by JL Bryan
“The next morning, I came out here for a look.” Toolie pulled open the door, revealing plain wooden steps ascending into darkness above. “There was Christmas ornaments all over the steps, red and green and some snowglobe ones we got at Wal-Mart a couple years ago. Something had picked up the box of decorations and threw them down the stairs. I knew it wasn’t one of my kids, because I would have heard them walking up and down the hall. Even if they tried to tiptoe, I could hear it, cause the floorboards are so old and squeaky. Didn’t nobody come down out of that attic all night.”
“Did you look for any kind of animals up there?” I asked. “Squirrels, maybe?”
“I called out a pest removal man, but he didn’t find nothing. No nest, no animal poop...Besides, what kind of animal laughs?”
“A hyena?” Stacey said.
“Well, there’s no hyena up there!” Toolie said. “Not even a rat. We did find a lot of boxes overturned, and that was about it.”
“Do you mind if we go up?” I asked.
“Suit yourself.”
I reached for my flashlight, but it wasn’t there. I hadn’t loaded up my utility for this quick daytime walk-through of the house.
“How are the lights up there?” I asked Toolie.
“They work sometimes. Sometimes they cut off by themselves.”
“We’ll check it later. I’m more interested in speaking with your daughter right now.”
Toolie took a deep breath. “We can try. Sometimes she don’t want to talk much. Teenagers, I guess.”
She led us back to the hallway intersection at the center of the second floor, then led us toward the door with the skull and the warning. The music thudded through the walls. The lyrics sounded something like Massacre! Massacre! Yeah yeah yeah! Deep stuff.
Too much stuff was happening at this house, and it made me feel overwhelmed and clueless. After what I’d felt in the disused crafts room, though, I was worried that at least one of the entities was malevolent. Friendly ghosts don’t present themselves as shadow figures.
Toolie knocked on her daughter’s door.
Chapter Three
Juniper’s room was chaos, but not particularly unusual for a thirteen-year-old girl with rebellion on her mind. The heavy curtains were drawn across the windows, blotting out any sunlight. Posters hung on the walls, mostly bands of young boys with black clothes and pale skin. Laundry was everywhere.
The girl herself didn’t look exactly like her pictures downstairs. Her hair was dyed an unnatural jet black, her eyeshadow and lip gloss were a dark purple that bordered on black, and the rest of her face was done up in stark white. A silver chalice pendant hung on her necklace, and she wore a long-sleeved black shirt and shredded jeans.
“What do you want?” Juniper snapped when she opened the door. Then she looked at us. “Who they hell are they?”
“Watch your language!” Toolie snapped, and the girl rolled her eyes. “This is Ellie and Stacey. They’re professional ghost investigators.”
“Ooh, they look really tough.” Juniper scowled as she looked us over.
“Just tell them what’s been going on in your room, Junie. Don’t be rude.”
“Right, because now you believe me,” Juniper said. “Now that it’s bugging you, suddenly you care about what happens to me.”
“I always care about--” Toolie said.
“You thought I was lying!”
“Juniper,” I said, “Can you just tell us what you’ve seen?”
The girl gave me a sullen look, then sighed.
“Like I’ve been telling Mom forever,” Juniper said. “It moves stuff around in my room. Jewelry or whatever.” She opened her door wider and pointed to a dresser jumbled with nail polish, mascaras, lipsticks, half-melted candles, and a stick-incense burner overflowing with ash. “It opens my drawers. Sometimes it does it quietly and I trip over them. Sometimes the whole drawer comes out and lands on the floor. Sometimes it rips down my posters, or my window curtains will move for no reason. Then there was the time my closet attacked me.”
“What happened?” I looked at the open double doors to her closet, which was crammed full of clothes and shoes.
“I was just sitting here one night texting with Dayton. That’s my boyfriend.” She punctuated the word with a triumphant look at her mother, who shook her head and sighed. “My closet was shut tight. The doors flew open, and then everything started coming out, like flying through the air. The clothes landed wherever, but the hangers flew right at my head. I had to keep ducking while they banged into my headboard, and then I jumped on the floor. I was totally screaming. I mean, seriously, one of those things could’ve hooked me through the eye or something. Then I’d be blind.”
“She was very scared,” Toolie added.
“Yeah, and then Mom came in and yelled at me for making a big mess. She didn’t believe me.”
“I believe you now, honey.”
“Yeah, so this house is haunted,” Juniper said. She gave me an appraising look. “Can you really do something about it?”
“That’s our job,” I told her. “Has it ever hurt you?”
“No, but it totally could.”
I glanced up at Juniper’s ceiling. There were four green splotches scattered across it.
“Has your ceiling leaked?” I asked her.
“Yes! And it’s so gross! It smells like puked-up piss,” Juniper said.
“Watch your language!” Toolie snapped.
“Tell me more about the time your closet erupted,” I said. “Was anything else happening that day? Something that might have upset you?”
“I was fighting with Dayton,” she said. “But it was all his fault. He was totally flirting with my friend China, like right in front of everyone at this party.”
“What party?” Toolie asked.
“It’s none of your business!” Juniper snapped.
As she shouted, a few paperbacks tumbled off her shelf and thudded to the floor. They looked like vampire-romance novels.
We all jumped and looked over at the fallen books.
“See?” Juniper said. “All the time.”
“Mom, who are those ladies?” a new voice asked. A boy with dark, rusty hair like Gordon stood in the hallway, wearing a Captain America t-shirt. Crane still looked like his pictures downstairs—he hadn’t reached the corruption of his teenage years yet. The seven-year-old had stepped outside of his room, which was decorated with Marvel superheroes and a few space rockets.
“They’re here to help with the strange things around the house,” Toolie said.
“You mean the ghosts,” Crane said.
“It’s nice to meet you, Crane!” Stacey said.
Crane studied Stacey, then me, his green eyes very bright, as if trying to take in every detail of us. Then he turned to his mom.
“Luke and Noah don’t like them,” Crane told her.
“Who are Luke and Noah?” I asked.
“Just his imaginary friends,” Toolie told me. “They don’t seem to like much of anything that goes on around here.”
“Can you tell me what they look like?” I asked.
Crane shook his head.
“How old are they?” I asked.
“They don’t want me to tell you about them,” Crane said.
“Why not?”
Crane looked at me again, then backed into his room and closed the door.
“He’s going through a difficult phase, too,” Toolie said.
“You mean a dorky-weirdo-freak phase,” Juniper said.
“You’re one to talk!” Toolie snapped.
“Whatever.” Juniper rolled her eyes again. “Can you two get rid of the ghosts or not?”
“I think we can,” I said.
“Then please do it,” she said. “And leave me alone. I have, like, homework to do or something.” She turned to look at the video game paused on her television as she closed the door.
“Those kids.” Toolie shook her head. “You wonder how things go
t like this, with everybody fighting about everything. We all used to get along so good.”
“The energy in a haunted house can be negative,” I said. “Anger, depression, and anxiety are common. We’ll do what we can to lift that dark cloud.”
“I hope you can.”
We returned to the back patio on the first floor to rejoin Gord.
“How did it...go?” he asked.
“I think I talked their ears off,” Toolie replied, sinking into a wooden deck recliner next to him.
“You have a lot of activity here,” I told them. Stacey and I dropped into lawn chairs. “I think there’s a good chance of a multiple haunting, with complications. We have an entity obsessed with water, creating problems inside and outside the house.” I glanced at the stagnant unwanted pool at the center of their back yard. “We have something that seems attracted to games and toys. I’m guessing that may be the entity in the attic, the one that laughs and threw the Christmas decorations down the stairs.”
“Is it a...kid’s ghost?” Gord asked.
“It could be,” I said. “You may have something dark and disturbing in the craft room upstairs, too.”
“I always got a...bad feeling there,” Gord said.
“We could be talking about at least three separate entities, based on the different behavior patterns,” I said. “On top of that, there’s a good chance you have a poltergeist.” I quickly reviewed what Toolie and Juniper had told us, including the books that had jumped off Juniper’s shelves while we spoke with her.
“Good Lord,” Toolie said. “We knew it was bad, but...that’s four ghosts?”
“What do we do?” Gord asked.
“I want to approach this in three different ways,” I said. “First, Stacey and I will need to set up our cameras and microphones for an overnight observation so we can get a better look at the entities causing the problems. In my experience, that might take a few nights to get more complete results. In the meantime, I want to bring in a psychic medium for a walk-through, just to get some extra impressions and a clearer idea of what we’re dealing with here.” Because there’s way too much going on for me to sort it all out, I thought. I prefer the hard numerical data gathered by my instruments to the vague, sometimes misleading information provided by psychics, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Stacey naturally grinned at the news that we would be calling Jacob.
“We’ll research the history of the house to see if we can put some names and faces with these unwanted inhabitants,” I said. “Is there anything you can tell us? Any reason the house might be haunted? Murders, suicides, and other strange deaths are usually involved, or at least a great deal of misery and suffering.”
“We don’t know much about the house’s past,” Toolie said. “My cousin might know things. I’ve asked her before, but she said she never lived here, just inherited the place from her aunt. But I felt like she was holding something back.”
“Like she didn’t want to admit that she’d invited you to live in a haunted house,” I said.
“Exactly!” Toolie nodded. “Now that you put it that way, that might just be it. Or maybe she just don’t really know anything about it.”
“I’d like to speak with her if I can.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Toolie said. “She insists she’s never seen a ghost here. Thinks I’m going crazy.”
“There’s one other step I’d like to take, if it’s okay with the two of you,” I said. “I’d really like to do some ESP testing with Juniper. It could help us determine whether she may have latent psychic abilities that would enable her to create a poltergeist.”
Stacey’s eyebrows raised—this was new to her.
Toolie and Gord traded puzzled looks.
“It’s perfectly safe,” I said. “My boss, Calvin Eckhart, would administer it, since he has more experience with that. If Juniper shows no signs of those abilities, then it’s much less likely we’re dealing with a poltergeist.”
“And what if she did make that poltergeist? Then what?” Toolie asked.
“Then we teach her to stop feeding it,” I said. “A poltergeist, once it’s active, is a spiritual parasite. It will keep draining energy from its creator, making itself more powerful and its creator weaker and weaker.”
“Oh, goodness! That’s awful!” Toolie said.
“Do...whatever you think will help,” Gord said. “We need some peace...around here.”
I nodded. “We’ll get started right away. Tomorrow’s Friday—is that a good night for us to set up our gear?”
“Any night’s fine,” Toolie said. “Sooner begun, sooner done.”
“How long...will it take...to get rid of them?” Gord asked.
“We’ll work as quickly as we can, Mr. Paulding,” I said. “When we understand more about your haunting, we can put together our eradication plan.”
He smiled a little, as if he liked the sound of eradication plan. “Thank you,” he said. “I just want my...family to be safe.”
“So do we,” I said. “We’re here to make this house safe for all of you.”
As we walked away from the house, through the patchy front garden, Stacey said, “Lots of crazy stuff happening there.”
“It’s an old house,” I said. “I think we might have layers of hauntings built up over the years. That could get messy.”
“Do you think the ghosts are dangerous?” she asked, while we climbed into the van.
“The poltergeist sounds like the most dangerous one.” I started up the engine.
“How do we remove poltergeists? Does a normal ghost trap work?”
“It can be easier than that, or much more difficult,” I said. “It really depends on how cooperative the poltergeist’s creator is.”
“Juniper doesn’t seem too cooperative about anything,” Stacey said. “What about the shadow man in that crafts room upstairs?”
“He worries me,” I said. “That room felt dark and cold to me. And...malevolent.”
“Me, too,” Stacey said.
“We need to figure out who he is. Then we’ll know how to kick him out. Or trap him.”
I drove through the city as the night crept in, bringing darkness to the old mansions and the tree-shrouded streets. Savannah is a city of graveyards, including countless graves, even ancient Indian burial grounds, that have been paved over to make room for new streets and buildings over the years. The whole city is really a cemetery, and the dead are everywhere, haunting the gardens and marble colonnades of the Historic District. I really love it here.
Chapter Four
The next morning was all about research. Stacey and I headed down to the Bull Street Library, a lovely marble-columned temple of knowledge with a large collection of local history and genealogy documents. Our clients’ home had been built in 1841, so we had to search through almost two centuries of deed transfers and obituaries related to their address, trying to find the sort of tragedies and deaths that can lead to hauntings. Some of this data has been digitized, some is on microfilm, and some is only available as crumbling yellow paperwork.
It was going to be a long day of digging through old information, but Stacey found a way to make it even longer.
“So...do we call Jacob today?” Stacey asked, while we sat at the big microfilm machines looking at old newspapers.
“Not yet. I want some hard facts before I start trying to interpret any psychic impressions.”
“But we could let him know we’re going to need him, right? Maybe tomorrow or Sunday?”
“Go ahead and call him,” I said, mainly to prevent her from going on and on about Jacob and how fascinating his psychic abilities were. “Just remember that dating a psychic can get complicated.”
“Who’s dating?” Stacey’s brow furrowed. “Complicated how?”
“Do you want a boyfriend who can read your mind?”
“Uh...can he do that?” Now she looked worried. “I thought he only communicated with dead people.�
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“Who knows? Maybe he’s listening to your thoughts right now.” I gave her a somewhat evil grin.
“Seriously?” Stacey glanced around the quiet library room, as if expecting to see Jacob there. “Have you ever dated a psychic? Not that I’m dating Jacob or anything.”
“Nope.” I scrolled through more obituaries from the 1850’s.
“Are you dating anyone now?” Stacey asked, giving me a little smile. “You don’t talk about yourself very much.”
“Probably because there’s not much to say. I work, I read books, I have a cat.”
“No boyfriend or anything?”
“I think that’s pretty obvious from my last statement.”
“I know plenty of cute college guys if you want one,” Stacey said.
“I’m twenty-six, Stacey. They’re probably a little young for me.”
“Young, handsome, energetic...”
“Immature, obnoxious...” I countered. “Come on, most guys my age are immature.”
“So what kind of guy are you looking for?” Stacey asked.
“Right now? I’m looking for one who died tragically in our clients’ house and might be haunting it to this day.”
“Pfft, all business.”
“Exactly,” I said. I didn’t feel like reviewing my fairly empty romantic history with Stacey right then. I just don’t like to get too close to too many people. Saying that out loud would run a dangerous risk of talking about Anton Clay, the antebellum pyromaniac ghost who had burned down my house and killed my parents. No, thank you.
I managed to steer our attention back to the work at hand. Stacey was actually quiet for a full twenty minutes before she said, quite a bit too loudly for the library: “Holy cow!”
“What is it?” I whispered my words, by way of reminding her to keep her voice down.
“Read this,” Stacey said in a not-so-quiet stage whisper. She pointed to a blurry article on the screen before her, printed in the less-than-pleasant blocky font of newspapers from the mid-1800’s.
This one was dated January 1853. The headline was: MOTHER, CHILDREN LOST IN DROWNING ACCIDENT.
“Catherine Ridley, thirty-six, died on Tuesday after drowning in the pond behind her house. Also deceased are her sons Noah, 12, and Luke, 10, and daughter Eliza, 8,” Stacey read aloud.
