Champ and the Deep Lake

There is something in the lake.

That is what people have been saying about Lake Champlain since before European arrival. The Abenaki and Iroquois nations both carried oral traditions of a large creature inhabiting these waters, something serpentine and enormous, commanding respect. When Samuel de Champlain paddled through in sixteen-oh-nine, he is often said to have described a lake serpent, but there is no evidence he ever did. He recorded large fish, likely gar.

The modern legend of Champ, as the creature is now known, begins with a newspaper report from the summer of eighteen nineteen, when a Captain Crum described something immense surfacing near Port Henry, across the lake in New York. Reports accumulated over the following century and a half, with more than three hundred reported sightings in total. The most discussed piece of physical evidence is a photograph taken by a woman named Sandra Mansi in nineteen seventy-seven, near Saint Albans Bay, showing what appears to be a long dark neck rising from the water. Scientists who examined the photograph in nineteen eighty-one found no evidence of tampering, though the original negative was never located.

In nineteen eighty-two, Vermont's legislature passed a resolution formally protecting Champ from harm. New York passed a similar resolution the following year. Whatever the creature is, or is not, it is technically illegal to harass it.

Lake Champlain is actually deep enough to plausibly conceal something large. It runs to more than four hundred feet in places. The water is cold and dark at depth. The scientific consensus is that no undiscovered megafauna lives here. The legend, though, has proven more durable than the scientific consensus. Burlington's waterfront hosts a statue of Champ, and the baseball team in town, the Vermont Lake Monsters, is named for the creature it may or may not be sharing the lake with.