We were driving to Devils Lake when the dark magic conversation started.
This wasn't planned. It was a sunny Sunday, the kind of BC summer day that makes you forget eight months of rain ever happened, and a friend and I were headed to a lake north of Mission for a swim. The destination was Devils Lake — a small, quiet spot I'd heard about but never visited. Someone in the car brought up Myanmar folklore, specifically the darker corners of it: spirits, superstitions, the kind of cultural inheritance that feels distant and ridiculous until you're alone in a dark room and suddenly it doesn't.
In Myanmar, the supernatural isn't a fringe belief. It's woven into everyday life. People wear amulets against the evil eye. Certain trees are not to be touched after sunset. There are spirits — nats — that live in specific places, and you don't mock them even if you consider yourself modern and rational. The stories get passed down sideways, through family, through warnings that start with "you won't believe this, but…" and end with someone swearing it happened to a cousin's neighbor.
So there we were, an hour into a drive toward a place called Devils Lake, trading ghost stories from a culture that takes ghosts seriously. At some point someone said the obvious thing: "Are we really doing this? Dark magic on the way to Devils Lake?"
We laughed. Then we diverted to Stave Lake instead.
The kicker
Stave Lake was beautiful, by the way. Cold water, clear sky, the kind of swimming that resets your brain. We had noodle salad for breakfast and steak for dinner. The day was perfect. But the detour was the part that stuck with me, because here's the detail I only registered on the way back: the road that leads to Devils Lake is called Burma Street.
I'm Burmese. Burma is the former name of Myanmar.
The universe has a sense of humor — or a sense of dramatic irony — and I'm not sure which one is worse. On the drive home I couldn't stop thinking about it: a Burmese guy, talking about Myanmar spirits, on a road named Burma, headed toward a lake called Devils. If this were a movie, the audience would be yelling at the screen.
Why is it called Devils Lake?
I looked up the name later. Why is it called Devils Lake? Someone must have documented this, right? A settler story, an Indigenous legend, a mining accident, something.
Nothing.
The official Canadian geographical-name record confirms it was named Devils Lake — no apostrophe — on May 3, 1951. The New Westminster Land District. No origin provided. No explanation for the name. Nobody knows.
The surrounding area is Kwantlen traditional territory, with interpretive signs along the trails. The lake sits in the Stave West / Mission Municipal Forest area, with logging and hydroelectric history nearby. But the name itself? Blank. One local hiking blog summed it up perfectly: "We haven't been able to find out why the lake was called Devils Lake — there is not too much information about this location on the internet."
Canada has only five lakes named Devil Lake across the entire country, out of an estimated thirty thousand lakes larger than three square kilometers. British Columbia has exactly one. And nobody can tell you why it's called that.
Other Devils Lakes exist — Oregon has one with a monster legend, North Dakota has one with Dakota spirit stories, Wisconsin has one that's actually named for the Ho-Chunk sacred lake Tee Wakącąk. BC's version has neither legend nor explanation. Just the name, filed in 1951, no origin story attached.
I find this oddly satisfying. Not every spooky name has a spooky backstory. Sometimes a lake is just called Devils because somebody felt like it, and seventy-five years later you're in a car on Burma Street, talking about spirits, and the coincidence is the whole story.
Burma Street
The street name deserves its own moment. Burma Road — or Burma Street, depending on the map — runs through the Mission area toward the Stave West forest. I don't know who named it or why. Maybe a veteran who served in the Burma campaign during the war. Maybe a surveyor who liked the sound of it. Maybe someone with a connection to the country my family is from, two generations and an ocean removed.
What I do know is that sitting in a car on a road named after your homeland, discussing your homeland's ghost stories, while driving toward a lake named after the devil, is the kind of alignment you don't plan. You just notice it and laugh.
The detour was the story
We swam at Stave Lake instead. The water was perfect. The detour was the right call — not because Devils Lake was dangerous, but because the moment had become too funny to ignore. Sometimes the universe lines up the signs for you. You don't have to believe they mean anything to enjoy the alignment.
The friend who was with me laughed all the way there and all the way back. The kind of laughing where you forget what was funny and just keep going because the vibe has momentum. Those are the best road trips — the ones where the destination barely matters.
And if you're ever driving up Burma Street toward a lake with a suspicious name, maybe save the ghost stories for the way back.
