The camera on the drone revealed that one body was in a suit
and the other body was in a dress. I
didn’t know what to make of it. We
stopped the YouTube live feed because the car was now the scene of a possible
murder. This is Audio Stories with J. B. Simien and this is the story of “The Incident at Lake Crescent”
In 1956, the narrow road around the rim of Lake Crescent, on
the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, was not paved. In many spots there is a sheer drop off into
the lake. There are no guard rails and
no road shoulders. The narrow road
itself tends to slant toward the 600 foot deep lake.
My grandparents were driving to a cabin on
the lake to spend their honeymoon. They
had just been married that day. It was
raining and dark. The road was muddy and
very slippery. The only lights on the
road was their car headlights and the headlights of other cars they met. Because of the rain and the fog, they could
only see a few yards in front of their car hood.
Based upon the weather conditions, they should have found a
place to pull over and wait for the rain to stop but they wanted to get to the
cabin and start the honey portion of the honeymoon. At the worst possible time, they encountered
a deer on the road. There was not enough
reaction time to avoid hitting the deer.
It went over the hood and into their windshield. Their car plunged off the road and fell down
a steep embankment into Lake Crescent.
Despite having the deer in the windshield, they were still aware
when they hit the water. Soon, their
Buick filled with the cold lake water.
As the car was sinking, they were able to manually roll down the driver
and passenger side car windows and hold their breaths. When the car fill with enough water, they escaped
to the surface of the lake out the windows.
The car continued to sink. They
were down so deep that they barely made it back to the surface of the lake. Everybody in the family has heard this story
over and over again. We have even been
up to Lake Crescent to see the scene of the accident on family vacations.
This summer (August 2016), a few friends of mine and I rented a mini-submarine drone with a camera.
We have been using it for video adventures in Puget Sound and Lake
Washington. We have video of lots of
wrecked objects in both bodies of water.
We came up with the idea to live streaming the underwater exploits on
YouTube. We have gotten thousands of
viewers for the live stream events. I convinced the guys at the end of August to go up to Crescent
Lake and look for my grandparent’s car.
I thought it would be a fun video adventure to show my family. I knew my grandparents would get a kick out
of seeing their old Buick at the bottom of Lake Crescent. So we set up a live stream for that adventure
also. My grandparents were especially
excited to be able to see their old car again.
My family threw a party at the lake for the occasion. My grandmother asked if we could recover her
wedding dress from the trunk of the car.
We located their car 560 feet down on the lake bottom (not too
far from the point of entry). The video
of the Buick showed the remains of a deer still stuck in the windshield. The car was deep in an oxygen poor
environment, so the deer had decayed slowly.
It appeared relatively fresh. The
video feed also showed that the driver side and passenger side windows of the
Buick were partially rolled down and the doors were closed.
That was odd.
My grandparents had rolled down the windows to escape the car as it
filled with water. They couldn’t have gotten
out of those windows. With the deer in
the windshield, there was no escaping that way either. I was struck with a weird feeling.
I took the controls of the mini-submarine
drone from my friend. I position the
camera to look directly into the open portion of the passenger window. After some adjustments for the light levels,
the camera revealed two decaying bodies inside the car. One body was in a suit and the other body was
in a dress. I didn’t know what to make
of it. We stopped the YouTube live feed
because the car was now the scene of a possible murder.
The family party at the lake stopped too. My grandparents didn’t have an explanation
for the bodies. They were as confused as
we were. The Clallam County Sheriff investigated. A week later, they recovered the vehicle from
the bottom of Lake Crescent. My
grandparents insisted that they had no idea who the people in the car could be.
The car was confirmed to be their Buick from
1956. The identification on the bodies revealed that they were George Cleveland (my grandfather) and Terry Baker (my
grandmother’s maiden name). The bodies
were that of a couple in their early twenty’s dressed in the same clothing that
my grandparents were last seen in when departing for their honeymoon. That was verified by their wedding photos.
The bodies of the couple in the car were DNA
tested and were found to have the same DNA as my Grandfather and
Grandmother. All the evidence confirmed
that the dead people in the car were my grandparents as their twenty year old
selves. However, my eighty year old grandparents
were still very much alive. They had no
explanation for the dead young people in their old car.
Nobody knew what to do.
So, with the government’s permission, my family buried the couple;
because, somehow, they were related to us.
Officially, despite the DNA
evidence, their identity was left as undetermined because their eighty year old
clones are still alive.
All evidence
indicated that they were my grandparents when they were in their twenty’s. All evidence indicated that my grandparents
had not been able to swim out of that car and they drowned. On the other hand, my eighty year old
grandparents are alive but they shouldn’t be.
They couldn’t have gotten out of that car, in 1956, through the windows
as they claimed.
My family and the
government have chosen to deal with this paradox by pretending it doesn’t
exist. The only thing that has been
firmly resolved is the recovery of my grandmother’s wedding dress from the truck
of that car.
Despite the evidence, did the will to live allowed George
Cleveland and Terry Baker (the honey moon couple) to supernaturally escape that
doomed car in 1956? Or, is it more
likely that the couple are still trapped in that car sinking to the bottom of
the lake and this story is their shared dream (hand in hand, lips to lips) facing
death together? Just a dream - within a
dream.
This concludes the story of The Incident at Lake Crescent. I’m J.B. Simien. I hope that you have enjoyed this story. To enjoy more Audio Stories as they become
available, please subscribe to this channel now and click the like symbol
below.
Thank you and take care.
