The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

10 : The Key to Anchor Lake

Excerpt from chapter 2 of The Key to Anchor Lake by Mary S Nesbitt - "A Brief Introduction to the History of Anchor Lake in the 16th - 20th Centuries"

•

I would like to start off by saying that my research is conducted through the use of town archives, extensive local history from the library and online services, and stories from family, friends, and residents. While it is hard to find full details for events that transpires hundreds of years ago, I have done my best to put together a timeline of events that have occurred in Anchor Lake between 1619 and 1994, and this chapter will outline each of those events in a little more detail before later chapters are dedicated to each individual event.

This chapter is separated into four parts: the events of the 17th century; the events of the 18th century; the events of the 19th century, and the events of the 20th century.

PART ONE

The Events of the 17th Century: 1619 - 1694

When I began this research journey, I didn't fully comprehend what I was letting myself in for. I had heard rumours about the tragedies that had struck this town over and over again, and I had heard snippets of history, but nothing compared to the truth that made itself clearer the deeper I dug.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, witchcraft was the obsession du jour, and the list of offences that could result in the execution of a woman (there were men executed for witchcraft, but they were fewer and farther between) was extensive. There are records across western Europe and the USA of women being accused of being witches for being too rich and too poor; too clever and too stupid; for having too many children or too few.

For a woman to have any attitude other than subservience was seen as a sign that she was a witch, if she was stubborn or loud or prone to arguments. If she had too many friends, she was part of a coven. If she had no friends, that too was suspicious, and certainly a sign that something was wrong with her. What else but witchcraft?

Scotland has a sordid history with witchcraft that I won't delve into too much between these pages, but let it be said that the practices carried out in Anchor Lake were not out of the ordinary. I was shocked to learn of the tortures women were subjected to, the hunts and trials that plagued the era and set in motion the course for the town's history of horror.

In 1619, seven years after the infamous Trial of the Pendle Witches down in England, Anchor Lake found itself to be a hotspot for suspected witch activity, and at the centre of these suspicions was Temperance Key. She was one of seventeen women to be executed that year, and the one about whom the most is known.

Temperance Key was an unmarried woman who, at the age of twenty-two, had a child born out of wedlock, a son named Henry. She worked as a healer, using natural plant-based remedies to heal the common and curable ailments of the time; she was also, as far as I have been able to gather from well-preserved records and diaries from the time, a rude and outspoken woman who never let sleeping dogs lie. These supposed crimes were enough to cast a shadow over her character and lead to the accusation of witchcraft, for which Temperance was killed in May of 1619.

She, along with her fellow sixteen accused witches, was thrown into the lake to see whether or not she would sink. To sink was to be innocent - and also to drown. To float was to be a witch, and to be killed. Records show that after surviving the water test, Temperance's body was burned at the stake. It is unimaginable these days, what these women were subjected to. Temperance's son was orphaned, and it can be assumed that hers was not the only family torn apart by these seventeen slaughters.

And so begins the dark and tragic history of this dark and tragic town.

Twenty-five years later, once the town has recovered from its witch frenzy and life has returned to normality for all except those who lost the women they loved, Anchor Lake is hit by torrential flooding. The overflowing lake combined with the water that comes off the mountains and saturates the valley proves fatal, and over the course of just one day, ten residents lose their lives. For a town with an already low population, the shocking loss is a terrible blow to the community.

By 1669, the floods are a thing of the distant past, and most living residents of Anchor Lake were born after the conclusion of the witch trials. There is no reason to suspected that tragedy might strike again when the town has had more than two decades of peace. But it has been twenty-five years since the floods; fifty since Temperance was burned to death. Anchor Lake is due another disaster, and it comes in the form of an unexpected and unprecedented landslide from one of the three mountains that surround the town.

There was no previous concern about the stability of the mountainside; its collapse shocked the town, and took five lives. Had the landslide followed the expected path, the devastation would have surely been larger, but the town itself was spared and the cemetery sustained most of the damage. Two of the dead were reportedly a mother and son visiting the gravesite of the child's father, who had lost his life in the floods.

The town's preacher later blamed the tragedy on the residents' sins, urging townsfolk to repent in order to protect themselves from future atrocities. He was still the town's preacher when, twenty-five years later, a freak storm struck the town and crushed the church during a Sunday service. He lost his life, along with the seventy-one parishioners attending the service.

Not a single worshipper survived the collapse. No other building was damaged to such an extent during the storm, despite several being more fragile and worse weather having blighted the town in the past. The collapse was blamed on poor architecture and the advanced age of the church, which was replaced within three years and remains standing today.

And that brings us to the end of a century of tragedy, each one a dark stain in the record books that forever altered the town's history. What would Anchor Lake be now if it hadn't turned on the women it raised? If it hadn't incurred the wrath of women scorned and cursed itself to repeat decades of disaster, ad infinitum?

We will never know the answer to that question. But we do know how the next three hundred years of Anchor Lake's history look, and it isn't good.

*