FtV – Gardner Lake’s Phantom Piano
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Wolfpack. Gear up. Stand out. Welcome, legendary listeners. Thanks for tuning in to From the Vault, a second look at some of our classic episodes. Look for a new episode every week. Now, can you go back and listen on your own at OurNewEnglandLegends.com? You bet.

But you won't get the added bonus of an after the legend segment featuring new commentary about that episode from your old pals Jeff and Ray. So let's open up the New England Legends vault and revisit another legendary episode.

Welcome to the Vault Kids. Hey, we're still in our holiday break, and this will be the last one of 2024, Last Vault, and it first aired November 30th, 2017. Enjoy. Well, this is a nice lake, Jeff, but why are we here? Ray, I've brought you to Gardner Lake in Salem, Connecticut, because fishermen have long told stories of hearing phantom piano music out here.

Well, I hope we find this ghostly piano soon because it's getting cold out here. Is the sound supposed to be coming from this side of the water or what? No. The music is said to come from the very bottom of the lake itself.

I'm Jeff Belanger. And I'm Ray Ogier, and welcome to the New England Legends podcast. This week, we're taking you to Gardner Lake in southeastern Connecticut. All right, Jeff, piano music from the bottom of the lake? That's what I heard. You need to realize that so much of what we explore each week is the backstory of a legend. You mean like the Star Wars prequels? Yeah, kind of like that. I mean, I'm fascinated with how a legend came to be where it is today. If we go back step by step, I feel like we can figure it out.

And even though we might be able to historically explain a legend, it doesn't mean there isn't some kind of cosmic magic in there. You mean like a paranormal explanation? I accept the possibility, always. But I also know how folklore works. How something happens and then people continue to talk about it for decades, and sometimes even more than a century later.

just like a highly memorable event that happened here at Gardner Lake during the very cold winter of 1895. All right, let me help set the stage here, because if there's one thing I'm good at, it's reporting the weather. Of course, we hear you each morning giving us the forecast on MyFM. May I? Sorry, yes, please go ahead.

All right. The winter of 1895 was brutal in this part of Connecticut. By mid-February, it was reported that the ice on the Thames River just above the railroad bridge was already 10 inches thick. The harbor drawbridge was frozen shut and the mercury hovering around 10 below zero. The forecast for tomorrow? More of the same. Cold.

Damn cold. This is an important part of the story, but hold this thought for right now. All right, why? Because I need to introduce you to Thomas LeCount, a wealthy grocer in Niantic who owned a handsome two-and-a-half-story home here on the south shore of Gardner Lake.

LeCount also owned land on the eastern shore of the lake, a spot he thought was better suited for his home. So he contacted a contractor to relocate the house from the southern shore to his land on the eastern shore. All right, I'm starting to figure out why the cold winter is an important part of this story. You're probably right, Ray. Moving a house is an intricate and expensive endeavor. To move it by wagons on the road would be extremely difficult and risky. But the contractor gets an idea.

Wait for the cold winter months, load the house onto skids, and then drag it across the frozen lake. Well, that sounds like a solid idea, and given how cold the winter of 1895 was, it sounds foolproof. Almost foolproof. On February 10, 1895, a crew of men shoveled a path across Gardner Lake, while more workers prepared to jack up the house onto giant wooden sleds that would serve to move LeCount's home from its foundation and start it on its relatively short half-mile journey across the lake.

Once that was complete, the process would repeat for LeCount's barn and bathhouse. So three buildings in total were going to make their way across Gardner Lake. Now I assume the house had been completely emptied for this kind of thing. That's the funny thing. They didn't empty the house at all. Clothing, china, carpets, furniture, the stove, their grand piano, even knickknacks were left in their place.

The thought is that this is a slow and careful process. If all goes well, items in the house will barely shift around. I guess what's a few thousand pounds more with a project like this, right? Exactly. And they estimated the house weighed about 28 tons. And the lake ice should be thick enough to handle that. So they start lifting the house with jacks. And lifting. And lifting. Until they can slip the giant skids underneath.

The thickest ropes they can find are secured around the house, and as many as 24 horses are brought in to start pulling. How long will this take? On February 11th, they officially started towing the house across the lake. The actual journey shouldn't take more than a couple of hours. At first, it's going well. The workers can't help but marvel at their genius in moving the house across the ice in winter. But then, something happens. Once the house is on the lake, about 250 feet from shore, well, they heard a crack.

Then the dragging slows. More cracking. And now they're stuck. The teams of horses can't seem to pull the house in either direction. So what'd they do? They're going to get some more horses and try again the next day. So they leave the house on the lake overnight. Right. It's colder at night, so the ice will be fine. What's the worst that can happen? Well, the worst that can happen is that Falls Mill in Norwich, who owns the water rights to the lake, has no idea there's a house sitting on the ice...

when they decided to open the dam that night and drain a significant amount of water, which created a gap between the ice and the water level. Yeah, that sounds bad. It was bad. And by the morning, the heaviest part of the house, the side with the chimney and kitchen...

broke through the ice and sunk down several feet. Water flooded in and froze again. So what happened to everything inside the house? Well, the next day, the engineers had already figured out there's no way to save this house from a watery grave. But they were able to remove almost all of the furnishings and personal effects. But there was one item they just couldn't lift out of the house. Ah, was it a piano? It was the piano. I see how this is all coming together now. So what happens to the house?

A bunch of people came out to see this spectacle. Photos were taken, people ice skated around the house and even through it. And check out this old postcard from Salem, Connecticut. Wow, this really happened. So this is a postcard of a house that's sinking into a lake. That's right, with people standing on the edge like, hey, look at us. While you look at that, we'll let a reporter from the Day newspaper of New London describe the scene. He said... The skating in the halls and sitting room was fine, but in the dining room, the water reached nearly to the ceiling.

A handsome sideboard is frozen solid in the room, which has now been turned into an ice house. Upstairs, the water has frozen in the west ends of the chambers. The plaster is all cracked and broken, never having been papered or painted.

The kitchen stove is still in position, and in the summer, a good diver could reach it and cook a pan of bullheads fresh caught from the window above. In fact, the house will be a great resort for fishermen if it is not torn apart. All right. Now, what happened to the house in the spring when all the ice melted?

With the ice gone, the house sank even further. It was described that it didn't fully sink, but floated mostly submerged like some kind of apparition. Water is, of course, the universal solvent. Given enough time, it'll eat through anything and everything. I can't imagine the house lasting too much longer sitting in a pond. It didn't. Each year, more wood rotted until the roofline sank below, and then even that deteriorated. Still, on some days, people out in rowboats could catch a glimpse of the old fireplace, the sink...

And that piano, though it's been over a century, some of those pieces are still at the bottom. Ray, how about the last word? All right. Well, it seems to me that there was a short period of time when the entire region was paying attention to this lake and this crazy story. And now it's been long enough that we've almost entirely forgotten about this event. But once in a while, this piano music drifts on the wind. And it's like history begs us to look back and gawk at this one more time.

If you want to see a picture of that postcard from Gardner Lake, you can visit our website at OurNewEnglandLegends.com and click on this episode. You can also check out all of our past episodes, leave us your comments, and share your own stories. Until next time, remember, the bizarre is closer than you think. All right, we'll break it down right after a word from our sponsor.

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Wolfpack.com. Wolfpack. Gear up. Stand out. Well, that didn't age well. No. You're not on MyFM anymore. I am not. We talked about, you know, you being anyway. I'm on radio now. You're on local radio. Radio. R-E-Y-D-I-O.com. And there's an app too. And there's an app. Yes. This is what I would do. I would take the MyFM app off your phone. Right. Just to save space. Right. And replace it with. Not being vindictive. Local radio. Right. Got it.

You should absolutely do that. When you downloaded the app in the app store, did you notice that it's under NPR? I'm not even top billing under radio. Because NPR sponsored that. It's a sponsored paid ad. So now I got to fork out more money to get up top. Now you get it. Now you understand. Good. Now that's crystal clear. So what I love about this story is it is a ghost story.

But nobody died. Right. Right? So that's interesting. And so it's the ghost of an event. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's different. Much different. Because I guess you could make anything up you want at that point when it's...

It's not a human involved. Do I need to shut the TV off? A little bit. I was distracted. You're so distracted. No, no. But think about this. So there's the ghost of the piano, I guess, right? But that's an inanimate object. I know. Yeah, you're right. How is a ghost haunted unless the pianist died while playing it? Did not. But I thought about this. Okay. Okay.

I do believe in the idea of, you know, sometimes we talk about like a haunting being like a movie that plays over and over. It's not, spirit's not there. It's not interactive. It's just, it's an impression that's been left, you know, a psychic impression, stone tape theories, another version of it.

So picture this. You've paid a really large amount of money to an engineer who believes he's the smartest person on earth and has figured out a way to move your house across a frozen lake, which will be smooth, easy. Hey, just go ahead and leave that on the shelf. Don't worry about it. This is going to be so smooth. We're going to glide this thing across the lake. Much better than horse and wagon. Way better. Bring it up. Bring it up on the other side of the lake. Put it where you want it and drive.

tomorrow night you're eating dinner in your new house on the other side. Right. So that, that's what happened.

So it starts and everything is going perfect. Swimmingly. Swimmingly. Yes, it's going great. It's on the lake. It's gliding. The horses are pulling it. Smooth. And with each foot that it glides across the lake, the owner and the engineer are like, we're the biggest geniuses on earth. Yeah. We got to market this and make some money doing it. They're going to put our face on the dollar bill. They're planning their future of brilliance. And then all of a sudden, crap.

And they go, okay, look, we'll wait for night. Night's colder. You know, like the pond will refreeze. Let's not push our luck. We'll be fine in the morning.

And then they did not count on someone letting the dam out and lowering the water. Right. Any amount. Right. So when, when they created a gap between the ice and the water, well, there's no support. Right. For the, and of course it's going to break. Yeah. And so imagine when you hear the crack and you see it starting to sink into the water and you know, and you can't do anything. It's over. It's the second that things goes down in the corner. It's, it's a,

Game over. It's not going any further. Nope. Because it's stuck on that crack. Now it's leaning into the water. And the only thing that's going to happen now is you're going to wait for spring and it's going to sink. And imagine the energy, right? Between the engineer, the workers, the owner, all going...

Oh my, right. I'm losing. I just lost everything. So you think that there was so much fear in that general area that some of it stayed. Maybe that movie got recorded. You know what I mean? Right. Because can you imagine how you would feel being like,

My house? Yeah. Slowly watching it start to sink. Ice skaters going around it. Laughing. Like, this is, well, wasn't that a dumb idea? You went from the smartest guy on earth to the dumbest guy on earth. Yeah. Overnight. They're going to put him on the penny. Although a penny was valuable back then. Never mind.

Even overnight, you went from like genius to idiot. What did you think was going to happen? You know, that was quite a gamble and you lost. So there was an impression that was left. That's my best theory. I like that. I like the idea that this event happened. There were postcards which we saw and it's on our website and

And that everyone locally remembered that for probably years and years and years and years to come. Right. Just being like, remember when that guy tried to push the house across the lake and it fell in? And then we saw the roof for years until it just rotted. Right. Nothing left down there but a piano. Yeah. And sometimes you can still hear it. See, I think if you tell that story enough through the years, people start to hear it in their heads. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. They tell somebody, I know I heard it. Yeah. And that I heard it too, even though they didn't. Maybe the most obvious explanation is a fish is playing the piano. Didn't even think of that. It did not come up. Maybe there's a lake monster. Duh. You know what? Yeah. And he's playing the blues. Yeah. Because he's stuck in a lake. He's stuck in a lake, but at least he has a piano. Yeah. And he taught himself. Love it.

In the dry states of the Southwest, there's a group that's been denied a basic human right. In the Navajo Nation today, a third of our households don't have running water. But that's not something they chose for themselves. Can the Navajo people reclaim their right to water and contend with the government's legacy of control and neglect? Our water, our future, our future!

That's in the next season of Reclaimed, the lifeblood of Navajo Nation. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.