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Camber House is a derelict clapboard mansion on Cinder Road in Lochdam, standing not far from Caledonia Church along the lake. Built in 1907 as the residence for the director of the Camber Dam, it has stood all but empty for decades. Where the church is said to be the town's spiritual heart, Camber House is its psychological dark — and by long repute the most haunted house in Lochdam.
The steel man Edgar Camber came to Lochdam from Pittsburgh in 1903, to build the dam. With him came his young wife, Margareth, from Boston — a marriage arranged by her father to settle a debt with a friend. When Camber House was finished in 1907, the couple were briefly the toast of Blue Rock, two bright faces from the East with money and culture. But Edgar's temper soon showed. It fell first on the dam workers, and was later carried home. Sometimes Margareth was seen pale and frightened, as though carrying something heavy and unsaid.
Between 1908 and 1919 Margareth lost three pregnancies, and each time Edgar blamed her. In 1923 came a fourth and final loss. That night people heard shouting from the house; no one dared go in. The next morning Margareth failed to keep an appointment in town, and when the sheriff broke open a window, he found her in the upstairs bedroom with a knife driven into the belly and drawn up through the breast. Suspicion fell on Edgar at once, but the case would not resolve: he had been seen in Wenatchee that day, there was no sign of forced entry, and the doors had been locked from the inside. It was never formally solved, and Edgar was never charged.
In the years that followed, Edgar lived alone in Camber House. He was rarely seen in town, and when he was, he was gaunt and afraid, muttering to himself and glancing over his shoulder. Neighbours spoke of movement in the dark windows at night — even when Edgar himself was away — and of distant cries carried on the wind. People whispered that Margareth's ghost walked the house — that it wanted Edgar dead, as he may have wanted her years before. In 1942 Edgar was found hanged at the top of the stairs; but there was no stool beneath him, and no one could say how he had reached the noose. His death, too, was left officially unexplained.
The dam's next director visited more than once and would not move in. The house was let to dam workers, but none stayed longer than a few months. Its reputation kept buyers away for years.
The last family to live there came in the 1960s, and stayed for a couple of years. When the children tried to explain their experiences to their father, he would not listen, and blamed them for the drowning of the family dog in the garden well. That lasted until the night he himself was woken by a woman standing at the foot of the bed in a faint green light, drawing a knife from her own breast and gurgling: “Where are my children?”
Since then the house has stood empty, remembered mostly in the stories the old tell to frighten children away from it. It is said that anyone who passes by after sundown risks seeing the ghost of Margareth in the second-floor windows. Another tale holds that on the worst nights of rain a howling can be heard from beneath the wooden lid of the old well in the garden.
While most of Lochdam's abandoned buildings are locked away behind high fences, Camber House is one of the few homes left to rot in plain sight. In name it is still privately owned, but no one takes responsibility for either renovating it or tearing it down. So there it stands, waiting.
Lochdam Town · Vanguard Mine · The Mirror