Haunted House Tales

by Riley Amitrani

  When a young man, her grandfather had farmed as well as done some fishing and crabbing when the bay had been young and unpolluted. His place was just off the water and she had gone there every summer she could remember enjoying the change of scenery from Suffolk. It was in his small cottage on the river that she had first become aware of her ability to tap into and, at least from her perspective, communicate with spirits. Initially, it had frightened her when these visions came to her, but when she finally figured out that the spirits she was seeing meant her no harm, she just took it as it was. It was not until many years later, that she discovered this was a unique thing for her. She had always just assumed everyone could do this.

  However, when she got odd looks and laughter from the adults around the Eastern Shore when she talked about this, Arianne kept her interactions with what she came to describe as her “special friends” to herself. The adults thought her either a “bit touched in the head” or just a little girl with a vivid imagination looking for attention. Her great-grandmother was the only one who took her seriously. To Esther Abrams, her grandmother’s Mom, it was no joke or a plea for attention. Esther had the gift as well. Arianne finally felt more at ease with her sightings as a child when she sat at Esther’s feet and listened to the old woman regale her with stories of her own connections with long-deceased beings.

  Esther told Arianne stories of how there had been old shacks and houses along the Eastern Shore which had been used for slave quarters before and during the Civil War. This was the bulk of her experience with seeing and communicating with spirits. They were not malevolent beings, just entities that had found it impossible to move on to their next destination in time based on how they had suffered in mortal life and the violent ends to which a number of them had come to. For Arianne, this was the same type of experience she had been having at her grandfather’s old homestead. Not the ghosts of slaves being psychically tied to their old homes, but other entities that had a long historical attachment to the land there, unable or unwilling to move on.

  And now, Arianne thought again of the old man’s reflection in the bathroom mirror of Harmony House leering back at her with a considerable degree of bad intent. It was the first time ever that she had encountered a potential spirit with a malevolent personality. At least that was what had occurred to her in the brief glimpse of him that she had caught the day before. But oddly enough, it did not frighten Arianne. It just made her curious. Just as the image of the man had come to her again, it seemed to evaporate from her mind like a vapor, leaving her wondering why. She got up to walk around the room and ponder this odd bit of memory. As she was making her third pass around her father’s desk, Arianne spotted an old folder of historical clippings stuck in between some large volumes on the bookshelf.

  She did not know why at the moment, but the jutting, frayed folder jammed to overflowing with old newspaper and magazine articles caught her eye. As she slid the flimsy file from its place on the shelf, Arianne recalled how her father had collected bits and pieces of what he considered important and significant events through time in Suffolk and the surrounding towns. He had always talked about putting them all together into a book one day, but as far as Arianne could tell all he had ever done was to continue stuffing the articles into the folder. To her knowledge, no book had ever been written…or even started for that matter. With nothing more to do to occupy her mind and time until Jack got off from work at the bar, Arianne took the folder of collected material back to the sofa to see what her father had been stashing away about the area all these years. However, as she approached the sofa to sit, an inner envelope—one of those oversized brown things often used to shuttle papers back and forth between offices of a business—fell from the main file folder. Arianne set aside the thick, bulging folder and bent over to retrieve the fallen envelope.

  She flipped over the aged, brown envelope from the side with the familiar red string that was used to secure the contents, as it had been wound back and forth between the envelope’s main body and the opening flap. There were no names on the various lines available indicating where the envelope had been or was to go to next. But when she flipped the whole thing over, on the front of the envelope was a simple script in her father’s own hand:

  Harmony House

  Circa 1700 - 1975

  Harmony House: Work In Progress

  Suffolk, Virginia

  June 26, 1998, 10 PM

  Arianne froze at the words she was seeing on the envelope. She had been about to sit down again, but once she saw the words, she found herself in a squat-like position hovering over the sofa cushion, neither standing up straight nor sitting down and seemingly unable to do either at the moment. It could not be merely coincidental nor synergistic, she thought to herself as she finally forced her legs to unhinge and gently lowered herself back onto the sofa cushion. But even as she sat again on the supple leather of the sofa, Arianne just stared at the unopened envelope trying to understand what had just happened. If her father had remembered about this packet of stuff on Harmony House, why had he not given it to her? It seemed that just out of pure consideration he would have wanted her to have it. Unless he had just forgotten about it? Or maybe she thought, there was something here he had not wanted her to see?

  She placed her palms flat on the envelope as it lay on her thighs, hesitant to go further. But the longer she thought about it, the more ridiculous her last consideration had been. Most likely, he had just forgotten he had the envelope at all. Citing the lack of a completed book or even a book in progress as evidence, Arianne figured he had just forgotten about the whole project and that the entire massive collection of clippings had been untouched for years until she had dislodged the bulky tome just now. With that conclusion reached, she exhaled deeply, flipped the envelope back over, and undid the red string from its figure-eight configuration and emptied the contents onto the cushion next to her.

  Arianne separated the myriad of contents into categories from newspapers, magazines, and then just handwritten notes that her father must have gotten by word of mouth she supposed. A lot of the material was repetitious and covered a lot of the details surrounding what she already knew about Harmony House. The bulk of the articles and notes were detailed accounts of events that had drawn her to the place originally: that it had a long and well-documented history of bad luck and sorrow and even murder. Just as she was about to gather it all up again and dump it all back into the envelope, she came across a very worn and yellowed article from what looked like an old newspaper article from a date she could not make out due to the age of the paper it had been printed on.

  The article’s body was only partially readable, but from what Arianne could discern it involved a series of gruesome and grisly murders that had been attributed to a drifter. He had not lived in Harmony House per se, but from the way the article described it, he had used the abandoned and empty house to perform his short but brutal reign of terror in Suffolk. The man, called only Brewster in the article, had escaped police capture for months, only to be finally surrounded and lynched by the locals before any authorities could intervene. They had hung him from a high thick branch of an ancient oak tree out behind Harmony House.

  Arianne let the article drop to her lap as she thought back to their tour of the grounds and though she could not swear to it absolutely, she was pretty sure she knew the tree the article was referring to. Even as he was being hung following what the article detailed as an especially brutal and relentless beating, Brewster was said to have sworn vengeance against the populace of Suffolk and witnesses to the hanging told of many downturns following his death and burial in an undisclosed grave nearby: crop failures, unexplained small viral and bacterial-related plagues, and long stretches of both drought and flooding when neighboring towns were not affected.

  Arianne thought no more of it as she finished what she could of the article and was about to return it to its place among the other papers as well until she noticed a second page attached to the main art
icle. She flipped the page over and there staring her in the face was the same face she had seen—or thought she had seen—in the mirror of the bathroom. Arianne stopped breathing and just stared at the old photo, mesmerized by the cold, dead-looking black eyes of the man. Even though it had been just a fleeting vision for her, Arianne knew it was the same man…the eyes were the giveaway. Her hands trembled as she continued to look, unable to let the paper go or remove her gaze from that face. She felt an icy shiver race up her spine and she supposed this was what writers were trying to describe when they said a person’s blood ran cold…

  A sudden new clap of thunder and a blinding bolt of lightning came almost simultaneously, causing Arianne to jump in her seat and finally break the spell that the photo following the article had seemed to have cast over her. She dropped the papers suddenly as if they had burned her fingers and then she stuffed it away, putting the envelope back into the main folder and returning the overflowing file to its home on her father’s bookshelf. She paced back and forth, like a tiger in its cage, trying to erase what she had just discovered from her mind. On one hand, this cemented in her brain the absolute certainty that Harmony House was what she had thought it was. Perhaps this should have gladdened her heart. It was just what she and Jack needed to launch their business. But on the other hand, there was something about this man…she supposed she now had a name for him…Brewster…that was making her wonder if maybe she and Jack might be biting off more than they could chew.

  June 27 - July 5, 1998

  Jack had stopped by her house late the night before to say goodnight but did not stay over as they had planned as his shift at the bar had been brutally busy and he was exhausted. Arianne had wanted to fill him in on what she had discovered, but in his fatigued state of mind and body, she knew this was not the time. Also, she was afraid that on some level she might be creating something that existed only in her own mind. As she arose that morning she began to suspect more and more that this might be the case. She must have been in a highly excitable state as she looked through that folder. Perhaps in a state of extreme suggestiveness to believe the connection between an old faded photo from a newspaper and a 2 - 3 second glimpse in a mirror were identical. Jack would think her mad.

  She went for a quick run early that morning to try and clear her head of it all and then drove over to Jack’s folks’ place to see if he had heard anything back from Marilyn. She joined him with his parents and Jack’s younger sister, Emily, for breakfast, feeling better, but still a bit unhinged from her research the night before. Being around Jack’s family, who she had known forever, helped and the light and easy banter lightened her mood considerably. Emily had a soccer match over in Willowbrook and Mr. and Mrs. Sawyer loaded her up with all her gear saying to they wanted to hear about their bid on Harmony House as soon as they had heard something. No sooner than they had driven down the street, than Jack’s phone rang and it was Marilyn telling them their bid was acceptable and asking them to stop by her office when they could to get all the contracts and other paperwork for the closing initiated.

  “No negotiation or anything?” Arianne asked as Jack hung up.

  “Nope. I am sure she just is glad to be done with it. Apparently, we are the only boobs in Suffolk, or anywhere else for that matter, that have no problem with fixing up a haunted house.”

  “Apparently…” Arianne replied. “Even at the price we offered.”

  Jack looked at her and laughed with her as they hugged warmly knowing the first step toward their new life together had just been accomplished. Once all the paperwork had been filed, Marilyn gave them the OK to go ahead and begin moving in. As a bonus, she agreed to cover them with the liability insurance she had been carrying while the place was empty. There was no concern over waiting for current owners to move out or anything, so Jack and Arianne began collecting their respective possessions from each of their parents’ places and transferring them to Harmony House. After a few days, they were as moved in as they could be with the meager assortment of stuff they actually had, but neither Jack nor Arianne could have cared less. They finally had their own place and they would soon be launching the business that they were sure would be hugely successful.

  After the last load of stuff was brought into the house, Arianne looked at Jack and smiled, her concerns over Brewster long forgotten.

  “Where do we even start?” she asked, looking around at what felt to her like an endless series of projects to make the interior really livable.

  “I guess the stuff we cannot see is a priority,” Jack replied. “I’ll give my Dad a call so he can get the electrician and plumber over here to do their thing. In the meantime, I guess we can tackle the cosmetic issues. Why don’t you make a list of stuff—you have a better eye for this than me—and you know what will make you more comfortable initially. I’m just a guy. I can live with anything. Then give me the list and we can figure out a priority of what to attack first.”

  “Deal!”

  The electrician and plumber apparently had their work cut out for them as they were in the house working on and off most of the following week. Jack hoped based on how much they had to fix that his Dad was not getting the short end of the stick on this “trade for services” he had mentioned. While the wiring was replaced and leaks fixed and new pipes installed where needed, Jack and Arianne replaced floorboards and gave the place an overall scrubbing and cleaning that looked as if it had been ignored for a long, long, time. After all of this was done, they added a few area rugs to the new gleaming hardwood floors and over the stretch of a few very late nights repainted the entire interior themselves. As the last touch of paint was applied, Jack and Arianne sat down on the kitchen floor and toasted each other with cold bottles of beer. It was not perfect yet, but they had put a huge dent in the to-do list and for now, it was fine. They both realized that an old house would need constant attention and that there was still lots more to do, but they needed to get settled and begin focusing on the new business.

  While all the renovations were ongoing, they had been staying with their parents, but as soon as the paint had dried, they decided it was time to officially move in and get a better assessment of the house in relation to its spirit population. Arianne had been so busy with all the chores of getting the place presentable with Jack that Brewster had been relocated to the far recesses of her mind. He was still floating around in her subconscious, but she had really begun to question the validity and truth of that article now. Arianne had continued to feel the presence of something in the house each day they had been working, but she was sure the entity’s true presence was being held at bay from all the activity and noise and clutter. Certainly, their first night alone in Harmony House would be the true test of who or what it was and how they could transform its presence into a basis for launching “The Harmony House Ghost Hunters”.

  Harmony House Ghost Hunters Is Launched

  Suffolk, Virginia

  July 5, 1998, 10 PM

  After they ate and cleaned up the dinner dishes, Jack and Arianne got down to business. Jack readied the camera he had gotten from an old photography studio that had gone out of business recently while Arianne set up and calibrated the electromagnetic field (EMF) meter she bought off the internet with her severance check from the diner. Though often dismissed by skeptics for the purposes Arianne wanted to utilize it for, the EMF meter measures fluctuations in ambient electromagnetic fields. Paranormal researchers believe specific entities have the ability to manipulate these fields, therefore the meter is used to detect the sources of such fields or possible changes in the fields indicating the presence of such entities. Current paranormal professionals rely on this as a basic piece of equipment to document and promote potential communication with the spirit world.

  Their plan was to have Jack ready to record activity indicated by the EMF meter. For their initial experiment, Arianne set up a couple of wooden chairs by the meter in the side room closest to the foyer where she had felt the strongest sense
of entities from the first day they had visited the house. The next step, like much research regardless of the field, was a waiting game. The variables are set and then the observers sit back and wait to see what will happen, ready to record the results of their setup. They were alternatively anxious and excited as they waited patiently, knowing that if they could prove Harmony House was home to the spirit world, and that they could in turn document such entities and then whisk them on their way to their proper locale, they could make a strong case for being hired as professionals in the ghost hunting business.

  The house remained quiet for a long time, the only sound a soft ticking of a wall clock in the foyer. Jack remained prepared to capture any activity on the camera, while Arianne looked at her watch. It had been almost a half hour now since they had set up their equipment, and despite her certainty that they were in the ideal location for documentation, Arianne was beginning to get antsy. Just as she was about to give up and suggest they move the meter to another location, they both stopped in mid-sentence and froze.

  “Did you hear something?” Jack asked quietly.

  He was about to say more, but Arianne held up a hand indicating for him to be still. He was sure he had heard something from above them, but now he was not so sure as the house was silent again. Then, with no warning, a loud banging sound started up from upstairs. Both Jack and Arianne snap their attention to the ceiling as the banging got louder and more consistent. She looked over and the needle on the EMF meter was slapping back and forth in a wild frenzy of motion.