“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene iii
The Spirit of the Steamboat Dispatch
Special Correspondence from East Bellmont, September 1908
By Mordecai Vilecreek, Editor, Adirondack Guide and Innkeeper
Dear Readers,—and by this salutation I salute my own reflection in the inky pane of our office window, for it seems the paper itself has turned conspirator against me. Strange and multifarious events have transpired since our latest issue took the liberty of printing the ghost stories of Chateaugay Lake. A curse, some say. A jest, others chuckle. Yet I cannot help but place before our readers the extraordinary, for it is in their very hands the matter now rests.
First, the presses themselves began to behave as though possessed. At midnight, when no compositor stirred, type rearranged itself into blasphemous headlines: “SPIRIT PILOTS OUR NEWS” and “LAST ISSUE BEFORE DROWNING.” I swear on my guide’s license that I witnessed the letters crawl across the galley, like beetles summoned by moonlight.
Testimonies Collected
Mr. Amos Kirby, a trapper of taciturn disposition, declared he heard “paddles without canoe” striking the lake at two in the morning, echoing toward the Narrows. “If ‘twas pirates,” he muttered, “they row in silence save the water itself speaks.”
Young Miss Eloise Marchand, boarding at the Banner House, swooned most poetically upon seeing what she described as “a luminous barque, gliding without passengers, its lanterns aglow with sepulchral fire, its pennant stitched from vapor.” Her account is so vivid that no sensible reporter could dismiss it, unless one wishes to affront maidenly honor.
Old Fog, our eccentric guide and amateur cartographer, insists that subterranean channels connect the Forge ruins with the deeper basins of the lake, allowing “errant moonlight” to refract in such wise as to conjure phantom hulls. He even produced a damp map, ink smeared into uncanny shapes, which, I confess, resembles more a skull than any chart of topography.
And finally, Professor Arbuthnot of Malone College, who dabbles in metaphysical physics, assures me this is no mere optical trick. “You are dealing,” quoth he, “with a recurrence of psychic discharge—an echo of those steamboat pirates who once ferried contraband timber, their very commerce etched upon the aqueous aether.”
Community Speculation
Is it then so? Has our humble Dispatch, in recounting legends, become the medium by which the legends return? Some townsfolk aver that each printed story feeds the spirit of the lake, as cordwood feeds the kiln. Others maintain that the paper itself has long been cursed, ever since our foreman printed a satire upon the Popeville Forge in 1874.
A Challenge to Skeptics
I invite—nay, I dare—our doubters to stand by the landing at midnight and watch for themselves. Let them hear the spectral bell strike one. Let them see whether the glimmering arc of silver across the obsidian night is wave or wake. If it be folly, then let the folly drown me too.
Coda
Even now, as I dip my pen in the dwindling inkwell, I hear the faint thrum of unseen paddles, a cadence not of this world. The presses wheeze behind me, unbidden. Should this be our last issue, let the record show that the Dispatch itself bore witness to its haunting. For though paper burns and ink fades, the lake remembers—and it prints upon water what no hand can erase.
Yours, under uncertain stars,
Mordecai Vilecreek
Adirondack Guide and Innkeeper
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?