Haunted House Tales

by Riley Amitrani

  “Mummy? Why are you in Henry’s room?” Jo turned around and saw Sean standing in the doorway. He was holding his comfort blanket.

  Life would be better without him.

  “How do you know this is Henry’s room?” Jo said.

  You could be free to be the artist you want to be, to be the person you want to be, without him.

  “He told me. We play in here together sometimes.”

  “How do you get in here?” Jo said. This was all too much. She didn't understand how her little boy knew so much.

  “Henry lets me in. He says this room is his secret room.” There was a sound of running water. Jo turned. There was a tin bath in the corner she hadn’t noticed. It was full of hot water. The surface was moving as if it had just been poured in.

  “Come here, Henry. It’s time for your bath,” Jo said. She gestured to Sean. The words that were coming out of her mouth weren’t hers. She grabbed hold of Sean. He looked confused and wriggled as she grabbed his wrists.

  “I’m not Henry! I’m Sean,” he protested. Jo ignored his cries. She lifted him up and put him in the bath, even though he was dressed in his pyjamas. “What are you doing mummy?” He said. Jo pushed him until he was sitting down. Then she placed her hand on his head and pushed him underwater. He started to struggle. He reached and grabbed her arm, but he was too little and weak to stop her. Jo could see a reflection in the water. It was the face of a little boy, Henry, watching Sean as he wriggled.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Gavin screamed behind her. She turned around. He was stood in the doorway. He ran over and grabbed Sean out of the bath. He hugged him tightly. Sean coughed and spluttered. Luckily, he had only been underwater for a few seconds. He started to cry and held onto Gavin tight. Jo looked around the room. It was old and dusty and dirty again. The bathtub was not full of clean hot water, but of dirty rainwater which had dripped in through a hole in the ceiling. Sean was covered in dirty water. “Are you crazy? Go back to bed.” Gavin shouted. Jo did as she was told. She went to the bedroom and put the light on. She no longer felt like sleeping. She wanted to see Sean, and to say sorry to him for what she had done. She wanted to see if her baby boy was ok. She went to the door and tried the handle. It wouldn’t open. Gavin must have locked it from the outside.

  “Let me out Gavin, I want to see Sean,” she shouted. “Gavin!”

  “You stay in there, Jo,” he hissed. “I’m looking after Sean. I don’t know why the hell you did that, but you are not coming near the children until you calm down.” Gavin stamped off, leaving Jo alone.

  Jo went to the window and looked outside. Perhaps she could climb down the ivy and then get in through the front door. She had to see the children. She couldn’t bear to leave things like this. She looked out the window and saw something below. It was Henry. He was stood outside on the patio looking solemnly at the ground. He looked up at Jo and waved at her. It was then that Jo realised Henry wasn’t an evil spirit. She looked at his face, and it was as sweet and innocent as Sean’s or as Emily’s. He wasn’t trying to hurt her. He was trying to tell her something. Jo had a thought. She needed to look at the paintings and the pictures the children had drawn. But the door was locked. Gavin had locked her in. She ran to her dresser and looked through the contents. She needed something to pick a lock. But there was nothing. She could sense something behind her. She spun around. There was the sound of something jangling. She looked to her wardrobe. It was one of the few antiques that came with the house that was actually salvageable. The bottom drawer beneath the wardrobe was ajar. It had been locked before, and she hadn’t got around to removing the lock. Now it was wide open. She opened it up. Inside was a key. She took it and tried it in the lock in the bedroom door. It was the perfect fit. She turned it and opened the door. She could hear Gavin in the bathroom giving Sean a bath. She could hear Gavin singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to him. Gavin hated singing to the children, but he knew that it soothed them. Jo felt ill. She had no idea what physical or mental damage she had caused to Sean by doing this. She walked past Emily’s shut door to get to the spare bedroom she was using as her artist studio. She went in and silently closed the door behind her. She put the light on and looked at the piles of drawing and paintings she had done since she had moved. She realised that most of them had focused on the house, and more specifically, the garden. She had always felt there was more to the garden then she had first thought. She looked at her paintings. She saw the one with a boy standing next to the pond. And another with the boy at the attic window, the drawing where the boy had appeared out of nowhere. She had also done a painting of a boy swimming underwater. There was another of a fish swimming in a bathtub. Jo looked at them. They must be telling her something. She had been possessed to try and drown poor Sean. Is that what happened to Henry? Had he been drowned in the house all along? But where was the body? Perhaps the parents lied about what happened as they did not want to be caught murdering their own child. As she was looking at the pictures, a child’s toy came flying into the bedroom. It fell onto the floor, and she bent down and picked it up. It was a paper kite. If this had happened only this morning, it would have scared her, but Jo was working out that perhaps Henry wasn’t to be scared of. It was the parents who had possessed her and Gavin. Jo went back to the desk, but her pictures had been moved. The one on top was of the boy standing next to the pond. But the picture had been changed. Somehow, in the few seconds she had been looking at the kite on the floor, the picture had been changed. The boy’s reflection in the water showed him to be trapped underneath the water like he was stuck there as if the surface was a pane of glass that was stopping him from escaping. Jo looked at it and tried to figure out what it means.

  “The pond. Henry’s body is in the pond,” she said out loud. She stood up, knocking over her chair as she did so. It clattered on the floor. She headed to the hallway and down the stairs.

  “Jo? How’d you get out of the bedroom?” Gavin called from upstairs. “A good wife should do what her husband tells her to do.”

  Jo ran faster, realising that Gavin was still possessed by the man who used to live here. She headed outside to the garden and ran over the pond. It was dark, and she almost ran straight into it. She stopped as she got to it.

  “Jo!” She heard Gavin shout behind her. He was marching out to her. His arms were swinging by his side, his hands in tight fists. This was the first time she had ever felt scared of her husband. She took off her dressing gown, leaving her just in her pyjamas. She walked into the water, her feet feeling the cold water and mud and underneath. She walked forward until the water was up to her waist. She felt around in the water, her hands just coming into contact with algae and plants.

  “Jo if you don’t get out of that water right now!” She heard him shout. Jo was desperate. She took a deep breath and dipped her head beneath the surface of the water. She opened her eyes, which stung from the dirty water. She could hear Gavin shouting, but she didn’t care. She looked around at the bottom of the pond. And then she saw it. A child’s skeleton, covered in algae and weeds. It was at the bottom of the water, right at the deepest part. She waded closer to it. She bent down and managed to scrape the dirt off of the skeleton. She managed to lift up the remains. Holding it close to her, she tried to stand up. But her hair was caught in something. She used a hand to try and get it free, but she was stuck. She pulled hard, trying to rip her hair, but she couldn’t. She really needed to get to the surface and breathe. If she died now, her son's last memory of her was of her trying to drown him. She felt dizzy, and the need to inhale was getting too much.

  A shining light came down from above. She thought that this was the end. Then a small child swam towards her. It was Henry. His little fingers tenderly freed her hair. She looked at him. He smiled at her and embraced her. Then he swam away, and the light was gone. Jo tried to push to the surface, but even though her hair was free, she didn’t have the energy. She felt herself slipping deeper and deeper
into the water and resigned herself to her fate. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth and let the water fill her lungs.

  New Beginnings

  Sean and Emily took the flowers from Gavin and walked up to the grave. They turned towards him. He nodded in reassurance. They laid the flowers down on the gravestone then ran up to Gavin and gave him a big hug. Sean was wearing his first suit. Emily was in a new dress and Gavin in a suit. They made sure that they were dressed for the occasion. The graveyard was peaceful that day, and the sun had shone for the whole ceremony. A robin flew around the cemetery, as if it was listening in.

  “Shall I say a few words?” Gavin said. The children nodded.

  “Yes, daddy, you can do it,” Sean said. “Mummy, are you going to join us?” Sean looked behind him. Jo was sat on a bench behind them. She had a large scarf wrapped around her like a shawl. It had been two weeks since the pond incident. She still couldn’t remember much of what had happened. She knew that she had been in a coma for two days after the accident. When she came too, the doctors were shocked. She had been deprived of oxygen for so long that they had thought she would be brain dead. When she woke up, she had calmly asked a nurse for a cup of tea and sat up in bed asking to see her family. The nurse in the room looked like she was going to go into shock. Gavin and the children had been so pleased that she was ok. Sean had all but forgotten about what had happened that night. Emily was pleased to have her mum back. Gavin had finally believed that they had been possessed by ghosts, but luckily Jo had broken the spell.

  Whilst Jo spent a few days in hospital recovering, Gavin had been visited by the police and by historians, keen to make sense of what had happened. He had passed on the research the man from the library had done on the house. The police came to the conclusion that Henry had died or possibly been murdered and to cover it up, the parents had dumped the body in the pond. They did not have enough forensic evidence to ascertain how he had died. Gavin and Jo knew that he had died through being drowned in the bath, but they couldn’t convey it. How would they have explained it, and who would have believed them?

  “Mummy, can I come and sit with you?” Emily said to Jo. She looked down at Emily, having drifted off into her thoughts she hadn’t noticed that she was there. Emily sat on the bench next to her mum and slipped her little hand into hers. Jo noticed that Emily wasn’t sucking her thumb anymore, though the shock of her mum being ill had been upsetting for her, she had also coped with it very well.

  “Are you ok, Emily? This is all rather a lot to take in.” Jo looked at Emily. They were having a funeral for a little boy who had died many, many years ago yet whose body had been in their garden. Jo half wondered whether Emily and Sean would be recounting this in therapy in the future. Emily nodded.

  “Yes. I’m glad we have had a funeral for Henry.” Jo sighed with relief.

  “Has Sean played with Henry since?” Jo asked her. Jo looked up to Sean, who was helping Gavin to cut back the weeds around some other children’s graves.

  “No, Sean said that Henry’s gone now.”

  Jo smiled. These weren’t the kind of conversations normal people had. “Why don’t you go and get Sean and daddy and we’ll go home. We’ll stop and get pizza. How does that sound?”

  “Pizza!” She shouted. Her eyes lit up as she went to tell Sean. They ran off in the direction of the car. Gavin walked over to Jo and sat down. He kissed her on the cheek.

  “Are you ok?” He said.

  “I’m fine. Thank you. A bit tired. But I can feel myself getting stronger every day,” she said.

  “That isn’t what I meant.” He said. “I meant, are we ok?”

  Jo turned and smiled. “Yes, we are.” She took his hand and smiled at him. They both knew that how they had treated each other was due to the spirits in the house. But since they had found the body, the house had returned to normal. It was now their home, no one else’s. Gavin got up to go to the car.

  “Are you coming, Jo?” He said.

  “Can I just have a minute to say goodbye?” Jo said. Gavin nodded. He ran off to the car where the children were waiting. He roared like a lion and picked them up, one under each arm and ran about the graveyard. Jo walked over to the grave and looked at it. Here lies Henry Mason. There was a picture of a teddy bear underneath. She took a piece of paper out of her handbag and put it on the grave. It was a sketch she had done. It was of her holding Henry. In it, they were both smiling.

  “Goodbye, Henry,” she said to the grave. “I hope now you can find some peace.”

  She stood up to go. As she turned, she felt something touch her ankle. She looked at it. It was a paper kite. She looked around the graveyard. She couldn’t see anyone, but she knew who it was. She picked it up and put it on top of the gravestone. She turned towards Gavin, Emily, and Sean and started walking towards them. They were excited to go and get pizza and to return home and ready to enjoy the rest of their lives.

  The Haunting of Carroway Mansion

  By Riley Amitrani

  Prologue

  London, England

  December 2017

  Ever since I was a kid, the idea of the paranormal and ghosts and possessions and haunted houses, inns, and other structures have always fascinated me. However, like a lot of people in my shoes, a first-hand experience has remained stubbornly elusive despite my firm beliefs in such things. Unfortunately, for me, anyway, this still remains the case. But a close friend of mine, Elizabeth Barnes, relayed this story to me knowing my deep level of interest in such things. Liz was always one of the most grounded people I knew of prior to the experience of the Carroway Mansion located in the north end of the Lake District National Park, in a little village called Threlkeld. Her time there working on a small independent film shook her skepticism in such topics, but in the end, I am not sure if she is a believer or not.

  Liz knew of my interest—though she routinely referred to it as an obsession—in these things and came to me just last month with this tale. I would love to say I had the first-hand knowledge of this event, but after hearing her story, I have no doubt that what Liz passed along to me is true. That is, of course, even if she is still perhaps on the fence with it all. Anyway, with my background as a published author with innumerable professional contacts, she was sure I would want to hear about it. I am not sure if this qualifies as nonfiction or is more one of those things that get labeled as “fiction based on true events,” but either way it certainly caught my attention. I prefer to think of it as nonfiction, but my publicist, editor, and the owner of the publishing house that currently has me under contract all feel that the latter is more accurate. And since the three of them are primarily responsible for my success as of late, I am more than willing to defer to their opinions. In the end, I like the process and the story in what I do, but if you cannot sell the book, then what is the point?

  But enough of me and my peculiar neuroses in the writing process. What I am calling “The Haunting of Carroway Mansion” should speak for itself. I hope you follow along and get as caught up in the narrative as I was when Liz first came to me with what happened to her in Threlkeld when she was on location for her film. I was only vaguely familiar with the Lake District National Park beforehand—I’m not what you would exactly call an “outdoors person” —and for sure I had never heard of Threlkeld. As a transplant to the UK, I am still trying to get used to all the oddly named villages across the country…at least to my American ear, anyway…and at the risk of offending anyone in England, Threlkeld almost sounded made up. But I assure you it is real and has a fascinating background, both historically and from what went on with Liz, making it a perfect setting for one of what are a myriad of eerie and spooky locales in the UK. Enjoy…

  Background

  Lake District

  Threlkeld

  Cumbria, England

  1873

  The Lake District, more commonly known to long-time residents in the UK simply as “The Lakes” or Lakeland, is a strikingly beaut
iful place full of dense, rich forests and stark mountain peaks. While the park is one of the most densely populated national parks in England, there are but a handful of towns there that might be considered major settlements. Needless to say, Threlkeld is not among them. While Threlkeld is of lesser familiarity than most, its’ location would make it resonate in your brain. It is found at the southern base of Blencathra, one of the most prominent peaks in the north of the park, and just adjacent to the River Glenderamackin. In its day, Threlkeld was home to various mining operations, primarily in zinc and lead, initially, and then granite. However, after the 20th century, agriculture took over as forests were cleared for the production of charcoal and to allow the introduction of pastures for sheep. Remnants of the old railway, the Cockermouth, Keswick, and Penrith, provide a footpath and cycle track for tourists these days.

  Historically, Threlkeld dates back over 800 years as an actual settlement, though various historians believe that human settlement of the Threlkeld Valley can be dated to Neolithic times, about 5,000 years ago. The name itself comes from Norse linguistics, meaning “the well of the thrall,” a thrall being a medieval term for a man bound in service to his lord, though no one has ever been able to unearth any record of any lord anywhere having ever existed. More recently, such literary notables as William Wordsworth and other authors, the so-called “Lake Poets” such as Beatrix Potter and John Ruskin were said to call Threlkeld home. Today, Threlkeld is only a tourist attraction, relying heavily on its natural beauty and location in the national park. In addition to its draw from its natural beauty, Threlkeld also relies on its mining past, including the Threlkeld Quarry and Mining Museum, the church of St. Mary, dating from 1777, with its intriguing collection of gravestones, and the local charm of a small village.