Content involves depictions of sludge-born cryptids, mine runoff horrors, and chemically blistered monstrosities. Not recommended for readers with an aversion to ecological decay or industrial-age Chateaugay Lake horror. (Keywords: toxic horror, sludge monster, environmental horror story, mine pollution creature)
THE SLAGMIRE SERPENT! A MONSTROUS TRUE ACCOUNT OF ELECTRIC GHOSTS, TOXIC EELS, AND HILLFOLK HERESY ON LYON MOUNTAIN! By Our Special Correspondent in the Shuddering North
It began on a Tuesday, which, as any man with sense and sin will tell you, is the worst day to die.
The trapper—name: Ephraim Dullard, a shambling beard with a man tangled somewhere inside it—stood ankle-deep in slagwater, twitching like a shot mule.
Next to him, the schoolteacher—Miss Ivy Gluntz, barely twenty, all knuckles and books—clutched a home-built contraption that spat sparks like an epileptic banshee. Between them swam a story that no man would believe and no woman would confess to having dreamt.
The water glowed.
Yes, glowed. Faint green. Sickly. Like a lantern left too long inside a corpse.
“You hear it again?” Ephraim asked, voice like splintered rail ties.
“It’s not sound,” Ivy said. “It’s oscillation. Waveform irregularity.”
“Girl, it’s a ghost with gills.”
So they stood—man and woman, past and future—watching the slime shift in the pond that used to be a mine. Watching the ripples twitch. And then it rose. Lord forgive us, it rose.
THE BEAST THAT SCIENCE REJECTED, AND SIN INVITED!
Let us describe the Slagmire Serpent with the clinical restraint of a doctor describing his own death: it was eel-like, but with extra appendages; it undulated in a fashion suggestive of madness rather than locomotion; its eyes were twin acetylene torches of damnation; its mouth, a smoking fissure ringed in chemical blisters.
It gurgled in frequencies Ivy swore bent her copper wires backwards.
“It’s not alive the way we mean it,” she whispered.
“That ain’t comfortin’,” Ephraim spat, and chambered a round.
Now, dear reader, you may scoff from the comfort of your cafe chairs or the moral clarity of your rectories, but know this: the Brooklyn Bridge contains ore pulled from this poisoned womb. Every footfall upon that monument is, perhaps, one tick closer to serpent-born collapse. You doubt? Then you’ve not felt it: the tremble of rusted steel beneath your teeth when you sleep. The distant song. The frequency of wrongness.
OF WIRELESS WITCHCRAFT AND TOXIC PHANTASMATA!
Miss Gluntz, a certified pedagogical agent of the Burke District School Board, had recently attended a demonstration of “etheric signaling” in Ticonderoga. Armed with a Geissler tube, a makeshift coil, and a stolen pie plate, she’d constructed what she dubbed a “Vibrational Perceptoscope.” Ephraim called it a “damned witch fork.”
Together they aimed it at Bradley Pond. What it picked up, they never repeated. The glass hissed. The pie plate warped. One of Ephraim’s teeth popped out on the spot.
“Magnetic inversion,” Ivy mumbled.
“Demon belch,” Ephraim said.
Either way, the machine cracked, the pond boiled, and the Slagmire Serpent howled—an arrhythmic scream that mimicked a railroad whistle underwater. At that moment, five weasels died in their holes on nearby Baldface Ridge, and old Mrs. Patterglass’s glass eye shattered in her sleep.
GHOST OR GUTTER-BORN MONSTER?
Locals recall old tales of a Finnish miner named Harl Veitonen, who perished in a collapse ‘round 1872. “He had strange blood,” Ephraim growled. “Said he could smell iron like bread bakin’.” The miner’s corpse was never recovered. Some say his soul swims still—now a blasphemy of flesh and filament, reborn in sludge.
Others—city folk, experts—claim the Slagmire Serpent is merely an evolutionary accident, a product of acid runoff, electromagnetic leakage, and prolonged industrial trauma. To which we say: Ha!
THE RITUAL OF THE REPEATED DAY – CONNECTION, OR COINCIDENCE?
Now, Lyon Mountain isn’t known for forward thought. Or backward, for that matter. But the town has its ways. And on that very same day, by unwritten agreement and long-dusty ritual, it was La Répétition du Déjà Vu.
Every sentence spoken had to be repeated exactly from the last time it was spoken. Down to inflection. The whole damn town was stuck on repeat.
Dullard and Miss Gluntz returned to town half-mad from the slag serpent’s incessant howling, only to be greeted with the same three phrases in a loop:
“Cold weather, eh?”
“Yup. Crick froze clean through last night.”
“Best get the chickens in early.”
They screamed at the barkeep, demanded a map, dynamite, a priest. He just nodded and said, “Cold weather, eh?” And for the fifth time that day, a man’s brain snapped like a mousetrap.
“I asked Old Hank if the weather’d hold, and he said, ‘Rain don’t ask permission,’” said Mrs. Peever, widow and laundress. “He said that last week, too. With the same smirk.”
Miss Ivy Gluntz noted that the serpent’s sonic signature mirrored the pacing of the Déjà Vu Day: a looping rhythm, recursive but never identical. “We’re mimicking it,” she said. “Or maybe it’s mimicking us.”
Some say this was the Slagmire Serpent’s influence — a ripple of cognitive contagion, a frequency infection. Others blame mercury in the well water. The rest just say, “Eh. Who’s to say?”
THE FINAL MOMENT – A GUN, A PRAYER, AND A BRIEF ELECTRICAL INVERSION!
Ephraim fired his last shot.
It ricocheted from a rusted sluice-gate, hit a power relay on Miss Ivy’s Perceptoscope, and triggered what she later called an “inverse broadcast event.” The Slagmire Serpent spasmed. Its limbs flailed in impossible geometry. And then—it receded, like a dream into fog. Not dead. Merely done with us.
POSTSCRIPT – STRANGE SIGNALS STILL HEARD IN THE NIGHT!
Even now, days later, radios across the North Country hum with indecipherable patterns. Steamboat crews down on the lake whisper of cries from the shore. Hunters swear their bullets curve near Lyon Mountain.
Miss Gluntz has taken to wearing copper mesh under her coat. Ephraim? He went back to trapping. But he won’t go near the pond. Says the ripples are… listening now.
And the next Déjà Vu Day? We’re due for another soon. If you walk into town and say “Cold weather, eh?”—pray the answer ain’t, “Not cold enough to stop it.”
SENSATION! SCIENCE! SIN! Subscribe now for our next issue—THE CHROME-FACED TRAMP WHO SLEPT IN A GHOST’S GRAVE!
Only in your faithful purveyor of the obscene and the unknowable—The Steamboat Dispatch
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?