The following is excerpted from Murder at Teal’s Pond: Hazel Drew and the Mystery That Inspired Twin Peaks, including the foreword by Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost and chapter one by David Bushman & Mark T. Givens.
FOREWORD
By Mark Frost
What’s the first “ghost story” you remember? One that left marks, if not scars. That gripped you with the singular chill of mortality introducing itself.
Mine came by way of my maternal grandmother—one for whom the words colorful and strange don’t begin to do justice—a more than apt stand-in for the archetype of the crone, one of mythology’s eternal guides to the underworld. The former head of the WPA’s music division and a charter member of the OSS in London during World War II, Betty Lawson Calhoun was brilliant, complicated, and an inveterate fabulist. Her family were city folks out of Troy, New York until the Spanish flu pandemic devastated the country in 1918 and Thomas Lawson decided to move his wife and two young daughters to the country.
So, to Betty’s ghost story: two local laborers, hill folk, staggering back up the mountain after a payday pub crawl in town—a weekly ritual—encounter something uncanny. Full moon. Clear, still night, early fall, with a whisper of winter in the air. As the men approach a small cow pond on the right, a desperate, loud, lowing moan fills them with fear. And then, hovering above the water in the moonlight, a glowing apparition that in their pickled minds assumes the shape of a struggling human form. The two drunks sprint home in terror, instantly sober, pledging to reform their ways.
Our eyes were like saucers. We drove by that cow pond every day on our way up and down the mountain. Haunted? Damn.
And then, with a cackle, Betty revealed that the next day a nearby farmer discovered one of his Guernseys had wandered off and gotten stuck in the shallows.
So I ask, innocently, why did they think it was a ghost in the first place?
Oh. Ten years earlier the body of a young woman, a murder victim, had been found floating in that pond. Betty offers this as a throwaway, a punch line, the end.
I didn’t take it that way. A real person died in that water. She never mentioned a name and, when pressed, remembered no details. As time passed, without knowing a single fact about this young woman—or if this story was entirely invented—the image of that poor, forgotten soul lodged in a corner of my mind.
Two years later in California, that feeling hit much closer to my life. While away at boarding school in Canada, a girl I knew well was assaulted and killed by a deranged young man. As time passed, and I learned more about the pervasive threat of sexual violence that women face on an everyday basis, these two dreadful events coalesced in my mind.
Twenty-five years later these conflated memories found fictional life as Laura Palmer in the television series Twin Peaks, which I created with David Lynch, Or rather, Laura Palmer became a way to explore and explain what might have happened to that lost girl in the pond.
After the show went off the air, I bought a place on that lake myself and began spending summers there for the first time in decades. It turned out a fellow I’d known since childhood had been equally obsessed with this story and for years had been digging to learn more.
She was real. She had a name. Twenty-year-old Hazel Drew—beautiful, blonde, and connected to a number of powerful men—died in that pond one hot July night in 1908. She was a local girl who’d moved to the city, encountered a new way of life, and got caught up in the fast lane. Her story became a regional and then a national scandal. Even Betty’s tall tale of the two drunks, 10 years later, mistaking a lost calf for Hazel’s ghost, turned out to be true.
I think of her whenever I pass Teal’s Pond. The ripples this murder created in that still water have continued to radiate around the world for 100 years. For all of our Hazels, this book is a monument of remembrance to their lost and stolen lives.
CHAPTER ONE
By David Bushman & Mark T. Givens
Dusk descends on the mountains of Taborton, though inside the woods it is already darkening. Listen and you can hear the humming of insects.
The cricket frogs call to her, like marbles clicking. The night is frightfully hot and still, though she shivers as an invisible gust of heat brushes past her, bending the patchy grass on the roadside as it sputters along and dies. Watch out for water snakes, she remembers; she has seen them here before: scaly, greenish-brown serpents with round heads, button-like eyes, and slender, banded bodies.
Am I doing the right thing? a voice in the back of her head tugs, but she manages to quash it.
The morning before last, she had woken up in the same bed she had almost every morning for the past five months, rising to the same melodies of chirping birds and the same view of the handsome homes across Whitman Court in fashionable East Troy.
Now, all that seems a distant memory.
She had left her parents as a teenager and, over the past five years, lived with and worked for three different families, but she wasn’t going to be a domestic servant toiling away for the elite of Troy forever, washing clothes and dishes and picking up after others’ children.
She had overcome her share of obstacles in life already. She had made plans and would see them through—whatever lay ahead, she was ready for it. She was fearless. Hadn’t a fortune-teller just warned her she would die a sudden death before year’s end? Hadn’t she simply laughed the dire prediction off?
Just then she hears a sound, a rustling in the trees. Campers? A drunken lumberjack? Probably just a deer or rabbit. She squints, peering deeper into the woods, but it is getting darker by the minute and she can’t make anything out…
Many women her age would have been spooked by Taborton this time of evening. Stories abounded of the dangers in these woods… Still, Hazel isn’t afraid. She knows these woods intimately, every twist and turn. She grew up in woods like these, not far from here, and visited often when her family lived nearby, as a refuge from all the pressures of her life.
The air smells of damp grass and rich dirt, and she inhales slowly, savoring it. What does it remind her of? Home…
She pauses to remove her black straw hat and stares briefly at the ostrich plumes… Her hair has dampened and matted in the heat. How many men had complimented her on her radiant blonde hair and glittering blue eyes?...
As the moon continues its ascent into the sky, she is suddenly overcome with weariness… She collects herself, clearing those thoughts from her mind, and continues to trudge up the hill. Destiny awaits her, just around the corner.
She hears the screeching of an owl, and then another rustling sound.
Someone is here.
Excerpted from Murder at Teal’s Pond: Hazel Drew and the Mystery That Inspired Twin Peaks by David Bushman and Mark T. Givens. © 2022 Published by Thomas & Mercer. All Rights Reserved.
