Kelly Tabor was alone at her parents’ house in South Carolina, reviewing raw drone footage on a big-screen television, when something near the bottom of the frame caught her eye: a long, narrow shape rising and dipping in the water just behind a rowboat, propelling itself forward on what looked like a pair of flippers. The clip was nearly two years old, shot during a single month of filming on Lake Champlain’s Bulwagga Bay in July 2022. Tabor had seen it before, but this time, around the four-minute mark, something caught her eye.
“Oh my gosh, this has to be it,” she remembered thinking. She told the Standard that she was certain, in that instant, that she had finally found Champ — the lake creature long rumored to live in Lake Champlain. Tabor picked up the phone and called her creative partner, Richard Rossi, in California. “Richard, look at this,” she told him. “What do you think?”
That call came in 2024, and it took almost two years before the rest of the world saw the clip when it was picked up this month, unprompted, by The Daily Mail and The New York Post. Producers for the History Channel series “The UnXplained with William Shatner,” according to Rossi, called it the “most compelling” visual evidence of Champ since the famous 1977 Sandra Mansi photograph.
Richard Rossi, left, and Kelly Tabor, celebrate the Best Family Film win for “Lucy and the Lake Monster” at the Green Mountain Christian Film Festival. Courtesy of Richard Rossi
Tabor and Rossi have been friends for decades, since they met as university students in the 1980s. Rossi, a Hollywood actor and filmmaker, used to visit Tabor’s elementary school classrooms to talk with her students about writing and film. He noticed how the kids lit up whenever Tabor told them about growing up on Lake Champlain, hunting for Champ alongside her grandfather.
The two began working on Champ projects when Rossi, newly a grandfather himself, started looking for a story to tell his granddaughters. He had also recently survived “a couple of life-saving surgeries,” he said. “It was a period that left me looking my mortality in the face.” Around the same time, he was performing onstage in Los Angeles as Lewis Carroll, who, Rossi said, “wanted to create a story, a classic story for children.”
The pieces clicked. He called Tabor, then living in Greenville, South Carolina, with an idea: a story about a grandfather and granddaughter searching for Champ together.
It was while shooting the film adaptation of their book, “Lucy and the Lake Monster,” in July 2022 that the viral footage was captured.
For more on this, please see our July 2 edition of the Vermont Standard.
