Beth Haig initially thought she was looking at a wave. Watching Lake Champlain from Point au Roche on 7 August 2026, she noticed a large disturbance travelling across the water, rising and falling in a way that suggested something serpentine. Her mother, Susan Sisti, described what looked like a partly submerged alligator, with raised sections behind the front. It seemed much larger than any alligator she had seen and moved, she estimated, at the speed of a small motorboat. Hailee Finkle recorded 24 seconds on her phone before the disturbance subsided. When it reappeared, she chose to watch rather than keep filming. Haig remained unconvinced that they had seen Champ, the lake's famous alleged inhabitant, but the movement was unfamiliar to someone who had grown up beside the water. By October, their summer experience had reached a national audience. For another group of lakeside visitors, an ordinary view had briefly become difficult to explain. There is something familiar about the way the encounter unfolded: first an unusual movement, then an attempt to recognise what might be producing it. The creature, if there was one, remained largely concealed. What the witnesses could describe was the disturbance it left behind. Similar moments recur throughout the history of Champ, linking people who visited the lake decades apart and arrived with very different expectations. Lake Champlain provides plenty of room for such encounters. Stretching roughly 120 miles, it reaches a maximum depth of about 400 feet, with its deepest waters between Charlotte, Vermont, and Essex, New York. Its length and changing shoreline allow a visitor to know one part intimately while remaining unfamiliar with much of the rest. A sighting from a beach, a fishing boat or an upstairs window offers a different fragment of the same enormous body of water. Long before phone cameras, reports of strange animals circulated among the communities along its shores. Regional histories describe nineteenth-century encounters involving railway workers and steamship passengers. An 1873 newspaper report told of a railway crew seeing an enormous serpent with scales that reflected the sunlight. Passengers aboard the Ticonderoga reported another creature in 1945. These stories gave the lake a succession of witnesses well before the photograph that would become Champ's best-known image. Port Henry eventually made a public record of the tradition, displaying a board of reported sightings. Beside an actual lake, the names and dates have a different effect from a general tale about a monster somewhere in the depths. They suggest particular people, particular stretches of shoreline and particular days when something happened. For a newcomer, the board provides a reason to keep looking at water that might otherwise receive only a passing glance. On 5 July 1977, Sandra Mansi was visiting the Vermont side of the lake with her fiancé and two children when she noticed turbulence offshore. The children had been wading, and her fiancé had gone to fetch the camera. Mansi later described something that appeared to have a head, neck and back emerging from the water. She took a single photograph. The resulting image shows a dark form above the surface, its apparent neck curving upwards beside a lower section. It became public in 1981 and drew attention far beyond the lake. Yet Mansi's recollections remained those of a family outing interrupted by something she had not expected. Interviewed years later, she resisted the word “monster” and spoke about protecting whatever she had seen. The photograph had brought a lasting question into her life; it had not supplied her with a name for the animal. Her image gave people something to study after the water had closed over the original encounter. It also established an enduring difficulty. A photograph can preserve an outline without preserving the movement, scale and changing impressions experienced by the person behind the camera. The scene becomes available to everyone, while part of the encounter remains with the witness. A later account brought those missing movements back into the story. On 7 July 1988, Walter Tappan went onto the lake with his wife, Sandi, and their daughter, Heidi. They carried a camcorder, hoping to see again something they believed they had observed the previous evening. Walter described a series of humps moving near the boat, increasing from two to five and extending across an estimated twenty feet. Sandi said that during their experiences she also saw a head and neck rise from the water. She recalled the creature looking towards her before submerging. Walter regretted that this part had escaped the camera. Their conviction rested on the fuller experience, while the recording preserved only a portion of what they said they had watched. For anyone hearing their story afterwards, the most extraordinary moment was precisely the one unavailable for replay. Other witnesses described movement that seemed stranger the longer they watched. Peg McGeoch, interviewed for a 1986 magazine profile of Champ investigator Joseph Zarzynski, had been looking across the lake near Basin Harbor when she initially thought she could see three large fish. She then concluded that the shapes belonged to one animal. Watching with her friend Jane Temple, she described humps, a raised front section and a sinuous motion that reminded her of a caterpillar travelling across a table. The two women reportedly watched for seven to ten minutes, although much of that time involved following a disturbance rather than seeing a complete creature. McGeoch distinguished its ripples from the familiar wake of a boat. Her account contains the same progression as the Point au Roche sighting: an initial comparison with something ordinary, followed by details that made the comparison feel inadequate. Zarzynski collected encounters through his Lake Champlain Phenomena Investigation, bringing scattered accounts into a continuing record. In the summer of 2005, fishermen Dick Affolter and Peter Bodette recorded another encounter that would reach a national television audience. They described something moving near the surface, with portions briefly appearing above it. Affolter said they never saw the whole body. Both men had previously been sceptical of Champ, but what they encountered did not resemble an animal they recognised. Bodette expressed the distinction plainly: “I'm 100 percent sure of what we saw. I'm not 100 percent sure of what it was.” Their footage was examined for ABC News, which reported on it in 2006. Forensic image analyst Gerald Richards found no indication of manipulation, while also saying he could not identify an animal or object at the surface. The recording retained the movement and the uncertainty together. It was a closer view of an odd wake, rather than the complete revelation that years of lake-watching might lead someone to hope for. The search has since extended beneath the surface. In August 2019, investigator Katy Elizabeth reported unusual sonar returns during a trip on her boat, Kelpie. She said two anomalies appeared about 165 feet down. With fuel running low, she could not remain over them for long, but saved numerous images of the display. Examining them afterwards, she interpreted the shapes as possible long-bodied animals, estimating one at around twenty-five feet. For Elizabeth, the images belonged to a sustained search rather than an isolated afternoon's curiosity. Her interpretation was that the equipment had detected Champ. The sonar pictures added another kind of encounter to the collection: something noticed on a screen, at a depth where the person operating the instrument could not simply lean over the side and look. Aerial cameras have offered a different perspective again. Filmmakers Kelly Tabor and Richard Rossi drew attention to a large shape visible beneath the water in drone footage made during production of Lucy and the Lake Monster. Tabor noticed it while reviewing the material. The rowboat in the picture supplied a familiar object against which viewers could judge the shape nearby. The footage attracted renewed coverage in June 2026, although it had already been reported in 2024. That earlier report placed filming of the movie in the summer of 2022. Its return to the headlines became another chapter in the story of the recording, rather than a newly filmed encounter. Tabor and Rossi believed the shape showed the creature they had spent years bringing to life in their work. The appeal of the aerial view is easy to understand. Most lake sightings happen from a position only a little above the water. A drone seems to offer the view the witness lacked, allowing an observer to look down through the surface rather than across it. Yet depth, reflection and the softness of an underwater outline can still leave the viewer trying to assemble a body from an incomplete shape. Across these accounts, Champ is rarely encountered as a fully visible animal. There are humps without a clear head, an apparent neck without a visible body, or a moving disturbance whose source never quite emerges. Sometimes several people watch together and leave equally convinced. Sometimes, as at Point au Roche, they share the experience without agreeing that it belongs to the lake's most famous inhabitant. Those differences keep the individual stories worth telling. Mansi's photograph, the Tappans' missed camera moment, McGeoch's changing impression of the humps and Bodette's careful distinction between observation and identity each preserve a different encounter. Reducing them all to a single familiar silhouette would lose much of what makes them interesting. For the people on shore, the experience ends when the disturbance disappears. Afterwards come the repeated viewings, the questions and the comparisons with earlier reports. The lake itself offers no such explanation. Each new disturbance offers another chance to see more than the last witness did, provided it stays above the surface long enough. Further Reading The Point au Roche sighting, August 2026 Sandra Mansi’s photograph and recollections — Yankee The Tappan family’s account — Unsolved Mysteries Joseph Zarzynski and lakeside witnesses — Yankee The fishermen’s encounter — ABC News, 2006 Katy Elizabeth’s sonar report, 2019 The filmmakers’ drone footage — The State, 2024 Renewed coverage of the drone footage, June 2026 Champ’s regional history Lake Champlain facts — Lake Champlain Basin Program

Descending through mist on Ben Macdui, Norman Collie began to hear footsteps behind him. Every few steps he took were followed by a heavier crunch, as though another walker were covering the same ground with a much longer stride. He could see nobody. He listened again, tried to dismiss what he was hearing, and continued down the mountain. The sounds continued too. Eventually, the experienced mountaineer became so frightened that he fled, stumbling among the boulders for miles towards Rothiemurchus Forest.