🦕 S05E38 - Champ Across the Border

Champ Across the Border: Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France and the French colonial period of North America, to talk about Champ - the famous monster of Lake Champlain. Most of the lake sits between New York and Vermont, but about 7% of it lies in Quebec, and Joseph's upcoming paper in the ethnology journal Rabaska asks a question almost nobody else has: how does the French-speaking side of the border see this most American of lake monsters?

The answer involves a fabricated Samuel de Champlain quote, a five-foot fish that really was a monster in its own way, nearly 300 years of digitized Quebec newspapers, and a curious case of cross-border monster pride - because why borrow Champ when you already have cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Ponik and Memphré (file///H:/PodcastWorkshop/mt/MT_2026-06-25_Cha…)? Plus hoax serpents, colonial werewolf panics, and how Nessie taught every lake monster what a lake monster is supposed to look like.

Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org (monstertalk.org/%F0%9F%A6%95-s05e38-champ-acro…)

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