Champ

French explorer Samuel de Champlain gave the lake his name in 1609, and his journals describe the local fish and waters in detail — a passage often cited as the first European 'sighting' of a great serpent, though Champlain himself wrote of a large gar-pike rather than a monster. The Abenaki and Iroquois who lived along these shores had the older claim, telling of a horned water-being to be respected and left alone.

By the nineteenth century the creature had hardened into a New York legend. In 1873 a railroad crew reported a great serpentine head rising from the lake, and that same era the showman P. T. Barnum, never one to miss an opportunity, posted a standing reward for the carcass of the 'Champlain serpent' to display in his collection. No one ever collected. Champ stayed in the water, and the legend only grew.

The defining moment came on the Fourth of July weekend, 1977, when Sandra Mansi was picnicking with her family on the lake's eastern shore near St. Albans. She watched a dark neck and head rise from the water and had the presence of mind to snap a single color photograph before it submerged. The Mansi photograph — grainy, undeniable, impossible to dismiss — became the most famous image in American lake-monster lore and put Champ on the front pages.

He has been seen far more often than he has been photographed. The village of Port Henry maintains a public record of hundreds of sightings logged over the decades, and the town crowns itself the home of Champ with an annual celebration in his honor. Fishermen, ferry passengers, and shoreline picnickers from both the New York and Vermont sides have reported the same thing for generations: humps in a line, a dark head, a wake against the wind, gone in seconds.

Skeptics offer the usual lineup — lake sturgeon, swimming deer, drifting logs, standing waves thrown up where the lake's deep trenches funnel the wind. Believers point out that Lake Champlain was carved by glaciers and was once an arm of the sea, the Champlain Sea, that flooded the valley after the last ice age; if anything ancient were trapped here when the salt water drained away, this is exactly the kind of deep, cold, sealed-off water where it could have stayed hidden.

Champ is unusual among American monsters for being beloved on both sides of a state line and protected by law on both — resolutions on the books in New York and Vermont have declared him a protected species, a courtesy extended to few legends. He is the mascot, the secret, and the guardian of the inland sea all at once. The deepest parts of Lake Champlain have never been fully searched, and the people of Port Henry will tell you, straight-faced, that they don't need to search. They know who lives down there.