Slattery Falls

by Brennan LaFaro

  “Who shit in your cereal?” I said with a greeting.

  He squinted his eyes in a way that either meant perplexed or sick of my crap.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Elsie,” he said. “My cousin.”

  “Okay, what about her?”

  “She’s staying with us for the summer. Got here three days ago. My aunt and uncle are going through some stuff.”

  “Stuff? No, sorry. Not my business.”

  “No, it’s fine. Division of assets is the way I’d put it. My parents agreed to allow one of said assets to live in our guest room for the next two months.”

  “I guess I’m still not seeing the problem.”

  “Elsie’s a good person. She’s a couple years younger than us. The problem is, she does not respect boundaries. On the first night she was here, I was downstairs watching a Mets-Phillies game. The Mets finished losing, and I headed upstairs and found Elsie in my room, sitting with my Misfits bag.”

  “Oh shit,” I said, feeling my heart crawl up my throat.

  Josh’s pace sped up. “I said she’s a good person, and I stick by that, but she also grew up in a house where people recognize what a lock pick set looks like, and how to use it.”

  He stopped a moment, letting out a small laugh that seemed for him alone.

  “So,” Josh continued, “I’m thinking she’s going to threaten to tell my parents, maybe even get so extreme as to call the police. Your face is looking kind of pale, Travis, so I guess that’s probably where you thought I was going as well, but no.”

  He shook his head, looked down at his shoes, and paused again. “Really, she just wanted to know what I was up to and if she could help, or tag along, or whatever. Mainly, I think she was just—”

  “Bored” added voice C to our A and B conversation.

  The girl that walked around the side of the house looked just enough like Josh that I could believe they were related. She couldn’t have been more than a few inches over five feet, but was every bit as lean as he was. She carried herself in a completely different way, with a confidence Josh couldn’t have hoped to match on his best day. Oh, and the hot pink hair that she later informed me was fuchsia. That was another difference. I’m trying to think of a more accurate way to describe her approach than ‘strut’, but words then, as they do now, failed me.

  “Bored, yes. Travis, this is Elsinore.”

  “Remember what happened last time you called me that?” she asked Josh through a smile as she took a step toward us. Josh crossed his arms in front of his jeans, trying and failing to be subtle.

  “Elsie,” she said. “Pleasure to meet you. Josh has told me essentially nothing about you,” She stopped a few feet away and put her hands in her jean pockets. “Oh, except that you two are ghost hunters, of course.” She said this in a tone that conveyed not a bit of mockery, but I felt it anyway.

  “It’s nice to meet you too,” I said, colder than was strictly necessary.

  Josh and I had kept our activities and interests quiet, not so much because of the legalities, but the judgment. Reflecting on this now, the legal gray area was probably the better reason. I have to imagine we wouldn’t have had a wealth of well-wishers at UConn if the people we saw every day knew we planned to break into haunted houses, as opposed to the more socially acceptable model of getting blackout drunk until the calendar flips to September or, you know, getting a job. It was easy to see why Josh felt so alienated for refusing the status quo. It made no sense.

  Long story short, we weren’t interested in advertising and it surprised me and pissed me off a bit that Josh had let someone else in so easily and quickly, even if that someone was family. This belonged to us.

  “Look,” said Elsie, “I don’t know you, but I’ll tell you what I told my cousin. Maybe you can wipe that shitty look off your face for a minute?”

  She seemed content waiting for me to oblige, taking her hands out of her pockets in order to cross her arms in front of her.

  “Okay, I’m all ears,” I said, trying to soften my tone. I assumed I had done just good enough, because the look of panic that had been developing on Josh’s face slipped away. Clearly, he had planned an introduction and explanation, and Elsie had sent those plans through a wood chipper by jumping in too soon. Improvisation was never Josh Costa’s strong suit.

  “I need this,” Elsie continued. “Maybe not this exactly, but something like this. You guys went straight from high school to college. Probably never questioned whether you would, just had to decide where and for what.”

  Anger tinged Elsie’s voice, but I suspected I was no longer the cause or the target.

  “I didn’t really have the option. I graduated from high school in New Haven on a Tuesday and I started working in a shitty coffee shop on a Wednesday. I’ve been there for about two years now, and it’s not even that bad a job. I mean, the customers can be annoying, but that’s the service industry.”

  “Elsie, you’re digressing,” said Josh.

  She shot him a look that could have melted the ice caps.

  “It’s just so dull,” she continued. “And I’ve known way too many people that lose themselves in a dead-end job. Both my parents, for starters. You get so wrapped up in working open to close, you come home and crash, you get up the next day and you do it again. You start to lose the friends you had from school, you’re too tired to start a new hobby, and nine bucks an hour doesn’t fund them, anyway. Fuck, you’re right Josh, now I’m rambling.”

  I realized now that the confidence Elsie had been projecting up to this point was a pose, and it was slipping.

  “No, you’re fine. It’s fine,” I murmured and nodded for her to go on. I knew eventually I’d have to do something about these Costas laying their life stories at my doorstep, but now wasn’t a good time to make a stand.

  “I heard Josh tell you my parents have some shit going on. They pretty much have for as long as I can remember. My mom has left a few times, disappeared after an argument and showed up a few days later like nothing happened. My dad seems to have a semiannual appointment to do the same. And it’s always the same shit. Things go back to normal and nobody talks about it. We reset the clock. This one is different, though. It’s too calm. It’s like the eye of the fucking hurricane. And we’ve never gotten to the point where we’re moving stuff out of the house before.”

  Elsie slipped into a softer tone, not much more audible than a whisper.

  “Coming here, even if it’s just for the summer, is an opportunity to do something that isn’t tied to brewing coffee, sleeping, or just wallowing in an atmosphere of perpetual bitterness. I want to be needed and I don’t give much of a fuck what it’s for.”

  “You know,” I said, “you’re really supposed to reserve fuck, and it’s derivatives for emphasis.” As soon as I said it, Josh’s eyes went wide, and he made a face like a fish gulping for air, but Elsie started laughing. Only a little at first, but then more and more until we couldn’t help but join her.

  “I’ll bet,” she fought through laughter, “that he told you that.” she said motioning to Josh. This was the moment where our trio came together. If she had stormed off like she probably should have, I mean, it was a pretty shitty joke, then the rest of this story definitely goes in a different direction. We didn’t know it, mostly because we’d only tried this once, but Elsie would become an instrumental part of every late night excursion we would take from then on. She thought the existence of ghosts was utter bullshit, but that was just a minor obstacle.

  “Is he any good with that lock pick set?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, actually. I was surprised.”

  “Who do you think taught him how to use it?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Josh already had the next venue almost ready to go. The trip would be further, but still in Connecticut. Our target was a place called the Benson House in Waterbury. Isn’t it weird how houses of dubious repute always seem to have t
itles? I can’t think of a time where we announced we would break into 16 Maple Drive.

  The Benson House didn’t have any historical significance. It was mostly just known within the community. Elsie may not have believed in spooks, but she had been invaluable at helping Josh dig up old articles and stories about the place, even going to the library to find a couple articles stored on microfiche when we got to where search engines couldn’t cough up anything new to us.

  In 1956, the house was owned by; you guessed it, the Benson family. Thirty-six-year-old Michael, thirty-three-year-old Samantha, and their four-year-old son, Todd. One night in April of ‘56, Mr. and Mrs. Benson put their son to bed upstairs and returned to the main floor to read. According to multiple articles, this would have been around 7:30. Maybe twenty minutes later, Todd wanders down the stairs to get a drink of water. Mom gets him a glass, sends him back to his room, tucks him into bed, and kisses him goodnight for the last time.

  The parents decide to turn in a little before ten, and while dad is brushing his teeth, Mom goes down the hall to do one last check of the kid’s room, as moms tend to do. It doesn’t take her long to realize he’s not in his bed.

  No panic at first. Like any young kid, he sometimes gets out of bed and falls asleep in a strange place. She flips the light on and checks under the bed, in the closet, next to the toy shelf, and nothing. Panic is rearing its ugly head now, and Samantha pulls her husband out of the bathroom. They tear apart the top floor to no avail. Next, Michael goes up into the attic while Samantha checks all the windows. They’re locked from the inside.

  Both parents are convinced he must be up on the second floor somewhere. The chairs in the living room faced the stairs and no one could have gone up or down without Michael and Samantha noticing. They would later tell police that Michael got up several times between 7:30 and 10:00 to fix drinks and once to use the bathroom. Samantha also left once, but at no point was the living room vacant.

  Once convinced that Todd was not on the top floor or in the attic, Michael phoned the police and Samantha frantically searched the main floor and basement. While Samantha waited for the police to come, Michael scoured the neighborhood.

  When the police finally arrived, they performed a rudimentary search of the house and yard, and set up a perimeter in the neighborhood. They found nothing of note.

  There were some trampled flowers underneath Todd’s window, but nothing to suggest placement of a ladder or anything that might have granted access to the second floor. That night the police cordoned off the neighborhood and combed the small patch of woods nearby, but found nothing. They discovered no sign of Todd Benson inside or outside of the house.

  Over the coming weeks, they interviewed the parents countless times. We found twenty-three instances, but it was likely more. The officers interviewed all the neighbors first, followed by the detectives, but as time went on, no new information came to light. None of the neighbors had seen or heard anything suspicious, and most had been taking part in the same activity as Samantha and Michael Benson; sitting in a quiet living room while the children went to sleep. Elsie felt it necessary to add that the Bensons had no alibis except for each other.

  It was a close-knit neighborhood, and everyone who spoke to the police confirmed Todd was his parents’ pride and joy. They never would have done anything to hurt him and were beyond reproach. However, with no new leads, suspicion fell on the parents. The only problem being there was no evidence to suggest that anything had happened other than what they claimed. After the initial search of the house, detectives conducted a more invasive search, which also bore no fruit.

  Weeks went on filled with additional interviews—Michael’s co-workers, extended family, acquaintances, former acquaintances. Each straw grasped at more desperate than the last. Despite that, nothing new turned up. Waterbury police hit a point where they no longer suspected Samantha and Michael. Unfortunately, even though the judgment of the police subsided, that from the community never did.

  I’m glossing over the weeks becoming months, the missing posters, the televised pleas for information from Samantha and Michael Benson, the false tips, and the dead ends. You can probably guess that nothing new ever turned up, and in 1966, the Bensons began the process to have Todd declared legally dead.

  Neither parent would see that process through to completion. On January 3rd, 1967, Michael Benson hanged himself in Todd’s old bedroom. The parents had left the room untouched. Given the circumstances, police did not suspect foul play. Following the death of her husband, Samantha moved in with an aunt and lived in seclusion until she died of pneumonia on July 17th, 1969.

  With no clear next of kin, the house passed to Sylvia Jones, the aunt Samantha had lived with briefly. Ms. Jones hired a renovation team and then put the house on the market. Between 1970 and our research almost forty years later, the house was occupied five times, not counting the two buyers that intended to spruce it up then flip it. One family stayed for about three and a half years, but none of the others were there much longer than a year.

  We dug up some secondhand accounts of things the people in and around the house experienced. The exciting thing about such old accounts is if this is what we could find, how much did we miss, or how much activity never even got recorded?

  The most common report, shared by four out of the five families, was hearing a child crying softly. Anyone who investigated the noise could never find a source. No matter which way they chased it down, it always sounded one room away. There was never any contact, no words, just a soft sobbing that sounded like it came from a young child, say age four.

  One family that lived in the house during the early 1990s reported seeing a figure in the shadows, only in the room that belonged to Todd. Family members spotted the figure on multiple occasions, but whenever the viewer moved closer, the shadows would return to the form of whatever had been making them. The source mentioned most people wrote this experience off as literally jumping at shadows and letting the history of the house stake a claim on the owner’s headspace, but this was precisely the shit we were looking for.

  Two families reported seeing spectral figures that vaguely match descriptions of Samantha, Michael, or Todd. There was never any sense of danger associated with these sightings, more a sense of isolation, of loneliness. No reports exist of these figures being seen together. Sad, but fitting since all three family members, presumably, died alone.

  Most of what we found were one-off occurrences. Floating lights glimpsed from outside, a figure in the window when the house should have been unoccupied, and the occasional, usually unintelligible, disembodied voice. In one instance, a neighbor came over to check a strange sound, and reported being told to “get out” despite not being inside the house. We agreed informally to disregard this one because it didn’t really fit with the benign nature of most of what went on.

  The last family moved out in 1997, leaving behind no record of what led them to spend eight months in the house and then vacate without trying to sell it. As far as we could tell, the house sat empty after that, possibly with the occasional squatter. We were not able to find any records of a transfer of ownership, so unless Elsie missed something, the family that abandoned the house still owned it.

  Having this knowledge proved to be a happy accident. We made it commonplace in the years following to always know how likely it would be for the property owners to show up in the middle of the investigation. This last tidbit told us the likelihood in this case was ‘not very’.

  A few minutes online found us a public lot to park about a half mile from the house on Locust Street. The lot backed up to a patch of trees that would allow us to arrive in the backyard, away from the busy street.

  We had everything we needed, so we packed up and headed out in search of the next glorious adventure.

  Chapter Twelve

  I had arrived at Josh’s and we started planning on a Thursday afternoon. By Saturday night, we were on the road for Waterbury
. Just under an hour’s drive. We pulled into the lot on Division Street around ten and went for pizza before heading toward the Benson House. Thankfully, Elsie and I thought this might be a possibility and convinced Josh not to dress like a cat burglar.

  Despite our attire, I can’t help thinking we must have looked like we were up to something. All three of us were outwardly nervous, even Josh who had done this more often, and rarely wore his heart on his sleeve. Around 11:30, the restaurant started closing up, and we decided we had lingered long enough. We tipped an agreed-upon and forgettable amount, then headed back toward the car where we grabbed dark colored sweatshirts and a black knit cap for Elsie. It screamed robber, especially in July, but the alternative was attempting to be stealthy while donning fuchsia hair.

  By midnight, nobody was around to see us duck into the woods. We walked in pitch black until we were far enough from the road to risk flashlights, which Josh took from his Misfits bag and distributed. The further into the woods we got, the more my imagination kicked into high gear. It wasn’t hard to envision police combing these woods over fifty years earlier, looking for Todd Benson. This place felt like it had a pulse. I guess I’ll never know whether my knowledge of the events that took place here impacted my train of thought, but the woods felt alive, like something ancient and inhuman studied our every move. I never mentioned it later to Josh or Elsie—we had bigger things on our minds by then—but I recall taking every step with care, afraid to put a foot down in the wrong place in case it stirred up whatever made the hair on the back of my neck crawl.

  A palpable sense of relief washed over me as soon as we emerged into the backyard of the Benson House, and I fought the urge to run from the wood’s entrance.

  The backyard was small, probably seventy feet from the trees to the backdoor. An above ground pool sat empty and devoid of purpose, a hole punched through the side. Maybe by neighborhood kids, maybe the family who abandoned the house. A last-minute effort to make sure there were no more accidents on the property. Near the pool was a swing set that had seen better days. If this were a movie, the swings would have moved on their own, filling the air with some hearty creaks. However, it was a stagnant, humid July night, and those swings didn’t have any stir in them.