I watched the cloud unfurling around the mountains, threatening to creep down the rocky hillside towards the water. I stood on the damp wooden jetty breathing in the moist air. The lake I looked upon was vast and lifeless, a grey expanse. I thought how cold it would be falling into the depths.

It was a booming tourist spot in the warmer months. The lake teemed with visitors splashing with their boats and lilos. The energy of hundreds of people must have shrouded the sense that here there was something deeply wrong.

The locals couldn’t put their fingers on it; there were plenty of stories.

“Don’t go swimming in Lake Eyrie,” the waitress had said as she poured me coffee. “The spirits want people to join them and they’ll take you under.”

“It’s not that,” an old man said, waving his hand from the table behind her. “They say there’s a curse on it. Don’t go messing with it, son, that’s all I can say.”

“Have you ever experienced anything there?” I asked, taking a sip of my coffee to give them time to remember.

“Of course, everyone round here has. I lost three hours of my time there when I was a lad. Couldn’t explain it,” the old man told me, nodding.

“I saw lights in the sky above it in ‘89,” another waitress added as she walked by.

It was all intriguing. After my meal, I bid goodbye to the locals, prepared in my lodgings, and drove to Lake Eyrie, the purpose of my trip.

Out there on the jetty, I took out my camera and started taking photos. I didn’t see anything strange at first, and it started sprinkling with rain from the shifting clouds, so I decided to take out my Polaroid for one last photograph. I captured myself with my back to the lake, grinning in case a newspaper wanted my photo some day or I could prove to my friends I visited.

The picture took a moment to be printed, and then I took it and waited for it to generate.

What I saw made my heart sink and my legs go weak.

A crowd of people were behind me, knee or chest deep in the water. They were white and partly transparent. Some had their arms raised as though waving. And yet Lake Eyrie was as still and as grey as ever to my eye, innocently and quietly lapping against the jetty.

I threw the photo back to the lake and fled to my car, sat inside it, only to find the car suddenly knee deep in water and rising. I gasped in terror, clambered out, and ran towards the road. I don’t know how far I ran, but it had gone dark, and the cafe was the most welcome sight I had ever seen. I flung open the door, and locked eyes with the waitress who went white herself, choked out: “It’s you!” and fell in a dead faint.

And it was then I realised that we had done this before.