Memphre of Lake Memphremagog

Old, continuous sighting tradition going back to 1816

Lake Memphremagog runs about 40 kilometres from Newport, Vermont, north across the border to Magog, Quebec. Melting glaciers left it some 10,000 years ago. The mean depth is about 15 metres, but the bottom drops to 107 metres at its deepest, and the international border runs right down under the cold water. Every winter the lake freezes over, the ice often a metre thick.

The serpent story is older than the settlers. When Europeans arrived, the Indigenous people of the area warned them not to swim in the lake because something lived in it. The first sighting is believed to date to 1816, in a document signed by Ralph Merry IV, son of the founder of Magog, describing four people from Georgeville who believed they had seen it. On 21 January 1847 the Stanstead Journal reported a strange animal, something of a sea serpent, in the lake, and more articles followed in 1850, 1853, 1866, 1877 and 1892. Witnesses have put the creature at anywhere from 20 to 70 feet long, and nobody has ever seen all of it at once.

The name Memphré came from Jacques Boisvert, who lived just outside Magog and logged more than 1,000 scuba dives in the lake without finding a trace of it. On 18 August 1983 he published an article in the Newport Daily Express, Lake Memphremagog's Anaconda, hoping for feedback. A woman from Newport wrote back about a brown object with a long wake that had appeared out of nowhere the day before, and similar letters followed. On 19 June 1986 Boisvert founded the International Dracontology Society to study the creature. It kept only signed statements and taped declarations, and its archive grew to 229 sightings. Toward the end of 1995 it put up pictograms around the lake asking visitors to keep watch. A lookout in Magog now carries his name; he died in 2006.

On the Vermont side, Barbara Malloy of the Memphremagog Historical Society of Newport became the creature's champion and holds the copyright to its name. She described it to a reporter as having a head like a horse, a long neck and a big body, as long as a house, before it slipped into the mist.

In August 2011 an artist's impression of Memphré appeared on a coloured Canadian quarter. Scientists treat it, like most lake monsters, with scepticism, while reports of sightings persist, the last on record in 2005.