The Drowning of Cynthia McNamara, Cedar Lake 1979

On January 3rd, 1979, they found Cynthia McNamara’s gloves frozen upright in the ice at Cedar Lake, the fingers bent as if she’d been clawing from below. Forty-eight hours earlier, she’d vanished during a midnight walk along the shore, leaving no footprints back. That winter, every morning, another family reported new scratches appearing on the inside of their own window glass-parallel lines, five at a time. Cynthia’s mother started getting phone calls just after 2:16 AM: faint bubbling sounds and a girl’s voice whispering, let me out. The sheriff said it all stopped after the spring thaw, when the ice cracked, and they found a small red boot wedged inside the half-melted lake.