A haunted house story for Halloween
Dear Folks,
Your Aunt Billy here. It was a little before your time and all that’s left of the old Williams place now is a few scattered antique bricks hidden in the weeds and encroaching brush and gradually dissolving back into the red dirt where the lawn and garden used to be. It was once a beautiful big farmhouse built optimistically to sustain a legacy but after its builder died of pneumonia without heirs, siblings or even a wife in the muddy trenches of WW-1 Belgium it sat empty for more than two decades. Time, weather and small boys with rocks soon turned it into a gray and glassless hulk empty of everything that could be pried loose and carried off — except for whatever haunted it.
Mysterious flickering yellow lights as if from carried lanterns, creaking sounds from the walls and floors, thick spiderwebs swaying as if from a breeze in dead-still air and often high-pitched screams and low moaning. More than a few of the local brave-hearts and skeptics swore they would spend a whole night in the house; none ever did. Otherwise strong young men ran away screaming. Nobody knew what it was, many were convinced it was the devil, but, finally, one of the local preachers decided it was time the devil got his due, if indeed it was the ol’ boy his own fine horned-and-hoovered self. Armed only with his heavy black Bible and a Thermos of, some later claimed, sacramental wine or moonshine, the brave reverend entered the old house in the evening gloaming and he stayed as the air was filled with moaning, the lights flickered and the entire house seemed to shake, as did the preacher, but then, just a few minutes past midnight, the ghost of a young and beautiful woman, little more than just a girl materialized. This set the preacher back onto his heels since she was hardly what he had been anticipating, a face-to-face high-nooner with Christianity’s ranking nemesis, but he held his ground as she told him, in the softest of voices, that she had been traveling through the area when she was assaulted and murdered by a member of his very own congregation and could not rest until her murderer was exposed and brought to justice. “You will find my bones buried in a shallow grave in the earthen floor of this house,” she said. “Go down and dig there and take the smallest bone of my left little finger, then place it in your collection plate next Sunday and it will identify my killer.”
The preacher did as she had told him and as the collection plate reached a certain man, a deacon of the church in fact, the tiny bone flew out of the plate and stuck to the man’s forehead. Clawing desperately at the bone, he began to scream and confessed to the crime. He was arrested and put in jail. The girl’s body was dug up and reinterred with a proper Christian burial on Little Hope Hill and nobody ever again saw the mysterious lights or swaying cobwebs or heard the screams and moaning but by then the old house had deteriorated even more and just wasn’t worth fixing up even by retiring Yankees with visions of opening a bed & breakfast and nobody never spent a night there again. It caught on fire one blustery October 31st near midnight, nobody knows why and burned to the ground.
There was a trial, the killer confessed again and was sentenced to be publicly hanged a month later. It was an event eagerly anticipated, picnic lunches were planned, women and girls bought new outfits to wear for the occasion, Silas down at the general store ordered in and quickly sold a dozen pairs of mother-of-pearl opera glasses, watermelons were set to chilling in spring houses and every male over the age of 12 secreted a little flask of whiskey with which to toast the swinger. The sheriff even sent off to Sears Roebuck for a new hanging rope since Mabel Belle, his wife had commandeered his old one for using as a clothesline and refused to give it back.
But, as so often happens, Providence stepped in to confound the plans of man. The condemned prisoner beat the carnival-anticipating crowd by dying of a heart attack less than a day before starring in the big event. Everyone in the Hollow was angry, upset and downright peed off at being robbed of the biggest entertainment of the year. Most said the man should have been hanged anyway but the sheriff refused because Sears would not accept the return of a used hanging rope. They all went ahead and had their picnics anyway but nobody’s heart was really in it. Silas refused to take back the dozen pairs of opera glasses and refund the money. A few suggested hanging him instead but they needed the store to stay open or be replaced by a Dollar General so the idea died stillborn.
People said back then that a good old fashioned hanging beat a circus any day, even one with clowns, elephants and a human cannonball. There hasn’t been either in the Hollow for fifty years now and I reckon there won’t ever be. Just watching somebody executed by firing squad on television, I’ve been told by some old-timers, would be a yawner in comparison to the real thing and the antics of Congress puts even the best Big Top circus to shame and there aint no lions or tigers to be fed.
Nobody ever leaves the lights on where the old Williams house used to be for Ol’ Scratch or boogers or anybody else but mine’s always on for you. And for any trick-or-treaters or real ghosts that might happen by. Until next time, I remain with love, Your Aunt Billy.
