Big Moose Lake

I don't know how haunted the lake is. It tops the list of most haunted places in the state, but I think that's just because it's in the Adirondacks, which starts with A. My father used to take me and my brother up there every summer to stay at the last great American lodge.

My father and I were always friendly with the waitresses. One of them, Emily, lived across the lake and commuted to work in her own motorboat. When the dining hall was closed she would sit on the docks and draw the loons. One time she took my family out for a ride in her boat. She took us to the gas station dock where we got Sugar Daddy's and then she drove us all the way to the other end where there appeared to be a creepy lagoon. I remember there was always a fog over the lake and it seemed to originate in that part. Emily drove us into the very middle and shut down the motor.

Then she told us a story. In 1906 this scumbag, Chester Gillette, was two-timing a lot of chicks when one of them, the poor one, Grace Brown, got pregnant. So, being the scumbag he was, Chester took his pregnant girlfriend for a peaceful boat ride on Big Moose Lake one day. She never returned. In one account he hit her over the head with a tennis racket and pushed her over the edge, in another it was an oar, in one story the boat capsized by accident and Grace couldn't swim. Sources say her body washed up on shore the next day. Emily told us she was never found-- still in the lake, she said. The story has been made into at least two novels, one movie (staring the late Elizabeth Taylor with her huge doe eyes and Montgomery Cliff as the troubled Gillette) and an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. 

I looked out at the fog as she was talking. And then down at the murky green water and tried to see Grace down at the bottom. 

That night I had a dream. I was sleeping in my bed at the lodge when a fog started rolling in. The lamps along the sidewalk that ran along side that part of the lake started going out, one by one as the fog hit them. The scene turned eerie, cold, dark, cast in blue. At the far end of the sidewalk from our house a woman appeared. She was in a long light dress, made pale green from the lake. She started walking slowly. The fog proceeding her with each step. Lamps flickering off as she approached them. Until the whole lake was dark, silent, and her face was in my window. 

That is the only nightmare I ever had at that lake.