New York: Champ Meets Bigfoot

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls into New York and follows the western shore of Lake Champlain, home to one of America's oldest and most enduring lake-monster legends.

Across the water, Vermont may have the famous photograph, but Port Henry, New York has spent generations embracing Champ. A hand-painted sightings board records reports dating back more than two centuries, a highway sign welcomes visitors to the "Home of Champ," and every August the town celebrates a creature no one has ever managed to catch. The journey begins on the lake with strange encounters reported from a Port Henry dock, Crown Point, Westport, the Valcour channel, and the ferry landing at Essex.

From there, Brian digs into the history behind the legend—from Indigenous traditions and Samuel de Champlain's often-misquoted 1609 account to Captain Crum's enormous creature, the famous 1873 sightings, P. T. Barnum's reward, Sheriff Nathan Mooney's report, and the controversial 1977 Sandra Mansi photograph.

The episode also follows researcher Joseph Zarzynski's decades of investigation, the unusual laws passed by New York and Vermont to protect Champ, mass sightings, sonar contacts, recordings, and videos that have kept the mystery alive into the modern era.

Then the road turns south to Whitehall, New York, where a series of dramatic August 1976 sightings involving local residents and police became one of the most famous Bigfoot cases in the state.

From there, the trip pushes into the Adirondacks, the hills around Fort Ann, Allegany State Park, the Catskills, and the Tug Hill Plateau for frightening Sasquatch encounters involving hunters, hikers, fishermen, loggers, and families who found themselves face-to-face with something they never expected to see in the New York wilderness.

Lake monsters, Bigfoot, and more than two centuries of unexplained encounters—this stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip belongs to New York.

Have a sighting of your own? Send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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