The Mostly True Tale of Champ

The Lake

Lake Champlain sits on the border between Vermont and New York, with its northern end crossing into Quebec. It is 120 miles long. It is 400 feet deep at its deepest point. It is very cold. It is very dark. The bottom of it has not been comprehensively mapped, which is the kind of fact that sounds fine until you start thinking about it.

The lake was named after Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer who arrived in 1609 and became the first European to record it. In his journals, Champlain described a creature in the water: five feet long, thick as a barrel, with a head like a horse and scales that arrows could not pierce. Scholars have since argued about whether he was describing a fish or something larger or something he made up. Samuel de Champlain is not available for follow-up questions.

The Abenaki people who lived around the lake before Champlain arrived had their own name for what was in the water. "Gitaskog," the great serpent. Their traditions described it as ancient. As something that had been there before the people arrived and would be there after they left. They were not frightened of it exactly. They were respectful, which is a different thing and, as it turns out, probably the smarter approach.

Over Three Hundred People Can't All Be Wrong

The first modern sighting report came in 1873, when a railroad crew working along the shore reported something large in the lake. P.T. Barnum, the circus entrepreneur with an exceptional instinct for what the public would pay to see, offered a reward of fifty thousand dollars for the creature. The creature did not come forward to collect it.

Sightings have continued without interruption since then. Over three hundred reported by people with names and addresses and no particular reason to lie. Farmers. Fishermen. Tourists. A sheriff. A lighthouse keeper. People on paddleboats who came back to shore moving faster than they left. The accounts describe a long neck, a large body, dark coloring, and a movement through the water that is not consistent with any fish anyone has put in a catalog. No one has described what it smells like because no one has gotten close enough to find out.

The most famous sighting came in 1977 when Sandra Mansi, a Connecticut woman vacationing with her family, took a photograph from the shore. It shows a large, long-necked shape emerging from the water. The lake is dark grey behind it. The sky is overcast. The shape is real. Sandra Mansi kept the photograph in a drawer for three years before showing anyone, which is either evidence of her honesty or her remarkable restraint. The photo has been analyzed extensively. It has never been proven a fake. It has also never been proven anything specific.

The Legal Situation

In 1981, the Vermont House of Representatives passed a resolution protecting Champ from "any willful act resulting in the harm, killing, or capturing" of the creature. The New York State Assembly followed with a similar resolution. This is the part where the story becomes genuinely strange.

Vermont and New York have, as a matter of official government record, extended legal protection to an animal whose existence has not been scientifically confirmed. The resolutions are real. They are on file. They use language like "reputed" and "purported," which is government code for "we are not saying it exists but we are not saying it does not exist either, and we would prefer not to be the jurisdiction that allowed someone to kill it."

This is a politically sophisticated position. Whatever Champ is or is not, it has achieved something Bigfoot has not: legal status in two states. It cannot be killed without breaking a resolution. It does not pay taxes. It does not vote, though given the demographics of Vermont, it might appreciate the option.

What Champ Might Actually Be

The favored scientific explanation, when scientists are in a generous mood, is that the lake contains a population of some prehistoric marine animal that was not informed that it was supposed to be extinct.

The leading candidate is the plesiosaur, a large marine reptile that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, approximately sixty-six million years ago. Plesiosaurs had long necks, large bodies, and a general shape that matches what witnesses describe. There are two problems with this explanation. First, sixty-six million years is a very long time to hide a breeding population in a lake. Second, the lake was formed by glaciation and was not connected to any ocean until relatively recently in geological terms, making it unclear how plesiosaurs would have arrived.

Other candidates include the oarfish, which can grow to enormous lengths and behaves strangely near the surface. Or a very large sturgeon, which can reach ten feet in length, have a prehistoric ridged appearance, and move through the water in a way that could alarm an unprepared observer. Lake Champlain does have a documented population of large lake sturgeon. A large sturgeon moving at speed through dark water, seen partially and briefly by a startled tourist, would produce a memorable account. None of this entirely explains what Sandra Mansi photographed. The sturgeon explanation requires a sturgeon with a neck. That is not a thing.

Champ Country

The town of Port Henry, New York hosts an annual "Champ Day" festival. There is a Champ museum. There are Champ sculptures. There are Champ t-shirts, Champ plush toys, and Champ beer. The Vermont side of the lake has its own cottage industry. The Burlington waterfront has a Champ statue. A minor league baseball team called the Vermont Lake Monsters changed their logo to a Champ silhouette and the merchandise sold well.

This is not unusual. Monsters are good for local economies. Nessie generates an estimated forty million dollars a year for the Scottish Highlands. Lake Champlain is doing its best. The key economic ingredient is the combination of genuine ambiguity and photogenic landscape. People will drive a long way to stare at a lake that might have something in it. They will buy a hat while they are there.

The Chamber of Commerce takes Champ seriously as a brand asset. The scientific community takes the Mansi photograph seriously as an unexplained artifact. The Abenaki oral tradition takes the creature seriously as something that has been there longer than the disputes about it. These three groups do not often agree on anything. On this particular point, they have each independently arrived at the same conclusion: there is something worth paying attention to in that lake.

What's Down There

The bottom of Lake Champlain is cold enough that organic material preserves unusually well. Shipwrecks from the Revolutionary War sit on the lake floor in extraordinary condition, the planks and rigging still largely intact after two hundred and fifty years. This is remarkable. It is also slightly unsettling when you are trying to estimate what else down there has been preserved.

No bones. No carcass. No specimen. No definitive proof that any large unidentified animal lives in the lake. The Champ file is exactly the same as every cryptid file: full of witnesses and photographs and almost-evidence, and missing only the one thing that would close it.

The lake is 120 miles long. It is 400 feet deep. The water is cold and dark and the visibility at depth is essentially zero. If something large wanted to exist in that lake without being confirmed, it could probably manage it. The lake is more than capable of keeping a secret. It has been keeping them since before there were people to ask questions.

The Abenaki called it the great serpent and they left it alone and they got along fine. There is a lesson there about the value of respectful coexistence that modern tourism culture has not quite absorbed. But people keep coming to the shore and looking. The lake keeps not answering. And somewhere, in the cold dark water, something may be looking back up at all those faces pressed against the surface.