Haunted House Tales

by Riley Amitrani

  “Um…everyone try and stay calm…but I do not think this is paint…”

  “If not paint, then what…” Josh began, but before he finished his reply, he realized what Sabrina was saying.

  “You mean…” Wendy began as well.

  “Looks and has the feel of blood to me…” Sabrina replied. “I’m no expert, though. I’d not bet my life on it, but it seems likely.”

  “Oh, damn!” Josh exclaimed. “I say we beat feet before we make that wager.”

  “I second that motion…” Wendy added.

  Sabrina had to agree. This whole thing was spiraling way out of her comfort zone now. Before agreeing with her partners, though, Sabrina looked down and spied an old leather-bound book in the crib tied shut with twine. The cover was blank save an elaborate and faded but once golden embossed crest in the center, just visible through the coils of twine. It was small—maybe only six to seven inches square with perhaps less than a hundred pages total—and giving the appearance of the passage of time as the cover was straining to fall off. The twine was all that was holding the volume in place. A voice in her head told Sabrina to pick it up before she had the team retreat. Perhaps the voice spoke to her, and this is why the door was thrust open…to get us to see this mysterious message on the wall…to find this diary or journal or whatever this is…

  No sooner than Sabrina had reached down and grasped the book, then all hell broke loose in the playroom. Books on the shelves flew from their perches, and the ones they were not able to avoid began to batter them at will. Overhead lights and a couple of lamps on side tables flashed to near-blinding brilliance and then went dark over and over until the bulbs in the settings shattered sending tiny bits of the bulbs across the room at them as well. They ducked and bobbed and weaved as they ran into one another in a wild panic as they tried to protect themselves and find the door to the hallway. The toy chest blew open, and all manner of toys went airborne as if possessed and taking part in some macabre dance, perhaps caught in a nonexistent whirlpool of air.

  It was odd, but all Josh could think of was the old Disney film, “Fantasia” when Mickey Mouse became a temporary sorcerer. The crib rocked in a mad and raucous rhythm slamming into the wall below the message of blood until the posts dug into the drywall and began to spray the floor with debris. Paintings joined the book brigade and drawers opened and closed in raid repetitions as the whole room seemed to begin to vibrate and rumble as if alive. Josh definitely had enough. He broke the semi-trance he had fallen into over the whirlpool of toys and herded both Sabrina and Wendy toward the door. Just as he rushed them into the corridor and then dove to safety himself, the door to the room slammed shut just as violently as it had opened. They lay in a panting heap on the hallway floor and listened as the house again went quiet. Just the rain remained audible. Josh glanced over at Sabrina with a look she knew well: the “I told you so look.”

  “Don’t say it, Josh,” she warned firmly, “just do not say it…”

  Josh had known her long enough not to make that mistake again. He had done it once when they were first dating, and the fallout had been enough never to have him utter those words again. In fact, he was now regretting he had even looked her way. Sure…he was thinking just that…but he had not realized his facial expression must have betrayed his thoughts. Note to self, Josh thought…be careful in the future when dealing with this highly intuitive woman…

  Instead, Josh stood shakily and asked if they were alright.

  “Just some minor cuts…maybe some bruises tomorrow, but nothing major…” Sabrina replied as she shook some bits of glass from her hair.

  “Me, too…” Wendy added as she rose, checking the camera for damage.

  However, as they all stood and took inventory of equipment and their bodies, an eerie and spine-tingling moan arose. It seemed to be coming from the playroom, and they were sure if not for the closed door that it would be hideously louder than it was. The moan began low and resembled someone in minor distress, but after a few seconds, the moan morphed into a major wail. This was no moan of discomfort anymore. The wail resembled more of an aggressive warning or a prelude to attack. As they trembled and became glued in place from fright, the wail moved from the playroom and seemed to fill the entire lower level of the house.

  Without another word among themselves, the trio gathered themselves and raced away from the playroom down the corridor toward the foyer and their freedom from this place through the front door. The hallway runners skidded from under their feet, nearly making them lose their footing, but somehow, they managed to keep moving. That was, until they reached the junction of the hallway and the foyer…

  The Return of Glory Trevil

  St. Francisville, Louisiana

  December 7 - 8, 2015

  They ran back to the foyer with no more thoughts of the project at the moment, but only consumed with self-preservation. Josh returned to the front door to find it just as immobile and frozen in place as it had been earlier. Even using all of his body weight and trying to lever the door open by placing his feet on just the jamb was useless. When Sabrina and Wendy saw this, they went to the windows, but found them just as jammed in place as the front door. And true to Josh’s word, despite their feeling and appearance of being made of normal, regular glass, the panes seemed impermeable to all the objects they threw at them to shatter the glass. All manner of objects just bounced off harmlessly, though it defied any degree of logic or rational thought that Sabrina could conjure up.

  All that had changed in the time they had gone exploring was the constant and growing wail of the ghostly-sounding voice emanating from all around them. Seeing the attempts to escape the way they had entered the mansion no longer seemed to be an option, Wendy turned from the front of the house to suggest they try running down one of the corridors and out the back, as she seemed to remember a door that led off the kitchen at the very rear of the house.

  “Plan B?” Wendy asked as she gestured to the corridor on the opposite side of the house from the extremely disturbed if not haunted playroom.

  No one needed any more encouragement and, in a group, they fled down the corridor as the resounding wail finally began to fade and the mansion went quiet once again. In just a few seconds, they reached the kitchen and paused, all breathing heavily as they stopped to rest and try and make sense of what was going on.

  “How about that journal, Sabrina?” Josh asked as they seated themselves at the table.

  The thunder again shook the house as another bolt of electricity tore through the sky, throwing the kitchen into momentary bright illumination. However, this time none of that even phased the team…Sabrina assumed that it paled in comparison to what had just been awakened in the playroom.

  “Might as well,” she replied. “It is feeling to me like we were led there to find this thing, so maybe there is something in it to answer some questions about the mansion and Charles Wilder. See if the lights work, OK?”

  Josh tried all the switch panels all around the room, but none of them turned anything on. When Wendy saw this was not helping, she began to rummage through the drawers in the kitchen and finally came upon a box of tall tapered candles and some matches.

  “Guess these will have to suffice,” she said as she held them out for Sabrina and Josh to see.

  “Fire ‘em up, Wendy,” Josh replied.

  “Yeah…” Sabrina added, “at this point, they seem pretty applicable to the atmosphere anyway. What is more fitting for a ghost hunt than candles?”

  Josh and Wendy grimaced but did not laugh at her attempt at some black humor. Any other time or place it might have gotten a laugh, but neither of them could find a laugh in their situation at the moment. The candles did illuminate the kitchen nicely, but as Sabrina had been trying to emphasize in her joke, the flickering flames did create an added dimension of creep to the situation. She loosened the knot on the twine that was holding the journal together and then slipped it all off in one loose loop tossing it aside. The w
riting was hard to read. It was definitely in English, but the pages had aged, and the script was small and in the writing style of another era. As well, the characters had many flourishes that made going slow as Sabrina poured over the entries.

  “Can you make anything of it?” Josh asked as he peered down at the writing over Sabrina’s shoulder.

  “It’s hard to follow completely, but it is definitely a journal of some ilk. From the entries, which are dated, and from the narrative, I think we have found Suzanne Wilder’s diary. The first few pages are just daily commonalities, it seems…her thoughts and feelings as she went through her normal daily routines after she and the children first came to Daucourt Mansion once Charles was settled.”

  “So, nothing to answer what is going on in this place, then? Nothing that might explain that scrawled message on the wall of the playroom?” Wendy asked.

  “I’m just getting to the point in her entries where her children allegedly got poisoned…hang on.”

  Wendy sat patiently and waited on Sabrina while Josh took one of the candles and wandered around the kitchen, too wired up and nervous to just sit. After a few long and almost interminable minutes, Sabrina spoke again.

  “Guys! I think I can answer all the goings on here, including that message on the wall. Well…not who did it or how…though I have a wild theory, but this diary spills it all. And it is nothing that any article or person in the know here in St. Francisville has ever revealed. At least to my knowledge.”

  Josh strode back to the table and sat in a chair next to Wendy, waiting for the revelation.

  “OK…these past pages, the ones I assume were Suzanne’s last few thoughts before dying—killing herself according to the legend anyway—clearly illustrate a woman making a rapid and steady descent into madness driven by jealousy based on her husband’s reputation that was not well-known among his business dealings in town.”

  “Something tells me this is like nothing we have ever written about or covered before,” Josh commented.

  “Let me give you the summary, and then you tell me,” Sabrina replied.

  “Following the deaths of her kids, apparently Suzanne began to dig into the rumors surrounding Charles’—shall we say indiscretions—among other women in St. Francisville. There had been loose talk surrounding this for years, but Suzanne, like a lot of women—even today, I think—was in denial. Well, one day Charles appeared back home with this young child in tow.”

  “Uh-oh,” Wendy replied.

  “Yeah…uh-oh…and based on her suspicions and what she had supposedly confirmed about him, she just assumed it was from one of his extracurricular affairs. Long story short…Charles refused to discuss the allegation which only fueled her jealousy and anger, and one day, Suzanne finally just seems to have snapped. I guess she could not take the situation any longer—perhaps partly a personal insult from her husband and partly all the talk about them behind her back from the people in town. Whatever the case, Suzanne appears to have believed the child was born to him out of wedlock and she ended it.”

  “She killed him?” Josh asked.

  “Well…that is the legend. And this last entry describes just that plus more.”

  “The child as well?” Wendy asked with pain in her voice as it cracked.

  “That is what she writes here. If she had in fact begun to go a bit mad, I suppose her anger and jealousy flowed onto the child as well, even though it was an innocent. The last entry describes her fears if she was found out by the authorities of the day. She could not envision the remainder of her days either in an asylum or prison, so she took matters into her own hands preemptively.”

  “Wow…” Josh said as he sat back and tried to digest it all. “So now the message makes sense. And perhaps we have an additional ghost here that we did not anticipate.”

  “Additional?” Wendy asked.

  “Yeah…” Sabrina said jumping in, “we were assuming the ghost residents were the slave girl, Corrie and Charles Wilder. But I suspect the spirit of this child may be in residence as well.”

  “But is it possible that Suzanne is still attached to the place as well?” Josh asked.

  “Good point,” Sabrina replied. “I had not thought of that until you mentioned it, but she is most likely the author of that scrawl on the wall.”

  They sat in silence wondering what their next move was when a soft but audible explosion erupted from the front of the house, and soon both corridors were filled with flames that were rapidly consuming the old wood. Smoke began to flood the kitchen, and they all coughed and choked on the fumes. Josh tried the tap over the sink, but there was no running water. Nor could they locate any type of fire extinguishers. Wendy knew she had seen a door near the back of the kitchen off a walk-in pantry, but her brain was not functioning well as the smoke was overtaking them.

  Just when they thought that was it, the door of the pantry burst open and Glory Trevil rushed to their aid. The blast of fresh air helped to dissipate the smoke enough to let them gulp a few lungfuls of air and get to their feet, all three of them having collapsed to the floor. Sabrina looked up, her eyes watering heavily from the smoke, not sure who or what she was seeing or if the vision of Glory was even real. She hesitated briefly as her imagination took over, making her fear one of the ghosts had come to finish them off once and for all. Josh, though, recognized the old woman at once and went to Sabrina and Wendy to help Glory get them up and moving. They dove from the kitchen, which was just beginning to be touched by the growing fire and into the pantry. Glory got Sabrina back to her feet fully as Josh got under Wendy and raised her as well. They were about to flee into the yard behind the mansion, when…and to this day Josh and Sabrina have no idea why…Wendy went back.

  Josh thought he had heard her shout something about the diary and the camera, but he was not sure. Anyway, Wendy stumbled back into the kitchen dodging the few flames that had progressed there, holding a handkerchief over her mouth to ward off the smoke. Josh shouted for her to stop, but she either did not hear him or just did not want what they had done so far to be lost. Josh raced after her, but he was just a step too slow. As he came to the door leading into the kitchen, he saw the diffused form of Wendy through the smoke and flames as she reached out to grab the camera and stuff the diary into a pocket of her coat. He relaxed as he saw her turn to join him, but just as she moved forward toward Josh, a large timber from above broke loose and struck her solidly on the head.

  The camera went skittering across the room toward Josh’s feet, and the diary fell from her coat onto the tiled floor. Wendy, however, disappeared through the floorboards of the kitchen, where it was not tiled, the weight of the timber taking her crumpled and crushed body with it into the basement. Josh ran to the jagged opening in the floor where Wendy had disappeared, but it was too deep and too dark to see anything. He called and called for her, but got no response. It would haunt him forever, he knew, but based on the imminent danger facing him in the kitchen, he had no choice but to save himself. Acting on instinct, Josh snagged the shoulder strap of the camera and flung it over his back while simultaneously gathering the stray pages of the journal under one arm and ran for his life.

  He fell onto his hands and knees once outside again, retching and coughing while his eyes watered uncontrollably. Glory was attending to Sabrina. A nagging intuition told Josh it was too late for Wendy, but he refused to give up anyway. Looking around wildly, he finally spied a hose that was attached to an outside water cistern, and he ran to the vessel. He turned on the pump, and with water gushing from the hose, Josh ran to the rear of the house, the hose unwrapping from its holder in a blur as he inundated the kitchen and then the corridors finally dousing the majority of the fire which then just petered out having no fresh fuel to burn.

  He flew from the kitchen once again as Glory had gotten Sabrina to a seat on the patio out back. She tried to stand, but a combination of smoke inhalation and Glory’s grip held her down.

  “Where’s Wendy? Josh! Damnit, wher
e in the hell is Wendy?”

  “I’m going after her!”

  Sabrina once again tried to follow him, but Glory restrained her.

  “No child…” Glory said in a calming voice heavily tinged with her innate Creole accent, “you just be. Mr. Josh will get her…”

  Sabrina finally relented but could not hold off her tears. Glory comforted her, but before Josh went back again for Wendy, Glory knew what Josh only suspected at that point: Wendy was already dead. In fact, a reality that was discovered later, Wendy Newton was dead long before she fell through the kitchen floor to the cellar below. The timber that had struck her on the head had snapped her neck, and she died pretty much instantaneously. Josh however needed to confirm his suspicion and he raced to the storm door that provided access to the cellar with a large flashlight from the van.

  He was gone only a few minutes when he reemerged from the cellar, walking slowly, his head down, the light off. He walked dejectedly through the continuing pour of the rain to join Glory and Sabrina under a canvas cover at a patio table. With cold water dripping from his face and shoulders, he just looked at Sabrina and shook his head back and forth. Sabrina rushed to him and fell into a violent wave of grief and anguish, her body racked with sobs as she cursed to the skies at anyone who she could think of.

  Josh looked over her shoulder at Glory.

  “There was nothing you could have done, child…” she said softly, “the mansion took her long before you could have done anything.”

  “And you knew that before I went after her?”

  Glory just nodded, but kept his eyes in her gaze.

  “I think…” Josh began as he held Sabrina from falling, “that we need to talk. It seems you are more than you advertised, Glory. We just lost one of our partners in this business, and more importantly, a dear, dear friend. So, I think it is time for you to come clean…”