The Ghost of Haunted Spring Was Just a Bottle of Rheumatic Medicine
A pioneer camping near Lake Washington finds his dog paralyzed with terror by a 'weird, unearthly wailing,' only to discover the source was a discarded bottle of cure-all tonic.
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.
Night after night, I had been startled by a weird, unearthly wailing, which seemed to proceed from the neighborhood of the 'Haunted Spring,' which, edged with poplars, is stunned with superstitious horror by the aborigines and rarely visited by the most adventurous of the pale faces. Night after night, my faithful collie slunk into the cabin quivering with fear as the dissonant wail thundered through the startled air. I could bear it no longer, and shouldering my trusty rifle and leaving my faithful watchdog whimpering piteously as he saw me depart for the unhallowed spot, I followed the spontine trail which led to the 'Haunted Spring.' As I neared the locality, the mournful cadence of the mysterious sound rose fitfully above the soughing of the wind through the somber pines. Treading lightly, I stole unawares upon the source of the hidden horror. Just then the moon, hitherto partly veiled in clouds, shone 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 Swamp Angel's Rheumatic Cure, left there by someone, unmindful that it would be to me a divine message of a divine gift.
“The mournful cadence of the mysterious sound rose fitfully above the soughing of the wind through the somber pines.”
This 1885 vignette captures the transition from a 'wilderness' Pacific Northwest, where settlers projected ghost stories onto the landscape, to a consumer culture where the cure-all tonic replaces the supernatural. It’s a classic example of how early Seattle newspapers mixed hard-nosed local timber politics with colorful, self-aware human-interest yarns.
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