* Emergency Reading Before You Hike — Iron smell on the shoreline, furnace glow in an empty forge, antlers rising from the lake. Chateaugay Lake Wendigo guide • Lyon Mountain powder-keg legend • survival tips.
THE STEAMBOAT DISPATCH
Special Investigative Edition • March 17, 1916 • “Truth in Ink, Consequences in Iron”
By Ignatius Pike
Star Correspondent, & Chronicler of Corporate Villainies
CHATEAUGAY LAKE, N.Y.— Gentle readers, steel your nerves and clutch your Bibles—for the depths of Franklin County now vomit forth a horror not seen since the Devonian Age. The Chateaugay Ore and Iron Company, that leviathan of industry whose forges once lit the furnaces of progress, stands accused of tunneling into realms best left buried. Their so-called “Progress Shaft”—a gash in God’s green earth stretching 1,685 feet into the abyss—has stirred a slumbering terror. A terror with teeth .
THE SHAFT THAT PIERCED HELL
The Company’s “Progress Shaft,” sunk near Standish in 1881, was touted as a marvel of modern engineering. “A conduit to prosperity!” crowed then-President Smith M. Weed, that silver-tongued statesman who secured railroads and backroom deals with equal fervor . But whispers persisted. Miners spoke of “veins that hummed” and “walls that bled black ichor”—omens ignored for profit.
Now, under CEO Virgil Grange (nephew of the vanished Silas Grange, last seen fleeing to Montreal with Tammany Hall’s silver), the shaft lies abandoned beneath Rogersfield’s Reservoir. Yet Grange’s men skulk nightly with dynamite crates marked “safety measures.” Safety for whom? .
WENDIGO’S RIBS & THE TRAITOR’S ORE
The Old Military Tract, land wrested from frontier soldiers in 1781, has always been cursed. Trapper Collins—the mad soul who first discovered Chateaugay’s ore in 1823—wrote of “a laughter in the rocks” before vanishing into the wilderness . Modern assays confirm the ore’s purity: 99.7% iron, near-phosphorus-free, too perfect for this world .
But the Company’s greed dug deeper. Their 1902 “Rich Strike” near Lyon Mountain revealed a 70-foot-thick vein—a “geologic impossibility” that geologists now suspect was no vein at all, but the scales of something primordial .
THE CHRONOSAURUS REX: CORPORATE COVER-UP
Last week’s reservoir disaster was no act of God. The beast that breached Chateaugay Lake’s dam—a serpentine abomination of rusted clock faces and grinding gears—was birthed from the Company’s hubris. Internal ledgers reveal that in 1886, the firm secretly purchased a “Blake crusher” to pulverize ore into “8-inch fragments.” Fragments, this reporter contends, laced with fossilized marrow .
Worse, the Delaware & Hudson Railroad, the Company’s silent partner, rerouted tracks in 1879 to expedite shipments from the shaft—knowing full well the cargo was tainted .
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY: MINERS’ TERROR
Phineas Grawl, the diver who survived the reservoir’s bowels, recounts: “It weren’t no machine, sir. It were alive—screamin’ in a tongue older than Babel. And the walls… they pulsed like a heart.” Grawl’s brass-cog molar, pried from the beast’s jaw, now resides in Sheriff Zeke Rook’s evidence locker—alongside Grange’s dynamite receipts .
Other survivors whisper of the Wendigo’s curse. The Algonquin foreman of the 1881 plank road crew allegedly buried warding totems near the shaft. The Company fired him. Two days later, his body was found—desiccated, as if aged centuries in a night .
GRANGE’S GAMBIT: DYNAMITE & DECEIT
Virgil Grange, sweat-slicked and twitchy, insists the dynamite is for “stabilizing the reservoir.” Yet our sources within the Plattsburg National Bank & Trust (founded by Company stooge John Moffitt) reveal Grange has siphoned $250,000 into a private account labeled “Project Silencer” .
Lottie Voss, the rogue physicist tracking the Chronosaurus, theorizes Grange aims to collapse the shaft and blame “seismic activity.” “He’s not covering up a crime,” she hissed. “He’s burying a god.”
A CALL TO CONSCIENCE
The Steamboat Dispatch demands answers:
- Why did the Company’s 1886 crusher contract with Theodore Blake include clauses for “unforeseen biological hazards”?
- What became of the 1903 “magnetrometric survey” that mapped “anomalous thermal signatures” beneath Lyon Mountain?
- Who authorized the shipment of 500 gallons of liquid nitrogen to Standish Furnace last week—a substance with no use in smelting?
The people of Chateaugay Lake deserve truth, not tonnage. As the Wendigo’s laugh echoes through abandoned forges, we ask: Will Grange’s dynamite silence the past—or detonate our future?
NEXT EDITION: “The Ghosts of Belmont Forge: Spectral Strike Breakers Haunt Company Store” (Spoiler: They’re Union Men).
Sources referenced from the Shatagee Woods Hysterical Archives, Bigelow Society records, and suppressed Delaware & Hudson ledgers.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?