by Alex Silver
Dan’s Hauntastic Haunts Investigates:
Goodman Dairy
Hauntastic Haunts Book 1
Alex Silver
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
FORTY-EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
EPILOGUE
About the Author
Hauntastic Haunts Series
Psions of SPIRE Series
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Alex Silver
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, address: [email protected]
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-9995310-6-5
ONE
Dan
Dan Collins, ghost hunter, was trending on social media. This was it. The moment I’d been living for since I started my vlog channel. My moment to shine.
Too bad that instead of incontrovertible proof that ghosts walk among us, I’d become an overnight vlogging sensation because I fell. Through—not down—the rotted out steps of the old deserted building I was investigating. Over a quarter of a million views and everyone was yucking it up because I almost broke my neck.
At least I had good insurance, the ambulance trip and treatment for my broken leg were both covered. And my phone survived the fall, even if some of my ghost hunting equipment did not.
The footage captured the characteristic lens flare of a ghost in the corner of the frame right before I took my plunge back to the ground floor.
No one cared about that. No, all they saw was my expression of shocked horror as the ground gave way under me. My arms windmilling, my expensive gear smashing down the stairs and then I fell out of frame.
People posted reaction videos to my video. Kids reenacted my facial expression at the moment the ghost touched me. None of them seemed to notice the evidence of a spirit pushing me onto the rotten stairs. Only my most devoted subscribers pointed out the other presence in the frame.
The social media frenzy took off with me stuck in a hospital bed with nothing but my phone for company. Stacy quit once it was clear I would not die. She claimed she hadn’t signed on to risk her neck as my personal assistant. In all honesty, I couldn’t blame her. This wasn’t the first time I’d ended up with injuries while capturing footage.
It wouldn’t be the last time. Not that it was my fault. It was just that hauntings drove the living away. So they showed up in places that were falling apart.
By the time they generated enough buzz as urban legends to reach my ears and became accessible to the public, haunted places got rundown.
It also wasn’t the first time I’d lost an assistant to my injury prone nature. Stacy had lasted for almost a year. Zack, the assistant before her, quit after a couple months. Others had come and gone too. Martha, my first hire, quit after our first haunting.
Martha preceded me into the building to film my entrance. Her first step into a spider web had resulted in her screaming at coming face to face with the web’s occupant and then running back out of the building. Martha hadn’t been my best hiring decision ever, but I was still new to figuring out the whole employer thing.
My vlog, which I started after highschool, took off enough to consider supporting myself with it when I was a community college freshman. I developed a loyal core of followers. And I put out quality content.
My brand started as more of a ‘dare me to stay overnight in the spookiest spots on earth’ gimmick. But after my experiences road tripping to various spooky spots all around the Northeastern US, I’d started to believe in ghosts. How could I doubt with all the weird stuff that happened?
My subscribers agreed. Ghosts were real, and we were on a quest to prove it. I started getting gifts of ghost hunting gear and researching it more myself.
A good quarter of my webisodes were just talking about the ways we could measure paranormal activity. On my site fans discussed what would constitute incontrovertible proof of a haunting these days. In an age with digital media being what it was, skeptics could refute any evidence we found.
The other half of my video archives were the hauntings. Like the Old Miller House. Where I fell.
I sighed and refreshed my landing page. The view counts had ticked past three hundred thousand now.
I got an email notification. Since my video took off, my fan-mail had increased on a massive scale. I considered ignoring it. I used the term ‘fan’ in a loose sense, most of the people writing to me after the accident thought I was a joke.
But the preview in the notification for this message showed it was from my insurance carrier. They had denied my latest claim. Not again, ugh.
It probably said something about me that I had my favorite insurance agent’s extension saved to my speed dial. Heck, it said something that I even had a favorite insurance agent.
Stacy said it wasn’t normal. She joked that I should add a channel to my vlog rating the nation’s ERs since I spent so much time in them. Setting bones and getting stitches.
I suspected she was right about the not normal part. But my job could be dangerous. It wasn’t like haunted sites were famous for their impeccable maintenance. I dialed Chad’s direct line. He picked up on the third ring with his usual professional greeting.
“Chorus Insurance, Chad speaking, how may I help you this evening?”
“Hey, Chad, it’s me again, your favorite customer.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Mr. Collins?”
“Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!”
Chad sighed into the phone. Well, that was a break from the cool professionalism, progress on my campaign to wear him down from a call center bot.
“What can I do for you this time, Mr. Collins?”
“You can start by calling me Daniel, come on, Chad, we’re best buds at this point.”
I imagined Chad pinching the bridge of his nose. It was a gesture my dad used to do a lot with me when I strained his patience, so that was where the mental image came from.
Not that I’d ever seen Chad to compare him to my father, but from his voice I imagined he was a hot older guy. Maybe a bit of a nerdy professor vibe going. Sal
t and pepper hair, clean shaven. A person who wore chinos and pressed dress shirts and thought hipsters ate too much avocado toast. A real stickler for the rules. Real dad-like.
“Mr. Collins, can I just have the claim number you are calling about?”
“See? This is the reason I always turn to you in my hour of need, Chad, you’re just so efficient,” I rattled off the claim number from the email.
“It says here that your claim got rejected because you are being dropped as a Chorus Insurance client.”
“That can’t be right, I always pay my premiums on time.”
I did too. The first thing I paid for each month was my insurance. I’d used it enough that I wasn’t about to mess around with it getting canceled.
“The note says you are a high liability patient and Chorus Insurance can no longer meet your healthcare needs.”
“Chad, buddy, come on. There must be some way you can help me.”
“I can ask my manager about getting you signed up for a high risk policy,” Chad sounded doubtful. “The premiums are higher. You would have a larger deductible and the coverage isn’t as comprehensive as your current policy, but it would at least keep you covered.”
“If that’s the best you can do.”
“Let me speak to my supervisor and get back to you. And I’ll resubmit the current claim, since your old policy still covered you when it came through. As you said, you do always pay your premiums on time.”
“That would be great, thanks. I knew I could count on you!”
Chad gave me a canned response to the effect that I should have a great day and hung up on me.
A few hours later an email arrived saying they had approved the claim. Once again, I thanked my lucky stars that Zack had taken down Chad’s phone extension when we were dealing with the claims for my first concussion last year.
A direct line to Chad cut my call wait times down to nothing. He might sound like a crusty old guy, but he always came through for me. Even when I called on a Saturday evening.
TWO
Chad
Daniel Collins would be the death of me. In the insurance industry, I rarely talked to the same customers all that often. Not unless they were dealing with something catastrophic like a cancer diagnosis or something terminal.
Chorus was a large enough company, I didn’t get to develop relationships with most of the patients. Sure I dealt with people from doctor’s offices and pharmacies on a regular basis, and established working relationships with plenty of them. But no one seemed as accident prone as Daniel.
The kid was an idiot, if a lovable one. Kid, right, he was a year older than me. But he acted like a kid. A big reckless kid who did not understand the consequences to his actions.
I’d seen his latest stunt on his vlog when it went viral last night. I mean, I would have seen it anyway since I was a subscriber. But the viral video hit my social media before I checked for his weekly update.
The guy needed all the help he could get, so I figured a monthly sub to his channel was the least I could do for him. The rational part of me knew I shouldn’t think about him at all. He was a client. A frequent client.
One who forced me to find every loophole in the system to get his ridiculous claims covered. Not that I owed him anything. But my entire purpose in working at Chorus Insurance was to make sure other families didn’t go through the same uncaring crap mine dealt with to get their claims covered.
Without insurance Daniel would be up to his eyeballs in debt for just one of his many forays to the emergency department. Let alone the over a dozen trips in the year since I’d first gotten a call from him to complain about a rejected claim.
Well, the first time I’d spoken to his assistant. I snorted, remembering my incredulity that Daniel had an assistant making his calls for him. I thought it must be a pretense, to make him feel like a real star instead of a two-bit vlogger.
The situation piqued my curiosity. I shouldn’t have looked him up, but I had typed his name into the search bar, and there he was.
Six feet of athletic hunk creeping through what he claimed was a haunted forest. The first video gave a Blair Witch Project vibe, the video a clear amateur effort. But the camera work had improved in the later ones.
Dan had hit his stride as a paranormal investigations persona. His videos were good. He had a magnetic personality that drew me in from the first webisode.
The ghosts were a load of malarkey. But the guy was a natural showman and his videos kept me engaged. I had a soft sport for the ones where he responded to fans live.
The way he interacted with people, open and at ease with himself. His charisma captivated me. I might have a bit of an unrequited crush on the guy. Or I was just a giant sucker.
Here I was spending hours trying to finagle a way for the high risk social media personality to keep his primo policy. Despite the latest projections from our actuarial department labeling him a high risk.
He was high risk, but he hadn’t violated the terms of his policy. It seemed wrong to cancel it. Once again Daniel had me tilting at windmills for him.
I at least got the claim for the ambulance ride and ER visit for his broken leg approved. I checked the claim still being processed for his inpatient hospital stay and flagged it to my attention to make sure it got approved too.
That only left the policy issue. Since I worked the evening shift, there weren’t any supervisors to bring it up with tonight. They had left a couple hours into my shift.
I left a note in Daniel’s file and sent a message to the day shift supervisor who would be most sympathetic to the request. I used the subject line ‘urgent customer service matter’ and I wrote a quick note requesting a moment to discuss the matter at the start of my shift tomorrow. Then I donned my headset and returned to the phone lines.
THREE
Dan
The problem with being a social media hit was going viral came with an expiry date. My fifteen minutes of fame ended before my doctors signed off on my discharge papers. Let alone before I achieved full mobility again.
When it all blew over, I still wasn’t a household name. At least I picked up some new subscribers to my channel. Loads of my videos got a boost in their view and like counts. I had hundreds of new comments to moderate on my website.
The viral video generated plenty of buzz. Shame I was too overwhelmed at the moment to take full advantage of that fact. Modding the forum on my website was part of Stacy’s job, except that Stacy had quit.
So I had to take on all her responsibilities, including lining up a new site for next month’s Huantastic Haunts webisodes. The one Stacy had arranged for August would be difficult to navigate with my broken leg.
My top priority once I got released was finding a new assistant. Preferably one who cared about the paranormal as much as I did. Or at least wouldn’t freak out at the first cold spot or disembodied voice.
It would be killer if one of my longtime fans took the job. They would know my brand and be able to hit the ground running. My wish list sounded like a pipe-dream.
Another pro of hiring a fan was that they might be less likely to expect another viral video of my injuring myself. It shouldn’t have come as a shock that my most watched videos were now all the ones where I got injured. To be fair, there were a number of them.
Some enterprising individual had spliced together a greatest hits reel of all the injuries I’d caught on tape over the years. I reported the content as my IP, sent a cease and desist I kept handy, and then cut together my own version as a blooper reel set to funny music.
I had purchased a license for some generic mood music on the cheap from a friend who liked to compose in her spare time. The blooper video didn’t quite achieve viral success, but it did well enough. Better than the paranormal investigation 101 series I posted on occasion as bonus content.
That was a depressing thought. People would rather tune in to watch me get hurt than to see the ghosts I was trying to help. When I got into the paranormal
aspects of hauntings, it occurred to me that most ghosts were looking for a resolution.
I figured showcasing their stories might help them find rest. If people learned what happened to ghosts in life, then it might help their spirits find peace in death. A way to crowdfund a happy ending for the ghosts I encountered. That was how I saw it, anyway.
My video release schedule adhered to a pattern. The first Saturday of the month was the site reveal and gear review. I did it as an unboxing deal.
I reviewed the new tech at the new site, double unboxing, mind-blown. That had been Zack’s idea. I followed the unboxing up with a haunting profile of the site for the month on the second Saturday. I talked about who the ghosts in question were. Any relevant historical details. That was where the crowdsourcing came in, my fans liked to do their own amateur sleuthing. It got them invested in the hauntings.
Then, if it was a month with five Saturdays I devoted two weeks to the actual investigation, otherwise I just did one. Either way, I spent the first three weeks of the month on site, giving me a week or two to travel between sites.
My busy schedule was why I lived out of Vanessa, my converted van. Easier than paying rent on a place I never saw.
It wasn’t the worst way to live. I preferred it to being stuck in one place. Stacy hadn’t been a fan of the close quarters though. I suspected the nomadic lifestyle more than anything had been her reason for tendering her resignation.
The last Saturday of the month I uploaded a wrap up for the investigation. We talked about the ghosts we’d encountered and brainstormed ways to put them to rest. Sometimes I felt like we put the hauntings to rest. Other times we couldn’t.
Not that I was an expert on communicating with ghosts, I never claimed to be a medium. I was just an average guy using modern science to track the paranormal and try to be a good Samaritan for ghosts.
Sure, it sounded cheesy, but I brought in enough money to support myself and pay my assistant as long as I was frugal about it. And when I helped a spirit, well, that was all the reward I needed.
