everything checkable: the documents proved to be assembled from genuine letterheads, and the video showed a lit object in a field. In the 1990s the authorship was attributed to a local man; there was never a full confession. The story survives as a model of how a well-assembled hoax lives for years.
St. Paul and the UFO Landing Pad
In 1967, for Canada's centenary, this Alberta town built itself a UFO landing pad — a raised concrete structure with a map of Canada made from stone from every province and a plaque inviting any visitor from space to land. It was opened by Canada's minister of national defence, Paul Hellyer, who arrived by helicopter. Forty years later Hellyer became the first former defence minister anywhere to state publicly that extraterrestrials exist. The pad is still there and remains the town's landmark, with a tourist office beside it. In more than fifty years no landing has been recorded.
Falcon Lake and the Burn on the Chest
On 19 May 1967 an amateur geologist named Stefan Michalak was prospecting for quartz by Falcon Lake in Manitoba when, by his account, he saw two cigar-shaped craft; one landed a few dozen metres away. He walked up, touched the hot skin — his glove melted — and when the object lifted, hot gas from a grille in its side set his shirt alight. Michalak was hospitalised with burns in a grid pattern across his chest. The burns were photographed by doctors, and the pattern matched the grille he described. The Canadian government handled the case; a thick file survives in the archives, including soil analysis from the site that found raised radioactivity. The file contains no explanation.
Shag Harbour and the Object That Went Under
Shag Harbour is a small lobster-fishing village on the southwestern coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. The quiet community achieved international fame following the events of October 1967, when an unidentified flying object crashed into the harbour waters in front of dozens of witnesses, turning the site into the most extensively documented "underwater UFO" incident on record.
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
Okanagan Lake is an elongated, fjord-like glacial lake located within the Okanagan Valley of southern British Columbia, Canada, spanning roughly 135 kilometers north-to-south with depths reaching up to 232 meters. Flanked by semi-arid hills, vineyards, and the municipalities of Kelowna, Vernon, and Penticton, the basin has achieved international recognition as the epicenter of North American cryptozoology: the alleged domain of "Ogopogo," Canada's definitive lake monster archetype.