by Riley Sager
The theory I’m even less inclined to believe is that my parents, knowing they had a money pit on their hands, wanted some way to increase the house’s value when it came time to sell. Rather than spend a fortune on renovations, they decided to give Baneberry Hall something else—a reputation. It’s not that easy. Houses that have been deemed haunted decrease in value, either because prospective buyers are afraid to live there or because they just don’t want to deal with the notoriety.
I still don’t know the real reason we left so suddenly. My parents refused to tell me. Maybe they really were afraid to stay. Maybe they truly and completely feared for their lives. But I know it wasn’t because Baneberry Hall was haunted. The big reason, of course, being that there’s no such thing as ghosts.
Sure, plenty of people believe in them, but people will believe anything. That Santa Claus is real. That we didn’t land on the moon. That Michael Jackson is alive and well and dealing blackjack in Las Vegas.
I believe science, which has concluded that when we die, we die. Our souls don’t stay behind, lingering like stray cats until someone notices us. We don’t become shadow versions of ourselves. We don’t haunt.
My complete lack of memories about Baneberry Hall is another reason why I think the Book is bullshit. Wendy Davenport was right to assume an experience that terrifying would leave some dark mark on my memory. I think I would have remembered being hauled to the ceiling by an invisible force, as the Book claims. I would have remembered being choked so hard by something that it left handprints on my neck.
I would have remembered Mister Shadow.
That I don’t recall any of this means only one thing—none of it happened.
Yet the Book has followed me for most of my life. I have always been the freaky girl who once lived in a haunted house. In grade school, I was an outcast and therefore had to be avoided at all costs. In high school, I was still an outcast, only by then it was somehow cool, which made me the most reluctantly popular girl in my class. Then came college, when I thought things would change, as if being away from my parents would somehow extricate me from the Book. Instead, I was treated as a curiosity. Not shunned, exactly, but either befriended warily or studied from afar.
Dating sucked. Most boys wouldn’t come near me. The majority of those who did were House of Horrors fanboys more interested in Baneberry Hall than in me. If a potential boyfriend showed an ounce of excitement about meeting my father, I knew the score.
Now I treat any potential friend or lover with a hearty dose of skepticism. After one too many sleepovers spent having a Ouija board thrust at me or “dates” that ended at a cemetery with me being asked if I saw any ghosts among the graves, I can’t help but doubt people’s intentions. The majority of my friends have been around for ages. For the most part, they pretend the Book doesn’t exist. And if a few of them are curious about my family’s time in Baneberry Hall, they know enough not to ask me about it.
All these years later, my reputation still precedes me, even though I don’t think of myself as famous. I’m notorious. I get emails from strangers calling my dad a liar or saying they’ll pray for me or seeking ways to get rid of the ghost they’re certain is trapped in their cellar. Occasionally I’ll be contacted by a paranormal podcast or one of those ghost-hunter shows, asking for an interview. A horror convention recently invited me to do a meet-and-greet alongside one of the kids from the Amityville house. I declined. I hope the Amityville kid did as well.
Now here I am, tucked into a squeaky chair in a Beacon Hill law office, still reeling from emotional whiplash weeks after my father’s death. My current mood is one part prickliness (Thanks, Wendy Davenport.) and two parts grief. Across the desk, an estate attorney details the many ways in which my father continued to profit off the Book. Sales had continued at an agreeably modest pace, with an annual spike in the weeks leading up to Halloween. Hollywood had continued to call on a semiregular basis, most recently with an option that my father never bothered to tell me about to turn it into a TV series.
“Your father was very smart with his money,” Arthur Rosenfeld says.
His use of the past tense brings a kick of sadness. It’s another reminder that my father is truly gone and not just on an extended trip somewhere. Grief is tricky like that. It can lie low for hours, long enough for magical thinking to take hold. Then, when you’re good and vulnerable, it will leap out at you like a fun-house skeleton, and all the pain you thought was gone comes roaring back. Yesterday, it was hearing my father’s favorite band on the radio. Today, it’s being told that, as my father’s sole beneficiary, I’ll be receiving roughly four hundred thousand dollars.
The amount isn’t a surprise. My father told me this in the weeks preceding his death. An awkward but necessary conversation, made more uncomfortable by the fact that my mother chose not to seek a share of profits from the Book when they got divorced. My father begged her to change her mind, saying she deserved half of everything. My mother disagreed.
“I don’t want any part of it,” she would snap during one of their many arguments about the matter. “I never did, from the very beginning.”
So I get it all. The money. The rights to the Book. The infamy. Like my mother, I wonder if I’d be better off with none of it.
“Then there’s the matter of the house,” Arthur Rosenfeld says.
“What house? My father had an apartment.”
“Baneberry Hall, of course.”
Surprise jolts my body. The chair I’m in squeaks.
“My father owned Baneberry Hall?”
“He did,” the lawyer says.
“He bought it again? When?”
Arthur places his hand on his desk, his fingers steepled. “As far as I know, he never sold it.”
I remain motionless, stilled by shock, letting everything sink in. Baneberry Hall, the place that allegedly so terrified my family that we had no choice but to leave, has been in my father’s possession for the past twenty-five years.
I assume he either couldn’t get rid of it—possible, considering the house’s reputation—or didn’t want to sell it. Which could mean any number of things, none of which makes sense. All I know for certain is that my father never told me he still owned it.
“Are you sure?” I say, hoping Arthur has made some terrible mistake.
“Positive. Baneberry Hall belonged to your father. Which means it’s now yours. Lock, stock, and barrel, as they say. I suppose I should give you these.”
Arthur places a set of keys on the desk and pushes them toward me. There are two of them, both attached to a plain key ring.
“One opens the front gate and the other the front door,” he says.
I stare at the keys, hesitant to pick them up. I’m uncertain about accepting this part of my inheritance. I was raised to fear Baneberry Hall, for reasons that are still unclear to me. Even though I don’t believe my father’s official story, owning the house doesn’t sit well with me.
Then there’s the matter of what my father said on his deathbed, when he pointedly chose not to tell me he still owned Baneberry Hall. What he did say now echoes through my memory, making me shiver.
It’s not safe there. Not for you.
When I finally grab the keys, they feel hot in my hand, as if Arthur had placed them atop a radiator. I curl my fingers around them, their teeth biting into my palm.
That’s when I’m hit with another wallop of grief. This time it’s tinged with frustration and more than a little disbelief.
My father’s dead.
He withheld the truth about Baneberry Hall for my whole life.
Now I own the place. Which means all its ghosts, whether real or imaginary, are mine as well.
MAY 20
The Tour
We knew what we were getting into. To claim otherwise would be an outright lie. Before we chose to buy Baneberry Hall, we had been told its
history.
“The property has quite the past, believe you me,” said our Realtor, a birdlike woman in a black power suit named Janie June Jones. “There’s a lot of history there.”
We were in Janie June’s silver Cadillac, which she drove with the aggressiveness of someone steering a tank. At the mercy of her driving, all Jess, Maggie, and I could do was hang on and hope for the best.
“Good or bad?” I said as I tugged my seat belt, making sure it was secure.
“A little of both. The land was owned by William Garson. A lumber man. Richest man in town. He’s the one who built Baneberry Hall in 1875.”
Jess piped up from the back seat, where she sat with her arms wrapped protectively around our daughter. “Baneberry Hall. That’s an unusual name.”
“I suppose it is,” Janie June said as she steered the car out of town in a herky-jerky manner that made the Cadillac constantly veer from one side of the lane to the other. “Mr. Garson named it after the plant. The story goes that when he bought the land, the hillside was covered in red berries. Townsfolk said it looked like the entire hill was awash in blood.”
I glanced at Janie June from my spot in the front passenger seat, checking to confirm that she could indeed see over the steering wheel. “Isn’t baneberry poisonous?”
“It is. Both the red and the white kind.”
“So, not an ideal place for a child,” I said, picturing Maggie, rabidly curious and ravenously hungry, popping handfuls of red berries into her mouth when we weren’t looking.
“Many children have lived quite happily there over the years,” Janie June said. “The entire Garson clan lived in that house until the Great Depression, when they lost their money just like everyone else. The estate was bought by some Hollywood producer who used it as a vacation home for him and his movie star friends. Clark Gable stayed there. Carole Lombard, too.”
Janie June swerved the car off the main road and onto a gravel drive cutting between two cottages perched on the edge of an imposing Vermont woods. Compact and tidy, both were of similar size and shape. The cottage on the left had yellow siding, red shutters, and blue curtains in the windows. The one on the right was deep brown and more rustic, its cedar siding making it blend in with the forest.
“Those were also built by Mr. Garson,” Janie June informed us. “He did it about a year after the construction of the main house. One cottage for Baneberry Hall’s housekeeper and another for the caretaker. That’s still the case today, although neither of them exclusively works for the property. But they’re available on an as-needed basis, if you ever get overwhelmed.”
She drove us deeper into the forest of pines, maples, and stately oaks, not slowing until a wrought-iron gate blocking the road appeared up ahead. Seeing it, Janie June pounded the brakes. The Cadillac fishtailed to a stop.
“Here we are,” she said.
The gate rose before us, tall and imposing. Flanking it was a ten-foot stone wall that stretched into the woods in both directions. Jess eyed it all from the back seat with barely concealed concern.
“That’s a bit much, don’t you think?” she said. “Does that wall go around the entire property?”
“It does,” Janie June said as she put the car in park. “Trust me, you’ll be thankful it’s there.”
“Why?”
Janie June ignored the question, choosing instead to fish through her purse, eventually finding a ring of keys. Turning to me, she said, “Mind helping an old lady out, Mr. Holt?”
Together, we left the car and opened the gate, Janie June taking care of the lock while I pulled the gate open with a loud, rusty groan. Soon we were in the car again, passing through the gate and starting up a long drive that wound like a corkscrew up an unexpectedly steep hill. As we twisted higher, I caught flashing glimpses of a building through the trees. A tall window here. A slice of ornate rooftop there.
Baneberry Hall.
“After the movie stars came and went, the place became a bed-and-breakfast,” Janie June said. “When that went belly-up after three decades, it changed hands quite a few times. The previous owners lived here less than a year.”
“Why such a short time?” I said.
Again, the question went ignored. I would have pressed Janie June for an answer had we not at that moment crested the hill, giving me my first full view of Baneberry Hall.
Three stories tall, it sat heavy and foreboding in the center of the hilltop. It was a beautiful structure. Stone-walled and majestic. The kind of house that made one gasp, which is exactly what I did as I peered through the bug-specked windshield of Janie June’s Cadillac.
It was a lot of house. Far bigger than what we really needed or, under normal circumstances, could afford. I’d spent the past ten years in magazines, first freelancing at a time when the pay was good, then as a contributing editor at a publication that folded after nineteen issues, which forced me to return to freelancing at a time when the pay was lousy. With each passing day, Maggie grew bigger while our apartment seemed to get smaller. Jess and I handled it by arguing a lot. About money, mostly.
And the future.
And which one of us was passing the most negative traits on to our daughter.
We needed space. We needed a change.
Change arrived at full gallop, with two life-altering incidents occurring in the span of weeks. First, Jess’s grandfather, a banker from the old school who smoked cigars at his desk and called his secretary “Honey,” died, leaving her $250,000. Then Jess secured a job teaching at a private school outside Bartleby.
Our plan was to use the money from her grandfather to buy a house. Then she’d go to work while I stayed home to take care of Maggie and focus on my writing. Freelance pieces, of course, but also short stories and, hopefully, my version of the Great American Novel.
A house like Baneberry Hall wasn’t exactly what we had in mind. Jess and I both agreed to seek out something nice but affordable. A house that would be easy to manage. A place we could grow into.
When Janie June had suggested Baneberry Hall, I had balked at the idea. Then she told us the asking price, which was half the estate’s assessed value.
“Why is the price so low?” I had asked.
“It’s a fixer-upper,” Janie June replied. “Not that there are any major problems. The place just needs a little TLC.”
In person, Baneberry Hall seemed less like a fixer-upper and more like the victim of neglect. The house itself looked to be in fine shape, albeit a little eccentric. Each level was slightly smaller than the one preceding it, giving the house the tiered look of a fancy wedding cake. The windows on the first floor were tall, narrow, and rounded at the tops. Because of the shrunken nature of the second floor, the windows there were less tall but no less majestic. The third story, with its sharply slanted roof, had windows reduced to the point where they resembled a pair of eyes looking down at us.
Two-thirds of the house were constructed as rigidly as a grid, with straight walls and clean lines. The other third was completely different, almost as if its architect had gotten bored halfway through construction. Instead of boxlike efficiency, that corner of Baneberry Hall bulged outward in a circular turret that made it look like a squat lighthouse had been transported from the Maine coast and attached to the house. The windows there were tidy squares that dotted the exterior at irregular intervals. Topping it was a peaked roof that resembled a witch’s hat.
Yet I could sense the house’s disquiet. Silence seemed to shroud the place, giving it the feel of a home suddenly vacated. An air of abandonment clung to the walls like ivy.
“Why did you say we’d be thankful for that gate?” said Jess, who by then had leaned between the two front seats to get a better view of the house. “Has there been a lot of crime here?”
“Not at all,” Janie June said, sounding not convincing in the least. “The house gets a lot of looky-loos, t
hat’s all. Its history draws the curious like flies. Not townsfolk, mind you. They’re used to the place. But people from out of town. Teenagers, especially. They’ve been known to hop the wall from time to time.”
“And do what?” Jess asked.
“Typical kid stuff. Sneaking a few beers in the woods. Maybe some hanky-panky. Nothing criminal. And nothing to worry about, I swear. Now let’s get you inside. I guarantee you’ll like what you see.”
We gathered on the front porch while Janie June removed the keys from the lockbox hanging on the door handle. She then took a deep breath, her padded shoulders rising and falling. Just before she opened the door, she made the sign of the cross.
We followed her into the house. As I moved over the threshold, a shiver of air sliced through me, almost as if we had suddenly passed from one climate to another. At the time, I chalked it up to a draft. One of those strange, inexplicable things that always seem to occur in homes of a certain age.
The chill didn’t last long. Just a few steps, as we moved from the tidy vestibule into a great room of sorts that stretched from the front of the house to the back. With a ceiling that was at least twenty feet high and supported by exposed beams, it reminded me of a grand hotel lobby. An equally grand staircase swept upward to the second floor in a graceful curve.
Above us, a massive brass chandelier hung from the ceiling, its two decks of arms coiled like octopus tentacles and dripping crystals. At the end of each arm perched a globe of smoked glass. As we stood beneath it, I noticed the chandelier swinging ever so slightly, almost as if someone were stomping across the floor above it.
“Is someone else in the house?” I said.
“Of course not,” Janie June replied. “Why would you think that?”
I pointed to the ornate chandelier over our heads, still gently swaying.
Janie June shrugged in response. “It’s probably just a rush of air from when we opened the front door.”