Tread softly, picture-palace dreamers! Paul Wegener’s haunted troglodyte yarn carries real Abenaki hexes and foggy warrior shades—heedless souls carry the bat’s chill home forevermore!
SHATAGEE GITASKOG’S INN, UPPER CHATEAUGAY LAKE, N.Y., 15 August 1915.
The Moving Picture Wonder at Norton’s Peak.—Echoes from the Bat’s Cave.
Mr. Editor—
Talk swirls through these parts about a moving picture company from Frankfurt, Germany, that has ventured into the wilds behind Upper Chateaugay Lake. Directed by Mr. Paul Wegener and Mr. Franklin Sargent, the troupe is crafting a striking dramatic production based on the enduring whisper of a lost Abenaki treasure concealed within the caves of Norton Peak—caverns long known to old woodsmen as the Bat’s Cave.
These lie on lands once part of the vast holdings of the late Christopher F. Norton, original partner in the Chateaugay Ore & Iron Company. His widow’s lawsuits in the Malone courthouse, as documented in the Malone Farmer, unearthed several uncanny incidents of that era that are now seemingly affecting the completion of Mr. Wegener’s film production.
The cast features Miss Evelyn Nesbit and Mr. Jack Clifford, joined by several local hands. Many scenes were filmed on location. The tale follows a band of treasure hunters pursuing the buried Abenaki hoard—unaware that the cave itself harbors an ancient Algonquin curse. Older residents insist the site has been shunned after dark for generations, with strange disturbances plaguing any who probe its depths too boldly.
As the cameras rolled, tales spread among the townsfolk: voices murmuring in the spruce with no speaker in sight; a towering shadow gliding past the cave mouth long after the company had wrapped; one man claiming Mr. Wegener’s equipment captured unexplained movements and figures never scripted or rehearsed—sights no one could later account for without unease. Rumors even suggest company members were quietly urged by locals to keep silent about what the film truly revealed.
Whether these events stem from mere superstition or something deeper and less easily named, I leave for others to judge. Still, the project has stirred rare excitement here, and many eagerly await the finished spectacle to emerge from Norton’s haunted heights.
—The haying is nearly done below the lake, and the steamboat continues her steady runs with a solid crowd of summer guests.
SHATAGEE GITASKOG.
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What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?