Authentic Adirondack unease: city man’s amphitheater awakens something directional in the Narrows. Content includes unexplained screams, late-night listening, moss-covered altars, and the slow realization that some questions echo back changed.
👉 Part 3.
20 Years On
Time went by the way it always does up here—slow if you’re stayin’, fast if you’re comin’ back.
Asa Bellows died quiet.
Martha outlived him and kept her ledgers sharp.
Elsie married late, on her own terms, and never moved far from the lake.
The Narrows stayed where it was.
Then along came Franklin Haven Sargent.
The City Feller
Franklin Haven Sargent was a thin man with city shoes and a way of lookin’ past people like they were part of the scenery. He’d been comin’ to Upper Chateaugay Lake summers since before the road got smoothed out. Always polite. Always askin’ questions nobody had asked in years.
“What happened down by the Narrows?”
“Why don’t folks cut timber past that point?”
“Why does the lake go quiet at midnight in August?”
The old timers answered him plain enough:
“Because it learned somethin’ there.”
“Because it don’t need remindin’.”
“Because water remembers.”
Franklin smiled at that. City smile. Like he’d already decided what was nonsense.
Then he bought land.
Up in Merrill, just back from the water, on a rise that used to be a charcoal flat, he put up a stone Greek amphitheater—columns hauled in, altar slab set dead center, seating carved into the slope like he was invitin’ the woods to watch.
“That don’t belong,” Rope-Hitch Gadway’s nephew said.
“No,” Elsie said. “It don’t.”
But nobody stopped him.
The Radio Room
What folks didn’t see much of was the little building Franklin put behind the trees.
No windows.
Heavy door.
Wires runnin’ like roots.
At night you could see light leakin’ under the sill and hear a low hum, like a nest of bees caught in a bottle.
Franklin spent hours in there, listenin’.
To what, nobody knew.
He wrote everything down in tight little notebooks. Dates. Times. Lake conditions. Sounds.
He said later he was “collectin’ atmospheres.”
That’s what city men call it when they don’t want to say they’re listenin’ for somethin’ they don’t understand.
The Play
When the amphitheater opened, Franklin announced a performance:
“Iphigenia in the Woods.”
Said it was a “local adaptation.”
He brought in acting students from downstate—sharp voices, clean hands, no sense yet of when to stop talkin’.
And he hired the Chateaugay Lake Steamboat Pirate Improv Players to fill out the crowd scenes.
Ore miners.
Bloomers.
Boatmen.
Charcoal burners.
They improvised, all right.
They made it funny where it shouldn’t have been.
Sharp where it needed to be.
And real in a way the students didn’t expect.
The old timers sat in the back rows, arms crossed.
Nobody laughed much.
The First Scream
It happened on the third night.
👁️Right at🎙️midnight.
A scream came off the lake.
Not from the stage.
Not from the woods.
From the water itself, it sounded like.
Long. Ragged. Directionless.
The students froze.
Then one of them—some idiot boy with more bravado than sense—cupped his hands and screamed back.
A couple others joined in, hootin’ like it was a game.
That didn’t go over.
An old man stood up and said, loud and clear, “Shut your mouths.”
The scream came again.
Closer.
That time nobody answered.
The Lover
After that night, people started talkin’ about Franklin’s lover—the one who’d been seen around the property earlier that summer.
A woman nobody local could place.
She stopped appearin’.
Franklin said she’d gone back to the city.
But then one of the Steamboat Players said Franklin had been diggin’ near the altar late one night.
And somebody else said there was a stain under the stone that didn’t wash out.
And somebody else said, real careful, “A head ain’t a thing that wanders off by accident.”
Nothing was proven.
Nothing ever is.
The “Midnight Scream” Takes Hold
From then on, the scream came regular.
Always near midnight.
Never same spot twice.
Never answerin’ back.
The radio room lights burned late.
Franklin kept listenin’.
Kept writin’.
He said the lake was “respondin’ to reenactment.”
Elsie heard that and said, “That’s not what it’s doin’.”
The New Crowd
By the next summer, vacationers were arrivin’ in numbers.
College kids.
City couples.
Folks who liked “authentic local color.”
They laughed at the yarns.
Said the scream was a loon.
Or a prank.
Or wind through riggin’.
One group even took a boat out at night with a fancy gizmo to “catch it on ‘cylinder’.”
They didn’t catch anything.
They came back pale and quiet and left the next morning.
Another group tried screamin’ back again during a performance.
The Steamboat Players stopped playin’ mid-scene.
An old timer leaned over the bench and said, “You’re askin’ the lake a question you won’t like the answer to.”
How It Ends (For Now)
The play ran its course.
Poor Franklin left Merrill at the end of the season, scribbled a short note to his housekeeper, headed for the train in Plattsburgh. They say he met up with ol’ T’nahtoos — the Abenaki spook paddler of the final crossin’ — and took a canoe out where the water stops answerin’ back. Shows up as a man, a shadow, or a ripple movin’ against the wind. Never hurries. Never misses. Franklin never made it back to the city.
The radio room went dark.
The amphitheater still stands, moss creepin’ in around the altar stone.
Some nights, right at midnight, a scream rolls across Upper Chateaugay Lake.
Not every night.
Just often enough.
Elsie says, “That’s the lake tellin’ folks to mind their business.”
The old timers say less.
And the new generation keeps showin’ up, smilin’, not believin’, askin’ the water to prove somethin’ again.
So far, the lake hasn’t rushed its answer.
It never does.
#AdirondackHauntings #UpperChateaugayLore #MidnightLakeScream #GreekAmphitheaterRuins #FranklinSargentLegend #WaterRemembersFolklore #ReenactmentHorror #OldTimerWisdom #CityFellerIntrusion #StillWaterNarrows
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?