Blood’s Bay Boathouse

If I were to weave a terrifying tale of Lake Champlain pirates for a Halloween gathering huddled around a crackling bonfire — chill October night looming dark, close, and threatening — I’d homebase the burly brutes out of Blood’s Bay boathouse. Marauding by day, tethering fearsome frigates to a pier extending east into depths of Lake Champlain, and fêting fiercely late into the night. Aaarrr!

My audience would assume I was exercising my storyteller’s license, renaming Rosslyn’s boathouse for dramatic effect. But this borrowed epithet would not be my own invention. Since the best horror stories are rooted in truth, I’d simply dip into Essex yesteryear’s haunted history. Or, if not haunted history exactly, at least historic nomenclature hinting at a haunted past. 

Let’s rewind the clock and calendar by a century and more to the days of this panoramic silver print overlooking Blood’s Bay from a perch perhaps near today’s Nail Collector’s House.

Squint and you might make out the familiar form of Rosslyn’s dock house, glowing golden in the photo at the top of this post, once extending well beyond the currently cantilevered dock, across a wide expanse resembling like a tied-arch bridge spanning boathouse to immense lakeside pier.

Try this closeup if squinting doesn’t serve you.

There it is, the Blood’s Bay boathouse, late night domain of debaucherous pirate parties!

Northward glance from Begg’s Point across [what] was once known as Blood’s Bay… (Source: Rosslyn Dock House & Crystal Spring Farm)

If this stretch of the Historic Essex waterfront was in fact referred to as, “Blood’s Bay” once upon a time, from whence the pirate-y epithet? I’d love to know.

The name appears in various vintage photographs of Essex, and to the best of my cobbled-together understanding, it does reference the yawning harbor(s) roughly delineated by Begg’s Point to the south and Sandy Point to the north.

This sepia stereoview (from my sprawling Rosslyn-related collection), captioned Blood’s Bay, offers a time capsule that you can explore further in my post, Blood’s Bay in Essex, NY.

Sometimes sleuthing starts with old photographs, veers into oral storytelling beside a bonfire, and then wanders the wilderness until some clever contributor, perhaps foraging, finds it and gathers it together with other findings. From tidbits, a whole. Wishful thinking? Possibly. And yet maybe, just maybe someone reading my daily dispatch fancifully reflecting on our Blood’s Bay boathouse will be able to offer some answers, some context, some clarity combining this iconic lakeside folly with the pirate patinaed name of an Essex harbor.

Until then, I’ll conjure Halloween vibes!