The Haunting of Winchester Mansion

by Alexandria Clarke

  Table of Contents

  The Haunting Of Winchester Mansion

  Chapter One: A Fresh Start

  Chapter Two: Welcome to Black Bay

  Chapter Three: Sanctuary

  Chapter Four: The House on the Bluff

  Chapter Five: Priorities

  Chapter Six: Uphill, Downstairs

  Chapter Seven: Music of the Night

  Chapter Eight: Post Trauma

  Chapter Nine: Two for One

  Chapter Ten: Dead End

  The Haunting Of Winchester Mansion

  Copyright 2016 All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means without prior written permission, except for brief excerpts in reviews or analysis

  Chapter One: A Fresh Start

  Bailey and Bodhi: Flipping Out

  We’re on the move again! If you’re an avid reader of this blog, you already know that Bodhi and I just finished renovating an adorable beach house in Fort Lauderdale. (If you’re new to Flipping Out, click here for before and after pics of our favorite projects!) It was a doozy, but we learned so much. For instance, I now know that I would never want to live in Florida. First of all, it’s hot. Secondly, it rains a lot. What kind of propaganda is the “Sunshine State” feeding us anyway?! But the weather doesn’t compare to the third thing I learned: sinkholes are the monsters under your bed. Literally. A Jacuzzi-sized crater opened up in the room we were sleeping in and swallowed our mattress whole. Thankfully, we weren’t at the house when it happened. Check out the full story (and terrifying photos) of our sinkhole struggle in my February entries. Anyway, we went into this project thinking it would be a quick flip. Instead, we spent a lot of money and a lot of time repairing the foundation of the house, which will definitely take a toll on our net return. Seriously, everyone. Fear the sinkhole.

  On a more cheerful note, the sinkhole house is now on the market! Don’t worry; it is now sinkhole free. We made sure of that. If you love a searing sun, ravenous mosquitos, and hurricane-force winds, this beach house is perfect for you. Okay, fine. I’ll admit it. Florida is pretty great in some ways. The sunsets are straight out of a cruise commercial, and let me tell you, it’s pure paradise knowing that when you wake up, you can throw on a bikini and head out to your backyard… because your backyard is the beach! If you’re interested, click on the links below for pictures, a virtual tour, and pricing.

  Now that the beach house is waiting to be sold to a happy owner, Bodhi and I are in search of a new property together! You know the drill, people. We love a challenge, so drop a message in my inbox if you have an idea in mind for our next project!

  Until next time!

  Bailey

  I attached a photo of Bodhi and I posing proudly in front of the completed house, clicked the link to publish the new blog post, and lay back on the cool tile floor of our tiny apartment. I stared up at the stucco ceiling. The leak in the corner of the living room had started dripping again, staining the cheap white paint with a tinge of garlic yellow. I sighed, tilting my head toward the sliding glass doors. The vertical blinds were broken, and Bodhi wouldn’t bother to repair them. Outside, the pouring rain blanketed our usual view of the complex’s algae-infested swimming pool in a monochrome gray sheet. The fan palm on the patio folded sadly under the weight of the water and wind, its leaves bent like broken fingers against the concrete in a feeble attempt to hold itself up. Thunder drummed in the distance, and every few minutes, a flash of lightning illuminated the small apartment with a ferocity that went unchallenged by the weak lightbulb of the overhead fan. My own face peered back at me from the reflection in the glass door: tanned, freckled cheeks, chin-length light brown hair, and hazel eyes that used to have a little more sparkle in them. Without sitting up, I reached for the nearby plastic trash can and relocated it to catch the steady plop of rainwater from the ceiling.

  Thankfully, our living situation was temporary. We had moved out of the sinkhole house a few days ago. The apartment was a go-between, a shelter from the rain while we decided where to go next. With any luck, it would be someplace dry. Phoenix, maybe. Or Las Vegas. I was always impatient between projects. In theory, moving to a new city every few months and living out of half-built houses seemed appealingly bohemian—especially toward the end of the renovations when the houses we flipped really started to come together—but I had developed the poor habit of forgetting what life was like during the hiatus between projects. Without the distraction of blueprints, construction crews, and the eccentric catharsis of filling one of those massive industrial dumpsters with the guts of an old house, my mind tended to settle on things that I didn’t want it to settle on. Like why it took Bodhi an hour and a half to bring home Chinese food from a restaurant that was five minutes away.

  My laptop chimed from its perch on the cardboard box that currently served as our coffee table. Someone had already read and responded to my newest blog post. I closed my eyes, listening to the rain pitter patter on the roof. I liked to wait until my inbox was full. Then I went through all of the messages at once. It was a process I had learned at the beginning of my journey into blogging. I used to read an e-mail, get distracted by a new message, and never get back to the old one. I missed some great opportunities that way, including a historic property in Boston that had apparently belonged to one of the Founding Fathers and an old firehouse in Brooklyn that would have made the most fabulous apartment. Nowadays, I spent hours poring through my inbox and real estate websites. The best properties weren’t easy to find, but I had a knack for unearthing a good deal.

  I heard the key turn in the deadbolt, followed by Bodhi’s familiar grunt as he shouldered open the door. It regularly stuck to the frame, a result of the humidity levels in Florida. The ever-thickening air was another reason to get out of town as soon as possible. Water cascaded off of Bodhi’s raincoat as he trekked inside, leaving a trail of puddles from the door to the living room. At some point, the wind had caused his hood to abandon his head. With each hand occupied by a paper bag full of Chinese food, he had no way of pulling it back into place. His mane of black curls was plastered to the olive skin of his face, and though his forehead crinkled, a sure sign of grumpiness, a glimmer of longing dared to flash inside me at Bodhi’s appearance. It was a memory of a feeling, a tiny spark of hope before it flickered out, extinguished by the careless way Bodhi dumped the food on the floor. A plastic container of wonton soup escaped from the paper bags, rolling across the tile and settling against my bare foot. Bodhi shook out his hair, showering me with rainwater.

  “Bodhi, my laptop!”

  “Sorry. Why are you lying on the floor?”

  “It’s not like we have any chairs.”

  He meandered into the bedroom and returned with two pillows, plunking them down on either side of the cardboard box. “Welcome to Southeast Asia.”

  “I suppose that’s appropriate,” I grumbled. I wedged one of the pillows beneath my butt and opened the wonton soup.

  “China is in East Asia, actually.”

  “Don’t people sit on the floor in China too?”

  “I’ve never been to China,” he called, disappearing into the bathroom.

  “I know.” I set my laptop aside, made a grab for the damp paper bags, and reached inside for the first plastic container. It was scalding hot. I hissed, retracting my hand to suck on my burnt fingers.

  Bodhi emerged from the bathroom. He had stripped out of his soaked clothing and down to his boxers. A blue-and-white towel was draped over his damp shoulders. I steeled myself, biting my lip. I told him ten times a day not to pilfer the pool towels. The apartment complex was anal about it. We had alread
y been charged additional laundry fees.

  “Everything okay?” he asked, scrubbing his hair dry with the pool towel.

  “It’s hot.”

  “Go figure.”

  He sat opposite me and gently toppled the bag, spilling the contents across the surface of our cardboard table in a messy jumble. Carefully, I righted each container. Bodhi handed me a pair of chopsticks and a two-liter bottle of soda.

  “Cups?” I asked. He shook his head. I unscrewed the cap and took a swig from the bottle, crinkling my nose. The carbonation made my eyes water.

  As Bodhi sifted bourbon chicken into a container of egg fried rice, he gestured with his chopsticks toward my open laptop. “Any luck?”

  “I just posted the new blog entry a few minutes ago.”

  The e-mail feature chimed three times in a row.

  “Sounds promising,” said Bodhi. “Why don’t you check it?”

  “I like to see the messages—”

  “All at once,” he finished. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Plus, I’m eating.” I dipped a spring roll into a dollop of duck sauce and took a liberal bite.

  “Fine.”

  But when silence fell and the crunch of the spring roll’s crispy exterior between my teeth echoed to the far corners of the miniscule apartment, I relented. I dusted off my hands and drew my laptop toward me.

  “Crap. Crap. Crap,” I declared, flipping through the first few property suggestions with practiced ease. “Too expensive. Too ugly. Too Stepford Wives.”

  “Hang on. Go back,” said Bodhi. “What about the blue one?”

  “It’s in Detroit.”

  “Hard pass.”

  A notification for a new message popped up. I squinted at it. The thumbnail showcased a sizeable home nestled between brilliant green trees. In the lower left hand corner of the photo, sparkling reflections of the sun glinted off a body of water. I clicked on the e-mail.

  “That place is for sale?” asked Bodhi. He leaned forward to get a better look at the picture, but the cardboard box caved in beneath the weight of his elbow, and the food containers slid inward. Quickly, Bodhi sat up straight, popping the box back into place from the underside.

  I flipped through the pictures attached to the new e-mail. This house had potential. It was immense compared to the properties we usually tackled, but it would be an easy renovation. From a cursory glance, the house was in decent shape. Its only flaw was that it had been built well over twenty years ago. For real estate these days, it was severely outdated.

  “Well?” Bodhi prompted.

  “Just a minute. There’s a message attached.”

  I read it out loud:

  Dear Ms. Taylor,

  I recently discovered your blog, and I think you would find great interest in a property in my possession. It has been vacant for quite a few years, and I fear many critters have taken up residence in the meantime, but other than that, the house is in admirable condition. I have no use for the house myself, and I’ve simply tired of the responsibility that comes with owning such a stagnant piece of land. As such, I’m willing to come down as low as possible on the price. If you are interested, please let me know as soon as it is convenient for you.

  Courteously,

  Milo Holmes

  “Where is this place?” Bodhi asked, squinting at the mountainous scenery in the background of the exterior shots.

  I double-checked the listing. “Some tiny town called Black Bay. It’s in Washington.”

  “You know it rains like hell in Washington too, right?”

  “It might be worth it, if he means what he said about the price.”

  He ate the last bite of my abandoned egg roll and dusted his hands off. “I have to admit I’m interested, but it seems too good to be true. A house like that? Something has to be wrong with it if he wants to sell it for so little.”

  “What if we don’t bite and end up letting another great opportunity go to waste?”

  Bodhi tipped his head back, swishing soda in his mouth. He was thinking. The veins in his neck—his lifelines—stood at attention. He swallowed. “Can you do a little digging? This Milo fellow. Ask him for more information.”

  It was as close to a consensus as we were going to get at the moment. I wrote a short reply to Milo Holmes, requesting additional information. At the bottom, I left my cell phone number, signed off, and hit send. As the e-mail application swooshed, the familiar anticipation of acquiring a new property settled in. I tapped my chopsticks rapidly against the cardboard box to get the jitters out.

  Bodhi trapped them beneath his own chopsticks then lifted a piece of bourbon chicken to my mouth. I almost veered away, thrown by this rare display of affection, and studied the man sitting across from me. He was familiar but blurry, like I was looking at him from beneath the depths of the murky water in the community pool. This was an older version of Bodhi, a more playful version that hadn’t made an appearance in quite some time. I missed this version.

  I ate the chicken. I saw the ghost of his smile. My cell phone rang.

  Chapter Two: Welcome to Black Bay

  Bodhi hated Washington.

  He declared his hatred over the anguished groan of the landing gear deploying from the belly of our cramped plane as the pilot lowered us through Seattle’s dreary atmosphere, aiming for the SeaTac airport. As the ground rushed up to meet us, the muscles in my stomach clenched. Landing was the worst part of flying. It was the idea that you could make it all the way to your destination, the safety and solidity of the tarmac teasing you from the view outside the diminutive oval window, and still die in some inexplicable calamity that befalls the aircraft in the last five minutes of flight. That would be infinitely more tragic than dying during a fatal take-off procedure. At least if you bit the bullet during take-off, you hadn’t spent the last few hours of your life with your knees crammed against the vinyl seat in front of you, eating stale peanuts and breathing recycled air within a glorified tin can as your husband reads SkyMall with a level of concentration unwarranted by such expensive and useless materialism. In any case, Bodhi’s immediate animosity toward Washington State did not do any wonders for my aching low back, full bladder, or general anxiety.

  His seat belt loosened as he leaned across me to peer out of the window. “Have you ever seen a place this gray? It looks like a painting I saw in the Tate Modern once. Giant canvas—must’ve been at least eight feet tall—and the artist covered the entire damn thing in one shade of gray paint. Who does that? How is that art?”

  “The trees are green.” Anything to get Bodhi to shut up about the painting.

  “If you can see them through the clouds.”

  I didn’t care about the clouds. They were a safe haven compared to the apartment in Florida. One bedroom. A full-sized mattress. Innumerable accidental touches followed by hasty awkward apologies. There was an inch and a mile between us.

  Milo Holmes’s first phone call was a blessing, as were the following ones. It was the easiest buying process I’d experienced thus far. Milo was polite yet persistent. I had offered him a price that was borderline disrespectful, but he hadn’t blanched. On the contrary, he insisted on taking care of everything from drafting the closing papers to supervising the inspection. He had walked me through each detail over the phone, tirelessly e-mailed me copies of the paperwork, and shortened the entire process by at least fifty percent. All that was left was for Bodhi and I to make an official site visit. If everything went to spec, the house in Black Bay would be ours to rebuild.

  Blissfully, the plane touched down without going up in a fiery inferno. We deplaned, picked up our bags, and rented a car from the airport. The drive to Black Bay was quiet save for the navigation application on Bodhi’s phone barking out directions. I rested my forehead against the window, watching the trees, which in fact were not gray, blur together as they rushed by.

  “There it is.”

  The car crested over a hill. Black Bay lay before us, a quaint town nestled at the b
ase of an enormous bluff. It spread out delicately and in tremendous hues, as though someone had painted the entire scene in watercolors. Nature remained greatly undisturbed here. The residents of Black Bay had taken care to build their houses and businesses between the reaches of the tall trees and flowering plants. The bay itself curled around the town in a tight hug. Despite the cloud cover, the bright blues and whites of windsurfers and sailboats drifted languidly about, a stark contrast to the navy background of sparkling water. We passed a weathered sign with chipped paint as the car trundled toward the main street: Welcome to Black Bay - Population: 7324.

  “It’s quite colorful,” Bodhi admitted, letting off the gas to cruise down the hill.

  The main street was rife with activity. Women shopped in boutiques, men chatted amiably on street corners, and children laughed as they flew kites past a fountain in the town square. The marina was busy too. Fishermen hauled in their catches from the early morning while teenagers played catch or lounged on the docks, dangling their bare feet over the water. It was a Saturday, and it seemed all of Black Bay wanted to spend their day in the summer breeze.

  Bodhi drew to a stop, gesturing for a gaggle of high schoolers to cross the road in front of us. “What time did you say we were supposed to meet this Milo guy again?”

  “Eleven o’clock.”

  It took less than ten minutes to drive from one end of Black Bay to the other. The far side was quieter, more subdued, as though the thick forest ate sounds and swallowed them deep in its belly. A narrow road invited us into the misty retreat of the overlooking rock. I craned my neck, peering through the windshield. Somewhere above, our potential property loomed, but the only hint of its existence was the faint outline of a widow’s walk, barely visible through the thickening fog. Still, the familiar flutter of anticipation spun in my stomach.

  The car climbed up the slender street, winding back and forth through the trees until the land leveled out. As the house appeared in full view, I inhaled sharply. The plethora of pictures Milo had sent me hadn’t done it justice. The coastal home’s design might have been outdated and its derelict exterior run down by years of saltwater erosion and constant rain, but its soaring columns, grand doorways, and multiple wooden decks were breathtakingly gorgeous. I stepped out of the car before Bodhi put it in park, planted my hands on my hips, and took in the sights.