The Haunting of Beacon Hill

by Ambrose Ibsen

  “OK, then let's dive in,” he said. “The sooner we discuss this, the better.” He pulled out a chair and sat down. When Sadie proved too tense to follow suit, her eyes still traveling up and down the rows of tables, he snapped his fingers and pointed to the chair across from him. “Come on, sit. We have a lot to talk about.”

  She obeyed, but even as August began rifling through the stack of materials she could barely focus.

  “Where to begin?” he said, shuffling a stack of paper-clipped print-offs and then slipping his finger into an aged hardcover. Sadie recognized this particular book—it was a book on Montpelier history taken from the “Local” section of the library. These particular reference materials weren't technically supposed to leave the premises; patrons could use them in the library but weren't allowed to check them out. Regardless, August had apparently snatched up several, and there were brightly-colored bookmarks sticking out of each. “Let's start with the house, shall we?” He straightened his Hawaiian print bowtie and cleared his throat. “It was built in 1883.

  “Take a look at what we had on file!” He tapped a blurry photocopy of what at first glance appeared to be a faded sketch. “This is an old architectural draft—a blueprint—giving the layout of the entire house as it was designed. Turns out we've got loads of this stuff stashed away in dusty old archives. It was designed by its first owner, a fellow by the name of Hudson S. Purefoy. You know that it's got ten bedrooms in it?

  “Never mind, that's not the interesting part. When the original owner passed on in 1927, the house changed hands. A woman by the name of Margot Blake moved in.” He tapped at the pertinent passage of the book and shoved it towards her so that she might read it for herself. Then, he picked up the stack of papers and flipped through them. “Margot Blake was an interesting character. I was able to dig some stuff up—birth certificate, death certificate, some other things—but most of it didn't amount to much. I learned that she was a nurse, and that she'd never married. Despite this, when she moved in to the house on Beacon Hill in the spring of 1928, she brought with her five children.

  “You see, I learned about these children in a photograph of the house.” He held out a rough printout whose background was the hulking house on Beacon Hill. In the foreground stood a middle-aged woman and five children that varied in age from five or six to mid-teens, though little else could be said of any of them for the grainy quality of the photo. “I wondered who these kids were; if she never married, had she adopted them?” He set the photo down and next handed over another sheet. “She worked as a nurse, right? This is a copy of her nursing license here. I looked into her work history, and it turns out she worked at a place called Rainier Asylum in nearby Tiffin, Indiana.”

  August let Sadie glance over the glut of offered materials and dug into another of the hardbacks, navigating to one of the bookmarked sections. “Rainier Asylum wasn't a real nice place by the sounds of it. I mean, psychiatric care in those days verged, well, on the barbaric, you know? But that's where Margot worked up until 1927. I didn't think too much of that until I looked into the asylum itself, and when I did...” He singled out a few passages with an outstretched finger. “Rainier Asylum was out in the boonies—the people who built it thought that the fresh air and wide open space was good for the patients.

  “But its distance from the city also made it easier to hide various abuses, and it looks like the staff there were up to something—something dark—because the whole place got shut down in 1927. The Governor of Indiana actually stepped in and forced the place to close after certain activities came to light, and I understand it led to quite a stir, locally.” August went back to his stack of print-outs. “There are some old news articles floating around from that time, discussing a number of staff members and their participation in...” Here, he licked his lips, seemed to struggle to find the right words. “The best way I can put it is that they were members of a cult. Some kind of Satanic thing, I guess. There were a few doctors, some nurses and others, who were abusing the patients and carrying on weird rituals with some of them. Two of the doctors—Roger S. Burns, M.D. and Leonard A. Small, M.D. were both hanged for their involvement in this thing! I don't know what they did in particular, but it must have been pretty brutal stuff to warrant the noose.

  “So, the place gets shut down in 1927 when all of this comes to light, right? Another news article details the children who'd been living in the institution, most of them orphans, and how they were left without a home due to the closure. Instead of shipping them off to another facility, though, five of those kids were taken in by a kindly nurse who'd worked at Rainier for several years. Any guesses as to who that was?”

  Sadie glanced up from the paper. “Margot?”

  “Bingo,” replied August. “Margot Blake wasn't implicated in the occult stuff that went on in the asylum. She was considered a good nurse, an upstanding woman, and she petitioned the governor for custody of those five young patients. She insisted that she had the experience to care for them, that they needed the stability of a familiar caretaker, and apparently the local government agreed because they awarded her custody. Around this time, a wealthy benefactor in town, so disgusted by the events at the asylum but moved by Margot's service to the children, bought the house on Beacon Hill and gifted it to her. That was how she and the five kids came to live in it.”

  “And then what happened?” asked Sadie.

  August grinned, wagging a finger at her. “Ah, you understand that the story doesn't end there. Very perceptive of you!” He scratched at his fiery hair and then slipped another sheet from the stack of papers. “Long story short, this wasn't a big, happy family. There were... problems in that household almost from the get-go. In 1929, 1930, 1931, we've got multiple police reports filed. Nothing was ever done in any of these cases, but documentation still exists.

  “Once, one of the kids—cited in the report merely as “Robert”—ran away from the house. He went to the police and said that Margot was subjecting him and the other children to nightly tortures of some kind. He was returned to the house and the complaint was dismissed, by the looks of it. Other reports later on elaborate on the kinds of things that went on in that house, though. One report, from midway through 1930, deals with one of the girls, Sophia, a teenager. Someone living nearby saw her outside and noticed that her wrists were both bandaged up. When asked about the bandages, Sophia confided in this neighbor that Margot had forced her to cut herself—and that she'd even tasted the girl's blood. A report was made and, again, it was dismissed as the talk of a troubled kid.

  “Anyway, I could bore you with more, but the point is that something seemed to be going on in that house. Margot wasn't just keeping an eye on those children, and she'd probably been more involved in the asylum's sordid business than she'd let on. Now...” He grit his teeth, actually winced as he picked up the next page. “This went on for years, but in 1936, something changed. There was a murder.

  “Margot was murdered in the summer of that year. The culprit was never caught, but I can tell you right now it was likely one of the kids living in that house. If even half of these police reports have a kernel of truth to them, then I'd bet top coin one of the older kids tired of her abuse, snapped and did her in.” He thumbed at the edge of the page in his grasp. “I really had to do some digging to find this, but it turns out that the crime scene was photographed.” He handed the paper over and leaned back in his seat. “That's how they found her.”

  The picture quality was very poor, but the broad strokes were plain enough. The setting was a room of narrow dimensions and the edge of a window was visible in the background. The walls were adorned with some small pictures—blurry decorations—and a small mirror hung to the right. It had not been these paltry details that the photographer had chosen to focus on, however. The true subject of the photo was the rigid body on the floor of said room, fallen a few paces in front of the aforementioned mirror, face-down. Dark splotches marred the already dark wooden floors—presumably blo
od. Though the graininess made it difficult to know for sure, the corpse's attire seemed casual—evening wear, perhaps. Sadie dropped the picture onto the table and promptly slid a book over it so that she wouldn't have to look at it anymore.

  “It's hard to say what happened—even the police didn't have all the answers. If you ask me, she was probably getting ready for bed one night, brushing her hair in that mirror, when someone came up behind her and let her have it. The autopsy report cites something like twenty stab wounds—if that isn't proof of a grudge then I don't know what is. She died on the floor, bled out, and according to the report she wasn't found until a few days later. By that time...” He shrugged weakly. “Let's just say the urban myth may have a little truth to it after all. The flies may have gotten to her, thus the moniker 'Mother Maggot'.” He threw his hands up. “I never found out what happened to the kids still living in the house; I imagine they were sent elsewhere. Since that day the place has been unoccupied—Margot was the last to live in it. There. A crash course on your ghost. Any questions?”

  She scanned the materials before her, chin propped on her palm. “So... she took in those kids and hurt them? Made them hurt themselves?”

  “Looks that way. It probably had an occult angle to it, though it doesn't seem like anyone ever got to the bottom of it.”

  Sadie nodded. “Well, Ophelia told me that she was driven to hurt herself by Mother Maggot. It makes a little more sense now. Maybe her spirit is trying to continue this work—harming children—from beyond the grave. But... why? And what keeps her from moving on?” She chanced another glance at the gruesome crime scene photo and asked, “What about the mirror thing? Ophelia mentioned first seeing Mother Maggot in a mirror. For all I know, it was the same mirror that Margot died in front of. I don't know if that has any significance, but what did you find about mirrors?”

  August took a few moments to stir up the papers on the table. When he'd finally pinpointed the one he sought, he adjusted his glasses and continued. “Right, mirrors and ghosts. It turns out there's a connection. Er...” He smiled weakly. “Some people believe there's a connection, right? See, in some cultures, when someone dies in a house, it's a tradition to cover up the mirrors. It's believed that leaving them uncovered can trip up a spirit that's supposed to be on its way to the next life. People cover the mirrors to keep ghosts from 'finding their way back' here, so to speak. Mirrors have always been thought to have magical properties. This notion that a ghost will live on in a mirror or get trapped in one is an extension of that.”

  “It looks to me like Margot died in front of a mirror,” said Sadie, tapping at the crime scene photo. “If that's the case—and if there's anything to this old superstition—then is it possible the mirror in that house, the one that Ophelia looked into, contains Margot's spirit? I mean, if she died while staring into it, who's to say, right?”

  “In light of everything that's been happening recently, I'm inclined to think it possible,” he replied. “And, look here. I even went through the trouble of digging deeper on the matter. Traditions vary, but if you've neglected to cover the mirrors in a house where someone has died, don't fret. All you have to do is sprinkle salt all over the mirror and bury it at least two feet in the ground. Oh, and it has to be buried at night-time. I don't know why that matters, but the ghost-hunting types I got this from insist it's important.”

  Sadie sat upright, knocking the mess of materials aside. “I don't know if it'll work, but... do you think we can stop Mother Maggot if we find the mirror in that house—the one featured in this photo—and bury it with salt? Could that do the trick?”

  “I mean, maybe...” August carefully closed the books and gathered up all the loose sheets. “We'd have to go back to the house, though. And if you want to try this as soon as possible...” He peered at his phone. “We're burning moonlight.”

  There was no telling whether or not this course of action would prove effective. It was a gamble. Sadie turned and looked out the window of the dining room, its square borders black with night. Their initial visit to the house had been intensely frightful; the mere idea of making that same trip after dark turned her blood to ice. Still, if she and August didn't act immediately, Mother Maggot would still come for her. Either they could bring the fight to Beacon Hill or she could return to her apartment and wait for the specter to show up at her bedside again.

  “Let's do it,” she said, standing up. “Please, let's try this. I don't know if it'll work, but... I don't have any other ideas. If this fails at least I'll know we tried. At least I won't have sat at home all night just waiting for her to walk in.”

  August began tucking the materials back into his bag. “All right, we can give it a whirl,” he said. “One problem, though.”

  “What's that?”

  “You know where the mirror is in this house?”

  Sadie hesitated. “No, not exactly. But Ophelia told me enough. I know it's on the first floor, and I think I know where to look. She found her way there by following the moonlight. We'll be able to do the same.”

  “Moonlight is nice and all, but if we're going to do this, we're going to be better-prepared than last time,” he insisted. “We'll pick up some lights, things like that. I'm not going in blind again.” He slung his bag over his shoulder with a grunt. “Oh, and another thing. I can't see these spirits like you can, but something occurred to me earlier that might help me be a second pair of eyes in a situation like this. Remember that video we watched of Ophelia in her hospital room? When the camera malfunctioned and she disappeared?”

  “Sure, what about it?”

  August started from the table. “I'm going to bring a camera with me—I've got a good handicam at home. I'll start recording the minute we walk in there, and if the video goes wonky it may be a sign that the spirit is close-by. What do you think? Mother Maggot's presence messed with the hospital cam; maybe if I bring a camera to the house it'll give her away, yeah?”

  “It might work,” she said, joining him as he strode out of the dining room.

  They passed the cafeteria and started into the main hall. August fished his keys out of his pocket and led her through a side entrance into the young, warm night. His Honda sat across the way, in the visitor's lot. When he'd dropped his bag into the trunk and started the engine, he turned to her and asked with a forced joviality, “Are you ready to rock?”

  She could only offer a lukewarm smile. Buckling up and taking repeated glances through the windows in search of dark figures outside, she didn't feel ready in the least. She was only going because she no longer had a choice.

  22

  August lived in a two-bedroom bungalow located in a new subdivision. Half the houses on his street—all of them close together and practically clones of one another—were still up for sale, and those that lacked for-sale signs in their spotty lawns sat dark and silent.

  He led the way in, putting on the foyer light and then dropping his keys onto a rickety little stand he'd left sitting in the doorway. From there, he made a beeline into the kitchen where he immediately grabbed a can of soda from the fridge. He tossed a second one to Sadie, who failed to catch it, and the can struck the linoleum with a nasty clang. Thankfully, it didn't explode as she picked it up and set it on his cluttered table.

  “Gonna need some good flashlights, the handicam...” He said after downing half his soda in a single gulp. Dirty dishes and unsorted junk mail were scattered pell-mell across the counter. He set his soda down into this mess, amidst a handful of long-empty cans, and nodded at the doorway. “I'm gonna see what I have. One second. Make yourself at home.”

  Sadie ended up doing the exact opposite, instead lingering near the sink with her arms crossed. The sounds of August's rummaging issued from down the hall and he took to whistling a pleasant tune as he went looking for supplies. She peeked around the corner and asked, “So, you read a lot about ghosts today, right?”

  “Uh-huh?” came the muted reply. He was on his knees, pawing at things in his
bedroom closet.

  “Did you learn anything else about them?” she continued. “Why they exist? Why they haunt people at all instead of just moving on after death?” These questions had been nagging at her all day, but her own searches had brought only facile answers to them. It was a lot to hope for, but she wanted to know if August, in all his reading, had happened upon more substantial theories.

  “Oh, cause, you know, I've got a PhD in busting ghosts now,” he said mockingly, unzipping a duffel bag and digging through its contents. When he'd exhausted the closet he moved to his dresser, searching the drawers. “There's no one answer to questions like those,” he eventually replied. “The common theories are that ghosts are just the spirits of people who died with unfinished business. They can't move on because they kicked the bucket with something important on their conscience. Till it's dealt with, they won't know peace.

  “There are other opinions, though. One writer who'd studied the paranormal claimed not to believe in 'ghosts', per se, but that apparitions were actually demonic manifestations—nothing human about them. Then there's the metaphysical new-agey theory that we never really die, and that there are multiple universes; some theories about how 'ghosts' are just memories that play on in the fabric of reality, a sort of time loop. One dude wrote about how reality is just a computer simulation and that spirits and other anomalies were akin to bugs in the code—glitches. So, a dozen different theories, all told. Can't say which is right, but if I were a betting man I'd say the answer is somewhere in the middle of 'em all.” He returned to the kitchen with an armful of materials and dropped them on the table.

  She thought back to August's earlier lecture about Margot Blake's past, and about her ties to Rainier Asylum where, allegedly, patients had been abused in the performance of dark rites. “Margot worked in that asylum, probably closely, with the people who ended up getting in trouble for the abuses that shuttered the place, right? At the time the asylum closed she wasn't suspected of taking part, but no sooner did she move into the house on Beacon Hill with those kids did stories of similar abuses start to circulate. Do you think she was involved back at the asylum, with the others? Do you think that she got away with it and then continued whatever work they'd been doing on her own, in the privacy of that house?”