Champ (Champy, the Lake Champlain Monster)

Region/Culture: North America (Lake Champlain, shared by New York, Vermont, and Quebec)
Mythos: Cryptids
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A long-necked, serpentine lake monster said to surface in the deep cold water of Lake Champlain and vanish before anyone can prove it was there.
Role in Mythos: Champ is the resident leviathan of a single great lake, a creature the lake is famous for and that has never once been caught.
Relation to Humans: For two centuries people on both shores have reported seeing it, hunting it, and photographing it, and the legend now draws tourists to the towns along the water. No one has been hurt by Champ, and the creature is protected by law in two states, just in case it is real.

The lake is 125 miles of cold fresh water pressed between the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains, deep enough in places to keep its secrets, and on a still morning the surface holds the mountains so perfectly that any disturbance reads like a signature. A line of low humps breaks the calm. A dark neck lifts, turns, considers the shore, and is gone before the person watching can decide what their own eyes just did. Then the water closes and the mountains settle back into it, and there is nothing to show anyone, which is the whole problem with Champ.

It has been seen more than three hundred times. The descriptions hold together better than they have any right to: a body like a thick snake or a string of barrels, dark and glistening, somewhere between twenty and thirty feet long, riding low with a hump or two above the waterline and a slim neck carrying a head that most people compare to a horse. Cold spray, the smell of weed and wet rock, the flat slap of a wake with no boat under it. The creature never does much. It surfaces, it moves, it submerges. That is the entire act, repeated for two hundred years.

The story is older than the name. Before any European wrote it down, the Iroquois spoke of enormous serpents in these waters, and the Mohawk called such a being Onyare’kowa, the great snake. Samuel de Champlain, who gave the lake his name in 1609, is forever credited as the first white man to see the monster, describing a serpent thick as a barrel with a head like a horse. He wrote no such thing. That quotation was invented for a magazine in 1970 and has been bolted onto him ever since. What Champlain actually recorded was a five-foot fish with armored scales and a long toothed snout, which later translators identified, with some regret, as a gar.

The written legend really begins in 1819, in a Plattsburgh newspaper, with a Captain Crum who swore he had watched a serpent nearly two hundred feet long from a fifth of a mile away and still made out its three teeth, its eyes the color of a peeled onion, a red band around its neck and a white star on its forehead. It is a wonderful account and not a single part of it is believable. The legend grew up properly in 1883, when Sheriff Nathan Mooney reported a water serpent close to shore, near enough that he could see round white spots inside its open mouth, and put its length at twenty-five or thirty feet. Mooney was a respected man, and his sighting unbottled a flood of others. People who had kept quiet for years suddenly had stories. P. T. Barnum, who understood exactly what kind of animal a legend is, offered a standing reward for the hide, fifty thousand dollars in one year and twenty thousand in another, and nobody ever collected.

The most famous moment came in 1977, when a woman named Sandra Mansi, picnicking with her family, photographed something with a long neck rising out of the bay. The picture is genuinely strange and has never been cleanly explained, which has kept it in print for decades. It also has two fatal gaps. Mansi threw away the negative and could not afterward say where on the lake she had stood, and the bay where the photo seems to have been taken is nowhere more than fourteen feet deep, far too shallow to hide anything the size of the thing in the frame. A rising log would account for it. So would a great many ordinary objects seen at the wrong instant by a person hoping for a monster.

That is Champ’s only real weakness, and it is a strange one. The creature is undone not by any hunter but by depth, by the dull facts of the lake itself. Where the sightings cluster, the water is often too shallow, too studied, too crossed by boats for a thirty-foot animal to live unseen and unbothered. Sturgeon grow long and ridged and break the surface. Gar look prehistoric. A drifting log lifts on a swell and holds a pose for exactly as long as it takes to take a bad photograph. Against all of this, Champ has produced no body, no bone, no scale, no clean film in two hundred years of looking.

And yet the lake keeps it. Vermont’s legislature voted to protect Champ from harm in 1982, New York’s followed in 1983, and the village of Port Henry had already declared its waters a safe haven the year before. There is a giant model of the monster on the New York shore and a baseball team named for it across the water. People still come to the railings on calm mornings and watch the place where the mountains lie reflected, waiting for the line of humps, half hoping the water will sign its name again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Champ?

Champ, also called Champy or the Lake Champlain Monster, is a lake monster of American folklore said to live in Lake Champlain on the border of New York, Vermont, and Quebec. Witnesses describe a dark, serpentine creature twenty to thirty feet long with humps and a long neck topped by a horselike head. There have been more than 300 reported sightings, but no physical evidence has ever been found.

Is Champ real?

There is no scientific evidence that Champ exists. No body, bone, or clear photograph has ever been produced, and skeptics note that famous sightings can be explained by floating logs, large fish such as gar and sturgeon, or waves seen at a distance. Believers point to the consistency of the descriptions and to ambiguous photos and videos, but none has been authenticated.

Did Samuel de Champlain see the monster?

No. Samuel de Champlain is often said to have sighted a barrel-thick serpent with a horselike head in 1609, but that quotation was invented for a magazine article in 1970. What Champlain actually described in his journals was a large armored fish later identified as a longnose gar.

What is the Sandra Mansi photograph?

The Sandra Mansi photograph, taken in 1977, appears to show a long-necked creature rising from Lake Champlain and is the most famous image associated with Champ. Its credibility is undermined because Mansi discarded the negative and could not identify the location, and the bay where it was likely taken is only about fourteen feet deep, too shallow to conceal a large animal.

Is Champ protected by law?

Yes. Vermont passed a resolution protecting Champ from harm in 1982 and New York did the same in 1983, while the village of Port Henry, New York, declared its waters a safe haven for the creature in 1981. Champ is one of the few legendary creatures in the world to receive official legal protection.