Delve into the historical mystery of Chateaugay Lake, where a dwindling population and bizarre disappearances fuel tales of ghostly apparitions and a possible temporal rift. Was Jonathan Reed a victim or a witness?
The Vanishing of Jonathan Reed: A Chateaugay Lake Incident
By the editors of the Steamboat Dispatch
“Crime, Ghosts, and the Eternal March of Time”
March 13, 1912
It was the sort of thing you read about in old penny dreadfuls—right before the doomed hero is dragged off the edge of civilization and into some black, long lost abyss of fate. But this, dear readers, is no fiction. This is Chateaugay Lake, a place where the clock ticks backward if you stare long enough and where the air itself might be thick with something more dangerous than just the winter chill.
The lake population here is thinning out—fast. Down from 2,155 souls in 1900 to a measly 1,743 a decade later. Where are they all going? Hitching up to the afterlife seems as good a guess as any, considering the year’s string of peculiar disappearances. But who is to blame? The lake? Or something lurking beneath it?
Let’s begin at the start of this old mystery. The name Jonathan Reed may ring a bell, but not for the right reasons. This reckless original Chateaugay Lake settler, one of the most ambitious of the region, vanished into thin air one summer night in 1837. Only a journal was left behind, marked with the frenzied scrawl of a man unraveling faster than the string of his own sanity.
He was obsessed. Chateaugay Lake—that cursed body of water—was the cause of it all. His notes—written in that feverish tone reserved only for men at the brink of madness—told of strange lights darting beneath the surface and sounds that came from nowhere. But the worst? “Yammerin’ shadows” and a dark something beneath the lake’s still waters, something that had slumbered for a long time.
Now, Reed may have gone off the deep end, but what about the others? Over the past few decades, there have been odd stories in town of “ghostly sightings” over the lake at night. But this is no romantic tragedy from the works of a dime-store poet. This is something more sinister.
Reports of the phenomenon come with an eerie consistency—repeatedly, at night, on the still surface of Chateaugay Lake, strange lights appear, moving in patterns that defy logic. They flicker like the last vestiges of some forgotten, burning ship—or the phantoms of Reed himself, lost in time. Is it merely natural gases bubbling from the depths? Or is it something more… sinister?
This story goes deeper, much deeper than anyone—investigators, scientists, and lawmen alike—care to admit. In fact, a team of scholars from the New York Historical Society came to the lake in 1905, combing through Reed’s journal and the local folklore. One Dr. Thomas Lyle, a man with a too-cold demeanor for any good-hearted doctor, went to the lake with high expectations and left with a manic grin.
“I’ve seen it,” Lyle said, his voice tinged with excitement and something darker. “The Rift. The Temporal Rift.”
No one knew what he was talking about. But when Lyle turned up two weeks later, his body floating near the sandbar, it was too much to dismiss. The scientist’s notes, found scattered in his cabin, suggested that Chateaugay Lake was more than just a body of water. He theorized that it was a place where the very fabric of time had been torn, frayed. A place where the past, present, and future collided in an eternal struggle.
The locals—those poor souls too invested in their way of life to entertain such fanciful theories—laughed. But they shouldn’t have. Because one of the key components of this mystery—the one that’s kept it alive—might just be the missing roadster known as BOHAT 1P. A car that should not exist.
You see, this is where it gets real messy. BOHAT 1P has been seen over the years, sporadically, mostly at night, cruising along the lakeside. That name—that monstrous contraption—keeps coming up in old police records, in witness reports, in local gossip. And no one has a good explanation. Some say it’s an invention lost in time, others that it’s a vehicle from some far-off future.
But no one asks the real question: Why is it always seen near Chateaugay Lake?
Could it be tied to the same phenomena that have plagued the place for decades? Was it Reed’s journal? Or was it the ripple in time he uncovered? If it’s a time-traveling machine, then perhaps Reed’s obsession with the lake is the real answer to his disappearance. He didn’t vanish—he just slipped through—and perhaps, just perhaps, he’s still out there, caught in an eternal loop.
But let us not forget the darker side to this story—the stories from the Abenaki, the ones that speak of the Wendigo, a creature as old as the forest itself, waiting, watching, lurking just beneath the surface. The land’s dark spirit that feeds off hunger, madness, and time. Perhaps it’s the Wendigo that lurks in the depths, feeding off the disruption caused by the Rift.
Reports have surfaced, quite recently, of strange gas-like releases from the lake’s bottom, potentially explaining the ghostly sightings of the past. A suffocating blanket of methane could explain the otherworldly apparitions. But the scientists on-site can’t agree on anything, even as they circle around the lake like vultures.
As for the remaining residents? They’re dwindling. The local authorities can’t explain the decreasing population, but one thing’s for sure: the ghostly lights, the strange machines, and the unnatural breath of the lake are not just stories told to pass the time.
The following is a direct quote from a local who preferred to remain anonymous:
“People leave. They vanish. You can’t explain it, but they do. The ones who stay, they hear the whispers at night. Not ghosts, not spectres. Something else. Something that… calls.”
Could it be that Chateaugay Lake is more than just a lake? Is it a doorway, a conduit, a rift? Could this be the very place where time and reality bend, twist, and stretch, until the past is never really past?
To you, dear reader, I leave this thought: The truth is in the gas. And in the lights. And in the machine—BOHAT 1P, the ghost that should not be, and the spirits of time lost in this lake.
I’ll be back next week with more details, if there are any details left to uncover. Until then, do yourself a favor—stay away from the lake at night. Or don’t. After all, what’s time anyway?
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?