The Crows’ Parliament & the Clamor of Curious Mechanicks
by Miss Flossie Featherquill, West Bunker Hill Correspondent
Caution: This engrossing tale interweaves the spirit of bygone eras with futuristic sound innovations. Its antique Dadaistic tintype visuals and uncanny narratives invite inquisitive minds to explore Chateaugay Lake’s surreal frequencies beyond measure.
Young Johnny Miles was never one for fishing or idle afternoons, even on the shimmering shores of Chateaugay Lake. While other children skipped stones or explored the pine forests, Johnny spent his days scavenging for anything with gears, coils, or wires—leftovers from the once-grand workshop of his grandfather, the old squire. Legend had it that Squire Miles had once fixed everything from broken mill wheels and steamboat boilers to fiddles, but he was just as quick to throw away any part he deemed “unfixable.” To Johnny, these castoffs were gold.
No one batted an eye the day Johnny dragged an old lantern frame, a broken gramophone horn, and the battered shell of a wind-up clock out of the workshop’s junk pile. They did, however, whisper when he pieced them all together into something new. In the dim back room of the family boathouse, Johnny tinkered for weeks, oil-stained fingers adjusting valves and fiddling with copper wiring. He claimed he was building a “sound machine,” a contraption that could detect frequencies most human ears couldn’t pick up—somewhere between a crow’s caw and the wind’s whistle at dusk.
On the afternoon the cover photograph was taken, the sky above Chateaugay Lake had turned a curious shade of pewter. Clouds drifted in with an eerie calm, reflecting off the water’s surface like a sheet of polished steel. Johnny sat on the worn wooden floor, his contraption perched beside him. A pair of crows, lured by the device’s faint humming, swooped in to investigate. The camera’s lens caught them mid-flight, wings splayed like ragged curtains.
Johnny’s face, solemn as always, betrayed both excitement and uncertainty. He had never tested the machine out in the open before. His grandfather, who had no faith in “newfangled contraptions,” had wandered off muttering something about chores. So the youth took the moment for himself, ready to capture whatever unearthly tones the lake might offer up.
When he flipped the switch, the machine’s gramophone horn crackled. At first, it was nothing but static and the low moan of the wind. Then, gradually, came an unearthly melody—like the distant hum of a bowed cello, woven together with the cawing of the curious crows. It was as if the machine had tuned into a hidden undercurrent of Chateaugay Lake, translating the lake’s centuries-old secrets into a haunting symphony.
No one was entirely sure how Johnny’s device worked. Even he couldn’t say exactly why the crows responded so intently, hopping closer with each pulse of sound. But from that day forward, rumors rippled through the lake’s tight-knit community: they said young Johnny had discovered a hidden frequency in nature, an echo of the Adirondacks themselves—an echo that only the keenest ears (and perhaps the wildest imaginations) could ever perceive.
Though the original contraption would eventually rust and fail, the legend of Johnny’s weird experiments and contraptions lived on in family lore. And these prized tintypes, preserved for future posterity at the extraordinary Shatagee Woods Museum of Unnatural Hysteria, became proof that something weird happened on the lakeshore that day—a fleeting moment when a curious boy’s ingenuity collided with the timeless mystique of Chateaugay Lake.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?