In folklore, a lake monster is a fresh-water dwelling entity, often monstrous. A very well-known example is the Loch Ness Monster. Lake monsters' depictions are often similar to some sea monsters.
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Description
In Ben Radford and Joe Nickell's book Lake Monster Mysteries, the authors attribute a vast number of sightings to otter misidentifications: as Ed Grabianowski said,
"...a convincing argument based, again, on data mapping. He plotted the distribution of North American lake monster sightings. Then he overlaid the distribution of the common otter and found a near perfect match. It turns out that three or four otters swimming in a line look remarkably like a serpentine, humped creature undulating through the water. It is very easy to mistake for a single creature if you see them from a distance. "This isn't speculation. I'm not making this up," Nickell said. "I've spoken to people who saw what they thought was a lake monster, got closer and discovered it was actually a line of otters. That really happens." Clearly, not every lake monster sighting can be accounted for with otters, but it's an excellent example of how our perceptions can be fooled.
As noted by the Swedish naturalist and author Bengt Sjögren (1980), the present-day lake monsters are variations of older legends of water kelpies. Sjögren claims that the accounts of lake-monsters have changed during history. Older reports often talk about horse-like appearances, but more modern reports often have more reptile and dinosaur-like-appearances, and Sjögren concludes that the legendary kelpies evolved into the present day saurian lake-monsters since the discovery of dinosaurs and giant aquatic reptiles and the popularization of them in both scientific and fictional writings and art.
In many of these areas, especially around Loch Ness, Lake Champlain and the Okanagan Valley, these lake monsters have become important tourist draws.
Examples
Well-known lake monsters include: