Foggy Water: A Miraculous Lens

Horror by the sea is a common occurrence in the New England area.

Sea Captain wives stare from widow walks waiting for their husbands to return, suicides off cliffs overlooking the ocean waves, and lighthouse attendants who lose their minds from the solitary confinement are the experience of the day…or night.

Our story is a horror by the waterfall at Nichols Pond on Connecticut’s Five Mile River. A river that’s roots ultimately comes from the Atlantic Ocean’s water seeping through the earth’s crust underground.

This river carries itself and flows through the towns of Thompson, Putnam, and Killingly. The original Native American Nipmuc tribe named the river Assawaga, meaning "place between" or "halfway place.” And it was. A place between life and death. A halfway place between the living and the dead.

The Assawaga received its English name from the fact that the first land laid out upon it was "supposed to be about five miles from" Woodstock, Connecticut, as it was, it became used as a marker of that distance to its travelers.

The river is 23.5 miles long and is also a tributary of the Quinebaug River and is part of the Thames River watershed. Its source Little Pond also known as Schoolhouse Pond is closer to the Massachusetts border. It empties into the Quinebaug River at Danielson, near the intersection of Connecticut Route 12 and U.S. Route 6 where I live on Nichols Pond.

Nichols pond has a Shaman by the same name from the Nipmuc tribe that catered to the river and surrounding villages before the English invaded the region with their bloodshed on its water and land. Here a waterfall gushes under a wood covered bridge and whooping cranes almost four feet tall live among the ghosts of the deceased English that settled here. The Shaman Nicholas can see them.

Every morning a heavy fog covers the lake, like a cloud it lingers over the water. Nicholas sits with me and waits to see what develops in it like images captured on celluloid. He teaches me to see too.

Fog shows up when water vapor, or water in its gaseous form, condenses. During condensation, molecules of water vapor combine to make tiny liquid water droplets that hang in the air. When this water, caught between the stage of liquid and gas forms it hangs like a silver screen in the air. It is like a lens between places where the living can see the dead. Their images now visible in the negative space they create by moving in the celluloid air, you can see them walk through it in their spirit world, the dead’s non-solid world. Ghosts. Nicholas of the Nipmuc tribe and I can see them.

The Five Mile River has several dams, most of which are former mill operations. Its largest impoundment is Quaddick Reservoir, though there are several smaller dams including those that were built for the purpose of harnessing waterpower for industry. The best examples of surviving mill villages can be seen in Killingly in villages such as Pineville, Ballouville, Attawaugan, and Dayville.

Where I live I see the dead of those mill workers that harnessed the water. My grandparents were mill workers and now I am a biologist of that mill’s water. I harvest and grow amphibian life on the pond.

The dead men and women from the mill can be seen during the pond’s condensation phase. In that now transitioning state to liquid, the fog made of droplets hang just close enough so as to see the dead move and walk through them in the space and time the Nipmuc called the “place between” or “halfway place.” Here the dead can be seen walking on water off the river where these mills once created energy from its source and towards the houses nearby visiting the living.

Today, I see them, still. Ghosts from the foggy water, walking through back and front doors of the row houses in town located near the pond and laying down into the bodies of the next generation living there like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ghosts still claiming the “place between” to be their home. Nicholas visits every home in New England to record their hauntings and make a registry of ghosts along the Five Mile River from Massachusetts to Connecticut. A foggy water Shaman.

Thanks to the fog that lingers over the river I too can still see them form in its molecules moving about, ghosts to protect the next generation that inherited the mills they worked in, to harness the energy to live on in the houses located nearby and linger in the water droplets an organic lens capturing their images on the earth’s developed celluloid. Fog. Created by it’s water molecules. For all to see. Miraculous.