The lake's official name is more prosaic than its monster. In 1860, Royal Navy Captain George Henry Richards named it for David Cameron, the first Chief Justice of Vancouver Island -- a man whose judicial career was marked more by colonial administration than by drama. The lake sits 15 kilometers east of Port Alberni, at an elevation of 184 meters above sea level, on the north side of Highway 4 as it winds through the mountain pass between the Alberni Valley and the eastern coast. Mount Arrowsmith rises to the south, its 1,817-meter summit often dusted with snow, while Mount Wesley occupies the northern shore. The lake fills the valley between them like water pooled in a cupped hand.

The entire southern shore of Cameron Lake falls within Little Qualicum Falls Provincial Park, which protects a stretch of old-growth forest that is among the most accessible on Vancouver Island. Cathedral-like Douglas firs and western red cedars tower above the highway, their trunks wider than cars and their canopy filtering the light into green-gold columns. This is the forest that once covered most of the island -- the kind of timber that drew Edward Stamp and Gilbert Sproat to the Alberni Valley in the 1860s and launched an industry that reshaped British Columbia. Along Cameron Lake's southern shore, that forest survives, a remnant of what was and a reminder of what logging took.

Lake monster legends are common in British Columbia -- Ogopogo in Okanagan Lake is the most famous -- but Cammie is a more recent addition to the provincial bestiary. The sightings began drawing attention around 2009, when the B.C. Cryptozoology Club investigated reports of something large in the water. They could not identify what witnesses had seen, which only fueled speculation. In February 2016, John Kirk and his team returned with sonar equipment and detected an object of considerable size beneath the surface. Their underwater camera came loose before capturing footage, leaving the mystery intact. Kirk has speculated that the creature could be a giant white sturgeon -- the species can grow to six meters and live for over a century -- or possibly a large eel or salamander. No definitive evidence has emerged, but the legend persists.

Cameron Lake also harbors a more terrestrial legend: the story that a train once came crashing down the mountainside from the Island Rail Corridor into the lake below. It is a vivid image -- a locomotive plunging through old-growth forest into cold water -- but it is false, a popular folktale that has persisted despite no supporting evidence. The real transportation story is Highway 4, which runs along the lake's northern edge and serves as the only road connecting Port Alberni to the island's east coast communities of Qualicum Beach and Parksville. Drivers passing through are treated to one of Vancouver Island's most scenic stretches of road: the lake on one side, old-growth forest on the other, mountains rising in every direction, and the faint, tantalizing possibility that something very large is watching from below the surface.