Homesteader Investigates Wailing Near Haunted Spring
A lonely settler discovers a long-hidden message in a bottle near a 'haunted' spring.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
It was a lonely homesteader in the deep recesses of the forest primeval which borders the classic Lake Washington from whom we obtained the particulars of this o'er true tale. 'Night after night,' said he, 'I had been startled by a weird, uncanny wailing, which seemed to proceed from the neighborhood of the Haunted Spring, which, edged with poplar trees, is shunned with superstitious horror by the aborigine and rarely visited by the most adventurous of the pale faces. Night after night my faithful collie slank into the cabin quivering with fear, as the ghastly call shuddered through the startled air. I could bear it no longer, and shouldering my trusty rifle, I followed the serpentine trail which led to the Haunted Spring, picking my way over fallen logs and rocky boulders by the struggling moonbeams' misty light. As I neared the locality, the sound rose shrilly above the soughing of the wind through the somber pines. Now in the place I hitherto partly shunned, where the lost wretch leaves hope behind, could be heard a most frightful sound. Then, clouds, hitherto partly obscuring the moon, shot out in unclouded brilliancy, and there in the forks of a willow, close to the turbid waters of the Haunted Spring, I beheld an empty bottle that had once contained a message of a Divine warning to me. Signed, 'Mrs. O., Seattle, Washington Territory,' which entirely eased me of the terrible maladies which I had had for thirty years. I am now at peace in the deep wilderness.'
“Night after night my faithful collie slank into the cabin quivering with fear, as the ghastly call shuddered through the startled air.”
This story reflects the 19th-century fascination with the untamed, 'haunted' wild spaces surrounding early Seattle, areas that have long since been transformed into the city's suburban sprawl. It captures a moment where the frontier spirit met the gothic imagination, highlighting how early residents looked for supernatural meaning in the isolation of the PNW landscape.
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