Lake Crescent on Washington's Olympic Peninsula
Photo Credit:
Tim Robison |
"An old legend has it that Lake Crescent never gives up its dead. The Klallams would never cross it by canoe. They said there were evil spirits that reached upward with icy claws to drag down anyone who tried to fish there. Until 1957, the lake was commonly thought to be bottomless; many grew up in Port Angeles believing that was a fact. It was finally sounded at six hundred twenty-four feet at its deepest point; and that's plenty deep enough."
The waitress seemed to have taken her break specifically to fill me in on the local lore. She had overheard me introducing myself to the bartender as "Penelope Pettiweather, intrepid Northwest folklorist and ghost detective." He'd laughed, glad enough to meet an eccentric old gal with an interest in strange things, but he couldn't add much to my store of notes. I hadn't seen the young woman as the bartender and I spoke, but when I sat down at a table with a Roy Rogers and a grilled cheese sandwich to peruse my field notes, the waitress sat across from me and said, "You're the woman who writes books of spooky stories for kids?"
"Well, not necessarily for children, but I must confess I do write about odd things now and then. Call me Penny."
"Hi, Penny, glad to meet you," she said, offering me a hand across the table. She didn't introduce herself. "Are those notes about the soap woman?"
"Some are. Do you know anything about her?"
"Sure." She lit up a cigarette. I wished she hadn't, but you can't criticize someone who's about to volunteer sought-for information. She said, "I kind of relate to her in a weird way, you know what I mean? I think she wants her story remembered. She doesn't want to be forgotten. I've sort of taken it as my duty to keep her memory alive. I look like her a bit, don't you think?"
"I haven't seen a photo of her yet. I planned to spend the night here at the lodge and check local newspaper morgues and libraries tomorrow. Then I suppose I'll see some photos."
"Take my word for it; she and I could be sisters," she said, and leaned back in her seat. She blew smoke rings toward the ceiling, which rather impressed me despite my disapproval of smoking. My friendly waitress continued: "Hallie Illingsworth had auburn hair and piercing dark eyes. She was a big strong woman—not unattractive, mind you; but it couldn't have been easy killing her, I'll tell you that; she would have put up a devil of a fight. If not for a lucky blow, it might have been a husband rather than a wife that went into the bottom of that lake. So, what do your notes say there?" She was trying to read my scrawls upside down.
I lifted my notes. I began to read a fragment: "1940, afternoon of July 6, Lake Crescent for the first time returns one of its dead."
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The coals are glowing in the Campfire Forum They look like burning eyes, don't they?... Yikes! What was that noise?!
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"You've got that right," she interrupted. "The first and only time. The day she resurfaced, the lake was smooth as a mirror and the deepest blue imaginable, fading toward shore to a polished turquoise. There was this guy named Louis Rolfe in a fishing skiff with his brother. Louis spotted an oblong object and pointed it out. His brother asked, 'What the hell is it?' It floated near the rocky wall that leads to Sledgehammer Point. It looked like a human body wrapped in a gray-striped blanket. Louis turned the skiff about and hurried to the dock of the state trout hatchery, where he told the superintendent what they'd seen. 'Shorty' Immenroth laughed it off at first, said it was probably a deer. Nevertheless, he went out on the lake with Louis. There on the crystal-clear water, Shorty saw the outline of the object, a pure white shoulder showing through a tear in the blanket, and an alabaster foot dangling from one end of the bundle, a piece of rope tied around the ankle.
"It was a fact—she'd turned to soap. The lake is fed continuously by Olympic Mountains snowmelt. When you're six hundred feet down in frigid water, you don't rot. You're preserved, that's what, and saponification sets in. That's what it's called. Saponification. It means that after the cold stopped the decay, salts in her system changed all her fatty tissues little by little, and she turned to soap. She was down there for three years at forty-four degrees Fahrenheit, just exactly what the process required. Because the soap was lighter than the water, she came to the surface. The transformation must have happened to past corpses too; all of them must have turned to soap. So you might ask yourself, Penny, why only this one came to the surface, especially as she had been tied to something to weigh her down. There's more of a mystery there than people realize."
Her voice had lowered, and I found myself leaning forward, despite her smoky breath, eager as I was for her perceptions regarding the mystery. She paused and waved the cigarette about, evidently appreciating how she had put me at the edge of my seat. Then she took up her narrative again.
"Even after all that time in the depths, she was still recognizable as a strong, good-looking woman, her auburn hair hanging thick and wet. She was taken to a mortuary. The mortician and the cops found her to be as shapely as the day she was tossed in, not a speck of rot, a clean neutral smell coming off her. An elastic garter was still on one leg and she wore fragments of a green dress. As the soap was soft, she had undergone some damage when she was transported. Part of her face as well as her toes and fingers were gone or damaged.
"They put her in a potter's field grave. Fourteen months later the case broke, thanks to dental records distributed to five thousand dentists throughout the USA. A dentist of Faulkton, North Dakota, remembered the partial plate that had been kept as evidence. His records reminded him he'd made the plate for one Hallie Spraker. It didn't take long after that to find out who she'd married and that she'd disappeared from her Port Angeles residence on December 3, 1937. Hallie Illingsworth's fool husband must have known the day would come when his crime would be found out. He served nine years of a supposed life sentence before he was paroled, then disappeared, probably with an assumed name.
"All this is a matter of public record. But there's one little piece of the puzzle still missing. That's the matter of the lake allowing her to return. When someone drowns in that lake, their corpse is never found. Never. So how did Hallie come back? Perhaps it's because the lake didn't kill her itself. It doesn't take offerings, it only takes lives."
I could tell by her manner that she had told me pretty much all she intended to, and her break from waitressing was done. As she stood, she told me, "There's an old geezer comes in here now and then, name of Benjamin White, lived in the area all his life. You should go and talk to him."
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