Ghost Walk

by Cassandra Gannon

  Perhaps it was a different take on the Ghost Walk script, but --Darn it-- she wasn’t boring. No matter what her family, thought, she could be as exciting and fun as anybody. Besides, why would tourists find some cheap campfire stories more interesting than actual history? It didn’t make any sense.

  History books had gotten Grace through some of the darkest parts of her life. For the past year, she’d lived inside of them. She’d always read about Virginia history for fun and relaxation, but now she felt like it was keeping her alive. Ever since she lost her mind in that alleyway, she’d been struggling to rebuild her life. Without the refuge of her books, she’d be lost. If she could just instill that feeling into others, surely they would understand why they should care about her unflashy tours.

  Grace took a calming breath, before she started getting stressed, again. Stress was the enemy, according to her shrink. It was what caused her hallucination. A skeptical little voice (that sounded a lot like her aunt Serenity) asked how she could’ve hallucinate the blood on her hands, when everybody else at the scene had seen it too, but Grace didn’t like to listen to that voice. If she did, all the nice normal walls she’d built would come toppling down again.

  “You’re standing in front of Virginia’s oldest tavern, The Raven.” She waved a hand at the building behind her. “Built in 1768…”

  “1769.” Mr. Tri-Corner casually interrupted. Who the hell bought those stupid hats at the gift shop and actually looked good in them, anyway? It was sooo unfair.

  Worse, he was right about the date.

  “1769.” She corrected, refusing to acknowledge him. “The Raven was the site of many clandestine meetings during the Revolution.” See? That was interesting. She tried to infuse her voice with excitement. “A favorite tavern of luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, Josiah Oliver, and even Gregory Maxwell, the hero of Yorktown…”

  “Hero of Yorktown, my ass. The man was a bloody idiot.”

  “…it served as the unofficial headquarters for the patriots in Harrisonburg.”

  “That’s because it had the bawdiest wenches in town. Ach, Mistress Mary…” The jackass in the back gave a dramatic sigh. “Josiah could hardly keep his hands off of her long enough to lead his troops. Almost lost us the war.”

  Grace’s teeth ground together, but she kept going. “The Raven was owned by Edward Hunnicutt, one of the Richmond Hunnicutts.”

  “Watered down his ale, the cheap bastard. Treated the serving girls quite badly, as well.”

  “He also had a fascinating history as a cartographer of the region…”

  “Maps? Sweet bleeding Christ, you’ll really be talking of maps, now?”

  “…Edward charted portions of the James River,” she pointed towards the harbor, “helping to make it navigable to larger ships. He imported goods like tea and cloth from England, opening a shop. It did so well that he doubled his money by selling the store to his sister-in-law, Aggie Northhander, making enough gold to invest it in this tavern.”

  The tour critic gave an exaggerated groan at that entirely factual account. “Take pity on these poor people, woman! Spin a ghost yarn. Do ya think they want to be hearing of Ned’s dull life? The man was a wanker. I’ve always suspected he was a Tory, at heart.”

  Grace shot him another glare. “Edward Hunnicutt led a fascinating life.” She repeated firmly.

  For a second, the guy actually shut up, a strange expression flickering over his face. He looked over his shoulder, like he suspected she might be talking to someone else.

  Meanwhile, her group didn’t look fascinated, at all. A frat kid fiddled with his phone, while his girlfriend examined her vampire-y nails. A man in Bermuda shorts checked his watch for the sixth time in as many minutes. Several of the older customers looked like they were listening, but they weren’t listening, at all. They were tuning her out the way they would ignore a droning commercial, waiting for some better show to start.

  A young teen tugged on her mother’s arm. “When are we going to hear about the ghosts, Mom?” She asked in a loud whisper. They group might be politely disregarding the troublemaker, but his comments were infecting all of them.

  Drat, what spooky story could she tell?

  The tour guide training had given Grace some background on the standard Harrisonburg tales, but panic wiped them from her brain. Everyone was looking at her. What the hell was she supposed to say?

  Desperate, she tried to make up some nightmarish tale of horror, but it was less Stephen King and more Mad Libs. Unlike the other Riveras, Grace wasn’t the most imaginative person, the occasional hallucination notwithstanding. “Uhhh… Some people say a --um-- skeleton with a… hook? For a hand --um-- sometimes eats here… sometimes.”

  Eyes rolled all over the tour.

  The gadfly sadly shook his head at that halfhearted campfire story, rallying from his momentary confusion. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I hope you’re not depending on this job to keep you fed. If ya are, you’ll surely be starving ta death, by the end of the week.”

  Grace hesitated. He was right. Again. Skeletons were just not going to cut it. Somehow she had to do better, before more customers wandered away. She’d already lost three. Crap. She needed this job. What part of local history might interest this group?

  She wracked her brain for a minute and then --for no reason at all-- seized on a story that most people in this town wanted to forget. “And it was very near this spot that Harrisonburg’s most notorious criminal was hanged for his horrible crimes.” She announced. “Captain James Riordan. America’s first serial killer.”

  “Oh bloody hell.” The guy snapped in disgust, but everyone else perked up at the promise of a grisly tale.

  Grace smiled, sensing the story would be a hit. This was going to work! She should’ve thought of adding good old Jamie to the tour in the first place. “Captain Riordan was the Jack the Ripper of Harrisonburg. A dashing and devious criminal mastermind. He came from a good family, but he was disowned at a young age for his disreputable behavior. He left Scotland in disgrace and fled to America, where he gambled his way into a ship.”

  Her detractor scoffed at that. “Horse shit. No one ‘gambles their way’ into a ship. You have to cheat and not get caught. T’is all skill.”

  “During the war, James Riordan smuggled luxury goods into the Colonies, using Mr. Hunicutt’s maps to evade capture by either side.” She tacked that part on just to piss off the heckler. Edward Hunicutt was fascinating, darn it. “After the war, he became an out and out pirate.”

  “Have you ever seen Ned’s maps?” The guy demanded, because of course he arrogantly assumed he knew more about local history than Grace did. “They mostly led to swamps and dead ends. No one with an ounce of sense used them for anything more than wiping their ass.”

  Grace tuned out the snarking. “Quite the ladies’ man, Captain Riordan wooed all the pretty girls of the colony. He made quite a good living and he was incredibly handsome. There were few who could resist his charm.”

  “Incredibly handsome.” The jackass repeated with a nod. “Finally, you begin to make some sense. …Although you do make it sound like a disease. Are you a Sunday school teacher, by chance? You sound like a Sunday school teacher to me.” It wasn’t a compliment.

  Grace had taught Sunday school back in Richmond, as a matter of fact. “Despite his reputation, Captain Riordan was welcomed into many of Harrisonburg’s nicest homes.” She continued and then paused dramatically. “But not all of them. Some of the finest young women in Harrisonburg refused his ill-gotten gifts and dishonorable propositions. Furious, he vowed to make them pay for the insult.”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “Lucinda Wentworth was the first to die.” Grace went on, trying to stick to the facts of the case. Now that she was at this part of the tale, she was suddenly remembering why she’d never added James Riordan to her tour before. Even discussing a crime that was two and a half centuries old, had her stress level spiking. She pi
ctured peaceful green cornfields and kept going. “Lucinda sneaked out of her bedroom, just a few blocks away,” she gestured down the street, “and was never seen again.”

  Everybody turned to eagerly look in the direction she was pointing.

  Well, not everybody.

  “Why are you telling this story?” The guy hopped off the top rail of the fence, no longer smirking. His eyes stayed fixed on her, glowering in annoyance. “I know you’re new here, but I take this tour every night. No one ever tells this story on the Ghost Walk.”

  Grace knew that she was off-script. Harrisonburg’s Official Ghost Walk was supposed to be G-rated. The whole village made its profits by appealing to vacationing families wanting to experience a weekend of Revolutionary life. A place where parents could tell themselves their kids were learning something about history and the kids could buy rubber muskets. The residents of Harrisonburg didn’t like anything controversial sullying the carefully cultivated, plastic perfection of their town.

  Which was why the Riveras had always been a stone in their sensible shoes.

  For generations, Grace’s relatives had been the fortunetellers in town. Their small shop had been housing tarot card readings and mixing potions since before the Revolution. Way longer than the cutesy antique dealers had been in town.

  Regardless of their authentic provenance, though, the rest of Harrisonburg was embarrassed to have their storefront anywhere near their white picket fences. They wanted to forget all the messy aspects of the past and focus on have fife-and-drum parades every day at three o’clock. The Riveras had never fit into that gentrified ideal. From the day her parents died and she moved in with her aunt, until the day she went off to college, Grace had felt out of place. Which is why she’d left this stifling town and never looked back.

  Well, until her breakdown had driven her from Richmond and she had nowhere else to go.

  Harrisonburg hadn’t changed much since Grace left, just like it hadn’t changed much in the two-and-a-half centuries before. It was the most complete Colonial town in America, filled with eighteenth century brick houses and cobblestone streets. For generations, it had been forgotten and passed by as America grew-up around it. In the 1940s, the Harrisonburg Preservation Association had successfully lobbied to have the entire town set aside as a landmark. Instantly, ruined buildings turned into “historic” buildings and property values doubled. The small town now existed out of time. Entering Harrisonburg was like stepping back to days of John Handcock.

  In a completely sanitized way.

  The whole place was part history lesson, part Disney World. Unsavory things like slavery, dirt, and James Riordan had no place in their pretty reimaging of history. Friendly actors showed tourists how to make paper or weave blankets in quaint shops. Horses clumped up and down the streets. Musicians serenaded diners with high-spirited fiddle music. …But there were still three Starbucks within walking distance.

  Harrisonburg’s modern restaurants and shops fed off happy tourist dollars. It gave the place a sense of artificiality that Grace hated. Harrisonburg should be teaching people what really happened, not just what was appealing to the customers. The Founding Fathers had walked these streets and slept in these buildings. Redcoats attacked Patriots not three miles away. The United States had been conceived in the backrooms of these taverns. That was what Harrisonburg was really about. That was what they should be focused on, even if meant that the shops on Main Street didn’t make a fortune every summer, selling six dollar popcorn in plastic powder horns.

  No one else saw things her way, though. Most of the people who actually lived there were retired college professors, small business owners, and paid-by-the-hour employees. All of them liked Harrisonburg just the way it was. They didn’t care about historical accuracy. They just wanted to stay the seventh most popular tourist destination in Virginia, even if that meant adding air-conditioning to the historic mansions so no one got too hot while experiencing the “authentic” lifestyle of Colonial America.

  Since triple homicides and lynchings didn’t exactly blend with the cafes, garden tours, and the annual fireworks display, all the remaining evidence of the murders was locked up in the basement of the Harrisonburg Historical Museum, on permeant non-display. No one would be happy about Grace reminding guests that the town was also the site of America’s first serial killing.

  Too bad.

  She needed the tips.

  “Lucinda’s family immediately suspected that James Riordan was behind her disappearance. The two of them had been seen around town, in the weeks before the murder. There were whispers and speculation. Her sister Eugenia nearly fainted whenever she saw him. Men muttered that something should be done. …But there was no proof.”

  “Bloody right there wasn’t.”

  “People grew even more suspicious when Anabel Maxwell and Clara Vance went missing in the following days. Like Lucinda, they were never seen again. Anabel disappeared out of the governor’s hedge maze at a party and Clara vanished at the 4th of July celebration in town square. All that was ever found of her was a lace shawl, splattered with blood.”

  The heckler paced around, glowering at her.

  Grace almost didn’t blame him this time. Even two and a half centuries after the girls’ deaths, it seemed tacky to twist the crimes into some macabre form of entertainment. Her rent money was at stake, though, so she kept going. “Since these were the three women who’d rejected Captain Jamie’s lecherous advances at the Summer Ball, Harrisonburg grew more convinced of his guilt. The good citizens of the town decided to act.”

  The tour began to buzz amongst themselves, liking this tale.

  Most of them, anyway.

  “Oh bullocks! That isn’t true, a’tall!” The loudmouth stalked closer to the lantern, looking even more pissed off. …And even more stunning in the stronger light. “Whoever told you this was out of his skull.” His face was a study in masculine perfection, his auburn hair tied back in the kind of ponytail favored by guys who not-so-secretly longed to be Wesley in The Princess Bride.

  Who was he? He looked familiar. Maybe he was an actor, who starred in some pirate TV show that she was too smart to watch.

  …Or maybe he worked in Harrisonburg.

  Yeah, that actually made sense. Obviously he was a local, since he said he took a Ghost Tour every night. She was surprised none of the other guides had mentioned him. Grace looked him up and down, trying to recall if he worked in one of the local shops. If he did, she was totally going to get his ass fired.

  In the light, she noticed that he was dressed in Revolutionary-era style clothes, which backed up her new theory. Many employees wore period costumes, to keep Harrisonburg “authentic,” but this guy actually made the leggings and brightly patterned waistcoat seem not stupid. That annoyed her nearly as much as his running commentary.

  Grace herself was wearing a wide skirt and bonnet that weighed about six thousand pounds. Unlike her unwanted customer, she knew she looked wilted and silly.

  Ignoring that depressing fact and the stifling summer heat, she reached the grand finale of her gory tale. “The same night that poor Clara vanished, the angry townspeople vowed not to let Jamie Riordan strike again. They dragged him from his cabin on his ship, the Sea Serpent, and carried him down this very street, burning torches and chanting for justice.”

  “Bloody cowards.”

  “Then, they strung a rope from a tree that stood right there,” she pointed to the stump of a giant oak, which had been struck by lightning sometime during the Civil War, “and tied the other end around Captain Riordan’s neck. They say he begged forgiveness for his crimes, but Harrisonburg wasn’t in a charitable mood. They hanged him, while he pleaded for mercy.”

  “That’s a fucking lie.” Long John Idiot bellowed. “You donea know what you’re talking about!” His accent was thicker than ever, so it actually took her a beat to translate the snarled “donea” into “do not.” “How did you even get this job, woman?”

 
Grace had had enough. “Would you just shut-up?” She whirled around to face him, jabbing a finger at his chest. “It is what happened. James Riordan’s crimes are straight from the history books. Horror in Harrisonburg, written by Anabel Maxwell’s own brother Gregory, outlined the whole story. Feel free to look it up yourself, if you don’t believe me.”

  Several members of the tour jumped back as if she’d surprised them. As if her yelling had come out of nowhere and wasn’t completely justified given all the crap she’d endured from this jackass. As if she was the one acting crazy.

  The jackass in question gaped at her like she’d just hit him in the face with a fish. His jaw literally dropped, his mouth opening and closing with no sound coming out. It was almost funny to see someone so cartoon-character astonished.

  “Are you talking to me?” He blurted out, his patriot blue eyes as wide as Frisbees. “Holy fuck, are ya really talking to me?”

  “Who else would I be talking to?” Grace retorted. “And would you please watch your language? This is a family program.” Unlike most of the Riveras, she wasn’t an avid supporter of casually swearing.

  The man gave a crazed sounding laugh.

  Grace didn’t appreciate his attitude. Confrontations made her feel lightheaded and sweaty. Stressful or not, now that she’d started this, she wasn’t backing down, though. “I’m serious. You’ve been harassing me all night and I’ve had it. If you don’t like the tour, don’t take the tour. I’ll give you a refund. But I’m not going to have you yelling at me and calling me a liar, alright?”

  “Who’s she talking to?” The frat guy asked in confusion, looking around.

  Grace flashed him frown. Was he drunk? “I’m talking to him, of course.” She waved a hand at the costumed idiot who’d been tormenting her for the past forty minutes. “The man in the hat.” That should be perfectly obvious to everyone.