Ghosts

Ghosts are the dead presences associated with Dark Score Lake and its surroundings, first presented through local stories and uneasy guesses, then encountered as visible figures and active forces. Their significance lies in the way the novel joins personal haunting to the region’s accumulated history: the lake’s dead include people driven from their homes, soldiers who never returned, children who died there, and victims whose past remains entangled with Sara Laughs. By the storm, the ghosts are no longer just a subject of rumor; they participate in a confrontation whose force depends on the living people gathered around it.

Local Stories and the Lake’s Dead

The stories around Dark Score Lake give its haunting a history deeper than one house or one family. A local woman recounts her mother’s belief that the lake is haunted by the Micmac people driven away by General Wing and by the men from the area who went to the Civil War: more than six hundred left, she says, and fewer than a hundred and fifty came back, at least in body. The account makes the lake a repository for losses that exceed any single haunting.

The same story preserves the fate of a Black child associated with the Red-Tops. In 1901, he was caught in an animal trap and remained there for much of a day, crying for help. His foot was saved, but he died of blood poisoning. The Red-Tops left afterward, apparently unable to remain in a place marked by the loss. The woman’s mother believed the boy had stayed on the TR as a ghost; Mike, who had already seen an apparition of a child since arriving from Derry, privately recognizes that the tale may describe an actual presence rather than folklore.

Another haunting belongs to the history of the Auster family. Normal Auster, father of Kenny, drowned his infant son beneath a backyard pump and later died by suicide. Locals say he, too, haunts the lake, although the woman telling Mike the stories does not claim personal certainty about ghosts. Her matter-of-fact reserve preserves a tension that runs through the accounts: the tales circulate as local knowledge, but belief and direct experience are not always the same thing.

From Uncertainty to Apparition

The possibility of ghosts surfaces amid disturbances that could still be explained away. After someone leaves the word hello in spilled flour, Mattie wonders whether ghosts are responsible, but does so with an uncertain smile. Mike connects the incident to other events at Sara Laughs, including a child crying in the dark, yet chooses to bring the conversation back to the visible danger of Max Devore’s attempt to take Kyra. The supernatural remains present, but at this point it competes with an immediate human conflict for attention.

A later encounter makes the haunting more intimate and frightening. Kyra says she saw someone inside the house and feared that an unwelcome presence had entered the bedroom. She cannot establish what it was, but her description makes the threat feel close rather than legendary: the danger is not safely located in an old tale or out by the lake. In the storm, she sees a group of figures outside the sliding door: a Black boy, a woman in a large hat, a man in blue pants, and other shapes she cannot make out. She asks Mike if they are ghosts and identifies the woman as the one who wore Mattie’s dress. Mike confirms that they are ghosts, while Kyra fears them as she feared the men who chased them at the fair.

The appearances link distinct periods and deaths instead of presenting one undifferentiated apparition. The boy recalls the Red-Tops’ loss; the woman’s clothing connects her to an earlier presence that has crossed into Mattie’s life; and the man in blue pants joins the group of watchers Kyra sees during the storm. Their presence broadens the haunting from a private fear into an encounter with multiple layers of the past.

Sara Laughs and the Living

At Sara Laughs, the ghostly is not confined to what can be seen. Mike looks from the lake toward Sara’s house and sees its reflection in the still water, where the windows seem to become watchful eyes. He suspects that the focus of the phenomena lies on The Street, between the actual house and its drowned image. The reflected house gives the haunting a spatial structure: the boundary between place and image becomes a possible point of contact between the living world and the dead.

That boundary also carries a shared local burden. Mike knows that Royce Merrill was murdered, and wonders whether whatever caused the manifestations could come among the old-timers gathered for Royce’s funeral, drawing on their guilt, memories, and sense of belonging to the TR. His concern shifts away from solving the older story of Sara and the Red-Tops or identifying everything haunting the house. What matters immediately is getting through the next day with Mattie and Kyra, alongside the people who will gather to remember Royce.

During the storm, Mike sees the dead in the trees: Max Devore, Royce Merrill, Son Tidwell, and, most prominently, Sara. The vision gathers together people connected to separate histories and recent events, but Mike’s interpretation is that Sara is the active center. The figures are not simply memorial images; their appearance coincides with a force that presses against the house and draws on the people gathered outside.

The Storm and the Collective Force

The final storm sequence changes the scale of the ghosts’ role. Mike sees cars lined along the highway and understands that the old-timers are present nearby, sitting in their vehicles through the rain. He believes Sara is drawing on them, just as she had drawn on Devore and on Mike himself. He also revises his understanding of earlier manifestations: some may have been produced through his own psychic energy, rather than being wholly independent acts of the haunting. The supernatural therefore works through an exchange between presence and human participation, not only through appearances of the dead.

Inside Jo’s studio, the conflict becomes audible as moving air seems to gather into voices. Mike hears Sara’s hostile voice and then hears Jo screaming; he understands that Sara is hurting Jo for interfering. The sounds make the struggle between the ghosts immediate without making it fully visible. Mike advances to intervene, while objects in the room move and break around him. The scene locates the haunting in a collision between Sara’s force and Jo’s resistance, with Mike drawn in as witness and participant.

The ghosts consequently form a history that presses into the present rather than remaining behind it. Local accounts establish the dead as part of the lake’s inherited memory; Kyra’s sightings give that memory visible figures; and the storm reveals the possibility that Sara can use the living community’s accumulated psychic force. The book leaves room for uncertainty about the precise nature of each apparition, but not about the consequences of haunting: the dead can be seen, can affect the living, and can make buried histories active again.