The Black Tarn

Mysterious Disappearance of an Innkeeper’s Daughter—A Discarded Lover’s Vengeance 

Five or six miles to the north of the small town of Brompton, in Cumberland, England, there is a mountain lake known as Black Tarn. In the neighborhood are sheep farms, and a few insignificant hamlets lie here and there around. In one of these, known as Hayton, a murder was recently perpetrated, accompanied by cruel outrage. At the east end of the village there resided one John Coulter, who kept a beer shop, and cultivated a small farm. He was a rough, uncouth man, addicted to drink, and when he was incapable of attending to his customers who came of a night for beer, his daughter, a comely girl of seventeen, waited upon them. He had a son, also, but he was in Carlisle, learning a trade, and seldom visited his native village.

Coulter was reported to be worth a few hundred pounds, and consequently passed in the neighborhood for a man of means. A young man named Armstrong had been courting his daughter, but he had been driven off by Coulter, for assaulting a farmer who was the latter’s friend. Armstrong had quitted the neighborhood, having, as was supposed, enlisted. At that time now referred to, Kate, Coulter’s daughter, was receiving as attentions from one George Routledge, the son of a grocer in Brompton.

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