GARDINER LAKE
Lake — Salem, Connecticut
Status: Natural site · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/gardiner-lake-salem-connecticut/

Lake research record.

A lake in Salem, Connecticut, Gardiner Lake is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Lake research record. HauntHunt files it with haunting reports. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip. Names, dates and reports are filed together here, so the record stays honest about which is which.

The lake — spelled Gardner on the state maps — sits where Salem, Bozrah, and Montville meet, and in February 1895 it swallowed a house. Thomas LeCount, a Niantic grocer, wanted his two-and-a-half-story furnished summer home moved from the south shore to a new lot on the east side; rather than take it around by road, he jacked it onto skids, hitched a team of draft horses, and waited for ice thick enough to hold what was calculated at roughly twenty-eight tons.

THE DOCUMENTED RECORD
The crew dragged the house a few hundred feet out before it slid sideways into a snowbank and the ice began to crack; they quit for the night. That evening, mill operators drew down the lake for power, dropping the water beneath the ice sheet — by morning the house had pitched through. After the spring thaw it settled into about fifteen feet of water with the second story and attic riding above the surface like a small lighthouse. For years children fished from it in summer and skated through it in winter, until it went completely under with its furnishings — kitchen stove, and the piano. Divers later located it on the bottom, remarkably intact.

THE LEGEND
The piano is where the history ends and the haunting begins. For more than a century, fishermen have sworn that on quiet nights someone plays it — the tellings eventually added mermaids on the keys. The file keeps the sound as reported; the house itself, improbably, is documented fact — 'an extremely public miscalculation,' as the record calls it, that never quite sank out of the story.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Local folklore] phantom music: Folklore describes a submerged house and piano music heard from the water. A natural place in Salem, Connecticut doesn't need walls to hold a legend; it has geography. Local lore carries the account; no documentation has ever caught up with it. It's the sort of report that survives precisely because it asks you to listen, not look.
  source: The Haunting of Eastern Connecticut (https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunting-eastern-connecticut)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· The Haunting of Eastern Connecticut — Connecticut Office of Tourism
  https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunting-eastern-connecticut

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/