Haunted House Tales

by Riley Amitrani

  The team of officers showed up early on the morning of the 5th of February with enough heavy equipment to erect a large block of flats and it was not long before they came upon a makeshift grave that contained an unidentified body. The remains were carefully removed to a forensic lab just north of London and Jack made the positive identification on the body. As well, a battery of DNA tests was performed to corroborate the son’s identification, just to eliminate the outside possibility of some barrister somewhere along the lines trying to use Jack’s ID as just a revenge motive. As soon as Nancy’s remains had been positively confirmed, an official arrest warrant was issued for John Carver and a transport was arranged to have him moved from the holding facility in Herriard to the regional correctional facility just outside London, where John would await his trial.

  Tomasz and Sally assumed the man would at some point confess to the murder, but at this point they were taking nothing for granted based on the description of his extremely aberrant behavior that they had heard from Jack. They met one last time with Jack in Herriard to wish him well now that the case against father seemed like a slam dunk.

  “Now what, Jack?” Sally asked.

  “Wow…” Jack mused as he scratched his head, “I’m not real sure. I have been so obsessed over this whole thing since I was in my teens that I actually have no idea.”

  That got a wry smile from Sally and a small chuckle from Tomasz.

  “We were actually surprised that you were still hanging around.” Tomasz added.

  “Guess I just wanted to see him loaded up and off to jail in London. It’s hackneyed, I guess, but it is closure for me.”

  The detectives nodded, shook Jack’s hand and headed off in their car to head back north to London to get their next assignment. Jack watched with great interest as they marched John in shackles from the holding facility in the middle of Herriard to a waiting police van. The few remaining officers still in town following the exhumation packed up and headed home as well, leaving the lone regional cop to drive John to his new home pending his trial. As John hobbled to the back of the van he looked over to see Jack staring at him through dark glasses. He hesitated just before he stepped into the back of the van, wondering if his son would try something. But all Jack did was stare at him, his arms crossed over his chest.

  The driver helped John into the van, locked the back door and walked around to get in the driver’s seat. As he went around the side of the vehicle, he heard his name called from just around the side of the brick holding facility.

  “Sergeant! Can you hang on a minute…I need you to sign off on one last set of transfer papers.”

  The officer sighed and headed back to the building. It just never ends, all this paperwork, he said to himself with disgust. A few minutes later, a lone officer reappeared and slipped in behind the wheel and drove slowly out of Herriard, heading north to the correctional facility near London. They had been on the road for about thirty minutes, when John Carver felt as if something was off. It had always seemed to him that these types of transfers were done by teams of two…at least on TV and in the movies that was the case…just for security he guessed. It had not dawned on him until just now that his transport was being handled by a single officer.

  And the route they were taking seemed to be not the most direct to get to London. In fact, they had gotten off the M3 and based on the position of the sun were heading south away from London on secondary routes. John looked through the glass to the front of the van and his driver did not look like the same man who had helped him into the van back in Herriard. This man was much thinner than that officer had been. His hair was longer and it suddenly hit John that the police force would surely not allow such a hair length.

  “Excuse me, Sergeant…” John yelled through the wire mesh. “You sure you know the way to London?”

  “Just a shortcut, convict….” the man replied as he slowed the van and eased off onto the shoulder.

  John felt his blood run cold as he looked out the side window to see the sun setting on the horizon and to see they were in a very isolated and rural location. But that was not what caused him to be as concerned as he was. It was that voice…where had he heard that voice before? It was so familiar, yet he could not immediately place it. The van came to a stop and he heard the driver get out and saw him begin to walk to the rear of the transport. Though he hardly needed them anymore, John could not help but see that the man was still wearing dark sunglasses. Then John remembered who owned the voice he had heard from the front of the van.

  The driver unlocked the back of the van and stepped inside to where John was shackled to the side of the panel inside. He eased off his sun glasses and just stared with a wicked, grim smile.

  “It’s…it’s you!” John exclaimed.

  “Yeah…” the man answered calmly. “How’s it going, Dad?”

  John felt his body shake with a fear he had never known in his life.

  Jack removed a long, serrated blade from a sheath on his hip and held it up for his father to get a full appreciation of.

  “Got a call from hell this morning, Dad. Bad news…they are full up. And…I thought I would save the good people of the UK the waste of time and money on your bogus trial. I’m just a guy trying to help out where he can while I put my life back together.”

  With no more words or warning, Jack drew the finely-honed blade across his father’s throat and squatted down just long enough to watch his old man choke on his own blood. When he was sure John had drawn his last breath and it was all over, he wiped the blood from the knife on his father’s prison garb and re-sheathed the weapon. Jack closed up the van, locked the back door and tossed the keys into the center of a small pond just over a small hillock from where the van was parked. He slipped out of the police uniform he had “borrowed” and redressed in jeans, a T-shirt and a leather jacket he had stowed in the paniers of his motorcycle which was well concealed behind some shrubs. He popped on his helmet and headed on down the road, south from London with no particular destination in mind.

  The Haunting of Westmore Hospital

  By Riley Amitrani

  “Gonna die in this small town

  And that's probably where they'll bury me”

  >John Mellencamp & Kenny Chesney, from “Small Town”, 1985

  Prologue

  Westmore, NH

  November, 1956

  The small town of Westmore, New Hampshire, just at the northern end of Lake Willoughby, bordering the Willoughby State Forest was unremarkable. It’s location, just half an hour or so from the Canadian border, did not make Westmore a locale for most New Englanders, even those desiring to distance themselves from the hustle and bustle of major cities, a prime choice. For decades it was the home to particularly hardy souls who could endure the long, harsh winters for the reward of memorable, but very short summers. Like most small villages, it had just a smattering of businesses. There was a local post office, a hardware store, a couple small cafes, and a general store. The general store was adequate for items of necessity or emergency, but for the small population, they had to drive quite a distance to reach a major town for groceries or anything else of substance.

  For outsiders, it might be looked on as a major inconvenience, but the residents of Westmore just seemed to take it in stride, relishing their isolation and self-reliance to live there. In the late 1940’s, a project was launched to construct the East Brownington School, located in the town of the same name. It was primarily put up in response to the boom of births following World War II, as people from Westmore and the surrounding towns realized a need for a more substantial local school was needed. At the same time, the leaders in Westmore, not official mind you, but those who took a leadership role out of necessity, lobbied for some sort of accompanying medical facility to accommodate what they foresaw as an answer to the possible rise in families.

  They joined with the other communities in the county, and funds were appropriated from the state to construct the Orleans Count
y Regional Hospital. Due to space availability and land costs, Westmore was chosen as the site for the new facility. The hospital was a huge success, with everyone from miles around praising the idea and the care they could now receive without having to travel miles in case of a severe medical emergency. As the hospital grew and matured, it attracted a number of medical professionals that found Westmore much more to their liking than other more populous cities. Of all the new physicians and supporting staff that slowly trickled in to the new hospital, the most notable was that of Dr. Frederick Malone.

  Malone had been practicing in southern New England for just a few years, but his reputation and skill and diagnostic intuition had made him well-known from Connecticut to Maine. The administrators of the county hospital were pleasantly shocked when Dr. Malone contacted them for a position they were looking to fill as the hospital grew. The doctor could have most likely have had his pick of most any hospital in New England, or elsewhere for that matter, but upon interviewing him, they were soon convinced of his insistence that he was looking for just what they had available. Dr. Malone came on board and was soon taken into the fold of Westmore as if he had always been there. Indeed, it was impossible to find one of his patients or family members thereof that did not praise the man to the heavens.

  The East Brownington School as well flourished and expanded along with the hospital, the students there often making up the majority of Dr. Malone’s patient base. Ordinarily, word of a situation as this would have brought in more and more people looking to escape all the downsides of large cities, but for whatever reasons, Westmore remained a well-kept secret. And the residents were thrilled. The last thing they wanted was for their beloved home to get overrun with outsiders. For a few years, this idyllic and peaceful scenario went on. Even the turmoil of the 1960’s that seemed to be engulfing the country was just another news story for Westmore. It certainly looked disruptive and stressful on the evening news, but fortunately it seemed to not be touching them. The new decade, though, had its own particular brand of a black, dark secret in store for Westmore.

  At the Orleans County Regional Hospital, a string of unexplained and mysterious deaths began to crop up. At first it was just a single patient, and even though the man was young and in seemingly good health, no one gave it much thought. These things just happened from their perspective. And after all, they had the gifted Dr. Malone there to make sense of anything like this that arose. But as the months went by, the body count rose. In all cases, the patients who died had no indication of any current or previous serious conditions that would have indicated their sudden mortality. As the fifth death became public knowledge, the residents of the county demanded some answers. Just because the village of Westmore was well-removed from the furor of what was going on elsewhere in the country at the time, this did not mean rumors and conspiracy theories did not abound.

  In Westmore and surrounding towns, the news of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union was hard to avoid and ignore. And like a lot of other Americans, the residents soon had themselves worked up into a frenzy, sure that some clandestine, evil plot from Moscow was afoot poisoning them slowly, one-by-one. As the paranoia grew, the administrators of the hospital thought it prudent to have Dr. Malone speak in a local public forum to squash all the innuendo and speculation. They were sure if he could assure them that the deaths were from just natural disease states, the heightened fear in town would disappear. Dr. Malone, while caught off-guard and taken by surprise by the request, agreed to speak to the locals. A meeting was arranged at the town hall in Brownington and by the time they adjourned, the residents of the county seemed convinced that they were not the target of some Communist attack.

  Dr. Malone accepted the many thanks from his new neighbors as well as the accolades from the hospital administrators. But as he drove home that night, he knew things would never be the same. Malone had this compulsion. That was what he had always called it, anyway. One that no one knew about but himself. One that had been the driving force for his departure from his former position in southern New England. Malone did not understand where the impulses came from or how to control them. He had assumed that the stress of a busy and demanding practice in the south had brought them out, but even here in the small environs of Westmore, they had emerged again.

  Malone had considered getting some therapy to deal with this situation, but at the time, in his opinion, psychotherapy was at best worthless and at worst, damaging due to the therapies and techniques in vogue in that day. However, this was not what really kept the doctor from considering any help. When he was alone and had his thoughts all to himself, and was completely honest with himself, he had to admit he liked the compulsion. It was as much a part of his makeup as an arm or a leg. To remove the compulsion would be to no longer be the whole person he was…no matter how insidious it was. So, with this in mind, Dr. Malone went about his daily routines, tamping down the voices and the impulses. It would not, he told himself, do to continue on this path until the anxiety and apprehension in the area from the recent spate of deaths went away.

  With great effort and concentration, Malone kept his demons at bay and life in Westmore fell back into the same peaceful and serene state it had been for many years. But as time went by, and Dr. Malone began to lose his grip on controlling his inner beast, this was short-lived. Another of the sudden and unexpected deaths, almost identical in nature and description to the previous five happened. People in the area were no longer focused on the Soviet menace as the causative factor, rather wondering what exactly was going on inside the Orleans County Regional Hospital. When the administrators could no longer control the public outcry for answers, they succumbed to the pressure and launched an investigation, mostly to quell the constant demand for an explanation.

  At first, the investigation was launched just to placate the populace. None of the board members ever expected the internal inquiry to uncover anything. However, the longer they ran the investigation and the closer they looked into what had happened, the more suspicious the situation appeared. An initial red flag that arose was that the six deaths had occurred while the patients were under the direct care of Dr. Malone. On the surface alone, that was not overly circumspect, as the vast majority of the hospital’s patients had Malone as their attending physician. However, the young age and general good health of all of them, combined with having been seen by Dr. Malone seemed curious.

  It seemed the doctor’s experience and expertise would not align with what had happened, so the board called for a formal inquiry with Malone to get some answers they could take to the public. They were on the verge of public relations nightmare, and they needed to resolve this as soon as possible. When the chief administrator contacted Malone to inform him of their intentions, Malone knew it was all over. He readily agreed to meet with the board members the following morning, but he knew as well as anyone, that the truth would immediately come out. There was no way, even with his expertise and background that he could explain away or cover up this thing any longer.

  The conference room at the hospital was packed the following morning as the administrative staff waited anxiously for the arrival of their chief of hospital operations. As time dragged on and Malone had not appeared, they sent one of the board members to his office to retrieve him. This tardiness was well out of the doctor’s character, and they were sure some unforeseen emergency had arisen or perhaps the good doctor had taken ill. In just a few minutes, the man walked back to conference room on uneasy legs, holding a folder of papers in his hands. He looked up, pale and ashen as if he had fallen ill himself or had seen something awful.

  “What is it, John?” the head of administration asked, “Did you find Dr. Malone?”

  The man looked up, appearing as if he might be sick, and just nodded weakly as he held out the paper.

  “I did, sir…” he replied in a shaky voice.

  “Well?”

  “I think you had better read that and then come with me…”

  Th
e papers were passed from member to member, and soon each had taken on the pasty and pale complexion of their colleague. One by one they arose and followed the man down the long hallway as he stepped aside to let them peer into Malone’s large office just off the corridor before it branched to the clinical exam rooms. Hanging from the strong support beam that ran over the center of the office was the inert corpse of Dr. Frederick Malone. A few board members gasped at the sight and Mrs. Yarrow fainted. James Harrigan, the chief administrator had John call the police as they filed back down the hallway to the conference room after Mary Yarrow had been revived.

  The papers that John had retrieved from Malone’s office had not indicated his suicide, only an explanation for what he had done. Malone had taken full responsibility for the six deaths, explaining in some detail as to the inner compulsion he could no longer control. It had been with him since childhood, apparently, and while he could control it for short periods of time, it had become impossible for him to keep it at bay in the long term. The board sat in stunned silence as they waited for the police, all wondering how none of them could have seen this While Malone had taken responsibility for the deaths, there was no indication anywhere in any of the documents of an apology or any semblance of remorse.

  Years went by, and the memory of the Frederick Malone incident faded from Westmore, but it never fully vanished. It was still the tale that the older kids told the younger ones at Halloween for a good scare. In deference to the families of the victims of Dr. Malone, the old Orleans County Regional Hospital was demolished and a new facility, renamed the Westmore Memorial Hospital was rebuilt. It memorialized the six victims. However, what was not made public knowledge in the aftermath was that even in the new facility, Dr. Frederick Malone seemed to still be in residence. Late at night, or when there were few people around, nurses and other personnel reported having heard odd sounds…or seen things move on their own.