Eleanor, Alice, and the Roosevelt Ghosts

by Dianne K. Salerni

  Not in the mood to unpack just yet, Alice removes a single item from her suitcase and sets it on the bedside table—a framed photograph of her mother, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt.

  This photograph of her mother is the only one Alice has ever seen. Aunt Bye gave it to her, and in fact, everything she knows about her mother was told to her by her aunt. Her father never speaks of his first wife. He never even says her name, which means he avoids calling his daughter by the name they share. When he can’t get out of calling her something, Father uses her family nickname, Sissy.

  The Campaign of Terror (as Alice termed it in her head) had originally begun as a plan to gain her father’s attention. Events escalated only because nothing she did mattered to him. The spitballs in the Capitol? Reported to Mother Edith. The cigar stubs she deliberately left for the laundress to find? Passed to Mother Edith.

  It was when her stepmother threatened to send her to New York that Alice began to envision another end to this game. Encouraging her siblings to sled down the staircase hadn’t done it. Nor had wrecking the bicycle. But blowing up that tree stump with firecrackers—a stroke of genius! Telegrams were flying between New York and Washington before the smoke had dissipated. Even then, Father gave her no more than a cursory goodbye, too engrossed in some letter he’d received from the secretary of the navy, to whom he had been appointed assistant. “The second-highest civilian position in the navy,” Mother Edith often reminded Alice, as if that were far more important than being her father.

  Alice looks around her room with a sigh. The new wallpaper is quite hideous, but she can live with it. She suspects she’ll have more patience with a lot of things in a house where she is actually loved.

  She has just decided to try out the bathroom’s plumbing when a loud mechanical snap resonates in the hallway outside her room. The sound is followed by a blue glow visible beyond her half-open door.

  Alice sticks her head into the hallway. The blue glow comes from an Edison Ghost Lamp on a table down the hall. Alice approaches it warily. Her family owns two such lamps, but she has never seen one activated before. Its bell-shaped bulb pulses with blue light powered by something stranger than gas, electricity, or oil.

  The hair on the back of her neck stands on end. She looks right and left and sees nothing. Perhaps the lamp is malfunctioning? Then nausea rolls over her. A sensation akin to a shower of slugs crawls over her body, starting at the top of her head, dripping down her face, and oozing over her shoulders.

  Alice wipes her cheek and finds nothing there. Her pulse surging, she backs toward the stairs, her eyes darting everywhere. Even with the blue glow illuminating the hallway, there are dark shadows in every corner.

  Then she stiffens.

  From within the darkest shadow, a place face watches Alice silently.

  3

  ELEANOR ACTS ON IMPULSE

  I’M washing the supper dishes in a bucket of water from the pump when Rosie bursts through the back kitchen door, returning from her evening out. Her lined face is drawn with worry. “Miss Eleanor! Did you hear? There’s been a ghost eruption at your aunt’s house. There are policemen outside the house and city diagnosticians inside. I saw them on my way home.”

  “An eruption?” Faded ghosts like my uncle are one thing, but newly erupted ones can be dangerous. “Is everyone all right? Maybe I should…” I swallow nervously. “I’d like to go and see.”

  “You should go. Your aunt and uncle were standing on the sidewalk with Miss Alice. Find out if they need anything.”

  I pull off the apron and hurry to the front of the house, where I fumble through the coatracks to find a coat and a bonnet.

  Outside, it is bitter cold and dark, despite the streetlamps and the stars in their black tapestry above the city. It’s after nine o’clock, and the people who are still out and about look at me curiously as I pass them by. They are probably wondering what a girl my age is doing out alone.

  Grandmother will skin me alive if one of her neighbors recognizes me. There will be letters.

  Grabbing my hair in handfuls, I twist it under my bonnet. I’m tall enough that I can pass for an adult, as long as I’m not wearing my hair down like a little girl. By the time I reach Aunt Bye’s house, no one pays me any mind. There are indeed policemen on the street carrying lanterns and official-looking gentlemen in suits walking into and out of my aunt’s house, which has electric lights shining through every window. If Grandmother were here, she would collapse from apoplexy at the extravagant illumination.

  “Aunt Bye!” I locate my aunt on the sidewalk in front of the house. She wears a woolen shawl around her shoulders, held in place by Uncle Will’s great arms.

  “Eleanor, sweetheart, what are you doing here?”

  Aunt Bye’s embrace is as warm and welcoming as ever, never mind that we are standing in the street on a February evening. “What happened?” I ask.

  “Our ghost lamp turned itself on. And Alice saw something in the upstairs hallway.”

  Letting go of Aunt Bye, I turn to my cousin, who stands nearby with a suitcase at her feet. “Hello, Alice.”

  “Eleanor,” she replies. Alice is wearing an obviously new coat and a matching hat with a ridiculous spray of ostrich feathers. They protrude almost a foot into the air above her head. I move forward to hug her, but she doesn’t remove her hands from her fur muff. Feeling foolish, I stop short and pretend to be busy rubbing my own hands because I forgot to bring gloves. Alice is only a few months older than I am—and at least six inches shorter—but she always manages to make me feel like an awkward child with no social graces.

  “Lieutenant Commander Cowles?” We all turn as a man approaches Uncle Will. “I’m Hampton Grier, senior diagnostician from the Manhattan Ghost Diagnostics Guild.”

  “Do you have results for us yet?” Uncle Will asks.

  Mr. Grier wobbles his hand back and forth. “Some. There are definitely signs of an eruption. Temperature variations from room to room. Electromagnetic pulses. Ectoplasmic residue on the walls of the second-floor hallway. Visual and auditory irregularities. What we haven’t seen, however, is any manifestation of the ghost itself. This is good news because Vengefuls tend to attack immediately.”

  “Does that mean we can go back inside?”

  “Noooo.” The diagnostician purses his lips. “Better to err on the side of caution. Even an Unaware can be hostile if they view you as an intruder in their home. Now, I was told that one of the household members saw a manifestation at the time of the eruption?”

  “I saw a face,” Alice volunteers. “In a corner of the hallway. Just for a second, after the ghost lamp went on.”

  Mr. Grier glances briefly at Alice, then addresses Uncle Will. “Did it speak to her? Were there any sounds at all? Did it move or cause objects to move?”

  Uncle Will waves a hand at Alice. “Ask my niece. She can answer for herself.”

  With a frown, Mr. Grier looks down on Alice as if Uncle Will has just invited him to interview one of the lamp poles. “Think carefully, little girl,” he says. “Did the ghost say or do anything? Make objects move? Throw things at your head? Try to remember.”

  Alice scowls. “I remember exactly what happened, and I would have told you in the first place if it threw anything at my head! It made no noise, and it was gone so quickly, I can’t tell you if it was a man or a woman. But,” she adds, “it appeared at my eye level, so maybe it was the ghost of someone my age.”

  Mr. Grier mumbles that he’ll take her opinion under consideration and turns back to Uncle Will. “I cannot clear your house for habitation until we’ve diagnosed the ghost. Neither you nor your servants can reenter, but if you wish, my associates will retrieve whatever belongings you need for the night.”

  Uncle Will and Aunt Bye consult each other silently.

  “You can stay at Grandmother Hall’s.” The words pop out of my mouth before I’v
e thought them through, and immediately, my cheeks burn with embarrassment. Grandmother will be livid if I bring them all home with me. Think of the gas lamps they’ll light!

  Aunt Bye smiles as if she can read the dismay on my face. “Thank you, Eleanor. But Maisie and Ida have family they can stay with, and Will and I will go to a hotel. Of course, Alice would probably like to spend the night with you. Isn’t that right, Alice?”

  Alice looks at me, her forehead rumpled, and then she looks at the two servant girls, Maisie and Ida, as if wondering whether it would be possible to go with them instead. When she faces me again, however, she smiles in such a friendly way, I might have imagined her initial hesitation.

  But I know I didn’t.

  4

  ALICE IN THE HALL HOUSE

  ALICE would rather spend the night almost anywhere than with Eleanor. But the wriggling of Emily Spinach in her pocket reminds her of her promise to be good. She accepts the offer, and she and Eleanor walk the three blocks to Mrs. Hall’s gloomy house. It could be worse. With any luck, the old bat will already be asleep in bed.

  But the evening continues its downward spiral when they find Mrs. Hall waiting inside the foyer of her home, blocking the hallway like a siege engine. She starts talking as soon as Eleanor crosses the threshold.

  “I could not believe my ears when Rosie told me you went out! What in the world possessed you to go to your aunt’s home at this time of—” Seeing Alice behind Eleanor, Mrs. Hall stops cold. Her eyes narrow, and her lips press together while she no doubt pins the blame for Eleanor’s behavior on Alice. Then her gaze drops to Alice’s suitcase, and her lips disappear altogether, sucked right into her face.

  Hurriedly, Eleanor explains Alice’s presence, untying her hideous bonnet. Down tumbles her hair, and Alice can’t help but admire it.

  Eleanor’s life is hard, worse than Alice’s. Her mother and one of her brothers died of diphtheria when she was eight years old, and shortly after that, her father died too, leaving Eleanor and little Gracie to be raised by their horrible grandmother (who is no relation to Alice, thank heavens!). It’s no wonder Eleanor is timid and awkward and blends into the wallpaper if she stands still too long. There’s only one thing about Eleanor that is truly notable—and that’s her hair. Glossy and thick and the color of golden wheat, it hangs past her waist. Alice would steal it if she could.

  By the time Eleanor has hung up her bonnet and coat and taken Alice’s as well, she has explained to her grandmother that Alice will be staying only until morning.

  “You don’t know that,” Mrs. Hall says ominously, which makes Alice squirm. What if the diagnosticians need more than one night to categorize the haunting? Alice might be stuck here! Then Mrs. Hall poses an even worse possibility. “Your aunt may have to move. Many people do, after a ghost eruption.”

  The idea jolts Alice. In the rush to grab her suitcase and her snake and vacate the house, that thought hadn’t occurred to her. “Surely not!” she exclaims. “There’s only a one-in-three chance it’s a Vengeful!”

  “What a terrible thing.” Eleanor’s grandmother clucks her tongue. “And the house just redecorated too. So much money wasted. Alice, you must be exhausted after your travels. Eleanor, take your cousin up to your room and put her to bed.”

  The house hasn’t changed since the last time Alice was here. Dark, with gaslights turned as low as they will go, and furniture that…well, looms is the only word that truly describes it. This is the house that should be haunted, and of course it is, but only by the ghost of Eleanor’s uncle, who got soused and fell out an attic window twenty years ago.

  There isn’t any indoor plumbing, and the only privy is in the basement. At night, residents use a chamber pot, which they are expected to empty themselves down the basement privy in the morning. Alice sorely wishes she’d had the chance to use Aunt Bye’s new upstairs toilet!

  In Eleanor’s room, the girls change into their bedclothes. Alice’s nightgown is soft cotton with ruffles and bows. Eleanor’s is plain gray flannel.

  “You don’t think Aunt Bye will have to move, do you?” Eleanor asks.

  How should I know? Alice almost snaps, but catches herself just in time. “I don’t think so,” she says in a reasonable tone. “That man said a Vengeful would have attacked at once.”

  “You mean that man who called you a little girl?” Eleanor says. “I thought you were going to kick him in the shins.”

  Alice gives her cousin an appraising glance, surprised that such a thought would occur to perfect, “calming” Eleanor. “It crossed my mind.”

  A Vengeful ghost would be a disaster. Aunt Bye would have to find a new house, and Alice would likely be shipped back to Washington, D.C., on the earliest possible train. Since she knows perfectly well that she has burned her bridges with Mother Edith and that Father doesn’t care one way or the other, Alice’s next stop would probably be a boarding school.

  But the ghost didn’t attack her. It stared at her from the shadows for a single second before vanishing, leaving Alice alone and unharmed in the eerie blue glow of the Edison Lamp. Doesn’t that mean it can’t be a Vengeful?

  The knot that formed in her chest when Mrs. Hall made her prediction unravels a bit, and the idea of being stuck here overnight with Eleanor, using chamber pots and a privy, seems more tolerable. With that settled in her mind, Alice looks around the bedroom, her skirt folded over one arm, and considers what to do with Emily Spinach.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, Eleanor begins braiding her wheaten hair. “Even if it’s not a Vengeful, a newly erupted ghost is frightening.”

  “I thought you were used to sharing a house with a ghost.”

  “It’s not the same. Uncle Val is nearly faded away.” Eleanor’s eyes gaze across the room, softly focused, while her fingers weave a long plait as thick as Alice’s arm. “Sometimes I wish Elliott would erupt as a ghost. I know it wouldn’t really be my brother, but I miss him. And Father. Of course, Father didn’t die in this house, so he wouldn’t erupt here even if…” She breaks off and glances at Alice. “Is that a terrible thing to wish for?”

  “No. I don’t think it is.” Alice doesn’t blame Eleanor for wanting to see her brother and father again, even as ghosts. But she notices that Eleanor doesn’t wish for her mother to return.

  Two things about Eleanor’s mother stand out in Alice’s memory. The first is that she was very, very beautiful. The second is that she constantly criticized Eleanor, telling her to keep her lips closed to hide her crooked teeth. Once, when Eleanor stamped her foot and showed a little temper—a rare thing for her—her mother chastised her, saying, “You have no looks, so see to it that you have manners.”

  Alice’s family situation is not ideal, but she has to admit that the one thing worse than a mother who died before you knew her is a mother who disliked you when she was alive.

  Eleanor turns off the gas lamp, and the girls pull up the blanket and settle into bed. Alice must have been more tired than she thought because she doesn’t have another coherent thought until a loud screech jars her awake.

  Pale morning sunlight streams through the windows, and Eleanor is staring into one of her dresser drawers, both hands pressed against her mouth.

  “Oh.” Alice rubs her eyes and hides her smirk. “Eleanor, meet Emily Spinach. Emily Spinach, meet Eleanor.”

  TYPES OF GHOSTS AND HOW THEY FADE:

  A CHILD’S PRIMER

  BY J. M. MASON & A. STEELE

  Ghosts erupt, and no one knows why. Most persons die and never return as a ghost. Some persons return a few years after their death. Others appear after decades or centuries have passed.

  There are three types of ghosts: Friendlies, Unawares, and Vengefuls. There is no way to predict what type of ghost a person will leave behind.

  Friendlies are ghosts who interact with the living in harmless ways.

  Unaw
ares do not understand that they are dead. They might or might not interact with the living.

  Vengefuls are ghosts who intentionally seek to harm the living.

  Over time, ghosts fade and disappear. The time needed for a ghost to fade varies, but fading can be encouraged by the removal of anything in the house to which the ghost has a personal attachment. If the ghost is a family member and the haunting is troublesome, it may be advisable for the family to move and sell the house to strangers. In extreme cases, only the destruction of the house will cause the ghost to fade.

  Please note: The authors of this text have simplified information for the sake of children’s education. The authors are not responsible for death, injury, or mental anguish caused by a haunting or by readers following these guidelines.

  5

  ELEANOR EAVESDROPS

  ALICE doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with stashing her snake in my unmentionables. I don’t want her to think I’m afraid of it, so even though I’ll have to wash everything in that drawer after she leaves, I pretend I don’t mind. After breakfast, I find an old hatbox to make a better home, and we fill it with fabric scraps. Rosie gives us a bit of raw fish without asking why—although she does look at us strangely.

  After the snake is settled and, thankfully, out of my sight, Alice offers to brush my hair, which surprises me. I hand her the hairbrush, and she unwinds my braid and runs the bristles from the top of my scalp to the ends of my hair. At first, I feel awkward, as if I should try to make conversation, but I don’t know what to say to Alice. I never have. As the silence goes on, I start to relax, remembering how my father used to brush my hair like this.

  “You know who likes your hair?” Alice’s voice breaks into my memories.

  I think Alice likes my hair. “Who?”

  “Cousin Franklin.”

  I whirl around so quickly, she drops the brush. “Please don’t tease me, Alice.”