Chill your blood as Camp Jack awakens ghastly forces; scandal, spectral whispers, and ancient Wendigo curses at Chateaugay Lake forge a tale of paranormal dread and macabre intrigue like no other—beyond belief!
THE HAUNTING OF CAMP JACK
As Reported by the Steamboat Disatch
(Special Midnight Edition by Hector “Hacksaw” Dunnigan, Investigative Journalist & Moral Arbiter)
HUMAN VANITY MEETS A DARKER DESIGN!
Paranormal Investigators Enter the Devil’s Own Hunting Ground—Some May Never Return!
CAMP JACK, CHATEAUGAY LAKE—Men of Science, Women of Weak Nerves, and That Breed of Fraudulent Spiritualist Known to Lurk in Theatres and Saloons Have Met Their Reckoning on These Accursed Grounds!
It was just past the witching hour when the so-called “Scientific Society for Paranormal Inquiry” pitched their instruments of dubious merit in the rotted clearing that was once Jack Clifford’s personal retreat. His name, though still revered by locals, in the annals of crime and excess, remains synonymous with gin-fueled spectacles and theatrical entanglements, not least with the scandal-ravaged Evelyn Nesbit Thaw—she of the Gibson Girl features and tragic notoriety.
They had come, these well-fed modern ghost hunters, with their electric boxes and photographic plates, speaking of residual energies and “dimensional thinning.” As if spectral beasts of the wilds might present themselves for measurement like common livestock! As if the veil between sanity and dissolution might be quantified!
They should have asked the locals—men of simple means, but profound caution. They should have heeded the murmurs at the general store, the superstitions that seasoned the air like woodsmoke. But city minds believe only in what they can bottle and sell.
And so, under a leering, jaundiced moon, they woke the thing that never sleeps.
THEIR RECKLESS INQUIRY BEGAN AS ALL SUCH MADNESS DOES—WITH CYNICISM AND BRANDY
It was Doctor Aldous Fitch who led this doomed expedition, a man of sneering skepticism and wire-rimmed spectacles, his very presence a mockery of the unseen forces around him. “A tragic romance,” he called the vanished pair, dismissing any notion of lingering spirits as “folk hysteria.”
His companions—a trio of lesser worth—comprised:
- Miss Lucinda Graves, a society clairvoyant of the Broadway circuit, whose séances typically ended with an empty cashbox and a full whiskey glass.
- Elmer Quill, a newspaperman with a gambler’s pallor and a nose for scandal, whose editor had demanded either a ghost story or a corpse—and, by God, the latter sold more papers.
- Joseph Pritchard, a junior academic whose primary contributions to the evening consisted of nervous laughter and adjusting his bowler hat.
By dawn, one of them would be missing. Another would be reduced to an unrecognizable state of gibbering ruin.
THE FIRST SIGNS OF DAMNATION—AND A CURIOUS TEMPTATION!
The night’s inquiry began with a most unwholesome silence. No crickets sang. No owls called. The wind stirred the trees, but they did not rustle—rather, they seemed to breathe.
Lucinda Graves, ever the performer, set to her usual theatrics. She called upon the spirit of Evelyn Nesbit, invoked the lost soul of Jack Clifford. The lanterns flickered, though the air was still. Then—a sound.
A dragging. A scraping.
Elmer Quill’s fingers found the butt of his pistol. Pritchard muttered some fool’s prayer. Fitch scoffed, ever the rationalist.
But Lucinda? She swayed. She smiled.
For Miss Graves had felt something older than Jack Clifford, older than the poor, lost Gibson Girl, older than the whispers of the native guides who once refused to approach these woods.
AND THEN—THE WALL BETWEEN WORLDS SPLIT
Fitch’s derision crumbled the moment the smell hit him. A stench of rot, of animal sweat, of something decayed yet unkillable. The Wendigo.
It did not announce itself with rattling chains or phantom wails. It simply arrived.
A shadow that did not belong to any tree.
A shape that did not fit in the geometry of the world.
It moved wrong, all angles and convulsions, like a man who has forgotten how to be a man. And yet, its eyes—if they were eyes—knew them.
Lucinda Graves took a step forward. She sighed, as if slipping into a lover’s embrace.
And then, with the slow, deliberate certainty of a predator that does not know hunger—it took her.
A blink. A shudder in the air. And where she stood was only a disturbed patch of earth and the echo of a breath that did not belong to any living thing.
“GOD SAVE US—IT KNOWS OUR NAMES”
Quill screamed. Pritchard sobbed. Fitch—poor, stubborn Fitch—attempted words, but the shapes that left his mouth belonged to no human tongue.
The trees pressed closer. The shadows thickened.
And then—from somewhere in the dark—a voice.
“Pretty girl,” it whispered, though it came from no throat. “Dancing girl. She knew. She called. She is mine now.”
Something moved in the periphery.
Something laughed—a wet, sucking sound, void of mirth.
And then, footsteps that did not fade.
WHAT BECAME OF THE SURVIVORS?
By sunrise, Fitch and Quill were found half a mile apart, their minds as shattered as a gin bottle against a Bowery curb.
Pritchard, it is said, will never speak again.
As for Lucinda Graves—she is gone. The woods swallowed her whole, as they have swallowed others before her.
And so Camp Jack remains: an open wound in the skin of the world, a place where the living and the dead mingle too closely.
A FINAL WARNING TO THE READER
The fate of Evelyn Nesbit Thaw and Jack Clifford remains a mystery.
Or perhaps it does not.
Perhaps the Wendigo does not take its prizes in a single night. Perhaps it waits, patient as deep water, for those who dare call to it.
And if some foolish city-dweller, some skeptic in a fine coat, should come again with cameras and phonographs—
It will be watching.
It always is.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?