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Writer's pictureSmall Town Spooky Podcast
Oct 20, 202126 min read

Episode 3: What Lurks in Lake Champlain


Intro

A haunting hello to all the ghoul gang members out there. Yes, we’re going with that. Thank you so much for listening and your support of the show. I can’t believe it has over 170 streams so far! I was remiss in last week’s episode and didn’t thank Oz (@betterthingspending) for their comment on Episode 1 via Instagram: “this was awesome. I loved learning abt the history of the area too” and the 5-star review on Apple Podcasts! Thank you Lily :) And thanks to Kaushal, Brian, Matt and Joel for all of your messages about how you’ve been enjoying the show--I really appreciate your support! Just a reminder that if you want to express your appreciation, you can leave Small Town Spooky a review on iTunes, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you have a friend you think would enjoy the show, recommend it to them. :) You can also email smalltownspooky@gmail.com and share your thoughts—I do check the inbox!


I’ve been reading More Ghost Stories of Alberta by Barbara Smith. The book is very much in line with the ones I grew up reading during camping trips or stays at friends’ cottages—or cabins, as they’re called in Alberta. Anyway, I had wanted to get my hands on this one before I recorded last week’s episode, but my hold didn’t come in time, so now I’m going to retroactively mention one that I could have used last week—it’s called professionalism. In “Who Could She Be?” (fantastic title) Smith details an odd encounter she had in 1995, whilst chatting with Ernst Eder, the former owner of La Boheme restaurant, which I mentioned briefly in Episode 2. He pours her a coffee and she asks him about possible hauntings at the cafe, when they’re both interrupted. They watch as the lid of the sugar bowl in front of her levitates briefly before settling back down on the table about three centimeters away from the bowl. When Smith returned for another visit, Eder shared his theory that the spirit haunting the building block spent most of its time in the basement and was a “distinctly benign spirit” whom the staff suspected could have been a laudress for one of the families who originally lived in the Gibbard Block of buildings where La Boheme was located. No murdered wives here, I guess. I prefer the wholesomeness of this story, what do you think?


There’s also an account of the haunting at Princess Theatre, where Smith speaks to a former director and several employees who confirm hearing footsteps from the unoccupied apartment block floor, and knocking on the walls in several different parts of the building that were unoccupied at the time. A manager who had a first-hand encounter when she was alone in the theatre, and setting up in the projection room. She heard a rapping on the glass window of the booth--the glass window that overlooked the second-storey balcony, impossible to reach from the outside without a ladder. That’s a big “no thank you” from me!


In the last episode I also mentioned a social media poll for an upcoming episode topic; you can participate on the Small Town Spooky Website until October 29th, and I’ll announce the winner in the Halloween episode on October 31st. :) I’ll link to the poll on all of Small Town Spooky’s socials as well so you can find it there. The options are: The haunted hostel that used to be Ottawa’s jail, Brentwood College Boarding School’s ghost-infested student dormitory, or you can submit your own!


Now let’s ghost into it.


Trigger Warning

Trigger warnings for this episode include mentions of colonial settlers and exploration, war, homicide and suicide.


Curious About Cryptids

In today’s episode we’re covering one of my late dad’s favourite topics--cryptids. If you’re not familiar with the word, it denotes mysterious, sometimes folkloric living creatures that have yet to be studied (or substantiated) by science. Think Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. The word was reportedly coined by John E. Wall, a cryptzoologist from Manitoba. According to The International Cryptozoology Society, Wall first wrote the word in the summer 1983 issue of the International Society of Cryptozoology Newsletter. The word itself comes from combining the Ancient Greek kruptós, meaning “hidden”, with the adjectival suffix “id”, which in biology denotes something “connected or related or belonging to” a certain class, family or genus”, and was adapted from Latin and Ancient Greek -ides which denoted paternal lineage.


Cryptozoology is a relatively young field, first identified in print in 1959. It is “the scientific study of animal forms, the existence of which is based only on testimonial or circumstantial evidence, or on material proof judged to be insufficient by some.” The study of cryptozoology was arguably popularized by two men: Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans.


Sanderson was born in Scotland in 1911 and has one of the most “white guy receives higher education in the early 20th century” academic resume I’ve ever read. He attended Eton College--you know, that school in England founded by Henry VI that has turned out at least half a dozen prime ministers, hosted Princes William, Harry, Henry and Richard and other royals from around the world, authors Orwell, Huxley, Fleming and the poet Shelley, just to name a few, and notably long-faced English actors Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. Then at just 17 years old, Sanderson embarked on a year-long global trip, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts Honors in zoology from Cambridge University, later upgraded to a Masters of Botany and Ethnology.


He conducted a number of “expeditions” through the 20s and 30s -- to the British Cameroons, better known as Northern Nigeria (in West Africa) and Cameroon (Central Africa), South America and the Caribbean, Haiti, Trinidad, and Madagascar where he collected “samples” of local fauna. Not to be all Lemony Snicket about it, but “collected” is a word which here means “shot and killed” and by “samples of local fauna” I mean to say “dead animals”. In the late 40s, Sanderson became a television personality, appearing as a “naturalist” on wildlife television programs, and in the 50s opened a 25-acre (100,000m2) zoo in New Jersey. Sanderson published nature books and articles, and was an early follower of researcher and writer Charles Fort, who made a name for himself investigating scientific anomalies.


Somewhat unrelated but noteworthy: his father was a Scottish whisky manufacturer who died when Sanderson was just 14 years old, having been attacked by a rhinoceros while assisting a documentary film crew in Kenya. Sanderson himself would record a wild incident in his 1937 book Animal Treasure, in which he claimed to have been wading down a river in the Assumbo Mountains region of Cameroon in 1932. He was shooting bats out of the sky with his guide, Bensun Onun Edet, and his travel and research companion, Gerald Russel, accompanying him. Suddenly, a giant, bat-like creature swooped down out of the dark and dive-bombed Sanderson and his companions. It had a wingspan of about 12 feet and a flat, monkey-like muzzle, and its lower jaw hung open, revealing equally-spaced, huge white teeth. Sanderson said his guides referred to it as “olitiau” but this could have been a misunderstanding of two Ipulo words meaning “cloven” or “forked”, and used to refer to a dance mask representing a demon.


Heuvelmans, for his part, was a zoologist born in 1916 in Le Havre, France. Heuvelmans was a fascinating character. “But Renée,” I hear you cry, “how can he be more fascinating than the guy whose dad was killed by a rhino, got his Masters degree poaching animals in tropical biomes, and opened a zoo in New Jersey?” Well, for starters, Heuvelmans earned his doctorate by writing his thesis on the classification of “previously unclassifiable” aardvark teeth. He then went on to publish many articles about the history of science, until the advent of World War II, when he was called to military service. He escaped after being captured by the Germans on four separate occasions, and when the war was over he went on to earn his living as a professional jazz singer and comedian, writing popular science on the side. He published an encyclopedic, two-volume work of cryptozoological research called Sur la piste des bêtes ignorées in 1955 and continued to work on it up until his death in 2001. It has since been republished several times, as late as 1995, and in English as On the Track of Unknown Animals.



[Image: A map from 1570s Germany depicting all manner of interesting and terrifying marine life. Source: Wikimedia Commons]


Today’s episode is about a creature that Heuvelmans and Sanderson, in their hey-day, would have loved to get a gander at. We’re looking at a locale with many small towns surrounding it, each with their own history of encounters of a particularly unnerving inhabitant.


Lake Champlain

The water stretches farther than you can see. The thin layer of aluminum between you and the inky depths keeps you afloat, keeps you dry, but the pulse of the lake--the slow, steady lap of the waves against the hull, the rocking of the boat--seems to settle in your veins. You pull the collar of your windbreaker up to shelter your neck from the slight breeze that ruffles the surface of the water. It’s a clear day--unlike some mornings on the lake, when the fog rolls in so thick it crosses the expanse of water like a cloud unfurling. The islands of the lake, all rocky promontories and wind-bent pines, just up from the water like the sparse teeth of some gargantuan monster, sheer, stony faces rising from the depths.


Below, dark shapes move through the freshwater, all but imperceptible between the columns of seaweed and silt, until the sunlight filtering down catches a flash of scale or fin. Calls float across the water—gulls, and excited divers with their oxygen tanks, anchored at the shipwreck reserves. They’ll sink down to the silty lake bottom and see the towering wrecks from Champlain’s earliest colonial development looming out of their watery graves. At its darkest depths, the lake could comfortably conceal a pod of fully grown blue whales. But there’s something else rumoured to be lurking in the lake…


[Image: A view of Lake Champlain from Rattlesnake Mountain, Willsboro NY. Source: Wikimedia Commons.]


Lake Champlain is a large, freshwater lake that occupies parts of Vermont, New York, and Quebec. Its total size encompasses 490 square miles (1,269 km2), and it stretches like a gash in the middle of the map, running south to north for 107 miles (172 km) long. It’s only 14 miles (23 km) across at its widest point, and the area surrounding the lake is covered in some 800 acres of wetland--marsh and swamp. The deepest parts of the lake are 400 feet (120 m) deep, and it flows northward to empty into the St. Lawrence River. Lake Champlain -- or Lac Champlain, in Quebec—was first known to the Abenaki First Nations as pitawbagok, “middle” or “double” lake, possibly referring to the mountain ranges on either side: the Green Mountains to the east, formed approximately 500 million years ago, and to the west, the Adirondack Mountains, formed about 150 million years ago. To the Mohawk, the lake was known as Kaniatarakwà:ronte, “bulged lake” or Kania:tare tsi kahnhoka:ronte “lake to the country”; the Adirondack mountains were the Ratirón:taks tsi iononténion (The mountains of “they [who] eat trees” named for the Algonquin people in the area) and the Green were the Skanontkaraksèn:ke tsi iononténion --”the mountains where the cliffs are clumsy”.


[Image: Iroquois with various goods, presumably western goods which they traded for, from L'Histoire de l'Amérique septentrionale: divisée en quatre tomes (1722). Source: Wikimedia Commons.]


Historically, the lake has been an important locale for Indigenous peoples. Pitawbagok or Kaniatarakwaronte marked the boundary between traditional Abenaki and Mohawk (Haudenosaunee) territory. Although the totality of the Quebec region is the traditional home of at least 11 distinct ethnic First Nations groups (in French “peuples autochtones”), and the states of New York and Vermont the traditional territory of at least a dozen more, the bands in the area surrounding Lake Champlain would have predominantly been the Algonquin Abenaki, and the Iroquois Mohawk, who were part of the Haudenosaunee: a confederacy of First Nations groups that also included the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca, and then later the Tuscarora Iroquoians.



A (Very Brief) History of Colonial Lake Champlain

Colonial settlers were also drawn to the region due to the natural resources in the area and the economical and military advantages of controlling the waterways.


The St. Lawrence River basin (to the west) and the Lake Champlain region were the sites of some of the first contact points between First Nations and European colonists. European explorations westward accelerated in the 16th century, with maritime trading companies searching for faster, sea-based trade routes. Once land was identified in the west, both France and England scrambled to capitalise and colonize on the discovery. In the 17th century, Britain’s religious minorities sailed to North America to found colonies, while religious minorities in France fought with the Catholic church to leave. Quebec was initially referred to as “New France” before taking the name “Quebec,” appropriating an Algonquin word, kebec, meaning “narrow passage” or “where the river narrows”.


New York was part of the English settlement--though, the first European to sail to the New York Harbor and land on the tip of Manhattan was actually an Italian, Giovanni da Verrazzano, contracted by the French. Later settled by the Dutch as “New Amsterdam”, New York would become one of the first of the thirteen colonies of the future United States of America. Jacques Cartier, another Frenchman, was the first European in this time period to land in Quebec, and purportedly the first colonist to see the future site of Vermont. Cartier landed at Gaspé some ten years after da Verrazzano, in 1534. The French attempted to build settlements, but were largely unsuccessful until 1608, when Samuel de Champlain erected a fortified site in the St. Lawrence Valley. Champlain claimed Vermont for New France, too—“vert mont” is better said as mont vert or “green mountain” in French—but the area would later be lost to the British, making it part of New England.


In 1609, Samuel de Champlain explored the area, forever putting his stamp on the region with his namesake. Champlain rode along with a First Nations war party--including Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron--who were using the lake as an invasion route through the Adirondack and Green Mountains in a conflict with the area Iroquois. This area would have been of great interest to both de Champlain and Henry Hudson, the Dutch explorer who settled parts of Canada for the British and capitalized on the fur trade. Hudson entered Upper New York bay in fall of 1609, and encouraged the company to build a settlement there, in order to profit on trading furs with the First Nations groups inhabiting the area. Thus, as we heard in the first two Small Town Spooky episodes, came the Europeans and their damn forts.


[Image: Samuel Champlain's own illustration of his violent encounter with the Iroquois in July 1609. In a battle thought to have taken place somewhere near the Crown Point peninsula, The explorer and his men used their powerful weapons to change the course of a battle between native peoples' long at war. Source: Wikimedia Commons.]


The French established colonial forts St-Frederic (established on the border between present-day Quebec and Vermont) and Carillon on the northern part of the lake in the mid-1700s. The Forts were controlled by the French until 1759, when the British burned Fort St Frederic to the ground and built their newer, bigger fort, Crown Point, next to the ruins. The pettiness level: unmatched. Crown Point was captured by rebels during the American Revolution, along with Fort Carillon, which was renamed “Ticonderoga”—for the Iroquois tekontaro:ken “at the junction of two waterways”--by state militia led by Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen. By 1775, the rebelling British colonists--soon to be Americans--controlled Lake Champlain. Other notable naval battles on the lake include the Siege of Quebec, the Battle of Valcour Island, and later, during the War of 1812, The Battle of Plattsburgh.


The lake is full of shipwrecks—from merchant ferries to schooners to barges, over 300 wrecks may exist. In 1997, divers from the marine archaeology museum of Vermont found a 50-foot gunboat, the lone cannon on its deck still intact, and identified it as one from a fleet commanded by Benedict Arnold.


The settlements around the lake are numerous. Further north in Quebec, Lake Champlain becomes the Richelieu River, a major tributary of the St. Lawrence. This area is mostly rural, with small villages bearing the Frenchest of names such as “Saint-Georges-de-Clarenceville” and “Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel”. On the eastern, Vermont side of the lake, catch a walking tour or peep preserved 18th century architecture in a small historical town or village like Chesterfield, Essex, Lewis, Westport or Elizabethtown , which you may recognize as the title of the utterly forgettable 2005 Cameron Crowe movie starring Orlando Bloom and, for some reason, Kirsten Dunst (not the same Elizabethtown). The New York side is largely wildlife parks and preserves, with cottages and lodges, historic colonial forts and museums, and this one place called “Happy Pike Ice Cream & Snack Bar” that showed up on Google Maps. It has a 4.7 star rating? Well I’m definitely checking that out next time I’m in the area.


Sighting Serpents

With the invasion of colonial settlers and resulting battles and bloodshed, you would think the Lake Champlain area would be chock-full of ghost stories. And you’d be right. But there’s another undercurrent of oddness in the tales from the region.


In one of the stories of the Iroquois, the young hero Da-ra-sá-kwa meets a charming stranger who brings him to the lake bottom and lets him try on a beautiful cloak made from snake skin, which turns Da-ra-sá-kwa into an O-ni-a-re: a giant horned serpent. The story goes that once Da-ra-sá-kwa sees his new form in the skin of the serpent, he is so pleased with “his new and beautiful shape, his brightly spotted coat and his majestic antlers” that he goes to show the members of his village. He tells them what has happened, and then cautions them not to follow him, or to name any other child in the village Da-ra-sá-kwa, or they will meet the same fate as him, and then he sinks back beneath the waters, never to be seen again. The Horned Serpent can be a giver of good-luck and protective charms, a rescuer of young women—but he is also an enemy of thunder spirits, or thunderbirds, and a seducer, luring young women away from their homes in the form of a human.


Stories from further east, from the Passamaquoddy First Nations, tell of a woman who fell in love with an enormous river serpent and killed members of her village by absorbing the serpent’s venom and spreading it to others. Seneca stories feature “the underwater people”, spirits or beings that inhabit lakes, rivers and other waterways who can be helpful or dangerous, such as Djodi’kwado, a great serpent with buffalo horns. An Algoquian myth of Glooscap, or Klose-kur-be, depicts the hero confronting an enormous serpent on the Kennebec River in Maine (about 270 km or 160 miles east of Lake Champlain). Some 220 km (140 miles) to the west, Lake Ontario has its own lore about the son of an Iroquois chief, Gun-no-do-yah, who was kidnapped by a lake-dwelling horned snake and taken hostage. He was saved by the thunder spirit (or thunderbird) He-no, who killed the snake and



In an archaeological survey of northeastern Algonquinian rock art, serpents were often depicted as fish-tailed or horned. They represented “creatures of evil and darkness” but were also “viewed as powerful manitous, the guardian spirit [...] whose horns signified its great power”. Petroglyphs depicting “horse-headed” serpents or dragons were found in Frelighsburg Township, Quebec, and equated to the sightings of marine serpents around this area and Lake Chaplain. Lake Memphremagog, in the Frelighsburg region, supposedly housed a “lake monster” that “has been variously described as a horned serpent, a big fish, a seal, a living log, and a horse-head serpent” and was known to the Abenaki First Nations to be a dangerous place to canoe or swim. The Abenaki also referred to gitaskgogak, or peetaskog living in Pitawbagok, warning Samuel Champlain and his men not to disturb the waters of the lake by making loud noises or firing their muskets.


Records exist of Champlain’s observations of Lake Champlain, including one in which he described a fish called a Chaousarou: it was “five feet long”, “armed with scales so strong that a poignard could not pierce them” and its head was as wide as Champlain’s two fists. Its “snout was like that of a swine”, containing “a double row of very sharp and dangerous teeth” and, per Champlain, “this fish makes war upon all the others in the lakes and rivers”, which was not limited to other fish but also included swimming up into the reeds near the shore and murdering birds. Like a crocodile, it would belly up to the shallows and wait with its jaw open until a bird fluttered into it, then snap it shut and drag its prey back into the water. This fish would come to be identified, by cross-referencing other European writers from this area and time, as a gar pike, which can grow as large as ten feet (3 meters) long.


In the mid-1700s, Ann Eliza Bleecker, a white colonial settler born in New York, wrote an epistolary novel called The History of Maria Kittle. It’s an extremely racist narrative about a white settler woman being taken captive by First Nations—stories in the “captivity” genre being popular at the time. Though the story is purported to contain some autobiographical detail, it is a work of fiction. Bleecker includes a scene where the titular character, Maria, arrives at Lake Champlain with a First Nations band, possibly based on the real Schaghticoke First Nations. The party sees a meteor streak across the sky and it seems to land in the lake, setting off a panic among the First Nations people who explain to the whites that:


“‘...what [they] had seen was a fiery dragon on his passage to his den, who was of so malevolent a temper, that he never failed, on his arrival there, to inflict some peculiar calamity on mankind.’ In about five minutes after the earth was violently agitated, the waves of the lake tumbled about in a strange manner, seeming to omit flashes of fire, all the while attended with most tremendous roarings, intermixed with loud noises, not unlike the explosion of heavy cannon. Soon as the Indians perceived it was an earth|quake, they cried out, ‘Now he comes home!’”

This is taken by some scholars as an early example of local Indigenous stories of a mythical water serpent inhabiting Lake Champlain which were then taken up by the colonial settler population. This trend has only continued into modern day. The lake monster, dubbed “Champ”, has been written about, drawn, photographed, reproduced on t-shirts, and been the subject of multiple investigations, books and documentaries. At the lakeside in Bulwagga Bay (Port Henry, NY) a giant wooden sign with hundreds of names—all the people who’ve sworn they’ve seen Champ in the lake—is affixed for all to read.


[Image: Depiction of a maned sea serpent swimming in the front of an iceberg. There is a sailing ship in the background and a single-sail rowbot alongside it, with several occupants, one of whom is firing a rifle at the serpent. From Bishop Erik Pontoppidan's 1755 work ''Natural History of Norway''. Source: Ellis, R. 1998. ''The Search for the Giant Squid''. The Lyons Press via Wikimedia Commons]


In Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology, Champ is described as a “freshwater monster” and states that descriptions of Champ’s physiology have changed since reports from the early nineteenth century to now. What was initially described as “an enormous serpent” with “fiery eyes”, “glistening scales” and a “fishlike tail” eventually became “more like [...] the classic Loch Ness-like freshwater longneck” with “dark brown or black [...] rough skin”, a “horse- or snake-like head with two horns or ears” and a “long, upright neck”. Observers report seeing “humps”—between one and ten, “with two or three most frequently observed”. Some of the earliest reports come from the late 1800s, when the logging and mining industries were in decline, driving up lakeside developments and habitation. From The Untold Story of Champ:


In 1871, “passengers on the eighty foot-long, double-decker steamship Curlew excitedly spotted a mysterious creature near Barber’s Point, north of Crown Point, New York. The St. Albans Temperance Advocate reported that it was moving “at railroad speed” and the water was “strongly agitated for thirty or forty feet from the erected head of the monster when in motion.” It was too far away to get a better description and was seen through a field glass. This incident marked the beginning of a series of close encounters that would gradually escalate into a regional panic.”

In July of 1873, the Whitehall Times of Whitehall, New York, reported that a crew of railway workers laying down track for the New York and Canadian Railroad line “spotted a strange large serpentine creature in the water” which “rapidly swam away, portions of his body [seemingly] covered with bright silver-like scales, [which] glistened in the sun like burnished metal” and “would occasionally spurt streams of water above his head to an altitude of about 20 feet”. This encounter, and several others over the next couple of weeks, are the ones responsible for giving Champ’s description as snake-like, with some including seeing a “hood” running down its neck and a fish-like tail. These sightings escalated into reports of local livestock going missing, creating a regional panic among locals from the Whitehall region, all the way to Burlington, Vermont, where multiple sightings included a farmer who reported driving off a large water serpent which had been lying in wait near his cow pasture, ready to snatch up one of his calves.


The book The Great New England Sea Serpent recounts a sighting from 1907. In the newspaper story, two men are identified as having seen “the Champlain sea serpent” “playing around the buoy near the Canadian shore”. They loaded up their boat with a rifle and went out to investigate, getting close enough to identify it as a “man-eating shark”. They took a shot at it and were “confident the shot went home” but didn’t recover the body. Probably the most famous photograph comes from a woman named Sandra Mansi, who captured the image of a thick, swan-like neck topped by a serpentine head rising from the water, with one “hump” visible above the water behind it, on a family vacation in 1977. Critics of the image have argued that the effect could be created by a floating log bobbing in the lake’s current. One sighting of Champ from the 1980s includes a description of it having “skin the texture of a cucumber” and an unmistakable pleisiosaurian neck. Two fishermen in 2005 running a trolling motor on their boat spotted something weird in the water and crept close to it, taking it for a log at first but then realizing it was alive and “had what seemed to be a serpent body” and a “head [that] seemed to have the shape of a sledgehammer”. According to ChampSearch.com, sightings as recent as 2019 have yielded photographs (taken at a distance) and anecdotes about encountering some unknown creature living in the lake. Eyewitnesses have even described something serpentine making its way across the roads that criss-cross the miles of swamp surrounding the lake area.


Hypothetically, how could Champ (or its ancestors) have made its way to an inland lake? Well, one theory may hinge on the history of the Champlain Sea--an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean that once covered the entirety of Lake Champlain and stretched for 55,000 square km (about 34175 miles) during the Late Glacial Period 12 to 10000 years ago. It would have covered, at its height, all five of the Great Lakes and reached from Duluth in the West all the way to the Gaspe Peninsula. At its maximum depth, it would have reached 200 meters--over 650 feet--that’s 250 feet deeper than the lake’s deepest points today.


Charlotte whales and other sea life would have populated the lake, possibly drawing some of the earliest human inhabitants from the eastern coast further inland as they followed the game. Remnants of belugas and early pinneads—proto-seals—have been recovered for the lake. So is it possible that larger marine life could have survived until now? Perhaps, but there would need to be a sizable enough population to continue breeding through the centuries. Garpikes, bowfins and sturgeons make up some of the 90 or so different species of fish living in the lake. They belong to the class actinopterygii, a subclass of bony fish known to have coexisted with dinosaurs. Fossils tell us that sturgeons have existed from the Late Cretaceous period. So if not a marine mammal, might Champ be an amphibious reptile, an enormous turtle, or maybe a subspecies of the prehistoric proto-whale basilosaurus?


[Image: Side view of how a floating tree stump could look like the famous Mansi Champ monster photo. Model and photo by Benjamin Radford (2005). Source: Wikimedia Commons.]


Many investigators have brought their enthusiasm and expertise to bear on the hunt for Champ. In the summer of 2002, writing a piece for the publication Skeptical Inquirer (love it), “investigative columnist” Joe Nickell embarked on a four-day investigative expedition to Lake Champlain with the aim to solve the mystery of Champ’s existence. He and his partner concluded that many of the local sightings of Champ could have been the result of “expectant attention”, where people who are expecting to see something specific are fooled into thinking that something they see is in fact the thing they expect to see, leading to misidentifications of fish or other native, regional animals. Dennis Jay Hal, the founder of Champ Quest, who supposedly collected a “baby” Champ specimen that was then lost; Katy Elizabeth of Champ Search, and Scott Mardis have dedicated considerable time and resources to documenting sightings and evolving theories for what or where Champ could be. Enthusiastic observers post their photos and videos of possible Champ sightings online, and national news networks continue to feature the story. If you’d like to learn more about Champ, I’d definitely recommend Small Town Monsters’ 5-part series called “On The Trail of Champ”, which you can watch for free on YouTube and I will link to in the episode transcript.


The Ghosts of Lake Champlain

What’s a Small Town Spooky episode without a couple of ghosts? In addition to being a possible haven for prehistoric pleisiosaura, the environs of Lake Champlain provide a fertile breeding ground for colonial ghost stories.



Fort Ticonderoga has its share of hauntings; visitors have reported seeing colonial soldiers in the barracks and around the property. It is also the subject of a ghostly Scottish legend, immortalized in a poetry adaptation by Robert Louis Steveson. Duncan Campell was a Scots officer who fought the French at Fort Carillon (before it was renamed) in 1858. The story goes that one night, in the Western Highlands of Scotland, Laird Duncan Campbell receives a strange visitor at the castle of Inverawe who begs him for sanctuary, and demands he make an oath to keep him safe. Campbell swears to protect the man, and leads him to a hidden place in the castle where he’ll be safe. A short time later, an armed party arrives at the gates of the castle, demanding to know where the stranger had gone. It’s revealed that Duncan Campbell’s cousin has been murdered, and the man now sheltering in Inverawe castle is his murderer.


Torn over whether to adhere to his oath or avenge the death of his cousin, Campbell is visited by a vision of his cousin’s ghost who chides him for sheltering a murderer. The next day, Campbell discovers the man has escaped; and that night, his cousin appears to him again, bidding Inverawe farewell with the mysterious coda “‘til we meet at Ticonderoga!” Some years later, Campbell enlisted in the Scottish military and became a major, then travelled to Fort George where he was ordered to attack the nearby Fort Carillon held by the French. The night before his death, his cousin appeared to him for a final time, and revealed the truth: Campbell was heading into battle at Ticonderoga. He was gravely wounded in battle the next day, as Scottish and British forces were driven back by the French, and died nine days later.


[Image: A ghostly figure stands in front of a window. Source: Wix Media]


Another ghost haunting the area around Fort Ticonderoga, as described by Michael Kleen in his blog series on Mysterious America, is Nancy Coates, a “wailing” or “weeping” woman-type ghost who haunts the lake shore, wandering over the foggy banks and sobbing. She was a lover of Brigadier General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, who oversaw the fort in 1775 after its capture by the militia led by Benedict Arnold. The ghost of “Mad” Anthony himself has sometimes been seen on the Fort grounds, appearing in the reproduction of the fort commander’s dining room on the grounds. Wayne had many liaisons with the women living there, and according to legend, Nancy Coates was so distressed by his philandering that she threw herself into the lake and drowned. Take a stroll along the river banks and perhaps you’ll see a veiled woman in the distance, the sounds of her cries carrying faintly on the night air.


Malletts’ Bay, located on the east side of the lake, just north of Burlington, Vermont, may host its own infamous spirit. Named for Pierre Mallet, a colonial Frenchman who settled on the island, it was the site of a tavern and a cabin built by the reclusive man himself. It seems that local authority had it htat Mallet was a swindler or some kind of swashbuckler, and that he may have buried a small fortune in gold somewhere in the area. In her book Ghosts and Legends of Lake Champlain, Thea Lewis explains that according to legend, a local followed Mallet out to his hiding spot where he’d hidden his treasure and Mallet executed the man, burying the body along with the gold. Sightings of a ghost wearing 18th-century clothing have been reported by hikers and boaters around Mallett Bay and the nearby Coates island.


Outro

Researching for this episode and seeing the images of the Champlain Valley, the lake and the islands really made me think of the parts of Northern Ontario that I spent time visiting when I was a kid—all this exposed rock and twisted trees hanging on for dear life. I just can’t get over how much lore there is surrounding the area, not just about Champ but also all the ghost stories, not to mention the Bigfoot sightings from the area and the UFO encounters. I was intending to take this episode way further into the French cryptid direction. I had done some preliminary research into the Lac Wood Screecher and the so-called Quebec Mothman...there’s even supposedly a French Bigfoot lurking in the woods up there. Unfortunately I cannot leave the research piece alone.


There is a lot more on Champ out there than I expected, and I really didn’t know that much beyond this Loch Ness-esque story. I’m not saying I’ve completely ruled out the possibility that Champ—or a colony of Champs—lives in the lake. The 1873 sightings especially are really compelling: according to the accounts published in the newspapers around that time, multiple people got really close to whatever the creature was, and described these very distinctly serpentine features. Still, though, if I was not a local and I moved to the area near the lake, and I’d never seen, for example, a 6-foot long garpike belly up to the reeds to snatch birds out of the marsh, would I be able to coherently assess what it was I was looking at? Probably not. The piece for Skeptical Inquirer by Joe Nickell I found really compelling when he theorized that a lot of the sightings from people who see a long, lumpy form in the distance might be fish breaching the surface in schools, or even trains of otters, who like to swim in groups and might appear, from far away, like they’re all one animal.


As for the ghost stories in the region, yeesh. There are so many from all the different lakeshore towns that I hardly even knew where to start. Lots in the vein of drama relating to the colonial occupation of the area and more than a couple of stories I found really fascinating didn’t quite meet the brief for the episode. There’s this one about a woman named Eleanor Fisk who fought with her husband one winter’s night in the late 1700s. She was so upset with him that she took a cart and horses and took off across the frozen lake, and her body was never recovered—but an old superstition held that if you took a bit of clothing from that person and dropped it into the lake, it would float to wherever their body ended up. So the townsfolk dropped Fisk’s red cloak into Lake Champlain and it entangled itself on the shore of one of the islands, which forever after became known to them as “Cloak Island”. Another, in Ghosts and Legends of Lake Champlain, details the burning of a ferry aptly called the Phoenix, which sank outside of Burlington after an old woman was supposedly crossed by the captain and cursed him, causing him to fall ill and the boat to catch fire and sink in the bay.


In terms of the historical piece of this episode, I’m sure I don’t need to say that between Quebec, Vermont and New York there was way more history than I could include. Right now I’m reading a book by poet and historian Afua Cooper called The Hanging of Angélique that offers a particularly interesting look into 18th century Quebec, telling the story of an enslaved Black woman named Marie-Joseph Angelique brought to New France from Portugal. She is accused of burning down a whole neighbourhood in Old Montreal -- 46 buildings. This was partly possible due to the way the French settlers who appropriated land in Canada constructed their homes: in the traditional seigneur manner, which meant narrow, deep lots set close together along the river, ostensibly to foster a sense of community, while also, and I cannot overstate this, leading to SO MANY enormous fires of historical note. We don’t often talk about Canada’s history or role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, allowing French people to travel to the new French colony with enslaved human beings or its permissiveness in allowing defectors from the States keep enslaved people as their property in Canada, let alone the lived experience of the first Black Canadians. This book helps to fill in some of that historical blind spot.


If you have your own hometown scary you want to share, featuring an encounter with a mysterious creature of some kind, send it in via email (smalltownspooky@gmail.com) or on the socials @smalltownspooky.


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Until next time, thanks for listening and hope to spook you soon. ;)


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