Steamboat Dispatch Press — East Bellmont, NY — Circulation by Omen & Outboard
CAUTION TO LISTENERS:
This broadcast contains true accounts of disappearances, drowned financiers, and folkloric reptiles with a taste for toes. It is not recommended for tenderfoot dreamers, nor those with kin still workin’ the shafts at Lyon Mountain. Proceed as you would through the Narrows—silent, slow, and never alone.
📻 “He took a skiff to photograph the lilies. What came back was a shoe and a smear of silver on the marsh.”
Set your dials, folks.
The summer of 1922 brought more than fireflies to Chateaugay Lake—it brought L. Evan Larchmont, a bond man from Newark, who went out through the Narrows with a camera and a bottle of rye, and never came back. What did return was a skiff drifting in fog, lantern snuffed, and a trail that led private operative Harlan G. Warr straight into the shadowed remains of Popeville.
“Echoes in the Narrows” chronicles the only surviving case notes of that investigation—where kiln ghosts, liquor tunnels, and bootleg barge-folk collide. Warr’s journey took him past warped kilns and dead furnaces into a world where iron met moonshine, and where the Chateaugay Lake Steamboat Pirate Syndicate—yes, that’s what they called themselves—ran whisky through alder tunnels and left nothing behind but busted crates and bad luck.
But that ain’t the worst of it.
🐾 Enter the Little Nippers—legendary fire-born spawn of the Gitaskog, seen flickerin’ by collier fires and blamed for half the missing toes from Bellmont to Standish. More than myth, less than mammal, they were said to rise when the sparks flew thick. Croatians called ‘em dragons. Company doctors called it “rotary shearing with serpentine scoring.” We call it… one more thing not to wade into barefoot.
🎶 “Coke is cold, sparks no more—Nippers starve at iron’s door…”
From collapsing plank roads to sunken barges reeking of rye, this tale winds through the industrial carcass of the North Country—where even the lullabies are written in blood and lime dust.
🔦 In this episode
• The mysterious vanishing of Evan Larchmont
• Popeville’s ruin repurposed for bootleg ferry runs
• Floating warehouses disguised as ore barges
• Gitaskog folklore and the Little Nippers’ cradle-song
• A courtroom drama involving a shoe, a steamboat heir, and broken glass plates
• Wet footprints with no owner. Again.
📡 “There’s a hunger in the Narrows, and it ain’t just for whisky.”
Streaming now—on podcast apps, smuggled wax spools, and illegal tram radio.
🪜 #EchoesInTheNarrows
🛶 #SteamboatPirateSyndicate
🦶 #MissingToesAndMoonlight
🐍 #GitaskogLives
🏚️ #PopevilleAin’tEmpty
🔍 #WindsOfWMountain
⚙️ #IndustrialHaunting
🥃 #RyeRegret
📣 Don’t go pokin’ around those ruins after dark. The lake’s got a long memory, and short patience.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?