Chateaugay Lake’s Glass-Eyed Lurker reflects nightmares in its glassy gaze. Its cursed eyes, hidden nearby, bring watery death to those who dare disturb their resting place.
The Steamboat Dispatch
Week of June 21, 1893
East Bellmont Correspondent
The Glass-Eyed Lurker: A Tempest’s Torment at Chateaugay Lake
“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
Thus chant the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, and so too does Chateaugay Lake churn under summer storms, birthing a fiend most peculiar. Dear readers, allow me to introduce the Glass-Eyed Lurker—a spectral menace as twisted as the thunderstorms that summon it, and as enigmatic as the depths from which it crawls.
This abomination, neither wholly man nor beast, haunts the shores near Ralph’s resort, its glassy gaze rumored to crack sanity like a dropped porcelain teacup. But let us not leap headlong into hysteria; instead, let us dissect this mystery with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel (or, given the locale, a fisherman’s filleting knife).
A Specter of Storm and Splintered Sight
Imagine, if you dare, a figure so gaunt it seems stretched upon the rack of the lake’s own wrath. Its skin—pale as a grub beneath a rotted log—glistens with perpetual damp, while its eyes, two polished orbs of obsidian glass, reflect not the viewer, but a grotesque funhouse parody of their soul. Witnesses claim these eyes hum faintly, like a tuning fork struck by the devil himself.
The Lurker’s modus operandi? It slithers ashore only during thunderstorms, dragging its bony fingers through the muck as it stalks prey. Its victims, invariably those who linger too long at the water’s edge (or, in one case, a soused fiddler who mistook the lake for a chamber pot), are pulled beneath the waves. They resurface days later, sodden but unmarked, their minds shattered like the Lurker’s own fractured psyche.
Origin: A Tale of Hubris and Hydration
Local lore paints the Lurker as the damned soul of Thaddeus P. Quimby, a 19th-century industrialist who sought to “drain the pestilent puddle” of Chateaugay Lake for a railway scheme. The lake, affronted by Quimby’s arrogance, swallowed him whole—then spat him back out, reshaped as its glass-eyed sentinel.
“Ain’t nothin’ but a soggy busybody,” grumbles Nat Collins, the hermitic cave explorer. “But them eyes? They’s the real curse. Rumor says Quimby’s mortal peepers are still hid ’round here. Touch ’em, and you’ll drown quicker’n a sack o’ kittens in a cistern—dry land or no.”
Eyewitness Accounts: Hysteria or History?
Take the case of Miss Prudence Witherspoon, Ralph’s head housekeeper. During last Tuesday’s deluge, she spied the Lurker lurking (as is its wont) outside the boathouse. “It tilted its head like a confused terrier,” she recounted, “then hissed like a steam valve. I fainted straight into the rhododendrons. When I awoke, my best bonnet was full of minnows!”
Meanwhile, “Old Veritas” Eugene Miller insists he’s decoded a map to Quimby’s eyes using “hydrological trigonometry.” His findings? The eyes lie in a submerged grotto near Shatagee Woods, guarded by eels “with teeth like piano keys.”
A Challenge to the Curious
To you, intrepid reader, I issue this challenge: Dare you seek the Lurker’s eyes? Or will you heed the warning of Richard “Uncle Dick” Shutts, who advises, “Let sleepin’ dogs—and soggy phantoms—lie.”
The evidence mounts like floodwaters. Last week, a gang of ne’er-do-well steamboat musicians (self-styled “pirates of the Adirondack Accordion”) vanished near Bellows Bay, leaving behind only a waterlogged sheet music titled The Ballad of the Glass-Eyed Ghoul. Coincidence? Or chorus of the damned?
In Conclusion
The Glass-Eyed Lurker defies explanation—a riddle wrapped in a storm cloud, dipped in lake slime, and served with a side of existential dread. Is it guardian, ghoul, or geological oddity? The answer, dear readers, may lie in the reflection of your own eyes… should you dare to look.
Yours in soggy solidarity,
The East Bellmont Correspondent
Postscript:
Rumor persists that Quimby’s eyes are hidden in a tin box beneath the Indian Point Hotel’s outhouse. Prospective treasure hunters are advised to bring a shovel, a strong stomach, and a clergy member—preferably one with experience in maritime exorcisms.
“Double, double toil and trouble…” Indeed. And triple the peril, should you meddle with the Lurker’s ocular heirlooms.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?