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So say thrills. Welcome to Thursday Thrills, a quick weekly
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ride into the creepy stories, haunted places, weird obsessions, and
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eerie little corners of the world worth talking about. I'm
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your host, Enrique Kuto. Tonight we're going out on the water.
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Not in the bright rented pontoon boat way, not with
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sunscreen coolers and somebody's uncle yelling about how he knows
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a good fishing spot. I mean the other kind of
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lake trip, the one where the sun goes down, the
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trees turn black around the shoreline, the surface gets so
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still it looks unreal, and suddenly every ripple like it
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has a purpose you don't know about. Because lake monsters
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are one of the oldest horror tricks in the world,
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and somehow they still work. You can explain away a
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shadow in the hallway. You can say the sound upstairs
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was just the house settling. But a dark lake, a
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lake doesn't have to do anything. It just sits there, deep, cold, patient,
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and if something big moves under the surface, you only
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get to see the smallest part of it. That is
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the brilliance of lake monster folklore. It gives you one shape,
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a neck, a hump, a wake where there shouldn't be.
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One may be a head that rises for half a
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second before it drops back down. Then the rest of
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the monster stays in your imagination, and your imagination does
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all the heavy lifting. And right now one of America's
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most famous lake monsters is back in the conversation. Champ
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the creatures said to live in Lake Champlain, has been
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called America's Lochness Monster for decades. Lake Champlain stretches for
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roughly one hundred and twenty five miles along New York, Vermont,
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and Quebec, and the monster stories around it are not
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some tiny local rumor that three guys at a bait
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shop invented over a summer and some beers. The legend
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has been part of the region for generations. Some tourism
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pages lean into sightings, local history, and the fun of
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searching the lake. Museums and exhibits have treated Champ as
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both folklore and science bait, a mystery that lets people
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ask what we see, what we misread, and what we
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want to be true. Recently, filmmakers Richard Rossy and Kelly
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Tabor claimed they noticed something strange in footage shot on
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Lake Champlain for a children's movie Lucy and the Lake Monster.
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According to coverage of the claim, they didn't spot it
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in the moment. They noticed it later while reviewing footage,
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and described a long, skinny shape moving behind their boat.
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The history channels The Unexplained reportedly took interest in the footage,
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which is exactly the sort of detail that makes the
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Internet lean forward and go okay, wait a minute. And
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that is where CHAMPI gets fun. Not because the footage
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automatically proves a monster, because it doesn't. A lake is
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a wonderful factory for mistakes. Logs and driftwood move birds,
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dive into the water for food, Fish roll around and
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do whatever the hell they want. Wind can make wakes
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that look alive. Reflections can stitch two ordinary things into
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a single impossible one. A camera can flatten distance and
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turn a small object near the lens into a shape
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out in the water. But the feeling, well, the feeling
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is real. Imagine you're out there, the boat motor is off,
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the camera is rolling. Because you're trying to get some
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pretty lake footage. It shouldn't be too hard. The lake
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is gorgeous. You're concentrating on continuity, not cryptids. You get home.
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Days pass then one night you're scrubbing through the video
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and there it is in the background, something you didn't
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see when you were actually there. That is a special
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kind of haunting, a ghost in the footage, a monster
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that didn't show up to the party until later. The
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lake didn't scare you while you were on it. It
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waited until you were safe. Champ isn't alone, of course,
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Lockness is still the heavyweight champion of this entire category.
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NeSSI has had everything eyewitnesses, photographs, expeditions, sonar scans, hoaxes,
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tourist gift shops, skeptical debunkings, and people who will go
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to their graves insisting something enormous lives in that Scottish water.
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And in twenty twenty six, the Lochness Hunt went high
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tech again. The Lockness Quest brought together monster hunters, curious
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visitors and scientific explorers with an underwater drone nicknamed micro Miss,
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mapping parts of the lockbed in detail. The search focused
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on Urkhirt Bay, a place associated with sightings and dramatic
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underwater terrain. That's the modern lake story in miniature, old legend,
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new technology, and the same ancient question under all of it,
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What is down there? The spooky part is that better
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technology does not always kill a legend. Sometimes it feeds it.
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If the drone finds nothing, believers say the lock is
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huge and the creature simply moved. If the drone finds
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a cave, a trench, a weird shape, or even a
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sunken movie prop, the mystery tates. Suddenly the story isn't
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is there a monster? It becomes what else is hidden
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down there? And that is why these legends not only
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survive but thrive. They're not only about unknown animals, They're
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about places that refuse to be fully known. What Lake
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monsters always do, beautifully is travel. Every region wants its
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own version. Scotland has Nessie, and Lake Champlain has Champ.
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Of course, Bear Lake between Utah and Idaho as the
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Bear Lake Monster, a serpentine creature promoted in the eighteen
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sixties and still to local folklore. Texas has the Lake
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Worth Monster, which is less elegant Lake serpent and more
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What if a goat man started throwing tires at teenagers?
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Sounds like a fun time to me. That one exploded
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in nineteen sixty nine around Greer Island and Lake Worth,
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with newspaper reports late night monster hunts, and the kind
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of local panic that feels right out of a drive
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in movie. Then there are one of my favorites, sewer alligators,
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the big city cousin of lake monsters. They're not usually
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described as supernatural per se, but they check the same boxes.
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Something impossible, reptilian and patient, living beneath ordinary life. You're
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not on a dark lake anymore. You're walking down a sidewalk.
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You step over a manhole cover, Steam rises through the holes,
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and just for one second, your brain says, what if
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there are eyes under there? New York sewer alligator legend
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became famous because it feels almost believable. People really do
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buy baby alligators. My father had one. People really do
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make terrible decisions. My father also made a lot of
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those cities really do have dark underground systems most of
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us never seen. The legend only has to stretch reality
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just a little gets flushed, It survives, It grows, It
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learns the tunnels Suddenly, every sewer grate is a mouth
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full of teeth. That is the secret ingredient in the
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best monster folklore. It gives the impossible a practical address.
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Champ isn't somewhere, Champ is in Lake champlain NeSSI isn't
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out there NeSSI is in Lochness. The lake Worth Monster
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isn't in a fantasy kingdom. It's near a real lake
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outside fort Worth Sewer. Alligators they're not in a fairy
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tale swamp or Peter Pan's story. They're under the street
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you already walked across. Specificity makes the stories stronger. You
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can visit the place. You can stand on the shore.
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You can look at the water and think, all right,
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I get it. Because even if you don't believe in monsters,
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lakes are weird. Sound travels strangely over water. Distances become
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hard to judge. A swimming deer can look like a beast.
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A line of birds can become humps. A big fish
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breaking the surface can seem too big for a fish,
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especially if you only see it for a heartbeat. At dusk,
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the water turns reflective, and suddenly the sky, the trees,
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the shore, and the thing moving through all of it
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blend together. Skeptics are right to point that out, but
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believers are also reacting to something real, the shock of
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seeing the familiar become unfamiliar. A lake in the daytime
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is recreation. A lake at night is a black mirror,
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and if the mirror moves, your body reacts before your
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brain can argue. So here is the Thursday Thrills version.
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Imagine a small documentary crew heading to Lake Champlain after
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hearing about this new champ footage. They do all the
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normal things. They film the welcome sign, they shoot the
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cute roadside monster statue. They interview a local who laughs
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and says, I don't know what I saw, but I
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know I saw something. They get the skeptical biologist, they
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get the tourism angle. They get the sunset over the water.
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Then after dark they rent a little boat for one
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last shot. Nothing particularly dramatic, just the sound of waves
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against the hull. The host whispers into the microphone because
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darkness makes everybody whisper. The camera points toward the empty
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lake For twenty minutes, nothing happens. Then the boat rocks,
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not a big Hollywood action movie lurch, just enough that
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everybody freezes. The sound guy says, so is that awake?
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The camera operator pans left, black water, no lights, no
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other boats. Then something bumps the underside of the hull.
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This time there's no nervous laughter. The host tries to
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keep the show going, you know, bust out the calm,
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spooky voice. We may have just felt something beneath the boat,
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but the words come out too fast. The lake is
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too quiet. Even the insects on shore seem to have
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gone silent. A ripple appears ten feet away, then another
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one farther out, then a third behind them. The sound
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guy says there's more than one. The host tells him to,
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in so many words, keep his opinions to himself. They
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start the motor. It coughs once and dies, because of
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course it does. Horror knows how boats work. Then the
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water beside them rises, nothing clean enough to identify, just
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a long, slick curve pushing up beneath the surface, as
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if something enormous is turning over in its sleep. The
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camera catches maybe two seconds before the operator drops it, screaming, splashing,
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the boat spinning, the shore lights suddenly very far away,
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and then in the morning the boat is found drifting empty,
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no damage or blood, no monster teeth in the fiberglass,
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just a dead camera, a wet microphone, and one memory
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card sealed in a cracked plastic case. When investigators review
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the footage, most of it is useless. Black water shouting,
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the blur of a hand covering the lens. But near
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the end there is one clear frame, not of the
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monster of the shore. Hundreds of people are standing there
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in the dark, shoulder to shoulder, perfectly still, watching the boat,
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and every single one of them is smiling. That is
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the twist I love about lake monsters. The creature might
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not be the scariest part. Maybe the lake is not
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hiding one beast so much as hiding a whole town's secret.
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Maybe the legend survives because people keep feeding it. Maybe
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every monster story needs witnesses, and eventually the witnesses become
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part of the whole thing. So the next time you're
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near a lake and it's night, try this. Stand there
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for just a minute after everyone else has gone back
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to the car. Listen to the water, watch the surface,
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wait for the little ripples that seem to move against
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the wind, and if something rises, don't worry. You probably
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won't see enough to prove anything. That's how these stories
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get you, not with proof, but with just enough. And
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of course if you see too much, well there's no
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guarantee you'll live to share the story. Come back tomorrow
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for more fear. Until then, lock your doors, as if
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that will help you