© Chris Reilly / Jan Doerler

Treasured memory. Harbinger of ecological trouble. Lucrative souvenir logo. The product of one too many gin and tonics.
Champ, the denizen of Lake Champlain spotted by thousands of people over hundreds of years, is all of these things.

“It’s part of our folklore,” says Dee Carroll, co-owner with her husband of the Westport Marina and Galley Restaurant in New York, straight west of Button Bay and Basin Harbor. Dee began boating Lake Champlain in 1969, and found Champ a frequent topic of conversation.

“Some people said they saw things on the lake that were Champ, or that they thought were Champ. People were seeing something. It could be real, or it could be an artifact, like a wake from a boat that had passed some time ago.”

While Dee thought some of the Champ sightings she heard about could be mistaken, she firmly believed that “There are enough real stories that something is out there. My feelings about it were mixed and hopeful. Loch Ness has Nessie. Why can’t we have Champ? It’s a fun phenomenon.”

In the mid-1980’s Dee had her own encounter with Champ. “Bob and I were driving back to Westport along the Lake, and there are these rock cuts near Port Henry,” she recalls. “I said, ‘What’s that post-like thing out there, sticking straight up?’ When I turned my head back, it was gone and there were concentric circles in the water where it had been. But I saw a post-like thing, and then it disappeared. I think it was Champ.”

When she recounts her story, Dee says, “Some people get excited, others say, ‘Yeah, right.’ But I saw what I saw.” Dee is less concerned about naysayers than she is about the possible causes of a drop in Champ sightings—a trend she worries may be tied to the declining health of the Lake.

“I’m concerned because we don’t hear of as many sightings as we used to,” she says. “Is the lake polluted, and it died? Is it lost on the food chain with other things moving in? Was its food source wiped out by zebra mussels? The smelt are gone, the alewife came in and gobbled them up. So what if smelt is what it ate? There is, or at least has been, something out there and we don’t know what it is.”

“I Gotta Tell You”

Lorraine Franklin, proprietor of Champ’s Trading Post in West Addison, has never seen Champ herself, but hears frequent tales of Champ encounters from her customers—often in whispered tones.

“People come in and say, ‘I gotta tell you this story,’” she says, but they ask her not to let anyone else know who they are. “They are ostracized and labeled. A retired professional near here, highly thought of by his peers—his wife told me he’d seen Champ. But when he came in the store, he said, ‘I told my father, but don’t tell anyone else, or they think you’re crazy. But I know what I saw.’”

Lorraine and her husband Dana founded Vermont’s Own Products in the 1980s. Then they bought WAGS—the West Addison General Store—in 1989. When a small store in New York just past the Bridge came up for sale, the couple bought it to help protect the market share of WAGS. Looking for a fun, catchy name, Lorraine spontaneously decided to call it Champ’s General Store. But she didn’t seriously associate it with Champ until the Discovery Channel van came rolling into the parking lot, filming for their Monster Quest series.

“They said, ‘We’re doing a feature, do you have Champ things for sale?’” Lorraine recalls. “We didn’t at that time, but we thought it was a great idea.”

Her husband came up with a Champ logo, then the couple worked with a graphic artist to refine it. Their own line of Champ items has soared in popularity. In 2008, they opened Champ’s Trading Post on a piece of her husband’s family’s farmland on Route 17. Amid Vermont maple syrup, cheese and local souvenirs, their corner of Champ merchandise creates a huge draw: T-shirts, coffee mugs, shot glasses, umbrellas and children’s books.

“People are coming to the area to look for Champ. I’ve even had honeymooners here looking for Champ. That was their honeymoon,” Lorraine says.

What most intrigues her is not the scientific probability of its existence. “I personally hope Champ is never found,” she says. “It’s one of life’s mysteries and if it is found it’ll be like a circus. It’s more fun to speculate. Until you can prove to me that it’s not there, there’s always that possibility.”

CHAMP DAY AT
CHAMP’S TRADING POST
IN WEST ADDISON

Saturday July 26, 2014, is the first annual Champ Day at Champ’s Trading Post on Route 17 in West Addison.

Katy Elizabeth will be signing her book Water Horse of Lake Champlain and there will be water and ecology related activities for kids throughout the day.

Check www.champstradingpost.com for more details.

 

“It’s More Fun to Wonder”

Champ sightings are threads in the fabric of a strong sense of place inherent in the Lake Champlain region. Stories of Champ encounters form the basis of tradition within families that live around the Lake or summer here. “Champ sightings are the stuff of family legend, told to the grandkids around the fire,” Lorraine says. “Let’s preserve the lore. I hate to have the naysayers destroy that line. Don’t ruin it for the future generations. It’s more fun to just wonder.”

A sense of wonder about Champ has persisted for hundreds if not thousands of years. The serpent inhabiting the water realm, in perpetual battle with the thunder beings of the upper realm, is a venerable theme of Wabanaki culture, according to Abenaki artist and living historian Roger Sheehan. These possibly arise from cultural memories going back to the time of the Inland Sea.

“Most native people here understood what you now call Champ as one of these serpents,” Roger explains. “The Indian people would have seen this as a representation of this tradition.”

Water is an unknown, and going out on the water holds serious risks. Sailors from cultures around the world acknowledge the danger of entering deep water in small craft, and engage in rituals to seek favorable conditions. “We still to this day, when we go out on large bodies of water, give an offering: tobacco or something like that,” Roger says.

As to the scientific certainty of Champ’s existence, in the sense of being measurable by scientists, Roger embraces a pragmatic comfort in the unknown—shared by many who keep an open mind to Champ’s mystery.

“If it’s a spirit being, you’ll never catch it. If it’s a physical being, maybe they’ll catch one someday. Today’s phenomenon can be tomorrow’s science,” he says.

Myth and Science

It is possible for some people to keep both concepts—the myth and the science—in their minds at the same time, according to Jane Miller, a professor of mythology and literature at CCV. Miller cites the Anglo-Indian philosopher A.K. Coomaraswamy, who said, “Myth is the closest thing to absolute truth that can be expressed in words.” Yet another definition of myth is a collective deception. She explains: “Some scientists look at myth as a primitive and inferior way to explain natural phenomenon which is better explained through science.” These are the folks who want King Arthur’s grave to disprove the story. “To others, the story is what matters. People are attached to the metaphor.”

The two ways of thinking needn’t be mutually exclusive. “The story is not just entertainment, not just the idea that Champ is fun—though it is,” says Miller. “It is also a connection with a creature other than ourselves, maybe that was here before we were. People who know how old and deep the Lake is—they are willing to believe that there are creatures in there that we haven’t seen.”

Whether or not Champ is scientifically proven to be a physical being, people who encounter it with their own senses are sharing in a community’s story in a deeply meaningful and transcendent way.

Thanks in part to a 1970 Vermont Life article by the late naturalist Marjorie Porter—a woman respected for her scholarship and accuracy, but who has been roundly criticized on this point—Samuel de Champlain is popularly believed to be the first European to sight Champ. But his journals debunk this notion.

Association of the mysterious creature Champ with our region’s “founding father” is consistent with one of the important functions of mythology: explaining how a place came to be. Tying Champ to Monsieur de Champlain makes the creature a key figure in our regional cultural origin story—even if it happens to be patently untrue.
The first sighting reported in a newspaper occurred in 1808, and hundreds if not thousands of such reports have followed.

Individuals, couples, anglers, steamboat and ferryboat captains, gangs of railroad workers and groups of ship passengers have all publicly reported sightings.

Some took great pains to sign statements swearing to their sobriety, intelligence, education and eyesight, all of which are called into question the minute a Champ sighting is declared.

The smirks are likely to continue until there is an authenticated Champ corpse on a lab table at UVM. Or at least until someone manages to take an irrefutable photograph.

“We Don’t Know Everything”

In 1977 a Connecticut woman named Sandra Mansi took what has become the premier iconographic photograph of Champ. Unlike the leading photographs of Nessie, Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster, Mansi’s photo of Champ has never been definitively disproven. Despite being published by the venerable New York Times in June, 1981, Mansi’s photo is clouded in controversy.

The picture’s evidentiary value is tarnished by Mansi’s lost or discarded negative and an inability or unwillingness to identify the exact place on the shore between St. Albans and Canada where she took the photo.

These taints have done nothing to diminish the photo’s popular impact, and the picture—now in the possession of Burlington’s ECHO Center, which keeps a record of reported sightings overseen by Linda Bowden, their education coordinator —has inspired a new generation to the quest of finding Champ.

Katy Elizabeth remembers sitting in her Rhode Island living room watching the Unsolved Mysteries television show when she was seven years old, and up popped the image of Sandra Mansi’s photo. “I was so fascinated by seeing that, I said, ‘I want to go there!’ I asked my mom if we could go to Lake Champlain right then. She was like, ‘It’s five hours away, I’m not going to drive there.’ And I was so mad. I was so fascinated by the idea of a prehistoric or unknown creature living in a lake.”

She grew up on a lake in Warwick, and then on the shore of Long Island Sound. Katy Elizabeth’s lifeblood of water and love of animals—she makes her living teaching horseback riding and competing in equestrian events—coalesced to make Champ a personal obsession.

Undaunted by her mother’s dismissive response, Katy says, “I went to the library at my elementary school and asked for books about lake monsters and she looked at me funny, like I was crazy.” The librarian eventually located something on Loch Ness, and then some information about Champ.

Katy started reading about these creatures and has not stopped since. She recently added her own chapter of Champ lore with her self-published booklet, Water Horse of Lake Champlain.

Katy did not manage to make it to Lake Champlain until the summer of 2012. She camped at Button Bay State Park and searched for the creature with a makeshift array of cameras and equipment. She’s made two more trips since then and will be back this summer to hold book signings and engage with fellow cryptozoologists—a self-bestowed title indicating someone who by hobby or profession pursues mysterious creatures.

The practical logistics of business and family obligations in Rhode Island, together with a lack of available money for sighting slippery lake serpents, has precluded Katy from turning her obsession into a full-time pursuit. But they don’t deter her from trying.

“It’s very expensive, the equipment. It’s an expensive thing to get into,” she says. “There’s the lack of funds, and a lot of people, after a while, if they don’t find something significant, they give up. I’m not giving up.”

Even those who do find something often give up. The forces intent to disprove Champ’s physical existence can be powerful.
Vermont local Elizabeth von Muggenthaler’s 2003 echolocation study indicated the presence of some creature in the lake using echolocation signals akin to those used by whales. After several years of criticism and drama, von Muggenthaler abandoned her Lake Champlain efforts. An expert in the study of animal communication, with ample scientific credentials to her name, she shut down her website on the study.

Katy Elizabeth respects von Muggenthaler’s findings and hopes, somehow, to build upon them. She formed Champ Search, an organization with a Facebook page trying to connect people who have sighted Champ with research efforts, and resources.

“The driving interest is just knowing that we don’t know everything in this world. There are so many undiscovered things,” she says. “People say, ‘Oh this doesn’t exist.’ Then you find new species all the time. We know more about other planets than about our own oceans. The mystery of it is intriguing.”

Like other individuals who speak of their experience with Champ, Katy gets disdainful reactions. “A lot of people think I’m crazy. But some people don’t. Nowadays people are more open to new species being out there. But yeah, I get a few eyebrows now and then. Are you serious? Are you crazy? They joke about it. I tell them: until you see it for yourself, you’ll never believe it.”

“It Was Majestic”

About 25 years ago, in early spring when the water was high, Christine Hebert heard her dogs barking in the wee hours of the morning. She lived near the Auer Family Boathouse, a treasured local landmark at the far northern end of North Avenue, a narrow spit of land wedged between the Lake, the Burlington Bike Path, and the Winooski River.

Thinking she had forgotten to tie one of the boats up—it might be banging around. disturbing the dogs—she looked out the window. The night was foggy, but a bright streetlamp illuminated the boat launch ramp, providing a welcome beacon to late-night boaters.

“It came out through the mist,” she recalls. “Like a dinosaur, as big as me, with its head and neck out of the water.” She gestures with her hand bunched up at a 90-degree angle from her forearm, her elbow steeply bent. “And a hump. I couldn’t tell how much of it was still in the water.”

This was before the city had brought in truckloads of fill and broken-up sidewalk concrete to form a bulwark along this stretch of shore. The drop-off into the boat ramp was steep then. “The water would be over your head there,” she says now.

The creature, a pea-green color, sat under the bright light staring out at the Lake for several minutes, apparently unperturbed by the dogs. Christine looked out from her window about thirty feet away, entranced. It moved its head around, then glided off into the water. Christine had the sense it was headed towards the Winooski River.

A few nights later, the dogs barked again, and this time Christine was certain that everything in the yard was tied up tight. On this night, however, she was not alone. She woke her mother from her bed and dragged her to the window. The creature under the light this time was a bit smaller, and more brown than green.

Her mother “refused to commit” to what she’d seen, Christine says, and would never speak of it. Christine related her experience to a colleague just after it happened, and wound up facing a formal, intimidating inquiry about the soundness of her mind at work, followed by a wave of curiosity-seekers in tents and vans on her front lawn.

She was scoffed at and asked if she’d been drinking at the time. She and her brother started locking the gate across the boathouse driveway. And she stopped talking about it, except in response to serious, respectful inquiries.

While naysayers may have restrained Christine from talking about her experience, they have not changed her recollections of her sharp-eyed, sober experience.

“I don’t care if you laugh at me,” she says firmly. “I don’t care if you don’t believe me. I know what I saw.”

At 87, Christine is now retired from a career in banking. Her ‘retirement’ involves an exhausting schedule of playing piano and church organ throughout Chittenden County and the Islands, as well as running the boathouse with her brother in the summer months. Her lifetime of living on the lake has brought memories of beauty and an ongoing concern about the Lake’s health.

Like Dee Carroll across the lake in Westport, Christine worries about vanishing smelt populations, decrease in walleye size, escalating lamprey populations, flotilla of cormorants eating everything in sight, human development like the wastewater treatment plant nearby that dramatically altered the area’s drainage patterns.

“That’s our drinking water right there,” she says.

Out of nearly nine decades of treasured images of the Lake, the two instances of seeing Champ remain etched in Christine’s mind. “There was nary a ripple as they moved through the water,” she says with reverence. “It was majestic.”

Author Cindy Hill has seen many strange and interesting things in her life, though Champ is not yet among them. She does, however, make offerings to the water spirits whenever she gets into a boat—conveyances for which she has a healthy, Hobbit-like distrust.