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.