Tragedy in the Adirondacks

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Starting in the late 19th century, the rustic landscape of the Adirondacks Mountain range in New York became the favored summer getaway for many prominent families. This became known as the Great Camp Period. However even paradise has its dark moments.

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Camping in the Adirondack Mountains Postcard

As early as the 1860s, newspapers published stories about the splendid trout fishing at Osgood Pond. In 1889, Henry Wilson bought land around the lake. Ten years later he sold the land along with buildings to Basil Wilson. In 1919, Senator Wilfrid McDougald from Canada bought it from Wilson's widow for $21,000. By then any of the buildings erected by Wilson were gone, and McDougald hired Benjamin A. Muncil to design and build what would become Northbrook Lodge. He spent three years improving it.

There were four camps built on Osgood Pond at the turn of the century. They were White Pine Camp, once the summer house for Calvin Coolidge; Northbrook Lodge, a private estate; Camp Lu, the oldest on the pond and Beech Hill Camp. Most of them looked like log cabins, but made of wood frame construction covered with tree-sized logs and peeled birch bark. Inside there were ample fireplaces and unplastered walls. There were also tents with either brick chimneys and fireplaces or small wood-burning stoves. A great dining room with a hearth fire greeted the campers when they gathered for meals. Gardens, fountains and fish pools were designed to compliment the cottages set among the wilderness. A pump pushed water to each building. There were laundries, sewage systems, lighting and indoor plumbing. There were tennis courts, a gasoline pump, boat houses, woodsheds, workshop and even a bowling lane. Despite being in the wilderness, all the luxuries of life were provided at the camps.

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Dr. McDougald with his wife c.1920s

During his tenure there Senator McDougald was known to bring in illegal hooch since Prohibition was the law of the land. In 1931, a parliamentary warrant was served on Senator MacDougald to give testimony concerning an alleged scandal in the Beauharnnois Company's St. Lawrence river concession. This led to his resignation in 1932.

By the 1950s, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies and other prominent families had long ago abandoned the area, and it became a rental area especially favored during the summer months. Unlike the scandal attached to Senator MacDougald, perhaps many happenings never came to light, because in those days, notoriety was something rich families avoided like the plague, but that doesn't mean nothing ever happened.

In 2015, the following story was posted on Reddit:

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I managed a resort in the Adirondack for several years. The place is old and rustic. Its miles from civilization and very peaceful. It was built in the twenties and had somewhat of a sordid past. It was built for a Canadian senator who would run rum down from Canada during Prohibition. We still had the underground locked safe room where he would store the booze, as well as hidden booze hiding areas underneath some of the cabins. Calvin Coolidge stayed at a camp across the pond during his presidency, and would visit my camp (for the spirits I'm sure) where he would store the booze, as well.

Anyway I met a girl and decided to sleep out under the stars on the camp's peninsula. Well it started to rain... so I suggested we sleep on the screened in porch of the boat house which I thought was a pretty good compromise. So after we were all set up, it was getting pretty late, about 1:30 am or so. We were laying there, and I was all toss and turn because I'd been asleep and woken up, so I have a hard time falling asleep after stuff like that.

We'd lain there for about a half an hour or so when I hear the bathroom door open in the boathouse. It couldn't have been anything else but that door. I did all the maintenance on those old buildings, and oiling that particular door was on my work list for the next day. My first thought was my boss, the owner of the camp. She is notoriously nosey, and has been known to spy on the staff in their staff quarters, so she was my first logical thought as to who made the noise. Why she would have been hiding out in the men's bathroom in the boathouse for over an hour is beyond my comprehension. I proceeded to hear footsteps walking across the boathouse, down the three stairs on to the dance floor, and stopping right in front of the door to the screened in porch. I lay there just waiting for the door to open, and my boss to call my name. And as the minutes stretched out, I started praying that she would open the door, walk away, sneeze, dance the funky chicken, anything. Nothing.

The rest of the night I stayed up. Stiff and straight as a poker in my sleeping bag. No receding footsteps, no door noises, no nothing. My girlfriend, the night, and the empty boat house. The next morning, my girlfriend (she wasn't at the time, but she was the 4 years that followed) rolled over to me, and immediately asked me about the footsteps the night before. She had also stayed up all night waiting for some other sound to explain those footsteps in the night, and heard nothing. She was terrified. Never went into the boat house again.

I unfortunately had to go in the boathouse on a daily basis. Everything was cool during the day. At night I had to turn all the lights in the camp off. This is something I've done every night for the past 3 years. However, after there was always a sense of dread going in there, being alone in the dark in the boat house. The worst part is that there is an enormous hanging bed in there in front of the fire place. It was for the former camp owners to take naps on in the day, hung on chains, so that the bed can be lifted out of the way for entertaining guests in the evening. Every single night that bed was swinging; 175 lb. bed swinging on its chains in the dark of the boathouse. Until my last day at the camp, if I went in at night, that bed was swinging.

Carl Grahm a.k.a. Chester Gillette and Grace Brown

MURDER ON BIG MOOSE LAKE

On July 13, 1906, a woman's body was found in Big Moose Lake. It was a mystery that shocked the country. It started when a young couple registered at the Glenmore Hotel in the Adirondacks as Carl Grahm of Albany and Grace Brown of Otselic. The man carried a handbag with a tennis racket strapped to it. Shortly after arriving at the hotel they left and went to the boat landing, taking a canoe out upon the lake. They did not return, and the next day the boat was found bottom side up near Camp Craig. The search yielded the body of the girl found near the boat. She had marks and abrasions on her head. Since there were no rocks in this area of the lake, murder was immediately suspected. 

Eventually the woman's identity was confirmed as Grace Mae Brown, a farmer's daughter. For the last 3 years she worked in a shirt factory at Cortland. Four weeks before her death, she went back home, supposedly to vacation with her family, but this was unusual for a factory worker. 

​As her steps were retraced, it was found that a week before the murder she returned to Cortland, and was seen in the company of a Mr. Root and another unknown man. Her father had only heard his daughter mention the name of Mr. Grahm, but had never met him.​

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The lake was dragged, but the man's body was not discovered. Only his hat was left on the shore of the lake.

Mr. Brown confirmed his daughter had not returned to her job or her boarding house on Wheeler Ave. The authorities sent out a notice to all railroad stations to be on the watch for Grahm in case he was alive, and trying to escape.

Grace Brown known as Billy by her family was sent to Coroner Coffin of Herkimer County. His first impression was that she had been murdered.

Within a few days the man seen with Grace Brown was apprehended, and it turned out his real name was Chester Gillette. He was taken back to the hotel where he registered with the girl, and those who worked there identified him as the man who accompanied the victim. His family owned the factory where Grace worked. He was considered an eligible and handsome bachelor, and it seemed that Grace was blind to the fact that due to a difference in their social status, he would never marry her.

Gillette frequently visited Nettie Benedict daughter of a prominent lawyer in Cortland. It was known he kept company with Grace, but that was all. When she returned home, she wrote him several times. A long conversation she had with him over the telephone, was overheard. She accused him of being false to her, and that he had deceived her. She looked to him to keep his promise.

The motive for the murder became obvious went it was confirmed that Grace was 4 months pregnant. Gillette said the boat had tipped over and they had fallen in. He feared she would carry him down, and he shouted to her to catch hold of the boat, but she never did and sank, never to resurface.

By August, he was indicted and charged with murder in the first degree. A tennis racquet with dark marks on it had been found, and it was believed Gillette had used it to strike Grace. He went to trial in November, 1906. Later he claimed that Grace had jumped into the lake in order to commit suicide.

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Northbrook Lodge boathouse, Osgood Pond

Despite only circumstantial evidence being presented by the prosecution, Gillette was found guilty in December, and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Grace's letters to him were read aloud in court, which many believed led to his conviction. It seemed he had set his plan in motion after Grace threatened that she would come to see him in Cortland, if he did not respond to her letters.

It wasn't until March 1908, that Gillette was executed at Auburn Prison. His body was buried in Soule Cemetery in an unmarked grave. His notoriety extended even to his family who had to stay at the Salvation Army headquarters for a month before his execution, after they had been turned away from local boarding houses.

Gillette's body was autopsied and his organs were found to be normal. His brain was removed and preserved as were the lungs, kidneys and stomach.

​On November 28, 1908, William S. Brasch who had befriended Gillette during their incarceration in condemned row met the same fate. Brasch had fallen in love with Mary Gilmore, a waitress from Defiance, Ohio. On June 16, 1906, he pushed his wife Roxanne into the Erie canal at Maplewood Park in Rochester and watched her death struggles until she drowned.

Brasch's body was buried at Hope Cemetery next to his father Karl, who due to the disgrace of his son's actions killed himself by drinking carbolic acid in a saloon at Saratoga and Lyell avenues in 1907.

Comparisons were drawn between their crimes and their fate.

Brown's life and death inspired the novel An American Tragedy (1925); the George Stevens film A Place in the Sun (1951) was based on the novel. 

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The ghost of Grace Brown seems to have found no peace

​GRACE'S GHOST

If there was ever a setting for a ghost story, Moose Lake would be it. Beautiful but remote, its surface covers 1,242 acres; stretching 3 miles long and 1 mile wide. At its deepest point its murky waters plummet to 70 feet. In winter, the lake freezes over.

Only in the summer would people take a train to the Adirondack wilderness to spend their leisure time strolling along the lakeshore, and rowing canoes along its placid waters.

In 1996, Unsolved Mysteries aired an episode about sightings of Grace's ghost. It recounted how in 1988, several employees of the Covewood Lodge, when approaching the staff lodge, felt someone or something might be waiting inside the building.

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​I walked into the staff lodge, straight up the stairs with my hand out, reaching for the string, which is how to turn on the light. As I approached the top of the stairs and just before I was ready to turn on the light, a feeling came over me that somebody was right there. More or less, I stopped in my tracks and really just didn’t move. I didn’t have an overwhelming feeling of fright, but something definitely or someone was there, and it just kind of took my breath away. 

Ad for Northbrook Lodge

​Throughout the years, some say as far back as when she died Grace's spirit has been seen wandering along the lake shore, in the building or even reenacting the moment of her death.

On July 11, 2006, a small flotilla left a wreath to memorialize the centennial of Brown's murder. Some may ask why Grace's spirit is uneasy, since her death was avenged. Perhaps she feels cheated of what she thought life promised her so many years ago: a husband, children and a chance to grow old, and even the death of the lover that betrayed her has not brought her peace.

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Anna Mabel Smith Douglass

​A CURSED EXISTENCE

James Weaver Smith, a merchant of Jersey City married Wilhemina Joanne "Minnie" Middelegge on June 1, 1870. They soon had a daughter named Edith, and in 1877, Minnie gave birth to another daughter named Anna Mabel. For most of her life she would be known by her middle name of Mabel. Her sister Edith married Garret Joseph Byrne in 1895.

Mabel would go on to attend Barnard College graduating in 1899, and then she taught in New York public schools. In 1903, she married William Shipman Douglass, who was also a merchant like her father.

In 1906, their daughter Edith was born, and the following year a son followed, which was named after his father. All seemed well.

Whether she was high-strung or perhaps being a wife, mother and an active participant in the Federation of Women's Club took their toll, she had to take a break in 1915. Two years later, life would take a sad turn for Mabel Smith Douglass. In January, 1917 her father James died, and in May her husband died of influenza. 

Mabel took over and operated W. S. Douglass & Co., a butter, egg, and cheese business. She would continue running the family business until 1918, when she was appointed as the first dean of The New Jersey College for Women. She moved with her children to the campus.

Her mother Minnie died in 1921.

In 1923, tragedy struck once more when her son, William Shipman Douglass Jr. age 16, killed himself with his father's .22 caliber Winchester rifle. It happened after 11:30 p.m., when he had gone to bed. He had returned from spending time at Camp Wonposet on Bantam Lake in Connecticut. That night a party had been held to celebrate the return of William and his sister Edith from camp. Some newspapers described it as an accident, but others were not as gracious, and the inference that it was suicide was unmistakable.

In 1924, Mabel received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Rutgers. Five years later, Mabel Smith Douglass toured Europe with her daughter Edith, and upon her return went to spend time in the Adirondacks.

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Pulpit Rock, Lake Placide postcard

In 1930, she bought Camp Honnedaga on the west shore of Lake Placid. She made extensive repairs to the camp, with plans to stay there during the winter. The camp had been in the Mills family for 40 years.

​In 1932, it seems her health, physical and mental were failing. She took a leave of absence for a nervous breakdown, and that same year she received a degree of Doctor of Laws from Russell Sage College. She retired in the summer of 1933, and left to spend time at the camp on Lake Placid.

What happened a few months later in the Fall of that year is still a mystery. At about 1:30 p.m. Mabel Douglass was seen by servants walking towards a row boat moored at a dock. She was never seen alive again, and no eye witnesses could be found to say whether she actually left on the boat.

Once dusk fell, the servants called the police. The next day the row boat was found capsized drifting near Pulpit Rock almost a mile from her camp. The police dragged the lake, at the exact spot the boat was found. Bottom had never been reached in this part of the lake. A posse of campers searched the thick forest lands that skirted the lake. The search continued into October. Grapplers worked every day and searchers resorted to using dynamite in hopes of bringing the body to the surface. The cold water made it difficult for divers to reach the bottom which was estimated to be more than 200 ft.

Her body was not found despite the efforts made to locate it, and all believed she was dead. She was 56 years old when she disappeared.

In August, 1939, Mabel's sister, Edith Smith Byrne died.

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Edith Douglass Roth

Mabel's daughter, Edith Douglass had lost many of her close family members, but in March 1943, when she was 37 years old she wed Max Albert Roth. He was formerly part of the Swiss legation at Lisbon, Portugal. However the cloud of misfortune that brought heartbreak to her mother was not done with her family. Five months after their wedding, her husband was killed on July 28, when a giant British passenger plane known as a flying boat crashed as it flew through thick fog. He was a passenger when it left Lisbon destined for London. It went up in flames on a mountainside in a desolate area of southwest Ireland. Twelve of the 28 passengers and the crew aboard were killed.

​In May, 1948, Edith Roth, 42, plunged to her death from the 8th floor window of her apartment in New York. She had called Rev. Sargent, rector of St. Bartholomew Episcopal Church who had officiated at her wedding in 1943. She had been his secretary until a few months before, when she resigned from work and went to Regent Hospital to treat her depression. She killed herself within hours after her discharge. When the pastor arrived he spoke to her briefly, then she suddenly got up and went into another room moaning: "I just can't take it any more." She jumped from the bedroom window of her apartment at 405 East 54th Street. She had lived there alone since becoming a widow. 

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Who is the Lady of the Lake, that haunts Lake Placid

In 1955, The New Jersey College for Women changed its name to Douglass College to honor it first dean. In 1962, almost 30 years to the day of her disappearance a decomposed body was found in Lake Placid by skin-divers who were members of the Lake Champlain Wreck Raider Club. First they found an old guide boat on a rock shelf. As they continued down they saw a body on its side with its feet in a curled up position, almost as if she was asleep. It lay on a shelf about 95 feet down. It was so pale at first they thought it was a mannequin. It was mostly intact, but when pulled up it started to disintegrate.

What was left was taken to a pathologist, Dr. James Utterback from Saranac Lake. He said his preliminary findings were that it was indeed the body of Mabel Smith Douglass. He said the great coldness of the water held the tissue together almost in complete preservation. One of the clues that led the positive identification of the remains was a broken upper right arm she suffered while a patient at a sanitarium a few months before she vanished.

Later the divers told police something that inexorably confirmed that Mabel had committed suicide. There was a rope around her neck with an anchor attached, which they estimated weighed about 50 pounds.

Police were unable to locate any living relatives that might have helped in the investigation. The university claimed the body, and made all arrangements for a proper burial. She was laid to rest in Greenwood Cemetery where her husband and children were buried.

Although her body was recovered, there have been sightings of a woman in the water by Pulpit Rock. Sometimes she's in the lake, other times she's hovering above the water. Over time this ghost has been named The Lady of the Lake.

There have been others that have been claimed by Lake Placid, but two in particular disappeared at the same spot as Mabel Smith Douglass. In 1923, two men drowned after their canoe overturned on Pulpit Rock. They had left on a trip to climb Whiteface Mountain, and only when they failed to return was a search started. On a ledge 6-feet under the water of Lake Placid they found one of them caught on a projection. His name was Ray Osborne, age 32. Initially the other man Patrick Greeley, 39, could not be found and there was fear he swam to shore and was suffering from exposure. There was no mention if he was ever found, and perhaps his body fell down into the depths at the foot of Pulpit Rock. Neither men was married, and their immediate family never had an answer as to what happened to them. Perhaps The Lady of the Lake is not the only phantom that hovers over the still waters of Lake Placid.

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