ChampQuest Director’s Disappearance Deepens
Posted by: Loren Coleman on June 20th, 2007
Missing: The virtual vanishing of Dennis Hall, the founder and director of ChampQuest, is upsetting seekers and friends.
Dennis Hall is shown above during the happier days of the U-Haul Champ promotion. Used with prior permission.
For months, Lake Champlain Monster hunter Dennis Hall has not been able to be located.
His old website, ChampQuest.com is now posting this message: “Gone. The requested resource is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource.”
Attempts to reach Hall that I have made to his (old?) telephone number in Paton, Vermont, are greeted with this response: “I think you have the wrong number.”
Members of the champ-trackers email group remain baffled.
Sean Clogston, the moderator of that group, posted a new message today, June 20, 2007, in which he noted Dennis Hall’s email address is now “hard bouncing.” Clogston wrote: “Dennis Hall mystery deepens: Does anyone have any idea what has happened to Dennis Hall?”
Still missing: Dennis Hall.
Dennis Jay Hall was born November 4, 1956, in Middlebury, Vermont.
In the summer of 1965, at the age of nine, Dennis Hall had an experience that changed his life. His uncle Pete and aunt Shirley Bigelow were out boating in Plattsburgh Bay, Lake Champlain, when they saw something they took to be a Lake Monsters swim under their boat. They came home and shared the story with Dennis. His life’s quest had been decided, he felt.
Nevertheless, Hall got involved in other pursuits touching on Vermont-specific mysteries. Still in high school, in 1973, Hall was elected President of the Vergennes Chapter of the Vermont Archeological Society. While serving in that capacity, he was appointed by the Board of Trustees of the Vermont Archeological Society to a special task force to write the laws that protect the archeological sites in Vermont.
Dennis Hall graduated from Vergennes Union High School in 1974.
For over 25 years, Hall searched for Champ, and it appears, until recently, engaged in looking for Champ. Late in the 1990s, when I interviewed him for his entry in Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1999: pages 102-103), Dennis Jay Hall shared that he had seen Champ a total of nineteen times.
Now Dennis Hall has disappeared.
How do we expect to find Champ when we can’t even discover what happened to one of the recent primary seekers of the Lake Champlain Monsters?
Mysteriously missing: Dennis Jay Hall.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
This is from Wikipedia’s List of HTTP status codes:
410 Gone
Indicates that the resource requested is no longer available and will not be available again. This should be used when a resource has been intentionally removed; however, in practice, a 404 Not Found is often issued instead.
I hate to speculate but perhaps he was hunting for champ and found “Champ”. Perhaps Champ got him or maybe he had a tragic accident and fell in the water..God only knows about these things!
Maybe he is taking a lesson from BF… Is tired of poeple and just don’t want to be found…
Weird. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it had anything to do with actually meeting Champ. People go missing all the time for a wide variety of reasons and the fact that Mr. Hall was involved in Champ research could just be a coincidence. I always find these sudden disappearances to be spooky.
I tried to order his Champ book on Amazon.com last year and it took nearly 8 months of backorder after backorder before I finally cancelled my order (which, of course, is not his fault but I think it’s worth mentioning for those who are interested in trying to obtain a copy). I think I read that he had some work-related accident some years ago that may or may not have left him unable to work. There are, indeed, a lot of reasons why people go missing. I can’t think of too many of those reasons that are very positive.
He’s not the only Champ-folk missing… Where’s Joe Zarzynski? I haven’t heard about him in over a decade… is there a Champ curse, Loren?
There is no mystery about Joseph Zarzynski. He left cryptozoology many years ago to devote himself more completely to teaching, diving, and underwater archaeology.
I still exchange infrequent emails with him.
There is no Champ curse, as far as I know. That is unless “they” are after debunkers and skeptics, and I’ve not heard about that yet.
8-}
Another scenario could be that he did get some footage or proper images of the Champ and is now being or has been hunted down by a secret organization that doesn’t want the truth getting out.
But I guess we can speculate until the cows come home as there are so many possibilities, I guess we gotta keep our eyes out for clues that come our way.
As I stated to the “ChampTrackers” group, Dennis sent me some info back in early Dec. to help me when I Emailed him that I would be going up there in June ’07, and his Email seemed very enthusiastic and helpful, but I have not heard from him since. He seemed so dedicated to the cause! Also, anyone trying to buy his Champquest 2000 book might try alibris.com –A few years ago I was able to find pre-’70’s Nessie books there that I had been stupid enough to misplace as a kid after I read them!
So it looks so far that this wasn’t a planned disappearance, I mean DARHOP mentioned that he may have just got fed up of the attention and has gone into hiding.
But judging by richd40s comment about him being genuinely enthusiastic about his current project(s) it may not be a positive verdict and there must’ve been some hint of him not enjoying this field of work before if going into hiding is the case.
Maybe he is just taking a sabbatical of sorts, or taking a year off to get in touch with his inner Champ, or something. Have there been any missing persons reports of any kind filed? If not I think maybe the dude is just going incognito and recharging for awhile.
I know I would if I could.
Thanks for the tip on obtaining Hall’s book, richsd40. I went there just now but no luck. So I did a quick Google search and all I came up with was Amazon.com again. This is what Amazon.com has to say about Champ Quest 2000:
“Availability: Currently unavailable. We don’t know when or if this title will be in stock again.”
🙁
Luckily, I have a copy of Champ Quest 2000 around here somewhere. But, as I recall it is very dry reading. Very informative as far as the ecology and native species of the lake and a guide to when and where sightings are most frequent (as is the intent of the book), but hardly the book to curl up with on a rainy day. It is essentially a scientific tome. Technically, this was supposed to be an annually published guide as I understood it, but I’ve never seen anything more recent than the 2000 edition.
In any case, I hope Mr. Hall is doing ok and just on a bit of a breather. I remember when I contacted him by e-mail a few years back to order the book from him, I asked him where to send the check for it so I could get the book quickly since I had planned a trip to the lake in the near future. He immediately sent it to me without payment and just asked for the check to be sent when I received it (which I did). Very decent and trusting guy to do that for me. Unfortunately, I still never made it to the lake. The planned trip was canceled since it was scheduled within a week of 9/11. Hopefully I can make it out there in the fall.
Mr. Hall has become one with the beast, Champ. We had a cryptozoologist go missing here in Texas recently. Same deal, lake monster. They had been offered a large sum of money to solve the riddle, once and for all, to track down and kill ‘Eddie’. The client supposedly lost his wife and business partner to Eddie. Claims to have witnessed the entire thing.
The boat belonging to the crypto and his diving partner was found floating in the middle of the lake, but no occupants.
Local press receives a mysterious phone call from the guy who claims to have hired them, same dude who lost his wife.
Very strange story, but factual.
Champ, like Eddie, has gotten hungry, and it has begun to feed!
I too have found the 410 error on the http://www.champquest.com website. I tried sending Dennis an email and that was returned, as his address is now nonexistent. It is now almost 8 months since the last entry regarding his disappearance. What is the status? Does anyone have any news at all? Has a formal investigation been launched? Anyone contact the police and file a missing persons report? How about just sending him a snail mail letter to his home address?
Definitely very strange.
Dennis Hall is not missing, he has simply been doing other things. He has been writing some books. It took some effort but I found some current info on him. I will be contacting him tomorrow.
I live in vergennes vermont and know for a fact that Mr. Hall never left and is in fact still residing in panton vermont. He works as a carpenter and recently completed renovations at the little city market in vergennes.