The Legend of the Lantern Beast

As it’s told in Bracken Ridge.

Nobody in town agrees on where the story starts. That’s the first thing you should know about it.

Ask Lindy Everton, who has directed the elementary school play for longer than some of the parents have been alive, and she will tell you a star came down into Fortune Lake before there were any people to see it fall. It went into the water still burning and it burns there yet, and everything bright that has ever come up out of that lake is a piece of it looking for the sky again.

Ask Jake behind the bar at the Rusty Anchor and you will get a less romantic answer. A miner drowned when a mine flooded near the north point in the eighties — the eighteen eighties — with his lamp still lit. He never found his way out and he’s stil out there in the dark under the mountain, and when he sees a boat above him he comes up to see whether it is anyone he knows.

Both of them will tell you their version is the true one. Neither of them will tell you where they heard it. And there are a dozen more versions in that town, because the Lantern Beast is older than the tale and the town.

What everyone agrees on is that the creature is more real than the stories. The people who lived beside this water first had a name for it that meant the Ancient That Weaves With Lights. The men who came for the silver were not built for that kind of reverence. They called it the Miner's Friend, because it brought their tools back, and at some point it became the Lantern Beast. The name stuck. The ugliest name always does.

But the miners weren’t wrong, because the Lantern Beast does give things back.

The town will tell you so, as if it’s no more than a charming bit of local flavor, like the fudge shop or the Ferris wheel. If you lose something in the lake, there’s a chance the Lantern Beast will find it and return it. Sometimes it comes back knotted with lake weed — a good knot, worked tight and even, the kind that takes hands and time. Some things come back accompanied by a fine stone. Some turn up in the oddest places, like the bottom of a glass of ice water. Jake keeps a book behind the bar and writes down what comes back, and he has been doing it so long that the early pages are in someone else's handwriting.

It leads boats back to safety. Every family on this water has one fog story, and the stories are all the same story: The fog rolled in and the shore disappeared along with all sense of direction, and then a green light shows up, usually heading in the direction you weren’t going. Follow it. That is not advice. That is what people do.

And it plays. It draws schools of glowing fish across the shallows in August and unravels them before you can get a camera up. It puts a second moon on the water on nights when there is no moon. It sails a boat made of light across the cove against the wind and takes it apart at the far shore like a child bored with a toy. Radiant birds soar the skies, only to shatter into embers and fall harmlessly to the water below. It is considered a great honor to be shown these things.

There are nine children in the school play. There have always been nine children in the school play. Ask Lindy why it is not eight, or ten, and she will look at you as though you have asked why the lake is not on the other side of the road.

On the summer solstice, during the Fortune Festival, we lay out the Beast's Feast along the waterline.

You bring something you love — Peaches and plums, coins, a jar of preserves, a bracelet off your own wrist. You set it on the flat rocks below the boardwalk and you walk away. In the morning some of it is gone and some of it is not, and Jake writes it all down. And sometimes, the Lantern Beast leaves something back. Nobody can tell you what decides it.

There are four rules, if you take these old stories seriously. First, do not take back what you have set down. Not if you change your mind, not if you set down the wrong one, not for any reason at all. Second, do not dive for what you lost. It comes back when it is ready, or maybe not at all — that’s for the Lantern Beast to decide. Third, do not thank it out loud. Leave your porch light on instead. Fourth, and last, do not follow the lights past the north point and do not dive in those waters. Those waters are for the Lantern Beast alone.

Back in 1890, a man came out from Boston with a great deal of money, and ambition, and curiosity, and he staked a claim to the north point cliff and beach and pines.Samuel Callahan spent six years on that point, and whatever was out there drove him to madness. Whatever he was looking for, he was looking for it in the water, and finally, one foggy day in 1896, he went out onto the lake and he never came back.

Callahan is the fun-scary part of the play. The children love him. He gets a lantern and a long coat and he walks off the edge of the stage into the dark, and the parents laugh, and every year at least one child cries.

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You will hear all of this in a weekend here. The Lantern Beast is on the menus and the souvenirs. The soul of the town. Every person who tells you the story will tell you at the end of it that of course they do not believe a word.

Then, come June, they will walk down to the water with something they love.