Slattery Falls

by Brennan LaFaro

  “So did the town just, like, not trust Weeks? Have it out for him?” I asked.

  “He was never very personable, but he did frequent pretty much every shop in the town. All those little items added up, and since they saw him as a wealthy man, there was little to no chance they were going to shun him.” Elsie pushed her chair away from the table. “Give me a second. Let me grab my notes. I want to read you something.”

  She walked to the other room to get the red spiral-bound notebook she had been writing in all day, then returned to the kitchen. Not a sound in the interim.

  “This is from the diary of Emily Stone, dated July 20th, 1869. That man Weeks is a frightening one. I find myself putting it off to his size and the fact that he never smiles, but he has a way about him that I do not entirely trust. Michael, that’s her husband,” added Elsie, “seems perfectly acquiescent to taking his money. When Mr. Weeks converses, his words are friendly enough, but they do not match the tone. They do not match the man. Everyone here walks on eggshells when he is around, but they have plenty to say when he is not.”

  “It’s not super damning,” I said. “Just makes him sound like a bit of an asshole. I noticed he was from Bristol, but I couldn’t find anything about his life before he came to Massachusetts. Any luck on your ends?”

  “None,” said Josh. Elsie nodded in agreement. “You would think that someone of wealth would have had to leave some record on how they attained it, but there’s nothing. Like he simply appeared on the outskirts of Massachusetts one day.”

  Something about including the word appear didn’t sit well with me. We discussed nothing egregious, but it still felt like something unnatural hung in the air.

  “It’s around 1874 that it gets rough,” said Josh.

  “The missing children of Slattery Falls,” I said.

  “Exactly. For about five years, Robert Weeks frequented the town. He didn’t make any friends, but no enemies either. Like Elsie said, and I had the same notion, it just seems like a man trying to quash any suspicions that might lie on his doorstep by incorporating himself as just another citizen of Slattery Falls, although one with a much less modest home. The oddest part, and I also found this in Emily Stone’s diary, was that even when the house appeared finished to the outside observer, the workers never went away. The people of Slattery Falls didn’t see them as often, and assumed they must be renovating inside the house, but the workers would gather outside regularly, and not just a few, but just as many as the first day ground broke.”

  “Again weird, not necessarily sinister though.”

  “It was the summer of 1874 when the first child went missing. Six-year-old Benjamin Hempel. He went off to play down by the creek with his older sister, Elizabeth, in the middle of the afternoon. She came back, he didn’t. Now, the obvious answer is he fell in the creek and drowned.”

  “No,” I said, “I read about that one. I found pictures of the creek and descriptions and whatnot. I mean, I know they say you can drown in an inch of water, but even if there was some freak accident there’s no way they wouldn’t have found the kid.”

  “Benjamin,” added Elsie.

  “Right. Benjamin. They said his sister had no recollection of what could have possibly happened, like she lost time. She blamed herself for not paying enough attention and losing him.”

  “And she killed herself,” finished Elsie, looking down at her lap. “The next year, she couldn’t live with it anymore, and she killed herself.”

  I shot Josh a look, and he quickly put in, “Elsie, we don’t have to—”

  “No, it’s fine,” she added quickly. “I mean, it was hard to read through obviously, but there were seven other cases just like that, even after Weeks was supposedly gone, there were still two more. And guys, I don’t know if anyone else jumped to the same conclusion, but—”

  “Todd Benson.”

  “Yes. Everything we found about Todd Benson said there was no way someone could have taken him, but someone did, and who knows how many others. We just stumbled on that case, but it’s been almost 150 years. If this all pans out, it could be hundreds by now.”

  A moment went by while we took it all in. It was Josh who broke the silence.

  “Okay, so children went missing, and the people in town became suspicious of Weeks. Outsider syndrome. No matter how many years one spends in the community and how well they acclimate, there’s always a sense they don’t belong. If something happens, that’s where suspicion will fall. After the third child goes missing, that’s when the side-eye glances and mumbling turn into more direct accusations. Weeks doesn’t take kindly to this and abruptly ceases his visits to town. You would assume that the missing children would stop, or at the very least pause, but it doesn’t happen. Children continue to go missing at the rate of one every two to three months. Elsie, you said you read about nine cases total, right? Details or just names?”

  “Both.” She pulled her notes closer, not because she needed to, but to steel herself before reading from them. “I mentioned Benjamin Hempel was the first, age six. After that, Theresa Warner, age five, Jessica Hampstead, six, David Wright, eight, Eugene Davieau, five, James Hembree, seven, and Lucy Gibbs, three. I couldn’t find a ton of details on any one particular case, but honestly I think that’s because there aren’t that many. It seems like they all kind of mirror the Benjamin Hempel story. The children were away from the parents, sometimes for less than a minute. You can imagine after a few children went missing, the kids weren’t spending much time off on their own anymore. They were away from their parents, then they were gone.”

  “This is probably a shit question,” I said, “but did they ever find any of them?”

  She shook her head. Her mouth formed the shapes of the words, but only their ghosts came out.

  “Not alive,” Josh finished for her.

  Chapter Twenty

  The reign of terror lasted almost two years, parents afraid to let kids out of their sight, knowing that even their best efforts wouldn’t be able to keep them safe. The whole situation left local law enforcement baffled. They deputized several highly regarded community members and secretly assigned them to keep watch on the Weeks House to monitor comings and goings. Months of this turned up nothing. Robert Weeks had ceased leaving his house, and although people saw the workers outside sometimes, with a cigarette or chatting in groups, they never left either. On two separate afternoons where a child went missing, the house was under surveillance, and the deputies had seen no one depart the premises.

  Despite the evidence, or lack thereof, the people in town refused to acquit Weeks in their minds. According to Emily Stone’s diary—a source we were becoming intimately familiar with—on October 10th of 1876, the frustration and anger present in Slattery Falls, Massachusetts physically manifested, and a mob of almost two hundred people marched on the house, torches and all. The mass hysteria had boiled over to where it even involved the town’s lawmen, sheriff included. Nobody hid their face. They had a fucking monster in their midst and damned if they were going to wait for proof, or for one more of their children to go missing.

  They stood at the gate and demanded that Weeks come out. When he realized the group wasn’t going away, he did, appearing at the second-floor window. Several of the workers were present in the front yard, but made themselves scarce when the angry mob began throwing stones. I could paraphrase the rest, but I think it’s probably best to go word-for-word here.

  In an entry from later that night, Stone writes, Robert Weeks appeared at the window of his house on the hill, overlooking the town. He stood bold as brass, unrepentant and unashamed; declaring his innocence with no more emotion than a man might use to inform a passerby of the color of the sky. As though stating a fact. The people of Slattery Falls had already rendered their verdict, however, and it was not a favourable one for Mr. Weeks.

  We set to breaking down the gate. True, we had no tools to do so, but we had manpower in droves. The gates began
to give, and I looked up to see Mr. Weeks raise his hands as though pushing against an invisible wall. The gates seemed to draw renewed strength from this gesture, whether it be magick, I cannot say, but it took some heart out of the people who had seen it. In short order, the mass of human beings became too much for the gates, and for the man, to hold back. They came down with a clamorous roar and the townspeople made for the front door. It was no such obstacle and came down without circumstance. About twenty men on the front line stormed the second floor to retrieve Weeks, including Wright and Hampstead, who had lost children to this beast.

  The man, if man he was, I certainly have my doubts, was dragged down a flight of stairs and onto the front lawn where he stood surrounded and had accusations hurled at him. Robert Weeks showed no anger, yet there was a fire, a fury present in those startling sea-green eyes. One I suspect will stay with me for some time. The townspeople seemed at an impasse, and no one quite knew what to do next. I believe we all expected that such a gathering would force the truth out, and yet the man remained stoic.

  As the tension neared an unbearable point, a scream cut through the air. The folk who were not interrogating Robert Weeks had ransacked the house. The crowd parted around Shannon Brown, who held the lifeless body of Benjamin Hempel. Brown cried out that there were more, and not just the missing seven, but at least fifteen bodies, all children, in the house’s basement.

  At this discovery, Robert Weeks’ demeanor changed, not to fear as I might have guessed or hoped, but to joviality. This marked the only time that the people of Slattery Falls had seen the man smile, and it came at the public revelation that he had murdered children. He laughed, a sound that penetrated the stunned night air. And keeps me from finding sleep even as I write this. I fear that sound will haunt my dreams until my final day. In the end, there was no admission of guilt, no final words, just laughter. It was like there was a joke that only he had been privy to. Swiftly, the people had their justice as they hung Robert Weeks from the sturdy branch of an oak tree on his own property.

  The people continued making their way through every inch of the house, bringing out the bodies of the children, many of whom were not from Slattery Falls. I suspect we have quite the workload ahead of us in finding out where and from whom he took these other children from. They dragged workers out, about twelve of them. Those who resisted were deemed complicit and beaten to death. Those who came willingly were deemed equally guilty and hung. The last person brought out was a harsh-looking woman. Her attire suggested she’d been dragged from her bed, and tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, but refused to fall. No one in town had ever seen her before. When interrogated, she refused to give out any information, except that Weeks was her husband. That admission alone earned her a rope on the branch right next to his. Though Stone’s journal had no record of the woman’s name—perhaps they never learned it—Josh would later discover that it was Tabitha.

  When all was said and done, several people were missing. Not children this time, but men of the town, William Riley and Michael Tucker. They were among the folks who raided the house looking for any and all damning evidence, but no one saw them come back out. It is, of course, possible that they returned to their homes without notice amidst the chaos. Only tomorrow will tell.

  Finally, Emily Stone leaves us with this bit of wisdom. It was a night of blood and vengeance. As we returned to our homes, no one was truly satiated. The monsters are dead. Still, it appears the evil has not been extinguished, but merely changed its form. Perhaps this is why Robert Weeks went to the grave laughing.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  You’re probably thinking Josh and Elsie dug up quite a bit and I must have been sitting around with my thumb up my ass. Alas, you would be mistaken. I spent the day focusing on paranormal experiences in and around the house. Weird shit started up almost as soon as Weeks died. Almost immediately after stringing the man up, the town residents plundered every inch of his house and chained the gates shut. Despite the house being abandoned, people still saw figures passing by windows. One said to have strikingly resembled Robert Weeks. Passersby heard sounds coming from the house and described them as the noise of construction—the clang of a hammer driving in a nail, the rasp of a saw slicing through wood. Clearly coming from inside, but inexplicably amplified because how else would you hear that from outside the gate?

  And those two men Emily Stone mentioned? Riley and Tucker? Nobody ever saw them again. As far as anyone from Slattery Falls knew, they went in looking for the kids—down in the basement—and never came out. Then the same thing happened on several more occasions. When townspeople first saw specters at the windows and heard sounds, they believed someone was squatting in the house and sent people in to investigate. Sometimes they came back, sometimes they didn’t. Obviously they didn’t have a never-split-up-when-investigating-spooky-fucked-up-houses rule. We couldn’t find an accurate count of the men that entered the house in the months and years following Weeks’ death, but the number who never came out again was five. Not including the two lost the night of the hanging.

  Then two more children went missing, Sam Buckner and Nathan Stone. Almost identical circumstances to the original seven. And yes, Nathan was the son of Emily Stone. We first read about his disappearance in the diary entry from the day after he disappeared. Reading it together stopped us in our tracks for a bit. It made this whole thing a little more… real. If you really want to read it, feel free to do some internet sleuthing of your own, but I don’t have it in me to read it again, never mind writing it out.

  Both kids went missing in the house’s vicinity, but outside the gate. It served as the straw that broke Slattery Falls’ back and finally prompted the community to do something about the house because in 1879, even the skeptics believed Weeks was haunting or cursing the town.

  Here’s where it gets interesting. They elected a group of men to burn the house to the ground, but it didn’t work. How do you fuck up burning a house to the ground, you might ask? Well, it sounds like they did everything right and the house just refused to burn. No matter what they used as an accelerant, no matter how many times they tried, the flame would ignite, then extinguish almost immediately. Eventually, the men had to concede. The house didn’t take anybody that night, and if I had to guess why, it was probably so those men had to walk back to town with their heads hung low and admit defeat.

  Not entirely sure what to do with the house that had decided it wasn’t going anywhere, the town doubled down on keeping distance. The house’s relative isolation near the woods on the north end of town made this not only possible, but relatively easy. They basically drew an imaginary town line and banished the Weeks House from within the borders. After this entry, we didn’t find any record of disappearances, child or adult, for quite some time, so on the surface this worked. For a while anyway, because there’s two issues here.

  Number one, trying to make a problem go away by ignoring it absolutely never works under any circumstance. Number two, eventually the true stories that happen to one generation become the urban legends of the next. I suspect that’s what happened because there are reports of disappearances from 1880 to the present day, twenty-six in all. On a long enough timeline, it doesn’t look like an epidemic, but it struck us as a higher number than a town with a population of about 10,000 should probably have. I suppose I did neglect researching what an acceptable amount of disappearances might look like.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  By the time midnight rolled around, we had gone through everything. During past cram sessions, we had spread all our materials and discussions out over the course of a few days, but this one demanded a sense of urgency. As a result, we were pretty wiped out.

  “We still need to find some more about activity in the house between 1880 and now,” said Josh, rubbing his forehead and eyes to keep sleep at bay.

  “I’m not sure there’s much else to find,” I said. “For a while, it seems the town kept the place on lockdown
, and even though later generations didn’t believe the curse aspect, they seem to have had the good sense to stay the hell away from it, and not let anyone else in either. The town’s dirty little secret.”

  “So how do we get in?” Elsie said.

  I guess I should have been expecting that, but it still surprised me. “Whoa, why would we go inside?”

  Blank stares from my cohorts told me I was alone in this line of thought.

  “Not only does that place have a record of making people disappear, but it’s been actively trying to get our attention for ten years. Nothing about that says good idea. Nothing!” I continued.

  Elsie rolled her eyes. “Do you honestly expect anyone to believe you just spent fifteen hours learning everything you could about a cursed little town in Massachusetts, so that you could sweep it under a rug? You don’t have that in your personality, honey.” There was a trace amount of sarcasm in her voice, but she wasn’t joking. “Josh, what do you think?”

  “I abstain, courteously.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it,” Elsie said.

  “Okay.” Josh paused a moment, seeming to search for the right words. A quick dart of the eyes in my direction before he spoke told me what those words would be. “I think we should do it.”

  “Of course you do,” I said. “Because you’re obsessed.”

  Josh shrugged. “I am a bit, but that’s not why. You need to remember we’ve been looking into this for less than twenty-four hours, and so far, we’ve named sixteen people who have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, all presumably related to that house. Seven adults, nine children. Sixteen total. And ten children if you want to count Todd Benson, and I, personally, do. Elsie?”