My dearest glowing eyes in the dark forest:
I sometimes use this newsletter as a travelogue. I am clinically unable to sit still for more than five minutes and I make a lot of questionable decisions based on an unceasing need for activity. Decisions like driving out to the absolute wilds of Central Nevada to do ELECTION WORK. Why phone bank from home when you can spend 3 hours in the car squinting at the horizon and wondering if your destination has a coffee shop or just a gas station and why didn’t you pack an extra Diet Coke?!!! Only to end up at a cursed lake WHICH SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN OMEN ABOUT THIS FUCKING ELECTION?!!
This is how I ended up at the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation in late October. I was working as a poll monitor. Remember when we all thought Trump was going to launch another coup in 2025 instead of just fucking winning? Well, both parties wanted eyes on every polling station in every battleground state to make sure there was a record. I was one set of those eyes.
Pyramid Lake by Jeremy Stewart on Unsplash
The scenery at Pyramid Lake is surreal. The sky is incredibly vast. The landscape is pretty scrubbed – a wash of khaki dominated by deep gray and purple mountains. From the Tribal Offices, I could see a triangle of the lake in the distance, it was a perfect sky blue color. Like, almost aquamarine. It was sunny and mild and extremely bright at this time in October.
Like most spooky lakes, this one is super fucking old. It is the last remnant of an enormous ice age lake called Lake Lahontan, a body of water that took up almost the whole state. Locally, it is known for cutthroat trout fishing and the legend of the WATER BABIES. Water babies are a feature of Great Basin tribal lore – the Paiutes aren’t the only one who believe in them. Water babies can be spirits, supernatural entities, or the ghosts of drowned children, and they are said to haunt and curse bodies of water. Care and ritual are required to appease them when near the water, and avoid being drowned yourself.
There are different versions of this story, and they’re all incredibly grim. The version my friend Michael told me is that women who were raped by white settlers drowned their babies in this lake, and the babies are seeking revenge. Online, I found a version with ancient Spartan sensibilities – the Paiute were fierce warriors and strong people, and they drowned any sickly or malformed babies born. The spirits of the babies will cry at night to lure unsuspecting people to the lake and drown them in an act of revenge.
Because of this, the lake is considered cursed. Urban legends hold that there are frequent, strange deaths, and that the bodies are never found. Boats capsize, people drown while swimming, freak storms whip up over the lake with no warning. The desert is a severe environment, and winter can come on fast and strong. The lake is over 200 feet deep; it’s possible that bodies sink and become locked down in the cold. Looking around at the astonishing and harsh scenery, at this turquoise lake in the middle of windswept and barren Reservation land, you can be forgiven for thinking it’s cursed. Especially toward white people.
The history of settler violence toward the native inhabitants of the area is omnipresent. The West wasn’t conquered that long ago, the stories are fresh, as any Western tribal member will tell you. John C Fremont was the first white guy to see and name the lake – he called it Pyramid Lake after the large triangular tufa at the edge. He was famously NOT A FRIEND TO THE NATIVES!!
In the late 1850’s, white settlers began to push into Nevada with the discovery of the Comstock Lode. In 1860, two white men kidnapped, raped, and held hostage a pair of Paiute sisters. Tribal members rescued the girls, killed the kidnappers and their co-conspirators and burned their bar to the ground. A posse of white men formed up to respond, and the Paiute Wars began. In the first engagement, the tribal alliance killed 70 white men. Setters reinforced their numbers with actual American soldiers, and the tribes were driven back. The Army installed a small fort at Pyramid Lake, disrupting fishing and leading to starvation.
With this history in mind, it’s easy to see how the Native legends about water spirits morphed into stories of infanticide and revenge. Folklore evolves to address the fears and concerns of the people telling the stories – the aftermath of rape, murder, and starvation demands revenge. Similarly, exaggerated, fetishistic tales of Native American Warriors produced a legend about the eugenics required to produce such a race. The root of the true stories is that white settlers saw the indigenous people of the West as something less than human, and the folklore reflects that. The lake is probably dangerous for material reasons – weather, depth – but the feeling of a curse hangs over it for pure psychological reasons. That shit is haunted.
Anyway, on the shores of that cursed lake, I spent eight hours chatting with workers and observers, and around hour 6 we realized that everyone in the room was into the weird stuff. Ghost towns, haunted mines, abandoned cemeteries, Sasquatch – we all had stories. The Trump observer showed us photos of a haunted cemetery and told us about his UFO sightings. WHICH I VERY MUCH APPRECIATED BTW!
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t ask what this dude thought of vaccines or Latinos, but like, we’re all connecting over fucking UFOS?? On a Reservation in the middle of the desert with a lake full of haunted baby/spirits that are just waiting for the sun to go down so they can lure people into the water and drown them in revenge?? I won’t say I couldn’t make this shit up, because this is very much what I do for a living, but I guess the absolutely surreal location made for some surreal conversation.
Anyway, beam me up, guys. Preferably before January 20.
Xo,
Court