By Joseph Citro, author of Weird New England
“I hereby offer $50,000 for the hide of the Great Champlain serpent to add to my mammoth World’s Fair Show. You are authorized to draw on me for any sum necessary to assist in securing the monster’s remains.”
– P.T. Barnum printed in the Whitehall [NY] Times
At New England’s west coast there’s a vast body of water: Lake Champlain. It plunges like silver dagger from Canada, filleting Vermont from the rest of the United States. It’s 120 miles long. At its widest, near Burlington, it spans 11 miles. And, just like New England’s east coast--the Atlantic Ocean--its depths hold many mysteries.
I have lived near Lake Champlain for more than twenty years. For me it's like living next door to a haunted house: everyone says a monster lurks within. Lake Champlain lies on approximately the same latitude as Scotland’s infamous "Loch Ness." Perhaps this somehow explains why hundreds of witnesses have confronted something inexplicable in its deep waters. That "something," whatever it may be, is apparently alive--and big and occasionally terrifying.
To defang the monster, locals have taken to calling it “Champ” after Samuel de Champlain, the lake’s founder. He sailed down from the Richelieu River in 1609 and began four centuries of recorded sightings. Before he made the scene, local Indians were telling monster stories. They'd sprinkle offerings--tobacco and such--on the water before crossing. This token or totem was a sort of toll intended to guarantee safe passage.
Since then there have been hundreds, probably thousands of sightings: water sightings, land sightings... in 1973 one woman even spotted Champ from the air while flying over the lake in her father's plane.
Nineteenth century newspapers were full of monster stories. On August 31st, 1870, for example, a St. Albans, Vermont newspaper reported, "The What-Is-It of Lake Champlain was again interviewed near Barber's Point on Monday last. It was in full view of passengers of steamer Curlew, and was an object projecting some distance from the water and going at railroad speed." Railroad speed, even in those days, was pretty fast!
In 1892 Captain Moses Blow, a 42 year veteran of the Champlain Transportation Company, was on the lake one serene summer afternoon piloting the A. Williams. He, his crew, and some passengers got a good look at the serpent. An account by Capt. Blow's daughter gives the details: "They were at anchor and all of a sudden the boat started rocking, and they couldn't imagine what in the world was the matter. [They were] looking all around when all of a sudden, the head, then the neck came out of the water and it looked right straight at them, and then [Capt. Blow] said, 'Let's get out of here,' and then they headed for Burlington..."
The boat was at anchor because a group of scientists was aboard to check the water’s depth. Even at 400 feet they hadn’t reached bottom. The temperature down there registered 38 degrees. One scientist mentioned to Capt. Blow that if someone were to drown there, they would never come up--the pressure would hold the body in place. It was an oddly prophetic pronouncement. Sometime later Capt. Blow's brother Charlie and nephew Harvey drowned at that exact spot. Their bodies never surfaced. This aquatic oddity may illustrate why no monster's carcass has ever been found.
The Burlington News reported, "The Lake Champlain sea serpent”—as Champ was then called--“was seen at the 1892 encampment of the American Canoe Association when, coming to the surface in the neighborhood of a flotilla of cruising canoes, he scattered the occupants in panic."
Another interesting sighting occurred in September 1894. The Essex County Republican reported that four men saw "the Champlain Sea Serpent" at Cumberland Head, Plattsburgh, New York. "It caused a great commotion in the water... and came toward the shore and out of the water six feet or more upon the land."
Out of the water?
In the 20th century the unpredictable encounters continued. In 1945 people aboard the S. S. Ticonderoga observed the monster cavorting somewhere near the middle of the lake. In 1961 Thomas E. Morse of Westport, New York, was driving beside North West Bay at twilight. What he saw was like something out of the Twilight Zone. He reported, "When first seen it appeared as a massive gunmetal gray approximately 18-inches wide cable on the shore and out into the lake... It appeared to be a monstrous eel with white teeth that raked rearward in the mouth." Mr. Morse said while on shore Champ raised his head a full four feet. It might have been reacting to the sound of the car.
This, like the 1894 sighting, was unusual indeed. The creature, whatever it may be, is rarely spied out of the water. Such land sightings are of special interest because they are less ambiguous, not distorted by tossing waves or glaring sunshine.
On July 8, 1983 Laura Coble, a counselor at South Hero, Vermont’s Camp Greylock reported that ten counselors and 25 children saw Champ's humps as it swam past on the lake.
On July 30, 1984, the largest mass Champ-sighting in history occurred aboard a sightseeing boat, The Spirit of Ethan Allen. A private party was in progress, celebrating the wedding anniversary of a Massachusetts couple. Some 80 guests were aboard. The hour: six o'clock in the evening. The boat was near Appletree Point, just north of Burlington. Michael Shea, the boat's owner, is a professional airplane pilot. His keen powers of observation may explain why he was the first to spot something unusual.
"It was a perfect flat calm day,” he told me, “not a ripple on the water. I saw it about 200 feet away. First I thought it was a stray wake. I stared at it awhile and noticed [whatever it was] was creating its own wake."
Mike ran to the upper deck. The band stopped playing. People raced the rails to watch the strange humped creature swimming beside the boat. Many party guests came from out-of-state; they’d never heard of The Lake Champlain Monster. But everyone--natives and visitors alike--all saw... something.
Mike watched the creature for about three minutes. He identified three to five humps, each extending about 12 inches out of the water and estimated the creature was about 30 feet long. He said it was "green-brown [and] slimy-looking, like a frog..." It swam parallel with The Spirit of Ethan Allen for 1000 yards until a speedboat approached. Then the creature turned 90 degrees and submerged. Several people saw it reappear about 15 minutes later. Bette Morris of Grand Isle--daughter of the anniversary couple--snapped a picture. Alas, like so many Champ photographs, the image proved inconclusive.
Since then Champ has been spotted dozens--no doubt thousands--of times. Photos, digital images, and videotapes have been taken. Today, he's a star, having made guest appearances (in CGI form) in many TV documentaries. During his first brush with stardom, back in the early 1800s, waves of tourists flooded Lake Champlain in response to showman P.T. Barnum's offer of $50,000 for the creature--dead or alive. As far as we know the money is unclaimed.
Since Mr. Barnum’s day, a number of Monster Hunters have ventured to Lake Champlain. Joseph W. Zarzynski of Wilton, New York spent thirty summers on the lake, trying to prove Champ’s existence. His book, Champ: Beyond the Legend remains the definitive study of Champlain’s aquatic phenomenon. Though Mr. Zarzynski experienced a single sighting, he never found the solid proof he was after. Eventually he abandoned his dragon hunting to seek more tangible treasures: a cryptozoologist turned underwater archaeologist.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence came in the 1980s when accidental monster hunter Sandra Mansi snapped Champ’s picture. The clear, color photograph shows what appears to be the long neck and head of some unknown aquatic creature. Recently, Skeptical Inquirer magazine insisted Ms. Mansi mistook a piece of driftwood for a lake monster. To me, such a misidentification strains the credibility more than does the possibility of a surviving dinosaur in New England’s greatest lake.
Dennis Hall of Vergennes, Vermont is the best known of today’s Champ Chasers. In 1985 he videotaped a moving, seemingly living form that he believes to be the elusive critter. In fact, Dennis may also hold the record for Champ sightings, claiming more than twenty in all.
From July 21 to September 10, 1993, Mr. Hall participated in the largest and most generously funded monster hunt in the history of Lake Champlain. A film crew from the Tokyo Broadcasting System was on the water shooting a 90-minute Champ documentary for Japanese television. Fifteen boats equipped with the latest electronic equipment combed the lake. Helicopters patrolled from the air. A certain section of lake, believed to be a Champ hotspot, was under constant videotape surveillance.
As usual, Champ proved camera shy. But thanks to Jim Hotaling of Willsboro, New York, the disappointed crew did not return to Japan empty-handed. He used sonar to record underwater images on a paper-graph. Most were unremarkable: a good-sized salmon, a school of perch. But then the sonar sighted something interesting: a large irregular mass, 20-feet long, moving in 60-feet of water.
Mr. Hotaling was stumped. "I don't know if it's Champ," he said. "It's abnormal in shape—very dense. I've never seen anything like it before."
In the year 2000 Dennis Hall logged thirteen new reports of Champlain’s aquatic anomaly. In this case thirteen is a lucky number, at least for monster enthusiasts.
On June 18th a professional fishing guide spotted the critter near Isle La Motte. "Suddenly, there was a great disturbance on the surface,” he said. “Assuming it was a large fish attacking bait fish, we... headed for it... Then, suddenly, about 50 yards further out, we saw what we took to be two very large fish swimming one behind the other--but in perfect unison... Their backs were plainly visible, swimming north... in a snakelike fashion, almost as if attached! That swimming motion was unlike anything I have ever seen."
On June 29, a vacationer from Missouri saw it from the Charlotte, Vermont-Essex, New York Ferry. Because she knew nothing of our local lore, she cried out, "Look, it's the Loch Ness monster!" She really saw it, and she was from Missouri.
Near the mouth of Otter Creek, on July 6, 2000, Dennis Hall himself produced some new video evidence. He taped a pair of animals swimming side by side, each more than 16 feet long! What makes this different from other video evidence is the clarity: he says you can see the texture of the animals' skin.
One might say they look vaguely like sturgeon, but, Mr. Hall asserts, "The sturgeon theory has been blasted out of the water." He says he brought the video to the Federal Fisheries Department and had it viewed by a biologist who "knows sturgeon inside and out." This expert was at a loss to identify the animals, other than to say they were definitely NOT sturgeon. According to Mr. Hall, the scientist is willing to go public with this new information, providing she gets "the blessings of her superiors."
A bad sign. Neither the “blessing” nor the “blast” has been forthcoming. As far as I know, Champ is still tangled in a net of bureaucratic red tape. If you'd like to follow this and other developments in the riddle of the Lake Champlain Monster, you can visit Dennis Hall's web site at: www.champquest.com.
Even in the 21st century, Vermont's oldest question remains unanswered: What lies beneath Lake Champlain? The most exciting bit of new evidence is not something seen, but something heard. One chilly June morning in 2003, a team of scientists from the North Carolina-based Fauna Communications Research Institute, under contract to the Discovery Channel, were visiting Lake Champlain, working on a documentary about Champ. It was eight o’clock in the morning. Everything was still. The lake was mirror-smooth. Lead scientist Elizabeth von Muggenthaler and Dr. Joseph Gregory, were scanning the lake with highly sensitive underwater recording equipment. They were cold, bored, and not too optimistic that anything remarkable would happen.
But suddenly.... everything changed. Faintly, very, very faintly, an unexpected sound came over the headphones. It was not the sound of frolicking fish or outboard motors. It was something they'd never heard before in Lake Champlain. But it was most definitely an animal sound. If they had been at sea, the high-pitched tickings and chirpings would have been familiar--like sounds made by dolphins or Beluga whales. But then, there are no whales or dolphins in Lake Champlain.
Liz and Joe moved to another location and heard the sounds again. Had it been a whale, their trained ears and sensitive equipment would have easily recognized its echolocation. But what Liz and Joe heard was very different. The pitch of the sounds was incredible--ten times higher than any known fish in the lake.
What could it have been? No one knows. Yet this much is certain: they'd discovered a creature in Lake Champlain that produces unique and powerful bio-sonar. Quite possibly they've recorded the sound of Champ. (Check it out for yourself at http://www.animalvoice.com/LakeChamplain.htm.)
I asked Liz if the sounds she’d recorded were proof that an unknown animal existed in Lake Champlain, how did it affect her personal worldview?
“Not at all,” she told me. “It is patently evident that humankind knows little about our world, and virtually nothing about what lurks underwater. It would not surprise me in the least if there were “lake monsters”.
I asked her what the sounds tell us about their source? What can we infer without overstepping the grounds of scientific method?
“That the animal must have the same type of advanced communication structures in the brain in order to create the echolocation, as whale and dolphin do,” she said. “We can also tell that the animal can swim at least 5 miles per hour. That it does not appreciate sonar (it moved away immediately when we pinged). That it most likely uses the echolocation to find fish, and therefore it likely is a carnivore.”
To me, that seems like a “sound” definition of Champ.
My hat is off to the legislatures of Vermont and New York; they’ve made Champ--whether he exists or not--a protected species. So all the yahoos with shotguns and dynamite will have to confine themselves to cameras and videotape, making the world a safer place for all of us.
And since you’ve read this far, I’d like to share with you my own take on Lake Champlain and its so-called “Monster.” I believe that one protects the other. The ever-changing surface of the water is a magical veil that can never be lifted. In consequence, we will never see clearly what lies beneath.
It is my belief that one hundred years from today we’ll know exactly as much about Champ as we did one hundred years ago. And every year, from Whitehall, New York to the Richelieu River, people will continue to spot that mysterious serpentine head swimming wild and unclassified, and always just slightly out of camera range.
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LAKE CHAMPLAIN'S WATERY WHATZZIT