2026-06-12 11:01:16

The legendary monster of Lake Champlain in the US has seemingly been caught on camera for the first time.

The fabled beast – dubbed Champ – has often been compared to Scotland’s Loch Ness monster after years of apparent sightings at the freshwater lake, which stretches between the US states of New York and Vermont and all the way up to the Canadian province of Quebec.

Now a pair of filmmakers, Richard Rossi and Kelly Tabor, claim to have captured footage of champ while they were making a film on the lake – and they didn’t realise they had a Champ sighting on camera until they were reviewing their film in the editing suite.

Kelly told the Daily Mail newspaper: “When I saw it, I saw it was like a skinny neck, and that the body got larger. It looked like the skinny neck was oscillating back and forth, as if it was grazing underwater. My eyes were just popping out.”

The footage was taken while the pair were making a children’s film about the mystery of Champ called Lucy and the Lake Monster but they didn’t spot the beast in their shots until they looked over the footage two years after wrapping their shoot.

Kelly saw a dark shape under the water trailing behind the crew’s 11-foot wooden boat and she called Richard to tell him.

Richard said of the call: “I was skeptical at first. But then Kelly, in the editing process, called me one day, and she said: ‘I have the footage up on my large screen TV. You’ve got to take a look behind the boat’ … [She said]: ‘There’s a large creature swimming behind the rope’.”

There have been hundreds of sightings of Champ over the years including a picture taken by tourist Sandra Mansi in 1977 which appears to show a long-necked beast peering out of the water.

The sightings are believed to date back to 1609 when French cartographer Samuel de Champlain, who the lake is named after, apparently spotted a 20-foot serpent with a head shaped like a horse in the water.

The mystery of Champ was later popularised by showman P. T. Barnum who launched a hunt for the beast and offered a $50,000 reward for anyone who managed to capture the monster.

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