Memphre (Lake Memphremagog)

Not far down the road from Lake Champlain is Lake Memphremagog another elongated body of water bisected by the U.S.-Canada boundary. Like its more famous cousin in Lake Champlain, the monster of Lake Memphremagog is making a rather famous name for itself.

In 1816 a local inhabitant named Perry sighted the animal as it swam past the settler and his wife. Merry described a creature much like a sheep shorn of its wool and possessing 12 to 15 pairs of legs!This sighting is definitely at odds with the general description of the animal seen hundreds of times since. Most observers agree that the animal is dark-grey or black and measures between 15 and 45 feet-long, possesses a horse-like head and is a very swift swimmer often overhauling the motorboats of a significant number of witnesses.

Barbara Malloy has the distinction of photographing the animal on two occasions and in each depiction the animal is represented by a single mountainous hump above the water. Mrs Malloy has seen the animal on three different occasions and is the first female dracontologist in the world. Dracontology is a term coined by a monk at the monastery of St Benoit-du-Lac in response to a request by Jacques Boisvert, a Quebec monster enthusiast who needed a name for the specific study of lake monsters. Boisvert became the first dracontologist and also hold sthe record for sub-aqua investigation of any monster with over 4,900 dives to his distinguished credit. Although Boisvert has never seen the animal, he believes he may have stepped on it while scuba-diving. With his son beside him Boisvert thought he was making a landing on a log at the bottom of the lake, when suddenly, the log sprang to life at his touch and vanished in a haze of silt and air bubbles.

Mrs Malloy and Boisvert nicknamed their local monster Memphre and hold the respective copyrights to the name on both sides of the border. Memphre may yet be a valuable commodity as interest in the animal surged after 10 sightings were reported in 1996. The Lake Memphremagog monster has shown an odd propensity for showing off on the surface with a frequency unmatched since 1926 when Ogopogo was making almost daily visits to areas frequented by the humans. In 1996 the Lake Memphremagog phenomenon has frolicked vigourously in front of dozens of witnesses. Although its habitat seems to be relatively clean for a North American lake, it may be that the visits to the surface are connected with a need to feed and no one is absolutely certain of the quantity of the fish stocks therein. Could a food shortage be forcing the phenomenon to hunt closer to the surface for prey?

Jacques Boisvert and Barbara Malloy continue the search for Memphre as they have styled this monstrous craver of human attention, in the hope that one day they will know definitively what it is that has been mystifying and bemusing Quebeckers and Vermonters for 180 years.The search has been aided somewhat by a video obtained by Patricia de Broin Fournier who captured the image of a strange animal creating waves as it frolicked in the lake in the summer of 1997. The object in the video is certainly animate, but rather than being a serpentine form seen so often over the last one hundred and seventy five years at Lake Memphremagog, it could just as well be a wave.

In Decemeber, 1997 Patricia was accorded a rare winter sighting as Memphre surfaced near a pier in full view of Mrs Fournier and her sister Aline.