Champ, Lake Champlain’s most elusive inhabitant, has finally reared its head on the Burlington waterfront. While this particular sea serpent isn’t the real deal, just a scientifically plausible facsimile, it’s still making waves with visitors to the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain.
In early August, ECHO unveiled a new permanent exhibit called “Champ: America’s Lake Monster.” A year in the making, the multi-floor display dives deep into the history, folklore, science and speculation surrounding Vermont’s famous aquatic cryptid.
Visitors to the science museum are greeted by a 30-foot-long, 2,000-pound Champ sculpture that hangs from the ceiling. Installed in 2024, it’s reminiscent of the life-size blue whale on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City — or the T. rex sculpture in Jurassic Park. From a spot on the third floor, visitors can take photos in front of Champ. According to the display, the creators imagined it by combining the physical traits of a prehistoric plesiosaur, a sturgeon and a baby crocodile — because adult crocodile teeth were deemed too scary for young children.
The first-floor entryway lays out a timeline of Champ’s origins, beginning with ancient legends of sea monsters, water dragons and other whalelike leviathans of the deep. It then traces the legend’s growing popularity in the circus era of the late 19th century. In 1873, P.T. Barnum offered a $50,000 reward — more than $1 million in 2025 dollars — to anyone who brought him the Lake Champlain monster, dead or alive. In those years, rumors abounded, mostly among city dwellers, of a massive water creature that would crawl ashore and devour livestock.
After reports of Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster spread worldwide in the 1930s, Lake Champlain’s sea monster faded into obscurity — that is, until 1977, when Sandra Mansi’s now-famous photo of an aquatic, dinosaur-like creature “brought the legend back to the surface,” said Katelyn Olson, ECHO’s director of human resources.
By the 1990s, the Lake Champlain creature, dubbed “Champy” or “Champ,” was being featured in newspaper and magazine articles along with other mysterious beasts such as Sasquatch, Nessie and the Jersey Devil. It evolved from “local legend to marketable mystery,” the display notes.
ECHO’s curators have wanted to create an exhibit around Mansi’s original photo of Champ since 2012, when the Mansi family gifted it to the museum, Olson said. Last year, ECHO received a $117,800 grant from the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing, which funded the exhibit in combination with private donations.
“Champ: America’s Lake Monster” differs from other ECHO exhibits in its use of interactive electronics such as a Frogger-like video game, in which players try to get Champ home safely by moving the creature through a river, past cows and across railroad tracks.
On the museum’s second floor, a “Champ Interactive Design Studio” lets visitors color their own Champ on a video screen, then “release” it into a digital aquarium.
Lest anyone question the scientific basis for Champ’s existence, the exhibit features a multimedia display of local experts discussing which less fanciful animals might have been mistaken for Champ over the years, with facts about how researchers discover and study creatures that live in the lake. Whether you pooh-pooh the legend or want to believe, there’s something there for you.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Vermont’s Lake Monster Finds a Home at ECHO Leahy Center”
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2 2025.
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