A Homesteader's Dog Fears the Wailing Lake Washington Spring
A lonely homesteader near Lake Washington discovers the source of the mysterious, discordant sounds that have been terrorizing his nights—and his dog.
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 primeval forest 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 sound proceeding from the neighborhood of the Haunted Spring, which, edged with poisonous pale, is shunned 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 discordant wail wandered through the startled air. I could bear it no longer, and shouldering my trusty rifle and leaving my faithful watch-dog whining piteously as he saw me depart for the unhallowed spot, I followed the serpentine trail which led to the Haunted Spring, picking my way over fallen logs and rocky boulders. The struggling moonbeams' misty light enabled me to see my way. As I neared the locality, the mournful cadence of the mysterious sound rose fitfully above the soughing of the wind through the somber pines. Not in the place entering which the lost wretch leaves hope behind could be heard a more frightful sound. 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, the only known sure cure for rheumatism in all its forms, left there by some one, unmindful that it would be to me a Divine message of a Divine gift, for with one dollar I obtained one bottle from the S. E. C. Mfg. Co., Seattle, Washington Territory, which entirely cured me of the terrible rheumatic pains which I had had for thirty years.'
“Night after night my faithful collie slunk into the cabin, quivering with fear, as the discordant wail wandered through the startled air.”
While framed as a supernatural encounter, this story is a transparent advertisement—a common practice in 19th-century papers where 'news' transitioned seamlessly into patent medicine sales. It highlights how the anxieties of frontier life, such as physical pain and isolation, were monetized then just as modern social media feeds are cluttered with algorithmically targeted health supplements.
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