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LAKE CHAMPLAIN
Termed North America’s Loch Ness monster and known affectionately as “Champ,” the legendary Lake Champlain monster reportedly haunts those waters. Lake Champlain was formed roughly ten thousand years ago when an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean, the Champlain Sea, was transformed by receding glaciers into an inland, freshwater body (Zarzynski 1984a). This lake—and some say the creature, too—was “discovered” in 1609 by Samuel de Champlain. Since then, the 125-mile-long lake, situated between New York and Vermont (with 6 miles extending into Quebec), has received much attention (figure 2.1). In 1873 and 1887, showman P. T. Barnum offered huge rewards for the monster—dead or alive (Zarzynski 1984a, 83). More recently, there has been much cryptozoological interest and the development of a burgeoning Champ industry.
Proliferating sightings, “theories” of self-styled monster hunters, and even a Holy Grail photo of the supposed beast have spawned innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, books, entries in paranormal compendia, and radio and television segments, as well as key chains, mugs, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia, not to mention the “Champburger” (a seafood patty on a sesame seed bun). Such endeavors have made Champ the best-known lake monster in the United States and, except for British Columbia’s “Ogopogo” (see chapter 7), in all of North America. “Few cryptozoologists deny the possibility of Champ’s existence,” states W. Haden Blackman in his Field Guide to North American Monsters (1998), “and many openly accept the creature,” believing it to be a plesiosaur, zeuglodon, or other unknown or erstwhile extinct creature. Champ seeker Joseph Zarzynski has even given it a name: Beluaaquatica champlainiensis, or “huge water creature of Lake Champlain” (Owen 1982).
Figure 2.1 Map of Lake Champlain, showing selected sites. (Map by Joe Nickell)
To assess the reputed phenomenon, the two of us launched our own investigation in the summer of 2002 to examine all aspects of the Champ legend. Unlike some so-called investigations—which, though long running, were largely attempts to collect sighting reports—we believe ours to be the most wide-ranging, hands-on investigation of Champ ever conducted with an intent to solve, rather than promote, the mystery.
THE CHAMP EXPEDITION
Joe Nickell
Our investigation was multifaceted. I made an advance trip (August 2–4, 2002) to take in the annual Champ Day celebration (August 3) in Port Henry, New York, interview various people, buy books, and otherwise scout resources and make plans for our subsequent two-man expedition planned for August 22–26.
In the interim, we both studied the myriad articles and books on Champ and other alleged lake monsters. Ben Radford did extensive work to ready experiments regarding a famous 1977 Champ photo taken by Sandra Mansi, while I located her by phone, arranged for an interview, and borrowed a vintage camera (from photo expert Rob McElroy) like the one Mansi had used. We discussed options, drafted itineraries, obtained and readied gear, and made other preparations.
With a fully loaded car, we set out for Whitehall, New York. There we met friend and fellow researcher Robert Bartholomew and his brother Paul (a cryptozoologist) and discussed many relevant issues with them. Then we began to explore Lake Champlain from its southernmost tip near Whitehall to its northern end in Quebec. Our base camp for the next two days was Collins Cabins at Port Henry. Late that first afternoon, we set up Champ Camp I at a boating ramp area just outside Bulwagga Bay, the locale of the majority of Champ reports, and maintained a watch from 7:00 to 8:30 P.M. (figure 2.2)—a supposedly prime time for Champ sightings (Kojo 1991). Unfortunately, Champ was a no-show.
Figure 2.2 Benjamin Radford maintaining a Champ vigil. (Photo by Joe Nickel1)
Figure 2.3 Champ monster sighting board at Port Henry, New York, the “home of Champ.” (Photo by Benjamin Radford)
We later conducted research at the Collins Cabins bar. Ben took notes while I asked a group of men about a local signboard that lists Bulwagga Bay Champ sightings in six columns of names and dates (figure 2.3). One man, William “Pete” Tromblee, quipped that it was “a list of the local drinkers.” In fact, Tromblee’s own 1981 sighting is listed, and he assured us that he was entirely sober at the time. He admitted that he did not know what he had seen and volunteered that it might have been a large sturgeon—a refrain one hears quite often. The proprietor, Rita Collins, rummaged through a drawer behind the bar and came up with some related newspaper clippings, including one with a photo of a “six-foot piece of driftwood that bears a striking resemblance to artists’ conceptions of Lake Champlain’s legendary monster, Champ.” (See figure 2.9, later in this chapter.)
The following day (August 24) we crossed the Champlain Bridge to Vermont. We explored the lakeshore around Otter Creek, dropped in on the naturalist at Button Bay State Park, and then proceeded to Bristol to keep our appointment with Sandra Mansi regarding her famous snapshot (discussed in detail later in this chapter).
We subsequently rendezvoused with Norm St. Pierre, a veteran fisherman and lake guide who operates Norm’s Bait and Tackle at Crown Point, New York (a few miles south of Port Henry). Outside his “One-Stop Hunting and Fishing Supply Store” rests a giant hook baited with a large rubber fish and waggishly labeled “Norm’s Champ Rig.” Norm was to be our guide, aboard his sonar-equipped Starcraft cruiser, to Champ’s reputed lair (figure 2.4).
The sonar Norm uses to locate schools of fish soon picked up a twelve- to twenty-pound catfish or sheepshead. However, on our entire tour of Bulwagga Bay and many miles beyond, we saw nothing, either visually or on sonar, that could be construed as Champ, with the exception of one unidentified “hump” (see figure 2.5). That’s not surprising, given that during more than four decades on the water, Norm has never seen a giant enigmatic lake creature. He has occasionally encountered a wave on calm water that puzzled him and, like others, says there’s “something” out there. But he’s more likely to suggest a sturgeon than an unknown or extinct creature.
Figure 2.4 Norm St. Pierre, veteran fishing guide, aboard his sonar-equipped boat. (Photo by Joe Nickell)
Figure 2.5 Strange dark hump on the lake: monster or rock? You decide. (Photo by Joe Nickell)
Early in the morning we closed our base at Port Henry and, again crossing into Vermont, made our way to St. Albans and beyond. We searched the areas of Maquam and Missiquoi Bays in the hope of finding a landscape that matched the location of the Mansi sighting. Unfortunately, her description was so vague as to be almost useless, and in any case, the intervening years could have changed the scene completely. This precluded one set of photographic experiments, but we located a suitable area for others, near a boat launch. By wading into the water, Ben discovered that it was surprisingly shallow for more than 150 feet offshore. This was fortuitous, since we would not have to use the raft we had brought, but it raised an interesting point. A local man who had resided there for thirty years said that the general shallowness of the lake in the surrounding area made him doubt the presence of any leviathan there. Indeed, although the lake reaches depths of up to 400 feet, the maximum for all of Missiquoi Bay is 14 feet. And for the eastern edge of Maquam Bay and the connecting area of lake, the offshore depth at Mansi’s estimated sighting distance of 150 feet is 12 feet or less, as shown by a Lake Champlain hydrographic contour map (Lake n.d.).
The experimental work (discussed in the second part of this chapter) was time-consuming, but we were done by midafternoon and continued north to the upper end of Lake Champlain at Venise Bay, Quebec. We stopped along the way to explore and to photograph some driftwood that had piled up along the shore. We returned as far south as Burlington, Vermont, that night. Ben was glad finally to be able to wash up from his swim in Lake Champlain and treat a cut on his foot, injured on some sharp rocks during the earlier experiments.
Our final day, the twenty-sixth, was another long one. We took the ferry Valcour from Burlington to Port Kent, New York, traversing Lake Champlain at one of its widest places. We maintained a Champ watch, noting that
some reported sightings had been made from ferries as well as other boats. A veteran deckhand told us that he often teased the children to look overboard for Champ and instructed the adults to “go below” to the onboard snack bar that serves beer and wine, so that they might also see the creature.
Disembarking from the Valcour, we headed south along the west coast of Lake Champlain until we veered away on the interstate and headed for home. We had traveled more than twelve hundred miles and had obtained quantities of notes, photographs, videotapes, books, charts, and other research materials—all of which would now need careful study. Here are our findings.
SIGHTINGS
Promoters of Champ’s existence often cite the same major eyewitness. According to Discover magazine (Teresi 1998), “The first recorded sighting of Champ dates back to July 1609, when Samuel de Champlain claimed he saw a ‘20-foot serpent thick as a barrel, and a head like a horse.’” This quotation from Champlain—which has been repeated, paraphrased, and embellished with Indian legends (e.g., Coleman 1983; Green 1999)—is, alas, bogus. Jerome Clark, who was once taken in by the claim (1983), reports that it is “traceable to an article by the late Marjorie L. Porter in the Summer 1970 issue of Vermont Life” (Clark 1993). Champlain’s actual description is in volume 2 of his journal (quoted in Meurger and Gagnon 1988, 268–70):
There is also a great abundance of many species of fish. Amongst others there is one called by the natives Chaousarou, which is of various lengths; but the largest of them, as these tribes have told me, are from eight to ten feet long. I have seen some five feet long, which were as big as my thigh, and had a head as large as my two fists, with a snout two feet and a half long, and a double row of very sharp, dangerous teeth. Its body has a good deal the shape of the pike; but it is protected by scales of a silvery gray colour and so strong that a dagger could not pierce them.
As Champlain’s actual account demonstrates, far from heralding a serpentine, horse-headed monster, he simply mentions a native species of large fish. It was almost certainly a gar (or garfish), one of the Ganoidei subclass (from the Greek ganos, “shiny”), which includes sturgeon and other varieties.
Other supposed evidence of an early Champ sighting comes from an old powder horn bearing a Crown Point soldier’s name, the year 1760, and various pictorial elements, including “a rather large dragonlike creature.” Zarzynski (1984a, 52–53) suspects that this is a “possible link” to Champ. However, the figure is merely a stereotypical dragon—complete with large wings. It is by no means evidence for the existence of a Lake Champlain leviathan.
In his Champ: Beyond the Legend, Zarzynski (1984a, 152–205) cataloged 224 Champ reports. Putting aside Samuel de Champlain’s, which never occurred, the rest are from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The earliest is from 1819 and is still the most sensational description of Champ ever recorded. I tracked down the original account in the Plattsburgh Republican published on Saturday, July 24. The sighting was attributed to a “Capt. Crum,” who had been in a scow on Bulwagga Bay the previous Thursday morning. The black monster was said to be about 187 feet long, with its flat head—resembling that of a “sea-horse”—rearing more than 15 feet out of the water. The creature was some 200 yards away (twice the length of a football field) and was traveling “with the utmost velocity” while being chased by “two large Sturgeon and a Bill-fish.” Nevertheless, the captain was able to notice that it had three teeth, large eyes the color of “a pealed [sic] onion,” a white star on its forehead, and “a belt of red around the neck.” The outlandishness of the incident suggests that someone was pulling the reader’s leg.
Hoax or not, that monster has not been seen since, or it has apparently shrunk to a fraction of its former self and lost its distinctive markings, although not without gaining others. According to the various reports, Champ is between 10 and 187 feet long; it has one to four or more humps, or up to five arching coils; it is black, or has a dark head and white body, or is gray, black and gray, brown, moss green, reddish bronze, or other colors; and it is possibly drab or shiny, scaly, or smooth—even “slimy.” Moreover, it possesses fins, a pair of horns, “moose-like antlers,” “elephant ears,” a tan or red mane, glowing eyes, or “jaws like an alligator”—or none of these. Overall, it looks like a great snake, “a large Newfoundland dog,” “a steam yacht” (but traveling too fast to be one), a horse, a Florida manatee, a submarine periscope, a whale, and so on (Zarzynski 1984a, 152–205).
Astonishingly, some writers have concluded that there is a “surprising degree of correlation between all the various descriptions” (Grant 1992,115) or that they are “disturbingly similar” (Vachon 1977). However, to the rest of us, it appears that either Champ is a metamorphosing, contortionistic, chameleonlike creature, completely unknown to the natural world, or else eyewitnesses are viewing—and no doubt misperceiving—a number of different things.
Many of the sightings were from considerable distances—often a hundred yards or more, a few at between a quarter and three-quarters of a mile, four at one mile, and at least one at two miles away, although often the distance was unreported. A dozen observations were made by the use of spyglasses or binoculars. Since the apparent size of the creature depends on how far away it is, mistaking either the distance or the size results in misjudging the other accordingly. If we consider other factors—surprise, poor visibility (such as nighttime sightings and viewing the creature while it was entirely underwater), and other problems, including the power of suggestion—the sightings are obviously suspect.
One shouldn’t underestimate the power of what Rupert T. Gould (1976, 112–13) called “expectant attention.” This is the tendency of people who are expecting to see one thing to be misled by anything having some resemblance to it. For example, a log may be mistaken for a lake serpent under the right conditions, especially when reports of such a creature are common. Indeed, logs have actually been mistaken for the Loch Ness monster, and Gould (1976, 107) describes two instances in which “a pair of binoculars resolved an apparent ‘monster’ into a floating tree-trunk” at the loch.
Perhaps certain Lake Champlain monster sightings can be so explained. One from circa 1886, for instance, said that the monster looked “like a long log or pole,” and a 1954 report described the creature as “like a telephone pole in appearance.” Photos of “monster-shaped” driftwood at Lake Champlain have been published (Zarzynski 1984a, 99, 163, 171; Champ unmasked n.d.). In this regard, local fisherman Tom Forrest (2002) told an illuminating story: In 1998, he was with a group of people who were frightened by what they thought was Champ. However, it turned out to be a partially waterlogged tree trunk, bobbing and propelled by the current. It was nearly forty feet long with a root that resembled a monster’s head.
A particular feature of Lake Champlain—an effect called a seiche—may help produce such sightings. A seiche is a great underwater wave that sloshes back and forth, even though the lake’s surface appears smooth. The sloshing may dislodge debris from the bottom—logs or clumps of vegetation, for example—that bob to the surface as “monsters” (Teresi 1998).
Another likely candidate for some Champ sightings is a large fish. Champlain’s chaousarou—clearly a gar—is an obvious possibility. Forrest witnessed a friend hook a longnose gar that measured approximately six feet four inches long and weighed some forty to fifty pounds. He calls this “the real Champ” and has dubbed it, appropriately, “Gargantua” (Forrest 2002).
Among other large fish in the lake are sturgeon, which are now endangered. They are generally in the five- to six-foot range but can grow to twice that size (Zarzynski 1984a, 98–100; Meurger and Gagnon 1988, 47–48). In fact, one couple who saw a six-foot creature in 1949 described it as possibly a large sturgeon. Although a sturgeon’s length is insufficient to account for some other Champ sightings, the size can easily be overestimated. Multiple fish can also appear to be a single monster. Ronald Binns (1984, 205–7) tells of a young man who spied a fifty-foot sea serpent off England�
�s Brighton beach in 1857; he later became a marine biologist and realized that he had actually seen several dolphins “swimming in line.” In this manner, two or more large gar, sturgeon, or other fish could easily appear to be a single multihumped monster, accounting for numerous such sightings at Lake Champlain.
Otters, which are playful and enjoy “chasing each other” and “following the leader” (Godin 1983), are especially prone to creating this illusion and are often mistaken for lake monsters, as I discovered while investigating other cases. For example, Jon Kopp, a senior wildlife technician with New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, told me of a personal encounter in a duck blind on a lake in Clinton County. It was dark, and suddenly heading toward him was a huge snakelike creature making a sinuous, undulating movement. However, as it came closer, Kopp realized that the “serpent” was actually six or seven otters, swimming single file and diving and resurfacing to create the serpentine effect. “After seeing this,” Kopp said, “I can understand how people can see a ‘sea serpent’” (Nickell 2001, 102).
Otters, have been mistaken for monsters elsewhere, including Loch Arkaig and Loch Ness in Scotland (Binns 1984, 186–91) and, I believe, Lake Utopia in New Brunswick, Canada, and Silver Lake in Wyoming County, New York (Nickell 2001, 133–35, 92–103), among many others. The northern river otter (Lutra canadensis) measures up to fifty-two inches long and is dark brown with a lighter, grayish throat and belly but “looks black when wet” (Whitaker 1996). While treading water with its hind paws, it can extend its head and long neck out of the water, inviting comparisons with the extinct plesiosaur, which is so often mentioned as a possibility for Nessie and Champ (Binns 1984, 186–91).
In light of otters, consider this Champ report: On June 15, 1983, several people saw a thirty- to forty-foot creature with four humps in Lake Champlain off the site of Fort Cassin. However, as one witness admitted to the Lake Champlain Phenomena Investigation (LCPI), “It could have been one large creature or four smaller ones” (Zarzynski 1983). This concession takes on new significance when we learn that the sighting was at the “mouth of the Otter Creek” (although it is actually Vermont’s longest river, it is otherwise aptly named as a habitat for the northern river otter).
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