Twice ToldMarjorie L. Porter, “The Champlain Monster”, Vermont Life, Summer 1970
- Language
- English
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Retrieved
- 17 October 2026
A three-page feature in the state tourism magazine, with drawings by Robert Candy. The standfirst says the monster was “sighted by hundreds of reliable witnesses over a span of three centuries”. It is the earliest place we found where Samuel de Champlain is credited with a 20-foot, barrel-thick serpent with a head like a horse. The article gives no source for the Champlain sentence. Passages below are in the order of the article.
After all, the early Lake Champlain tourist, Samuel de Champlain, in July of 1609 reported and recorded his impression of a serpent-like creature about twenty feet long, as thick through as a barrel and with a head shaped like a horse.
Possibly the naval battles that kept the lake stirred up from the French and Indian Wars through the War of 1812, accounted for the monster’s later shyness, but on July 24, 1819 pioneers in the Port Henry area were flabbergasted by the appearance of a lake monster in Bulwagga Bay.
The next valley resident to see the fabulous monster apparently was Captain N.H. Mooney of Plattsburg, sheriff of Clinton County. In August of 1883 he made the sighting near Cumberland Head. It was moving in that direction from Adams Landing, Vt., Captain Mooney stated. The body was 25 to 35 feet long, the head about eight inches across and ten inches long.
Caption beside the drawing of a horse-headed animal and a canoe, p. 47: Samuel de Champlain saw it first, in 1609
From the Burlington News of April 1915, as quoted on p. 48: This strange creature, which the less imaginative among the natives are inclined to believe is an enormous sturgeon, has attained the dignity of a place in local histories, where he is described as being about twenty feet long, as large around as a keg, of a drab color, having a row of spiky projections along the back, and horns like those of a huge catfish.
Notes
- The article’s text is set in two and three columns; the passages above are given in reading order, with the two captions marked as such. We read them from the page images (p. 47 is leaf n48 and p. 48 is leaf n49 of the Internet Archive copy).
- Porter names no source for the Champlain sentence. Champlain’s 1613 text (p. 225) describes the chaousarou fish and nothing else in the lake. Radford and Nickell (Lake Monster Mysteries, p. 33) quote Jerome Clark (1993) tracing the quotation to this article.
- Porter dates the 1819 appearance to 24 July, the date of the Plattsburgh Republican that printed the report; the letter itself says the sighting was “Thursday last”.
- The 1915 passage is Porter’s quotation of a newspaper story; we did not see the newspaper. It already gives “about twenty feet” and “as large around as a keg” for the lake serpent, 55 years before Porter’s Champlain sentence, and says local histories describe it that way. Whether Porter’s sentence came from that tradition is not stated anywhere.
- The Mooney passage names no newspaper. The Plattsburgh Sentinel of 17 August 1883 has a one-line note about a Westport man who had seen the serpent and a separate mention of “Mrs. N. H. Mooney” visiting friends; it does not carry the sheriff’s account on the page we read.