Champ, Part I: The Monster of Lake Champlain

Champ is Lake Champlain’s legendary monster, with mysterious sightings reported from the waters between New York and Vermont for generations. In Part 1, explore Champ’s early history, famous eyewitness encounters, and the 1977 Sandra Mansi photograph that transformed a regional legend into one of America’s most enduring cryptid mysteries.

AQUATIC CRYPTIDSLARGE CRYPTIDS

losZorros

8/26/202610 min read

Champ, Part I: The Monster of Lake Champlain

Sandra Mansi was watching her children near the shore when the water began to move.

It was July 5, 1977, and Mansi was visiting Lake Champlain with her fiancé, Anthony, and her two children. They had stopped somewhere along the Vermont side of the lake, where the children went toward the water while Anthony returned to the car for a camera. Sandra stayed behind and noticed a disturbance perhaps 150 feet offshore.

At first, there was nothing particularly alarming about it. She thought she might be watching a school of fish or perhaps a scuba diver moving beneath the surface. Then something began to rise out of the lake.

Mansi later described seeing a large dark body followed by a long neck and small head. The creature remained partially above the surface while the family watched, apparently turning its head from side to side. Anthony yelled for the children to get away from the water while Sandra grabbed the camera he had brought back from the car.

She took one photograph.

Whatever they were watching eventually slipped beneath the surface and disappeared. Mansi later estimated the visible portion of the creature at perhaps 12 to 15 feet long, although judging size across open water is notoriously difficult. The family left with no physical evidence of what they had seen beyond a single photograph. For several years, they kept the encounter largely to themselves.

Then, in 1981, the photograph became public. It showed something dark rising from Lake Champlain, with what appeared to be a long, curved neck extending above the water. To anyone familiar with the classic image of the Loch Ness Monster, the resemblance was immediate.

After generations of stories about something strange living in Lake Champlain, someone finally seemed to have photographed it. The question was what, exactly, Sandra Mansi had photographed.

We'll get there.

First, we need to go back a couple hundred years.

Between the Adirondacks and Green Mountains

Lake Champlain stretches roughly 120 miles from the Champlain Valley north toward Quebec, forming much of the boundary between New York and Vermont. The Adirondack Mountains rise to the west and the Green Mountains to the east, creating one of the most dramatic lake settings in the northeastern United States.

It is also a much bigger lake than photographs sometimes suggest. So large, in fact, that not one, but TWO naval battles took place on it. In 1776 the Americans, under Benedict Arnold, engaged a much larger British fleet, and lost the Battle of Valcor Island. In 1814, the tables turned as the Americans, commanded by General Alexander Macomb, defeated a combined British army and naval squadron in the Battle of Plattsburgh.

Lake Champlain covers more than 400 square miles and reaches depths exceeding 400 feet. More than 70 islands dot its waters, while bays, channels, river mouths and rocky points create an enormous variety of aquatic environments. An absolutely gorgeous survey map from 1776 is available to view at the Library of Congress.

Spend time along Lake Champlain and you begin to understand why monster stories work here. On a calm day, the lake can look almost polished. When the weather changes, the water turns dark and rough, fog settles between the mountains, and distant objects become difficult to identify. Something breaking the surface several hundred yards away might be a fish, a swimming animal, a piece of timber or simply a wave catching the light differently.

The lake also contains some genuinely large animals. Lake sturgeon can grow to impressive sizes and look prehistoric even when you're standing directly beside one. Longnose gar inhabit the lake, as do muskellunge, northern pike, otters and plenty of other creatures capable of producing an unexpected disturbance at the surface.

For generations, however, people around Lake Champlain have claimed there is something else in the water.

They call it Champ.

What Is Champ?

Champ is the name given to a mysterious aquatic creature reportedly inhabiting Lake Champlain. Although descriptions vary considerably, the classic version is a large, dark animal with an elongated body, one or more humps and a long neck supporting a relatively small head.

Witness estimates frequently place the creature somewhere between 15 and 30 feet long, although considerably larger animals have occasionally been reported. Its coloration is usually described as dark gray, brown or greenish, which isn't especially helpful when you're trying to identify something seen briefly in dark water.

Some witnesses have described a horse-like head. Others mention horns, a mane, reptilian skin or a snake-like body. Still others never see a head at all and report only a series of humps moving together across the lake.

Over time, popular culture transformed Champ into something resembling a plesiosaur, one of the long-necked marine reptiles that lived during the age of dinosaurs. The same thing happened to Scotland's Loch Ness Monster, particularly after the famous 1934 “Surgeon's Photograph” created the image of a small head and long neck rising from the water.

There's no scientific reason to think plesiosaurs survived the extinction event 66 million years ago, much less established a population in an inland North American lake.

That said, we understand the appeal of a prehistoric lake monster!

Before Champ Had a Name

The history of Champ gets complicated very quickly because folklore, Indigenous traditions, newspaper reporting and later cryptid writing have gradually blended together.

Indigenous peoples lived around Lake Champlain for thousands of years before European settlement, and traditions involving powerful serpentine or horned water beings existed among peoples of the Northeast. The Abenaki figure Gitaskog, often described as a great horned serpent, has frequently been connected to the modern Champ legend.

That connection needs to be handled carefully. Indigenous spiritual traditions aren't nineteenth-century wildlife reports, and treating every traditional water being as evidence for a zoological lake monster strips those stories of their original cultural meaning. They demonstrate that powerful beings associated with water existed in the region's traditions long before Champ became a tourist attraction. They don't establish that Abenaki witnesses were reporting a 25-foot unidentified animal swimming around Lake Champlain.

Then we arrive at one of the most repeated claims in Champ history. According to countless books, websites and television programs, French explorer Samuel de Champlain saw the monster himself in 1609. Well, he kinda saw it...

Champlain did write about an unusual fish, describing something large, armored and equipped with dangerous teeth. But the description doesn't resemble the long-necked creature later called Champ, and the account has been interpreted as describing a large gar or another known fish. The familiar version in which Champlain encounters an enormous serpent-like monster in Lake Champlain appears to be a later addition to the legend.

That's actually useful to know because Champ don't need no stinkin' fake celebrity endorsement. By the nineteenth century, the lake was producing monster stories perfectly well on its own.

Something in Bulwagga Bay

One of the earliest widely cited modern accounts appeared in 1819, when a man identified as Captain Crum reportedly encountered an extraordinary creature in Bulwagga Bay near Port Henry, New York.

Crum's monster was enormous. According to later accounts, he estimated the animal at roughly 187 feet long, with a head resembling a seahorse rising several feet above the water. It supposedly had three teeth, pale eyes, a white star on its forehead and something resembling a red band around its neck.

Now, come on, Crum! We all know that Champ is not 187 feet long! Who you tryin' to fool?

The account is nevertheless important because it represents the kind of enormous “water serpent” story that became increasingly common around Lake Champlain during the nineteenth century. Whether Crum saw a real animal, wildly misjudged the size of something in the water or became attached to a story that improved with repetition is impossible to establish now. What we can establish is that by the middle of the nineteenth century, reports of strange creatures in the lake were becoming part of regional folklore.

Then came 1873.

The Year the Monster Got Famous

The summer of 1873 was a particularly good one for Lake Champlain monsters, with multiple sightings and the establishment of a bounty for the creature!

An entire railroad crew working near the lake reportedly saw an enormous serpent-like creature with silvery scales.
Later that summer, Clinton County Sheriff Nathan H. Mooney claimed to have seen an unknown animal moving through the water.
- Mooney's position made the report especially attractive to newspapers. A sheriff was a considerably harder witness to dismiss than an anonymous fisherman telling stories in a tavern.
- He reportedly estimated the creature at somewhere around 25 to 35 feet long and watched it from a relatively close distance before it disappeared beneath the surface.
Other sightings followed, including an alleged encounter involving passengers aboard the steamship W.B. Eddy

The reports became prominent enough to attract one of nineteenth-century America's greatest promoters. P.T. Barnum wanted the monster! Barnum reportedly offered a $50,000 reward for the creature, hoping to obtain its hide for exhibition. The offer was an enormous amount of money at the time and exactly the kind of publicity Barnum understood better than almost anyone alive.

Nobody collected.

Whether Barnum genuinely believed there was an unknown animal in Lake Champlain isn't particularly important. His involvement tells us something more useful: by the 1870s, the Lake Champlain monster had become famous enough to be commercially valuable. The creature still didn't have the identity it enjoys today, however. Newspaper accounts often described a sea serpent, water serpent or simply a monster. Champ would emerge as the friendly regional name much later.

The sightings continued.

A Monster Becomes a Local

During the twentieth century, the Lake Champlain creature gradually evolved from frightening water serpent into something closer to a local celebrity. Reports continued sporadically from fishermen, boaters, lakeside residents and tourists. Some described long serpentine animals, while others reported unexplained wakes or multiple humps traveling together across the surface. The details changed, but the basic idea remained remarkably durable: occasionally, something large appeared in Lake Champlain that witnesses couldn't identify.

Champ also benefited from what we might call the Nessie effect. As the Loch Ness Monster became internationally famous during the twentieth century, lake monsters around the world began being interpreted through the same visual language. Long neck. Small head. Large body. Prehistoric appearance.

Eventually Champ and Nessie began looking remarkably similar.

That doesn't necessarily mean witnesses were lying. Once a culture develops an established image for what a “lake monster” looks like, ambiguous sightings tend to be interpreted through that image. A distant shape that might once have been described simply as a water serpent could now become a plesiosaur-like animal.

Still, Champ remained largely a regional curiosity.

There were stories. There were witnesses. There were occasional newspaper articles. But there was nothing that separated Champ from dozens of other lake monsters scattered across North America.

Then Sandra Mansi went to the lake with her family.

The Photograph

When Mansi's photograph became public in 1981, people immediately understood why it mattered. The image didn't show a tiny black dot on the horizon. Something substantial appeared to be rising from Lake Champlain. A dark mass sat at the surface while a long, curved shape extended upward before ending in what looked very much like a small head. It looked like Champ.

More importantly, it looked like what people expected Champ to look like.

The photograph received national attention and was examined by researchers interested in determining whether it had been manipulated. No obvious evidence of photographic trickery emerged, and for many cryptid enthusiasts the Mansi photograph became one of the strongest images ever offered as evidence for a lake monster.

There were, however, some possible issues. The original negative was gone. Mansi said she had discarded it, as she routinely did with negatives after having photographs developed. and the exact location of the encounter also became uncertain, making it extremely difficult for later investigators to reconstruct the scene and determine the object's actual size.

To investigators, those aren't minor details. If you don't know how far away an object is, you can't reliably determine how large it is. Something that appears to be a 20-foot animal 150 feet offshore could be a much smaller object considerably closer to the camera. This lead investigators to later return to the photograph and propose a very different explanation for what Sandra Mansi captured that day.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Because by the time the photograph appeared, Champ was no longer simply an old story from Lake Champlain. There was something in the picture... and now people wanted to find it.

Our Take — So Far

Full disclosure: I spent an enormous amount of my childhood in and around Lake Champlain and Lake George. I WANT Champ to be real, soooo badly! So, I will try to remain clear of mind and neutral for the rest of this article and in Part II. But no guarantees...

That being said, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about Champ's history. Samuel de Champlain almost certainly didn't see the monster attributed to him, Captain Crum's 187-foot creature requires a heroic suspension of disbelief, and nineteenth-century newspapers were not exactly allergic to sensational stories.

But there is also something here that we don't want to dismiss too quickly.

Lake Champlain has generated reports of unusual animals for generations. Some witnesses were undoubtedly mistaken, while others probably saw known animals behaving in unexpected ways. A few stories may have been exaggerated or invented entirely. That's how folklore works, especially when a legend has had two centuries to accumulate material.

Sandra Mansi's encounter is different because she brought something home. A photograph doesn't prove that Champ exists. It doesn't even prove that the object in the photograph was alive. But it moves the story from “someone says they saw something” to “there it is—what do you think that is?”

That's where we're going to leave Champ for now.

In Part II, we'll put the photograph under the microscope. We'll look at the missing negative, attempts to determine its location, the submerged-tree theory and what later analysis suggests about the object's size. We'll also examine the 2005 video, sonar and hydrophone searches, modern Champ hunters and the animals that could account for some of the sightings.

Most importantly, we'll ask the question sitting underneath the entire legend.

Could a large unknown animal actually live in Lake Champlain?

For now, we have a lake, two centuries of stories and one very interesting photograph.

That's enough mystery for one Oddex file.

Like Champ (and how could you not?) Check out these posts: The Gloucester Sea Serpent and Champ Part 2

Field Notes: Champ Quick Facts

📍 LOCATION: Lake Champlain — New York, Vermont & Quebec

👀 FIRST DOCUMENTED SIGHTING: 1819*

🐍 CLASSIFICATION: Lake Monster / Aquatic Cryptid

💀 THREAT LEVEL (1–10): 2

📖 STATUS: Unconfirmed — Investigation Continues in Part II

*Indigenous traditions involving powerful water beings predate European settlement but should not automatically be interpreted as zoological Champ sightings. The frequently repeated claim that Samuel de Champlain saw the monster in 1609 is also poorly supported; 1819 is a more defensible starting point for the modern documented legend.