Your True Tales
November 2006 - Page 18

Wolf Woman at the Lake
by Debbie

I live on a lake in Maine in a nice four-bedroom house that was a steal for the price. It sits right on a small lake. Around the lake are fishing paths and a road called Old Mill that winds its way around it meeting with another road that loops on back to our house. Upon my first year living out here, we would hear a woman from time to time howling around the lake somewhere echoing from the other side. I could hear this banshe-like "woooing" sound that would emanate from one area then move to another area on the other side like an echo.

One summer a year or more back, I decided to go out after hearing this and seek out the source of the noise. I got in the truck with my dog Laddy and we went for a drive. I made my winding way around the lake on the old road. As I was driving around nearing the opposite side of the lake, there was something that caught my eye: a man in grey-brown gabardine was crossing the road who looked to be like something out of the early twentieth century, even wearing knickers and pull up socks. He wore a cap on his head and was crossing quickly over to a road that lead on up to an old run-down hotel (now a day camp), but when I got close to the road that he walked up, I could see no one was in sight. I went back home thinking how odd it was.

A few weeks later, I heard the same howling again. I believe it was in late August. I went out on my back porch in the dead of night and could see nothing out there. I decided to take a ride around to see these kids who were out there as I thought that was the source being late summer and all. I got in my jeep and went out the driveway to take a ride around, I went down Old Mill Road and saw my neighbor out on her front porch. I stopped and said hello and told her about the noises across the lake and she just smiled and told me her adventures with the female howler out there, too.

Apparently, every summer there's this noise. No one has ever found out where the noise is actually coming from, but it is always there. Kids, she said, sounded noticeably like kids, should they be out there, but this sound was a neighborhood mystery and went back decades.

I got back out on the road and went to do a quick drive-around, wondering why I would want to, but kept on driving anyhow. I got up around the area where I saw the odd, smallish man in gabardine and suddenly by the side of my car as I slowly drove was a "wooo-ooooooo" sound as my head jerked in the direction of my passenger side. I sped up a little and got the hell out of there. I got home again and went inside.

The next morning, I went out to put some things in my SUV for work and there on the passenger side doors were small hand prints all over the windows, front and back. Like children had been touching it all over.

About a year later, after getting to know some of the locals, I met an old man they call Lemmy, after his last name. He told me and my now ex about a hobo camp he remembered being up around there by what is now the day camp area. This was back in the thirties or forties or so. There was also a prostitution ring going on from that location and a horrible crime. A woman had stabbed and drowned her own children in a fit of madness. It was a big story locally for some time. One of the small inlet beaches is called "little inlet," which is right along where the two roads fork - that is supposedly where the stabbing and drowning took place. The mother upon capture had claimed that it was wolves taking her kids and that she was asleep when it had happened. The Maine press at the time had a field day with this story. It was in all the papers in New England and quite a big to-do.

The woman was given life in a women's prison at first and then put into a mental facility in the early fifties. Every summer, late at night we hear this noise, the female out there echoing across emanating a wolf's howl. Is it her ghost trying to cover her alibi? We'll never know, but it just is a weird fact out here that we hear it at least once or twice every year.

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