Champ
A creature reported from Lake Champlain for long enough that three governments have passed measures protecting it. The 1609 Samuel de Champlain sighting that anchors the whole legend was invented by a magazine in 1970.
Field Guide Entry
The quote nobody wrote
Almost every account of Champ opens the same way, with Samuel de Champlain recording a serpent in the lake in 1609: twenty feet long, thick as a barrel, with a head like a horse. The line first appears in the Summer 1970 issue of Vermont Life. It is not in Champlain's journals.
What Champlain described was a garpike, shown to him by his Indigenous guides. It is a real fish, long-snouted and armored, and there is no mystery in the passage at all. The invented quote has since been absorbed into tourist literature, local histories, and most of the books written since. The oldest evidence for Champ dates to 1970 and was written by a magazine.
July 5, 1977
Sandra Mansi photographed something in the lake near St. Albans and kept the print in a family album for four years before it was published in 1981. It became the most reproduced lake monster image in North America: a dark neck and head above the waterline, low shoreline behind.
The trouble with it is provenance rather than content. The negative was never produced. The spot on the shore was never relocated, which makes it impossible to calculate the size of the object or check the perspective against anything. Researchers returning to the case, including in Skeptical Inquirer in 2013, have raised further questions about the circumstances. Nobody has demonstrated a hoax, and nobody has been able to verify it either.
Protected by resolution
Port Henry, New York, declared its waters a safe haven for Champ in 1981. The Vermont House passed a resolution protecting it in 1982. The New York State Assembly and Senate passed resolutions of their own in 1983.
The lake runs most of the border between Vermont and New York and is deep enough in places to hide almost anything. Nothing has ever been recovered from it.
Visiting Information
Lake access is easy and mostly free on both shores, and no ticket is involved in looking at the water. Port Henry on the New York side leans into it hardest and keeps a sightings board by the lake recording reported encounters by date and name.
The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes, Vermont, is the serious stop, covering the lake's shipwrecks and its naval history, and the car ferries that cross between the two states are the cheapest way to spend time out on open water.
Summer is the season for reports, and also the season for boat wakes, floating deadheads, and otters swimming in line.
Field Gallery
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Community Notes
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Nearby Strange Places
Saint Joseph's Oratory
66 miOn the night of March 15, 1973, someone took Brother André's preserved heart from its locked vault at Saint Joseph's Oratory. It came back 21 months later through a Montréal lawyer, and nobody was ever arrested. The heart now sits at the center of an exhibition on his life, in the same shrine where pilgrims left crutches and canes in thanks for healings they credited to prayer to Saint Joseph in Brother André's time.
Allan Memorial Institute
66 miIn January 1973, on the order of CIA Director Richard Helms, the agency destroyed the bulk of its MKULTRA records. Records that survived tied the CIA to Dr. Ewen Cameron's "depatterning" experiments in this Mount Royal mansion, which the agency paid for in part from 1957 through a front called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. On July 31, 2025, a Quebec judge authorized former patients and their families to sue Canada, McGill University, and the Royal Victoria Hospital as a class.
Memphre
76 miA Magog diver spent 28 years collecting sightings on Lake Memphremagog and would only enter one in his file if the witness signed a declaration or recorded it on tape. He logged thousands of dives in the same water, more than 6,000 by his society's count, and never saw the animal himself.