Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper

by JL Bryan

  “The middle layer is this copper mesh.” I tapped the clear plastic exterior. The mesh could be seen through the plastic on the outside or through the glass on the inside—the trap was essentially transparent. “The mesh is charged by batteries at the bottom. It creates a second barrier, an electromagnetic wall to imprison the ghost. And the outer layer is just hard plastic to insulate the whole thing.”

  “Does that really work?” Dale asked, smirking at me. “It looks like something you stole off a bank teller.”

  “I’ve removed scores of ghosts with this kind of device,” I replied. I loaded the trap into the stamper, which sort of resembled a four-foot microscope. A bottle of compressed gas was at the top, where the eyepiece of a microscope would be. I snapped the cylinder lid into a shaft below it, where the microscope’s objective lenses would go. Then I locked the rest of the cylinder onto a little platform directly beneath the shaft. “When I press the button on the remote, the stamper slams the lid down onto the cylinder to seal the ghost inside. I can set it to automatically close when the sensors detect the temperature and EMF changes, but I prefer to operate it manually.” I lifted the remote, which had a digital display screen and one big red button.

  “That’s pretty cool,” Lexa whispered.

  “I hope it works,” Anna said. Dale snorted and shook his head.

  “Carry it around front,” Dale said. “I’m not hefting that dining table again tonight. I’ve got back problems.”

  “Can you make sure the front doors are unlocked, Mr. Treadwell?” Stacey asked.

  Dale blew out a long, slow breath, as if her request was the most annoying thing he’d ever heard and unlocking the front doors was a nearly impossible task. Then he took out his keys.

  Stacey and I picked up the stamper, a heavy and cumbersome piece of equipment, and lugged it together. We followed Dale through a path that had been recently hacked through the overgrown yard. Stepping stones were barely visible beneath a layer of stamped-down weeds. Dale carried my flashlight, and he wasn’t all that considerate about lighting the path for us.

  We reached the front steps, made of dark Georgia marble trimmed in brick.

  “What the hell?” Dale asked. He stopped on the walkway, looking up at the double doors beneath the sharp, peaked overhang. One of them stood wide open. “I locked those doors this morning when you two left.”

  “Maybe Anna opened them?” I asked. “Or Lexa?”

  “I doubt it. The girls won’t go into the main house at all anymore. Just me and the workers.”

  “Maybe one of the workers—” I began.

  “Probably. Freakin’ slobs.” Dale shook his head as he climbed the five steps. He pushed open the second door with a creak, then presented the pitch-black foyer with a sarcastic flourish, without stepping inside. “Here’s your room, ladies.”

  Stacey and I lugged the stamper up the stairs and into the center of the foyer. Dale did not step inside with us, and actually pulled a pretty good vanishing act just after we walked past him. He was probably scared to enter the main house, too, and didn’t want to hang around long enough to make his fear obvious.

  Despite the open door and the hot June night outside, the interior of the vaulted foyer was still a little chilly. Stacey and I had cleaned it up after the failed mock funeral, including sliding the little end tables back against the wall where we’d found them, plus sweeping up an amazing amount of dust along with the shredded funeral flowers. The room still looked filthy, though, and smelled like rot.

  We set up the stamper in the middle of the floor, then returned to the van a couple of times to haul in the rest of our gear. When we were done, we knocked on the side door again, because the family had returned inside the house.

  “I think we’re ready,” I told Anna, while I stayed out on the covered side porch. “You may as well try to get some sleep.”

  “We can’t watch you catch the ghost?” Lexa asked with a frown.

  “Stacey will get it all on video,” I said. “You can watch tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” She was still frowning, but she looked a little relieved, too.

  “Go get ready for bed, Lexa,” Anna said. When the girl was gone, Anna asked us in a quieter voice: “Do you want us to unlock the security door in case you run into trouble? I could have Dale pull the table away.”

  “No, but thank you,” I said. “Do what makes you feel safe. We’ll be right by the front doors if we need a quick escape. I’m sure we’ll be fine, anyway.”

  “All right.” She seemed relieved. “Good luck.”

  As we walked away, I heard Anna lock the door behind us.

  Back in the foyer, now lit by a few scattered electric lanterns, we set up for the night. We had our usual array of cameras, mostly pointed at the big stamper holding the cylindrical trap, the lid poised a foot above the open trap and ready to slam down at a moment’s notice. We had a high-sensitivity microphone.

  We also had a couple of sleeping bags, since there was no electricity to inflate my air mattress. The renovation workers were having trouble fixing up the wiring in the main house, though the power in the east wing seemed to work fine. We had a cooler with bottled water, sandwiches, and snacks.

  “This is almost like camping,” Stacey said.

  “It’s even worse than camping,” I replied.

  “We still have more than an hour until midnight. Let’s take a look around this place.” Stacey hopped to her feet.

  “Seriously? After what happened at the asylum today, you want to go exploring a haunted mansion?” I have to admit, I was a little impressed.

  “Do you think it’s better to sit in the one room we know is haunted?” Stacey asked.

  I couldn’t argue with that. Our instruments weren’t picking up any major electromagnetic activity, and we weren’t seeing anything on the thermal or night vision cameras. Aside from the abnormally low temperature and the aggressive reek of decay, the room seemed quiet. I don’t like to sit still for very long, anyway.

  “Okay,” I said. “As long as we’re back before midnight. Bring your camera.”

  I strapped my heavy night vision goggles to my head, keeping them up on my forehead for now, and grabbed my flashlight. I double-checked my pocket to make sure the necklace was still there—we couldn’t have the ghost coming by and scooping it up while we were gone. Active ghosts have a talent for making small objects disappear.

  We started by looking around the main level. The spacious front parlor had a big bay window overgrown with vines on the outside. A decayed piano slumped in the corner, and a few crumbling books adorned the mostly empty bookshelves. A model sailing ship lay smashed on the floor among broken glass, as if it had once been inside a bottle. A mildewed sofa lay like a corpse under an even more mildewed sheet. The brick fireplace was cold and empty, full of ancient gray ashes.

  “Nothing happening here,” I said, checking my Mel Meter. “Let’s keep going.”

  A heavy, abnormally wide sliding door stood closed in the north wall, opposite the giant bay window. Its unseen rollers screeched as Stacey heaved the door aside.

  I pointed my flashlight into a dining room that dwarfed the one in the east wing. Layers of crown molding encircled the high ceiling. The fireplace was huge and gorgeous, made of large river stones and almost big enough to stand inside. Sideboards were mounted along one wall, opposite a row of tall, narrow windows that showed nothing but darkness outside. There was no furniture except for a single dining chair overturned by the door to the hallway, one leg broken as if the chair had tripped and fallen while attempting to escape.

  Another sliding door led us toward a room at the back of the house, where we discovered a moth-eaten old wing chair poised by the small fireplace.

  “Do you smell that?” Stacey sniffed the air, which had a slightly acrid odor. “It’s very faint, but it’s like old cigars?”

  “This must have been the smoking room,” I said. “You could imagine the men retreating here to drink and smoke a
fter a dinner party. The ladies might have gone to the parlor instead.”

  “According to your friend from the historical society, they might have been smoking opium in here, too,” Stacey said. “And those ladies were prostitutes, at least in the later years….These must have been some wild parties.”

  We crossed the central hallway to the kitchen, which had acres of countertop as well as a separate prep table. It was big enough to cook multi-course meals for a crowd of people. A discolored rectangle on the wall indicated where the refrigerator had been. A brown 1970s-style six-burner stove with a circular window in the oven door remained in the room, but you wouldn’t want to eat any food that passed near it. Many of the cabinets had been bashed apart by vandals, and a disgusting black stain took up one entire side of the sink, the one underneath the rusty faucet.

  “So gross,” Stacey whispered, shining her light into the sink.

  “The Treadwells really have their work cut out here,” I said. “I hope they have a fortune to spend on renovation.”

  The first floor was creepy, but we didn’t encounter any cold spots, banging doors, or headless horsemen, and our instruments indicated nothing at all. We found the back stairs, which ran above an empty room with washer and dryer hookups, and we climbed to the second floor. The stairs were narrow and steep, designed for servants rather than valued guests. My arms brushed the walls on either side of me, and I’m not exactly a broad-shouldered football player type.

  I immediately did not like the second floor. The ceiling was much lower than the first floor, and the hallway felt cramped.

  We looked into a couple of rooms, finding only debris. The rooms themselves were impressive, though, with high ceilings, dark timbers, marble accents, and tall windows trimmed in colored glass. The house had probably been elegant and attractive back in its long-lost prime.

  Individual exterior locks had been added to most of the doors, probably during the mansion’s boarding-house days after Captain Marsh died and his niece inherited the house.

  There was no such lock on the bathroom door. Stacey wrinkled her nose at the cracked, dirty tiles and the open pipes where the sink and toilet had been. An oval-shaped porcelain soaking tub remained, its interior coated with black grime, as if a layer of mold had bloomed and died there ages ago.

  “I guess the boarders shared the bathroom with each other,” she said. “Ew. Lousy accommodations.”

  The next door was ajar, and I eased it open.

  “Watch out!” I told Stacey. My flashlight showed rusty nails jutting out along the edge of the door, like a row of sharp teeth running from the top to the bottom. A few chunks of the door’s edge were missing. They were still nailed to the door frame.

  “I wonder why they nailed it shut,” Stacey whispered.

  I opened the door wider, and it let out a rusty creak. Unlike the other second-floor rooms we’d passed, this one was still partly furnished, with a sagging single bed topped with rotten old blankets. A cheap pine wardrobe stood closed in one shadowy corner, by the narrow, sharp-peaked window. The plain, ugly furniture looked out of place under the high ceiling with its intricate, hand-crafted crown molding depicting leaves and grapes.

  “Ugh.” Stacey covered her nose as she swooped her light around the room. “Smells like a possum died in here. And a skunk, too. Maybe it was a murder-suicide.”

  “It feels weird, too,” I said. I was a little dizzy, and my stomach felt like it wanted to flip over. My Mel Meter detected nothing.

  I clicked off my flashlight and slid my night vision goggles over my eyes. Every detail of the room stood out in stark green. I approached the wardrobe. The knobby, thick grains of cheap wood seemed to glow in sharp relief.

  I hesitated, took a breath, then opened the wardrobe.

  Inside hung several empty hangers and a patched, worn coat and frayed necktie from a man’s suit. Whoever had owned it had lived in the forties or fifties, and had not been rich.

  A thick layer of dust coated everything.

  I lifted away my goggles and double-checked my meter. Nothing. I walked around the bed, then the tiny, bricked-up fireplace, and finally I circled the room. Despite my queasy feelings, I couldn’t find anything.

  I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. What I found wasn’t supernatural, but it was a little disturbing—a couple of broken syringes. I couldn’t see any good reason to touch them or examine them further without wearing gloves, so I left them there.

  “Why do you think they nailed this room closed?” Stacey whispered. She was lingering close to the door.

  “No idea. Be careful on the way out.”

  We stepped past the door with its edge of crooked, rusty nails, then eased it shut.

  The other rooms were similar to the first we’d seen, with beautiful high ceilings and arched, colored-glass windows whispering of the house’s original glory, now coated in dust and grime. The walls were set at odd angles to each other, giving each room a unique shape.

  The rooms were empty except for debris we didn’t particularly want to inspect, plus an occasional chair, table, or bedframe. We found another bathroom, where the sink had been removed and the mirror above it smashed. We also found a second small bedroom that had been nailed shut and later pried open.

  Looking inside that room, we found a decaying double bed with a rotten canopy. Lacy clothing hung in the closet, including an old-fashioned bustier and a scandalously cut red dress. We had the same uneasy feeling, but got no readings.

  Back in the second-floor hall, I opened a slatted door, expecting to find a linen closet, but instead discovered a set of stairs to the third floor. It made the previous stairway look roomy by comparison. The stairs were steep and shallow, almost like a ladder.

  “Should we check it out? They said the master suite is up there, right?” Stacey asked. There was apprehension in her voice, but a little excitement, too. I had to admit she was courageous. Maybe I was getting slightly less annoyed with Calvin for sticking me with a new apprentice to train. Maybe.

  “There’s no time,” I said. “It’s almost midnight. We need to go light up the trap.”

  Stacey looked both relieved and disappointed as I closed the door and walked back up the hallway.

  Chapter Fourteen

  We returned to the foyer by the wide front staircase. I gave the broken baluster on the second floor a sidelong glance—we didn’t know for sure that Mercy had hung herself on that particular baluster, but I couldn’t help imagining it.

  Pale spots of electric lantern light glowed on the foyer floor. The room was at least ten degrees colder than all the others we’d visited. The EMF readings fluctuated up to 2.2 milligaus, then 2.3. It was the low end of the ghost-EM range, enough to indicate a residual or dormant haunting, at least.

  “So, as far as we can tell, she usually begins in this room, then steps through that door and down the hall.” I opened the door to the hallway, where Stacey’s thermal camera had caught the cold spirit emerging from the foyer.

  I was thrown off for a moment. Apparently Dale had been working hard today—or more likely, his contractors had been working hard while he stood around with a beer giving them unwanted advice, as he’d done with the roofers.

  Fresh, unpainted drywall lined both sides of the hall, giving it the appearance of something freshly built. That meant they’d finished removing the rotten old paneling and updating the wiring, but I didn’t want to throw a switch and test it out. Instead, I dropped my night goggles over my eyes.

  “Let’s cut her off,” I told Stacey. I grabbed a hammer and a couple of nails from the portable workbench set up near the locked security door.

  We returned to the lobby, where I closed the hallway door and began nailing it to the door frame.

  “Whoa!” Stacey said. “Won’t the Treadwells get upset about that?”

  “Not as upset as they’ll be if we don’t get rid of their ghost.” I hammered in the third and final nail, then tested the door. It was sealed tight.r />
  “You’re the boss.” Stacey shrugged and checked her watch. “Three minutes to midnight.”

  “Let’s light it up.” I walked over to the big pneumatic stamper and reached into the cylindrical trap. The lid was already loaded into the stamper, ready to slam down and seal the trap at a moment’s notice.

  I dropped the tarnished silver necklace at the bottom of the cylinder, next to an unlit white candle mounted on a little tack. Two more tacks were built inside the cylindrical trap, one halfway up, one near the top. A white candle was mounted on each.

  “Want to do the honors?” I opened my toolbox and held out a box of kitchen matches.

  “Seriously?” Stacey’s eyes glowed like a girl receiving a pony for her birthday. “Can I?”

  “Can you handle striking a match?” I asked solemnly, resisting my urge to snicker at her eagerness.

  “I can.” She said it back with the same solemn tone, and I laughed.

  Stacey ignited a long match, then reached it into the trap and lit the three candles. I walked around the room, gathering up and switching off our electric lanterns. I left them by our “campsite” with our sleeping bags.

  “Now what?” Stacey asked.

  “Blow out your match and sit down.” I dropped into a cross-legged position on my sleeping bag.

  “I feel like I should say something.”

  I laughed. “You’re not casting a spell. Ghosts can feed on the heat of candles. You’re just setting out food for it.”

  “So why did we need the necklace?” Stacey sat down beside me and clicked off her flashlight, leaving the candles as the only light source in the room.

  “To really draw her interest. In a bad pinch, you can try using candles and nothing else, but it’s so much easier if you have something else to attract the ghost. Now stay quiet and watch.”

  We watched the three candles burning inside the transparent cylinder. The copper mesh didn’t obscure the view any more than a screen door blocks your view of the driveway. The leaded glass, though, distorted and magnified the flickering flames.