American Horror Stories – Lake

By: Kelly Kearney

When Jake and his friends go to the lake for the day the unthinkable happens, and what was supposed to be a fun afternoon on a boat turns into a nightmare that outs the secrets of the past and drags the truth down to its cold watery depths. 

WAY DOWN HE GOES

We begin with sister and brother, Finn (Olivia Rouyre) and Jake (Bobby Hogan), as they take a boat out on the Lake Pleseant to party with their friends. Jake, who sees himself as an amatuer history buff and topographer, mapped out the best places for a shallow dive. He explains to his pals that the town’s man-made lake was once farmland and rumor has it that below the surface it still sits untouched. It sounds like Jake is planning a fun snorkeling adventure and chooses to lead the others on the day’s first dive. Finn goes with him and after the two briefly explore the area full of drowned tricycles and other things the past left behind, Jake finds himself stuck and fighting to get free. Panicking, FIn tries to pull him free but has to resurface for a deeper breath. She calls out to their friends for help but when she dives back down, her brother he’s unconscious and floating. Again she attempts to free him but in the blink of an eye something drags him down into the darkest depths of the lake.

Witnessing the death of her brother lands Finn in a mental health facility for a few weeks. When she finally returns home, her parents–especially her mother, Erin (Alicia Silverstone), try to make things easier for her by staying strong and giving the appearance that they have moved on. There is just one problem with that; it’s hard to move when they never found Jake’s body. His family buried a coffin full of his favorite things–like a time capsule of his life, but not knowing where he floated off makes coping with the loss a bit harder to do. His father, Jeffrey (Teddy Sears), worries that FInn seems to be acting like an emotionless zombie who’s just going through the motions for everyone else’s sake. She must get that from her mother because Jeffrey is equally worried about how quickly Erin seemed to adapt to the loss. She’s looking ahead to the future and trying to set a good example for their daughter. After Finn settles in at home she expresses regret for missing her brother’s memorial. She also admits the main reason she’s struggling to move on is because of what she saw that day–and she isn’t just referring to the drowning. Something was off about those last moments with Jake and the fact they haven’t found him in the small and fairly shallow Lake, only adds to her confusion. With her daughter’s words rattling around her head, Erin heads into the bathroom for a relaxing bath and that’s when she sees a decayed arm reach out from the drain and try to drag her under the water! She manages to break free from the disembodied grip and when she looks again the hand is gone! Finn was right–something is up with that lake. Before Jake died he mentioned hw the lake used to be a part of their town and after that terrifying hand incident, Erin starts doing her own research on Lake Pleasant’s not-so-pleasant history. She was the one who insisted on everyone moving forward, and now that her husband has agreed to try, she’s being haunted by unanswered questions and traumatic dreams. Either Jake is haunting the house or just his mother’s mind, but strange things keep happening that Erin cannot ignore. Faucets in the kitchen turn on by themselves, and she can hear Jake moaning out a call to, “find me.” Realizing these are not dreams but a sign that she has to find Jake’s body, Erin tells Jeffrey she wants to go back to the lake and look for their son. Jeffrey reminds her of the recovery team and how they searched every inch of that lake and never found anything. This time it’s he who asks her to move on– saying it’s for Finn’s sake. Little does he know Finn agrees with her mother; they need to find Jake’s body and she offers to help her mother search. That day, the two pack the car and head to their family’s cabin on Lake Pleasant, making sure to keep this whole sad adventure from Jeffrey because he wouldn’t understand. 

SECRETS REVEALED

At the lake Finn points out the exact spot where she last saw Jake, but with rumors swirling about other drownings, she is worried that something might happen to her mom. Erin calms her fears by tying a rope around her waist so Finn can pull her back up if she doesn’t resurface. With the emergency life rope secured, Erin dives down looking for what Finn described as a forgotten town but there’s no signs any of that existed, and most importantly, no sign of Jake. The search is tiring but Erin dives down one last time and mysteriously, the underwater landscape changes and she sees the drowned memories like it’s own little time capsule. She also swims past a group of bodies chained to a concrete block! She pulls a necklace off of one the dead and starts to surface, but then something, or someone, grabs her foot and she struggles to break free. She eventually does, and so does her son, as they both float up from the watery grave. 

When the police arrive they are shocked by Erin’s discovery–not to mention the story about the bodies chained to the concrete block.They can’t find what she’s talking about but Jake’s body is all the proof she needs to know something is very wrong with that lake and the rescue team who couldn’t find her son. She calls Jeffrey to tell him the news and he can’t believe she found Jake. He tells her he feels guilty for not believing her but is thankful she ignored his pleas to move on because now the family can have a proper burial. It’s all good news but Erin still can’t shake the feeling that something is going on in this town. It’s almost like the police didn’t want to find Jake, and they certainly don’t seem interested in looking into the other bodies she saw below the surface. Realizing she isn’t getting anywhere with the local police, Erin takes the necklace she swiped off the dead man and tracks down local historian, Millie Boone (Heather Wynters) and discovers it belonged to Millie’s ancestor, a boy named, Maynard Nathanial Boone. Maynard worked the farm that was buried beneath the town’s money-making recreational lake  and rumor has it, was murdered by a powerful man who built the town they know today. The story goes that Boone and a few others protested the building of the new dam. They proved to be a thorn in the very wealthy side of WredePrescott (Todd Cattell)– a local businessman who built the dam and subsequently flooded the farmlands.In a lashback we meet Reed, a greedy and despicable man who orders his paid goons to chain up Boone and three other troublemakers to the same concrete block Erin saw in the lake. As the dam was opened the farm flooded, slowly drowning the men and their screams for help. The dam has never been a popular feature in the town and every time its dismantling comes up for a vote, the will of the people is ignored for tourist dollars and political power grabs. What’s really going on, she figures out,  is that generations of Prescott’s keep blocking attempts to ditch the dam and drain the lake all to protect their family’s name and cover up their ancestor’s crimes. The more Erin learns, the more she wonders why the name Prescott sounds so familiar? 

That night she realizes where she’s heard the name before when Jeffrey shows up to their lakeside cabin ready to escort Erin, Finn, and Jake’s body home. This is when it all clicks for her and Erin realizes Prescott is the name of the firm that Jeffrey works for! Jeffrey has been helping cover up Wrede Prescott’s crimes! All of this; Jake’s death, her hauntings that brought them all back to the lake, has been some sort of karmic revenge for the lives cruelly taken by the Grand patriarch of Jeffrey’s employer, Wrede Prescott. If that’s not bad enough, Jeffrey laughs off her revelation and admits he doesn’t just work for the criminal family, he is one! Prescott is the name he’s hid from his family– who, he points out, never once questioned his work while enjoying the luxurious fruits of his labor. Prescott hurt a lot of people and like some paranormal payback, Jake died for those sins and Erin now understands her husband helped cover it up! Erin screams at him that these forces could come after Finn next but he refuses to believe there is something otherworldly going on here. That all changes when the lights go out and we see the dead rise from the lake and attack their cabin! It’s a walking dead moment and the bodies of Boone and his murdered mates passby Erin and Finn to grab Jeffrey and drag him down to his own watery grave . Finn and Erin watch on in horror and wonder what they should do next. Should they call the police? Would they even believe them if she tried to explain? She decides time and the region’s seemingly never ending drought will reveal a truth the town could never ignore.