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Lake Champlain and Champ

added29 August 20261977

The lake between Vermont, New York and Quebec, where a creature called Champ has appeared in accounts since the nineteenth century and, by tradition, since Iroquois times. The best-known evidence is Sandra Mansi's 1977 photograph — a dark curved neck above the water — which experts could neither confirm nor call a fake. Both states have formally forbidden harming Champ, a rare case of a cryptid making it into law.

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44.53000, -73.33000

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DebunkedWhite

The Lake George Monster

In the summer of 1904 a green horned head began surfacing beside boats on Lake George in upstate New York. The painter Harry Watrous, who lived at Hague, had made it from a log: painted, with tin teeth and glass eyes, sunk on a rope and pulley so it could be raised at the right moment — the joke was aimed at his friend and fishing rival William Mann, who had been boasting of his catches. Watrous admitted it the same year, once the joke escaped their circle. The log survives: since 1934 the Hague Chamber of Commerce has displayed Harry the Hoax at the local museum on the shore of the same lake.

88 km away

CryptidYellow

Whitehall, the Official Home of Bigfoot

109 km away

UFO sightingOrange

Franconia Notch and the Hills' Missing Hours

On the night of 19–20 September 1961 Barney and Betty Hill were driving home from Canada on Route 3 through this notch in the White Mountains. By their account a bright light followed the car; Barney stopped, looked through binoculars, and drove off in a panic. They reached home two hours later than they should have, and could not account for the two hours. Two years later, under hypnosis, both described being taken aboard and examined. The transcripts became a book, and through it the whole subsequent genre of abduction: before the Hills, that story did not exist in the subject. A New Hampshire state historical marker stands on the highway — a rare thing to erect for an episode of this kind.

137 km away

More: Cryptid

CryptidYellow

The Kyshtym dwarf, Alyoshenka

In May 1996 Tamara Prosvirina, a resident of the village of Kaolinovy near Kyshtym in the Urals, brought home a creature about twenty-five centimetres long with an elongated skull and large eyes. She called it Alyoshenka, fed it, and told neighbours a son had come to live with her. She was taken to a psychiatric hospital; the body was filmed and photographed in the meantime, and that autumn it vanished without trace. What makes the case unusual is the sheer volume of material: video, photographs, dozens of interviews. Later genetic work points to human remains — most likely a premature infant with severe developmental defects.

CryptidYellow

The Goatman of Maryland

A half-goat, half-man with an axe, told of in Prince George's County outside Washington. The legend took shape in 1971, when a local paper ran a piece about a missing dog and rumours of a creature near Fletchertown Road; the article was picked up, and within a couple of years the story had acquired an escaped experiment from the agricultural research centre next door. The centre is real and still operating, which has helped the legend considerably — it has a building you can point at.

CryptidYellow

The Melon Heads

Creatures with disproportionately large heads living in the woods — a legend told in three American states at once, Ohio, Michigan and Connecticut, each with its own backstory. The Ohio version is the most widespread: supposedly children from a closed institution for hydrocephalus patients who escaped after a fire. No such institution and no such fire appear in the records. What is interesting is the rest: three unconnected regions invented almost the same image, and in all three it explains the same thing — that there is someone in the woods who was once hidden there.