AUBURN – It’s strange stuff for a hoax: an Auburn man allegedly sent out an e-mail to maybe hundreds of people Wednesday, masked as a wire-service story that appeared in the Sun Journal. The story celebrated a court ruling that septic systems don’t have to be dug so deep around Lake Auburn.

Except that didn’t happen, and there was no story.

The e-mail appeared to lift language from a real Associated Press story that did appear in the paper about an entirely unrelated water issue.

“The State of Maine Drinking Water Program called asking, is this true?” said Normand Lamie, Auburn Water District superintendent.

Lake Auburn serves 6,000 customers in Auburn and 9,000 in Lewiston. The water supply is protected with rules like no swimming. This summer, homeowner Dan Bilodeau tried unsuccessfully to get the city to change its septic system leach field requirements around the lake, arguing that state rules requiring 15 inches in a watershed were deep enough; Auburn requires 36 inches around the lake.

Earlier this month, the City Council voted Bilodeau’s change down.

“This guy has been a little bit of a pest to us for quite a while now,” said David Jones, director of Lewiston Public Services. Jones said he got the hoaxed story directly from Bilodeau, part of a mailing list he believes is hundreds of people long.

Lamie took about a dozen concerned calls throughout the day. Jones heard from five or six.

“The Portland Water District sent one e-mail saying, what the heck’s going on?” Jones said.

“It reads like it was something that was really in the paper. … I could see how people could read it and think it was true.”

Messages left for Bilodeau weren’t returned. The story also appears on his Web site labeled “Halloween article SunJournal.”