The earliest recorded references to a monstrous creature in the Scottish lake, however, pre-date these events. The life of St. Columba in the 7th century contains a miraculous tale of a confrontation with a predatory lake monster in Loch Ness. Sightings and skeptics continue to fuel the debate, and the tourist trade, in the Scottish Highlands to this day.
But Loch Ness is not the only lake that claims a resident monster. Lake Champlain lies between the states of New York and Vermont. Local sightings of a lake monster, similar in description to the Loch Ness Monster, have been reported since Samuel Champlain and the early explorers came to the region. Once called the Monster of Lake Champlain, the creature is now popularly referred to as “Champ” and a successful tourist trade has grown up in Port Henry, New York where local merchants offer coffee mugs and t-shirts celebrating their most unusual and legendary resident.
Although skeptics would be inclined to dismiss “Champ” as an imitation to capitalize on the commercial success of the Loch Ness Monster, this rationalization does not explain the historic accounts of the sightings of a great creature emerging from the deep waters, including an attack on a boat of fishermen in 1939 near Rouses Point.
The Native Americans in the region, the Ojibwa and Algonquin, also have tales of a great monster within the waters. Called Missipissy, or Mishipizhiw (sometimes Mitchipissy), the creature in these tales is described as a great sea serpent that guards the sturgeons as they hibernate through the winter in the Great Lakes.
A similar sea-serpent type of creature is Ogopogo, who is reported to live in the Okanagan Lake area of British Columbia. There are underground caverns near Rattlesnake Island that are considered to be the home of Ogopogo. Similar tales of a vast lake monster in the British Columbia region call the beast Naitaka. It is not clear if there are two names for a single monster, or two monsters.
While skeptics continue to seek to discredit individual sightings, the widespread reports between disparate cultures and regions in different times suggest that the phenomenon probably has (or had) some natural basis fueling these legends of monsters. All of these tales are centered on cold water lakes - a pesky fact which discourages the theory that these are plesiosaurs that somehow escaped extinction, since plesiosaurs inhabited warm, tropical waters. Even today, efforts to prove or disprove the existence of these creatures (as well as attempts to explain, describe or categorize them) often end with the conclusions the researchers held at the start.
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