The Ghost of Him
by
Alyson Larrabee
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Alyson M. Sousa Larrabee on Smashwords
The Ghost of Him
Copyright 2011 by Alyson M. Sousa Larrabee
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
Edgar Allan Poe
Chapter 1
An Old Ghost Story
Four strong hands grab me and pull me into the room. The door slams shut. “Enter if you dare, Annabelle.” My oldest brother, Joe, flips off the light, pulls a book of matches out of his pocket and lights one on the first try. “Let’s tell ghost stories.” He ignites the wick on the scented candle he smuggled in from our parents’ bathroom and shoves the flame toward my face. I don’t flinch. I say what I always say. “I’m tellin’.”
“Shanghaied and hoodwinked again!”
My brother Clement and I keep lists of words we love in an old shoebox. He yanks on my long ponytail and then runs to plaster himself against the door, arms spread out; blocking the only exit.
“Now I’m tellin’ on both of you.”
But I don’t even try to escape. If I leave I’ll miss the ghost story.
My brothers don’t want me to go, anyway; they find me entertaining. Their favorite pastime is trying to scare the crap out of me. How much torture can I stand before I run screaming for my mother? A lot and it gets harder to scare me every day.
“Let’s sit in a circle on the floor with the candle in the middle.”
Joe surprises me with his imaginative suggestion. Usually it’s Clem who thinks up stuff like this. We arrange ourselves around the candle, sitting down, with our legs crisscrossed. We're so close to each other that our skinny, scabby knees touch. Joe is chewing bubble gum and I can smell its pink sweetness. I want to ask him for a piece but then I might ruin the mood, so I don’t say anything. The three of us sit there in the dark, stare into the flame and listen to each other breathe for about a minute.
Clement begins.
“There once was a very lonesome boy. He cried all the time because everybody was mean to him, even his own parents. They got tired of listening to him cry. So they sent him to live in the Wild Wood asylum for the rest of his life. But the people who worked there didn’t like him either. They put him in a cell, locked the door and left him alone. Whenever he cried they ignored him.”
The action isn’t moving fast enough for Joe so he takes over.
“The lonesome boy stayed at Wild Wood for a long time and he grew really big. He hated all the people who worked there and he wanted to get revenge on them ‘cuz he was wicked sad, but nobody felt sorry for him. They kept him locked up in that horrible cell and never let him out. Then he thought up a plan. One night, he stopped crying. A guy opened the door to see if the kid was dead, but he wasn’t. He jumped on the man and clawed out his eyeballs.
“While the guy was standing there, screaming, with one eyeball dangling out on his bloody cheek and the other one rolling around on the floor, the kid grabbed his keys and ran off. He unlocked all the cells and set all of the homicidal maniacs loose.
“Twelve hospital workers died that night. By the time the cops got there, none of the corpses had any eyeballs left in their faces. After that they made the lonesome boy wear a straitjacket.”
“What’s a straitjacket?”
I’m only nine years old; I don’t know much about the equipment used in insane asylums.
Joe shows me by crossing my arms in the front and then tying the sleeves of my sweatshirt together behind my back. He yanks on the cuffs to make sure the double knot holds. I must look like an idiot, sitting on the old braided rug with my arms tied around my body, but I don’t threaten to run and tell. I want to stay and hear the rest of the story.
“Go on, Clem. What happened next?”
“They left him tied up in the straitjacket, like you are right now, and they slapped some duct tape over his mouth because they were scared he might bite someone. He stayed locked in his cell with the padding on the walls and the bars on the windows and everybody was afraid to go in. They didn’t even feed him. But now and then the hospital workers looked at him, through the little window, up high on the door.
“One day, someone peeked in and the boy didn’t seem like he was breathing. A nurse went in to check.”
Joe picks up the story where Clement left off.
“She stood there for a long time, staring at the kid. He was lying on his side and his chest wasn’t moving. She stepped closer and put her hand in front of his nose, to see if any air was coming out. She didn’t feel anything. Slowly and carefully, she pulled the duct tape off his mouth.”
Joe pantomimes pulling the tape off of his own mouth, in slow motion. I don’t breathe the whole time he's doing it.
“When the tape was finally all the way off, the kid jumped up, bit off two of her fingers and spat them out onto the floor. Then he sped out of the room, still wearing the straight jacket. He had blood and finger-guts smeared all over his chin when he ran out of the hospital and escaped into the woods. Everybody was too scared to chase after him. They called the police, but by the time they arrived, the kid was long gone. Nobody could find him. Everybody thought that he stepped on some quicksand out near the swamp and sunk all the way under. Nobody knows for sure, though. It’s a mystery.
“Nobody ever saw the lonesome boy again.”
Joe looks at Clem, who speaks in a hushed voice.
“But people still heard him…”
The candle sizzles, sparks and quits. I gasp. Clement grabs me and fumbles with the knot; trying to untie the sleeves of my sweatshirt in the dark. Joe jumps up and turns on the light. His face shines white in the glare.
Clem finally gets me untied and I rub my upper arms with my hands to warm myself. We’re all shivering because the room has grown suddenly colder.
“Light the candle again, Joe; turn off the light. I want to hear more, Clem, pleeez.”
My brothers look at me and then at each other. They’re scared. I can tell. But they try to hide it. They can’t show more fear than their little sister. Joe lights the candle, turns off the light and sits down. We settle in and Clement picks up where he left off.
“Soon after the lonesome boy’s disappearance, the asylum closed down.”
“Why did they close it down?”
“The people who lived near the hospital were afraid because a dangerous homicidal maniac had escaped. They didn’t want to live near a mental hospital. They complained and it got closed down.”
“What happened to all the patients?”
“They moved them to other hospitals. But not the lonesome boy. He came back to his freezing cold cell with the padded walls and the bars on the windows and stayed there, all alone, waiting. He’s been waiting for almost fifteen years now. He just sits there, all alone; crying and staring at the open door.”
“What’s he waiting for, Clem?”
“You!”
Joe shouts the word into my ear, and I jump.
“Stop it, Joe. Finish the story, Clem.”
“And still, on a cold dark night, they say, when the moon is full, if you go there at midnight, you can hear him. Tons of people have gone down to the old asylum to look for him. Nobody’s ever seen him, but lots of people have heard him crying. He whimpers and sobs, way out back, in the woods. Some brave ghost hunters have even gone upstairs to the room where he was always tied up. And all of them heard him weeping in the darkness.”
Joe aims a sly smile at Clem.
“I think he’s here now, Clem. Listen! He’s scratching at the screen.”
A coyote howls, high and sad, out in the woods in back of our house.
Sticking his face right in front of mine, Clement asks, “Did you hear that? He’s howling in the yard!”
He wiggles his eyebrows and opens his eyes crazy-wide.
Joe hisses, “Cover your eyeballs, Annabelle! He’ll get you and drag you back to his freezing cold, dark cell and scratch them out! You’ll never see Mom and Dad again. He’ll lock the door and claw at you, like he’s clawing at the screen right now.”
I listen, but I don’t hear anybody scratching on the screen. So I go over to the open window, duck and peer outside, with my hands cupped around my eyes, just in case. The moonless August night is pitch black; it’s impossible to see anything. Suddenly the flame on the candle grows brighter, tripling its brilliance. Icy prickles of fear tiptoe up my spine and I step closer to Clem and Joe. The dark window glimmers in the dazzling candlelight. My bug-eyed reflection stares back at me. As I watch, a circle of frost spreads slowly across the left pane. Five damp ovals appear in the cold crystals. Fingerprints! On the inside of the glass!
My brothers are standing dead-still. When I whisper their names, the tremor in my voice shocks them into action. Clem’s arm goes around my shoulders. Joe stands at my other side and reaches for my hand. His tongue stumbles when he tries to speak.
“L-l-look.”
Clem and I stare down at the place where Joe’s pointing. There’s a shallow coating of snow on the window sill. And in that snow, we see a footprint; five toes and the ball of someone’s bare foot, pointing out, toward the darkness.
I want to run screaming from the room and find our mother or even better, our large, sensible father. Instead we make a pact. We won’t tell anybody.
The three of us are spooked, but I can’t let it die. I ask a lot of questions about the ghost and the old, abandoned asylum; so many questions Clement and Joe get tired of making up answers. I beg to hear parts of the story repeated and Clement wishes out loud that he never started the whole lonesome boy thing with me. Finally, my brothers get out the cards and Joe beats Clem and me at rummy.
We summoned the lonesome boy that night and even though we were terrified, one thought comforted us a little. His footprint pointed out, away from the house. He was exiting, not entering.
Chapter 2
The Legends of the Triangle
It’s been seven years since Clement and Joe told me their version of the lonesome boy’s legend. I’ve searched through lots of books in the library and websites on the internet, but I haven’t been able to find out anything new about the old ghost story. My brothers’ crazy version was loaded with exaggerations and outright falsehoods but I know the truth is in there somewhere. And I’m determined to uncover it. Nobody knows anything about the lonesome boy, though. Who was he when he was alive? What really happened to him? How did he die? Why does he haunt the old Wild Wood asylum? During random moments of my quiet, small-town life, these questions haunt my thoughts.
I even asked my History teacher, Mr. Finn. He wrote a short book about the Hockomock Triangle, which is another one of my obsessions. Our house is located within an area of land in southeastern Massachusetts known as the Hockomock Triangle. It’s like the Bermuda Triangle, but smaller and colder in the winter.
Mr. Finn’s book has a short paragraph about the lonesome boy, but he doesn’t know any more than Clement and Joe knew. They actually made up most of their story, so Mr. Finn’s version is shorter, a lot less scary than theirs and way closer to the truth.
He sticks to the facts: Many people have visited the grounds of the Wild Wood asylum, where the boy used to be a patient, and lots of them have heard strange sounds, like crying. But no one has ever seen the lonesome boy and no one knows who he was when he was alive.
If Mr. Finn doesn’t know much about the ghost, nobody does. He’s an expert on the legends of the triangle. The first few paragraphs of his book explain some of the facts better than I can.
The Hockomock Triangle is a two hundred square mile triangular section of land, located thirty miles south of Boston. The towns of Eastfield, Raynwater and Freewater lie at its angles, and the southern border of Eastfield, which is also the northern border of Freewater, stands dead center. The 6,000 acre Hockamock Swamp is within these mysterious boundaries.
The native Wampanoag tribe members named the swamp Hockamock after their spirit god, Hobamock, the god of low lying places. He appears in the shape of a large snake-like serpent and is a sacred vision. He represents the inevitability of death. The white settlers called it the Devil’s Swamp. The magnificent wetlands of this great swamp spread throughout several small towns in southeastern Massachusetts.
The rivers in the triangle run black as midnight and hikers have seen ghostly Indians paddling their transparent canoes down them. Nature lovers who venture into the swamp need to be careful of more than just its supernatural dangers, though. They need to watch out for sinkholes and quicksand, too. It’s the largest freshwater vegetated wetlands system in Massachusetts and scientists estimate that some of the human artifacts found in the swamp might be 9,000 years old.
Starting sometime before the eighteenth century, many citizens from the area in and around the swamp have witnessed and reported sightings of ghosts, UFO’s, a Sasquatch-like creature and other strange and unexplainable phenomena. Some of the witnesses were typical New Englanders, too, conservative and skeptical, but they knew what they’d seen. They believed their eyes and they passed these eerie stories on to others who in turn told them to more people. Eventually they became legends and the Hockamock Triangle achieved some local fame.
Then he goes on to tell some of the stories in more detail, barely even mentioning the lonesome boy.
Finally, I decide to find out more about the famous ghost through my favorite educational method: learn by doing. And I have a plan. I’m going to talk my best friend, Meg, into visiting Wild Wood with me, to look for the lonesome boy. Every fall, all of the students in the junior class have to do a big project on the history and literature of Massachusetts. I want to do mine on local paranormal legends, but I don’t want to work alone.
Late one night, when I’m in bed with my laptop open, I seize the opportunity to talk Meg into doing the project with me. I can see on my Facebook page that she’s on line, too. Good, now’s my chance. I type in a new status for myself.
“Saw a spider bigger than a chipmunk today.”
I start scrolling through and reading the statuses of tons of people I don’t care about, when a chat window from Meg pops up. Awesome! She’s taking the bait.
Meg Crosby
“I saw a chipmunk bigger than a spider today, duh.”
Annabelle B
“If a chipmunk curled up into a circle and fell asleep, the spider’s legs fanned out from his body would form a bigger circle. That’s all I meant. Picture it, a huge black spider with a thin red stripe down either side of its body and eight really long legs.”
Meg Crosby
“Creepy. Plus that’s still a ridiculously big assed spider. This is Massachusetts not the Amazon.”
Annabelle B
“Lots of weird stuff crawls up out of the Hockomock Swamp and this mother of all spiders is one of them.”
Meg Crosby
“Again with the stupid-ass Hockomock Triangle. You’re obsessed.”
Annabelle B
“Hey, let’s do the Triangle legends for our History slash English project.”
Meg Crosby
“They’ll never let us. It’s too weird…and interesting. Isn’t everything supposed to be boring like The Scarlett Letter? That guy made even sex seem boring.”
Our project has to relate to the works of Hawthorne, Melville and several other guys who died a long time ago. The assignment is to research the relationship between literature and history in New England.
Annabelle B
“Yeah, but Hawthorne was from Massachusetts and the Hockomock Triangle is in Massachusetts. It’s all part of our history and the legends represent an important literary genre: oral tradition, folklore. I don’t know. Some bull-shiz like that.”
Meg Crosby
“We can ask Mr. Finn. He’ll stick up for us. Isn’t he supposed to be an expert on the Triangle?”
Mr. Finn is not only our History teacher, but also the head of the whole History department, so if he thinks our topic is a good idea we can probably get away with it. And he knows a lot about the cemeteries and ghost stories in Massachusetts. He can help us.
Annabelle B
“Forget about all that Big Foot crap and the UFO’s. We can narrow our topic down to just the ghost stories from the Triangle.”
Meg Crosby
“Let’s make a movie. Then we won’t have to write a paper or anything.”
Annabelle B
“Wordd. We can go to graveyards and cemeteries after dark and film what we see and hear.”
Meg Crosby
“I’ve seen some of those paranormal reality shows on TV. They have all this special equipment. How are we gonna get that stuff? It’s gonna be way too expensive.”
Annabelle B
“We don’t need to go all hardcore. We can make it more artistic than scientific. We’ll narrate the stories as we skulk through the graveyards and we can put in some creepy emo music and some loud, screaming punk rock and stuff. It’ll be way better. Those shows can get kinda boring sometimes.”
Meg Crosby
“Cool. I’m DTS: down to skulk.”
Right after I log off, I start writing the screenplay. I stay up until three in the morning, typing up the stories I remember and looking for songs that will be good for the soundtrack. I’m in a wicked good, hyper mood because I’ve found the perfect way to pursue my passion for supernatural legends and earn Meg and me A pluses for History and English. I don’t know if I’ll ever fall asleep.
It turns out we were right. Mr. Finn thinks it’s a great idea. He talks our English teacher into letting us do the project and we begin what I know will be the most exciting chapter in my life. I can’t wait to get started.
Chapter 3
We Begin Filming.
It’s hard to decide where to start, but Meg and I finally pick the Lizzie Borden House, in Fall River. Meg films me with her video cam while I recite the script we wrote together.
“In June of 1893, Lizzie Borden was tried for the brutal, bloody murders of her father and stepmother. She was found innocent. But was she really?
“One steamy afternoon on August 4, 1892, a violent murderer climbed the stairs in the Borden’s home. Lizzie’s stepmother was putting clean sheets on the bed in an upstairs bedroom. The unknown perpetrator burst in on her and chopped her up. Then the murderer crept back downstairs. Lizzie’s father was napping on the living room couch when the culprit hacked him to death with the dull edge of an axe; smashing Mr. Borden’s skull and splitting his left eyeball in half. Her parents were dealt 29 blows altogether, right here in their home, on quiet, sunny Second Street, in Fall River, Massachusetts.
“The museum is also a bed and breakfast style inn. You can sleep in the second Mrs. Borden’s bedroom for $150.00 a night and in the morning enjoy an authentic 19th century style hot breakfast just like the one Lizzie Borden’s parents ate the day they were murdered.
“These rooms are haunted by the ghosts of the victims, because the violent killings were never avenged. Justice was never done. Lizzie was acquitted. No one else was ever arrested or tried for the bloody crimes. Welcome to the room where her father died.”
I smile into the camera and point.
“Right over there on that old sofa.”
The large, uncomfortable looking couch has lace doilies on the arms and back of it.
I ask the camera lens, “It seems like we’re alone here in this room, but are we really?”
Then we film some more scenes inside the old Borden house, of Meg and me, sitting on the furniture and standing beside the family portraits on the walls. In the father’s portrait, he looks like he’s already dead and really pissed off about it, too. His white hair and beard are prickly and stiff and don’t match his bushy black eyebrows.
Lizzie’s eyes slant up toward her scalp, pulled tight by her hairstyle, which is slicked back so shiny that it looks like you could ice skate on her head. The whites of her eyes are just a shade paler than her irises and she looks mindless, like she’s hypnotized.
The ill-fated stepmother sits, all hunched up, in a black dress with giant, poofed out sleeves. Her chest and shoulders are so huge that her short neck and tiny head look like they’re sticking out of an overstuffed piece of furniture. She scowls at the photographer, squinting up her puffy lidded eyes until they look like empty black slits. Maybe she experienced a sudden suspicion that someone was planning to murder her, right before the photographer took the picture. She looks hostile and ready for a fight. No one in these portraits is smiling and they look like they never did.
We shoot some still photographs, too, with my digital camera. Later, when we meet at my house to load them onto my laptop, we see something kinda weird. The photograph of the bedroom where the stepmother died shows an old fashioned room with flowery wallpaper. The bed has fresh white sheets with lace trim and a cozy quilt. In the picture, though, over the spot where the maid found Mrs. Borden’s blood-spattered corpse, an orb of light floats toward the ceiling and a human-shaped shadow darkens an area on the quilt.
Meg says what we’re both thinking.
“Look at that shadow!”
“I wasn’t standing close enough to the bed to cast that shadow.”
“Neither was I.”
“Plus, it’s shaped like a person, lying down on her side. Both of us were standing up.”
“Yeah, I was right here, taking the picture.”
Meg points to a spot just beyond the foot of the bed, out of sight.
“You were over there.”
She points to the other side of the bed.
“And the sun was shining in from this window, over here.”
The window Meg points to would have cast a shadow from a completely different direction.
“Damn. I wish we could’ve stayed overnight in that room.”
We looked into it, but the room was booked past December and the project’s due before then. Big disappointment. It would’ve made an awesome segment for our film.
For the first part of the movie, we decide on a slide show of pictures taken at the museum. We download some of the slides from the internet and use the photographs we took ourselves for the other slides. The pictures will flash in quick succession as screaming loud rock music blasts on the soundtrack. All of these images will bombard the viewers as they listen to the raging beat of Raining Blood by Slayer. Heavy metal matches the gruesome axe murderer’s tale, plus the title of the song and the name of the band speak for themselves.
The Lizzie Borden Museum was just a warm up. We went there in the middle of a sunny afternoon, paid admission, took our photographs, filmed a little with the video cam and then we left. It wasn’t even scary until Meg and I loaded our pics onto my laptop. When we looked at the photos we took and saw the creepy shadow and the floating orb, my scalp tingled and tears stung my eyes.
But we don’t get really spooked, and have second thoughts about our project, until we start visiting the graveyards of the Triangle after dark.
At about nine o’clock on a Saturday night, Meg and I pack the video camera into my old 1998 Chevy Prizm and head off to the first cemetery on our list, The Captain Duncan Burial Ground on Church Street, right here in our hometown.
Eastfield is in the Guinness Book of World Records because we have more graveyards than any other place in the world. We don’t have much of anything else, though. Main Street runs through downtown, which is pretty small and boring. There’s a post office, a real estate office and a few small stores, all in a row, across from the old red brick elementary school, which has been converted into condominiums for the over fifty-five set. The library’s around the corner on North Main Street. That’s about it for downtown. Near the Freetown border we have a supermarket, a couple of clothing stores and a Target, but most of the town is just people’s houses with big front yards and backyards, and lots of forests and wetlands. Our town is large in area but small in population.
Meg and I arrive at Eastfield’s oldest graveyard around nine o’clock and almost decide not to get out of the car. I have to talk her into it when I’m not sure that I want to venture forth into the darkness either.
“C’mon, Meg. We can do this. We wrote the script. We know the history. We’re ready to go. Think about those A pluses. They’ll look amazing on your transcript. Johnson and Wales will offer you a scholarship.”
Meg wants to be a chef and the best culinary school around is in Rhode Island. She doesn’t even want to apply to any other colleges.
Finally, I jump out of the car first and coax her into getting out. She turns the video cam on and follows me. Holding a flashlight in my right hand, I walk backwards and speak to the camera, lighting up the artwork, names and epitaphs on the tombstones as I narrate. Then I swoop the arc of light around, to spotlight the eerie landscape. When I slow down and stop talking, I can hear the quiet shuffle of our feet moving through the leaves as we hike along.
Statues of angels, moonlit monuments and obelisks stand tall, bone white against the black sky. Small flags stir in the breeze beside the veterans’ resting places. Meg zooms in on a row of headstones.
I educate our viewers about their shapes, sizes and styles.
“Thin, dull gray and chipped, the oldest markers, from the 1700’s, tilt forward and back. Some of them have sunk into the ground, so only a foot or so is still showing. A few of the stones lie flat, here on the earth, knocked down by the weather or vandals. These headstones were made of local slate from nearby quarries in North Attleboro and Braintree.
“Winged skulls and rising suns decorate the grave markers from the eighteenth century. The suns represent resurrection.” I shine my flashlight on one of the suns. Its eyes peep creepily over the horizon, just above the name on the slate tombstone, “Samuel Hazzard Cox”.
I stop and wonder for a second what Samuel’s resurrection was like. Then I shudder and move on.
“From 1810, through the Civil War and on into the turn of the century, white sandstone became popular.”
I wave my flashlight in a dramatic arc and continue to explain.
“The traditional willow and the urn adorn most of these nineteenth century grave markers.”
The teachers will eat all this boring crap up with a spoon. We spent a ton of time researching everything, so our movie will be at least kind of educational. If it’s too exciting and scary we’ll never get those A’s we’re hoping for.
I walk over to a newer section of graves and Meg follows reluctantly with the camera.
“The twentieth century gravestones stand thick, shiny and sturdy. The names and epitaphs are chiseled into polished granite. These monuments were built to withstand the elements.”
I keep cruising along.
“Rashes of fuzzy moss and crusty pale green lichen grow everywhere, changing the texture and outline of the shapes they cling to, like time transforms the people and things it affects.”
My English teacher’s obsessed with description. She’ll love this part.
Again, the camera follows as I aim my flashlight.
“These are the names of some of the souls whose decomposed bodies lie beneath the headstones: Abraham Flint, Hezekiah Beech, Ezekiel Williams, Sarah Elizabeth Quinn.”
I make my voice suitably low and solemn.
“In 1796, Edward Jenner discovered that people inoculated with material from a cowpox lesion became immune to smallpox. Before his discovery, smallpox was a lethal and widespread disease that claimed the lives of millions each year. Here lies one of the saddest stories ever told.” I gesture at a row of miniature shin-high gravestones.
“Thirteen members of Captain Jeremiah Duncan’s family were buried here during three separate smallpox epidemics. Two sons and three daughters died in 1739; three young daughters during the year 1750 and in 1756 three more of his children and their mother died of the disease before Captain Duncan himself succumbed to smallpox on October 23rd, 1757 at the age of 59.
“Some brave midnight visitors to this burial ground have heard children laughing and a man calling out the name Emma in a sorrowful voice. Jeremiah Duncan’s three year old daughter, Emma, died of smallpox on May 22nd in 1750.”
I pause, but we hear nothing, only the eerie hooting of an owl. Meg and I start walking again and listen to the crunch of newly-fallen leaves and the squish of the damp layer of mud beneath them. We creep through the burial ground, stepping slowly.
The brisk, dark air pumps up my senses and adrenaline pushes me into a hyper-alert state. I can smell the leaves and pine needles as I crush them beneath my sneakers. I breathe in the evening mist and the mystery, together with the gradual decay that carpets the path to death’s door. Meg and I both shiver.
We’re filming our movie late in the fall, because of the due date for the project; but the season’s appropriate, too. All the leaves on the deciduous trees have finished spectacularly changing color and the warmth of summer has died a temporary death. Just a few weeks ago the foliage was brilliant, but now it’s lying on the ground, faded to a dull brown. The trees’ branches are bare and winter’s approaching. Will it creep up on us, one chilling step at a time as the days keep growing shorter and the nights longer? Or will the coldest season pounce on us with a sudden deluge of snow and ice that flash freezes everything and knocks out the power? Each time we step outside our front doors, the bleak landscape reminds us: the unholy cold is coming. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Sometimes side-by-side, sometimes one in front of the other, vibrating with anticipation, Meg and I walk down each leaf-covered path, toward the encounters we seek. We peer into the darkness, listening. Hair-raising whispers drift in from nowhere, and we record it all.
At ten thirty PM, on November 6th we enter the field where a plane crashed, in the meadow near an old horse barn. Meg starts the story.
“The ghost we’ll be watching for tonight is called the Blue Mist. On November 6th, in 1932, a small plane flew over this field on its way north, to Boston; the cargo shifted and the plane plummeted toward the earth. The pilot tried to bring his plane down safely, but it overturned during the emergency landing. The impact from the crash killed him instantly. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, if you walk down here after dark, a blue mist descends over the meadow; the plane takes shape in the fog and the pilot climbs out. It’s now 10:30 PM on November 6th. Let’s see what happens.”
Meg and I watch as a low lying cloud sinks down. The strange fog seethes around and settles on the ground, at about knee-height. I can’t see my feet. Meg’s holding the camera with one hand and she grabs my hand with her other. About five feet away from us, an area of mist gathers itself into a ghostly density then grows into a nebulous shape resembling the wreckage of an old fashioned airplane. An elongated blur, the size of a six foot tall human figure drifts out and away from the ghostly fuselage and begins to float toward us.
The vapor’s blue, and the human-shaped part thickens noticeably in the halo of light formed by my flashlight. It drifts even closer. I back away and step on Meg’s toe. She yells, stumbles and almost falls. I steady her and then we race to the car. Meg films only the ground because she forgets to aim the camera.
Frightened but not scared off completely yet, we plan our next excursion. This weekend we’re heading for another one of Eastfield’s oldest burial grounds, the cemetery on Prospect Street.
At around ten o’clock at night we start out. There’s no parking lot because people didn’t have cars when Eastfield’s citizens began burying their dead on the corner of Prospect and Bay Streets. So I have to pull off the narrow road in the dark, a few feet past the graveyard and leave my Chevy on the flattened hay of a nearby field. Then Meg and I walk back to the tall, rusty iron gate which tilts open, leaving about a two foot space for us to squeeze through. Aiming the camera up, Meg zooms in on the spears of rusted iron that point toward the starlit sky. I illuminate the first cluster of headstones with the beam of my flashlight.
As we enter the oldest section of the burial ground, the sounds of nature halt for a second and a quiet voice hisses, “Who are you?”
Tiny, sharp needles of fear stab the back of my neck. I scream and start sprinting back toward the car. Meg stumbles along wildly behind me. She films only my racing feet and the black road beneath them as we both take flight. I leave a little rubber on the street when I peel out. I’m never going back.
We save the lonesome boy for last.
Chapter 4
The Lonesome Boy
“Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;-
That it is and nothing more.”
Edgar Allan Poe
Closed down in 1986, Wild Wood has been the site of countless ghost hunting expeditions. Meg and I arrive and leave the car on a deserted back road. Then we have to hike across a big field and through a stretch of woods. Next, we climb a chain link fence. Miraculously, Meg’s video camera doesn’t get damaged. It’s late in bleak November, and the weather’s getting colder, causing us to shiver. An enormous full moon, trout-belly white against the dark sky, casts an eerie light on everything. As soon as we jump down from the fence, Meg starts filming me. I speak in a matter-of-fact voice, loosely following the script we wrote together.
“The moon has risen high and pale in the black sky, and casts shadows as distinct as those shaped by sunlight but colder; menacing and distorted in the dreary light. The ancient Celts called the November full moon the ‘Dark Moon’. If sunlight is life, then moonlight is death. Something that comes after, a reflection, a phenomenon not possible unless real life and light have existed before it.”
My English teacher loves Poe. She’s going to swoon when she hears this part.
We take turns narrating. Meg continues, reciting the facts we’ve researched. She also holds the camera, and pans it around to display the sinister scenery.
“We’re on the grounds of the Wild Wood Psychiatric Hospital. Founded in 1882, by Dr. Raymond Wilde, it quickly became a dumping ground for unwanted members of local families. Later, during the twentieth century, after Dr. Wilde’s death, the government took it over and the hospital continued to serve the same purpose. For a little more than a century, it served as a conveniently located facility where desperate families could drop off and then forget about embarrassing relatives who suffered from psychiatric disorders.”
Meg delivers the word “embarrassing” with a sneer, to emphasize how we feel toward these families who abandoned their so-called loved ones in this god-forsaken place. Then she carries on, in her best evening news anchorperson voice.
“We’re walking through the institution’s graveyard now. The stones are small, lying flat and almost buried by the surrounding earth. Only names and dates were recorded on them, no epitaphs. There are no monuments; people never visit to decorate their loved ones’ graves with flowers. None of the lost souls buried here had a funeral service. No ministers delivered eulogies for these forgotten people. More than six hundred patients lie beneath this tangled and untended meadow, some of them in unmarked graves, all of them neglected during their lives and forgotten after their deaths. No family members or friends ever mourned them.
“To the left of the graveyard, lies the forest, leading down to the edge of the Hockomock Swamp, where many brave visitors have heard the weeping of a young boy. Annabelle and I won’t be entering the woods, but let’s give a quick listen for the sound of a child crying. According to a local legend, this child whose voice has been heard by many is the famous ghost of the lonesome boy.
“No one knows who he was when he was alive. Everyone assumes he used to be a patient here at Wild Wood and that he died under mysterious circumstances. We can only be sure about one fact: tons of visitors to this gloomy location have heard him crying in the darkness. Listen, we might be able to hear something.”
I look off to the left, displaying my profile to the camera, sniffing the air and perking up my ears, like a two legged Labrador retriever. We hear nothing but the usual sounds of a fall night in New England. Meg sweeps the camera across the deep, wild forest and then turns the lens on me. I begin walking again.
Leaving the graveyard, we head toward the hospital. Meg follows me as I climb inside the ruins of the enormous stone structure through a basement window which is missing its pane. The video cam bobs and trembles as Meg hoists herself over the crumbling sill, recording everything. Rusted beer and soda cans, cigarette butts, shattered glass and a few candle stubs litter the grimy concrete floor. Graffiti decorates the walls.
We record some odd noises and catch a few towering shadows on film as we walk through the dank corridors and passageways. We’re keeping our eyes and ears alert for the security guard who’s on duty, but he wisely remains in his heated and well lit office. He stays out near the locked gates, the ones through which we didn’t enter. We climbed the fence instead.
I move behind Meg and the video cam follows the wavering path of my flashlight beam through the dim and empty hallways, providing our audience with a first person perspective. On the ground level floor our light reveals offices, most of them numbered. Nameplates with the names of doctors and administrators are still nailed to the walls outside some of the doors. Inside Meg and I find some old, rusty file cabinets with files still in them. We open the drawers and pull out a couple of disintegrating folders. They contain documents that give off the musty smell of old paper.
Meg zooms in as I hold open a dust covered folder to reveal a log of patient notes written by a caretaker. Her name was Nurse Mary McGuire, and she recorded each visit with her patient, and took notes about every sound he made, but no words, because he couldn’t speak. The most recent entries are dated December, 1985. Only a few months later, the hospital closed for good. Meg and I return the folders to the file cabinet and move on. I don’t want to spend any time reading boring old documents. I’m looking for realistic action shots of paranormal phenomena. I’m looking for a ghost.
We peek inside examining rooms and see high tables with thick, wide leather cuffs and dangling straps: restraints. In one room, hanging from a hook on the wall, we find a mildewed straitjacket.
I pinch a tiny corner of grimy fabric between my index finger and thumb, gingerly holding up one damp sleeve.
I report straight into the lens.
“Some of the more violent patients were restrained in garments such as these.”
Dropping the creepy article of clothing, I back away and shudder. Meg catches it all on film. We leave the ramshackle torture chambers and head down another gloomy hallway until we arrive at a concrete staircase encrusted with years of filth.
Upstairs is worse. Meg and I turn left into a dark, narrow corridor, lined with doors at regular intervals. I stumble into an abandoned wheelchair. There are straps dangling down from the arms and legs and back. It’s like a miniature electric chair on wheels. A bike helmet is lying next to it; except I don’t think the kid who wore it ever rode a bike. Everywhere these patients went, they were restrained.
All of the doors are closed and locked. On our tiptoes, we peer into the small windows to see identical tiny cells, each with two beds and no other furniture. Some of the rooms have padded walls. Then we come to the only open door, the door to a room marked with the number 209. Because of a detached hinge near the top of it, this door rests crookedly on the bare wooden floor of the tiny room.
Meg’s trembling voice announces, “Here is the infamous Room 209. According to the legend, the door is always open, the only open door on the second floor. Curious visitors, brave enough to venture into room 209 have heard all kinds of eerie noises, creeping out of the darkness. But the sound heard most often is the heartbreaking voice of a young boy crying. Many believers think that the famous lonesome boy, whose weeping can be heard throughout the forest and down to the swamp’s edge, was once kept locked in room 209. Let’s see for ourselves if this ghostly legend is true. Enter with us if you dare.”
Meg zooms in close to record my expression as I push aside a gauzy curtain of cobwebs and walk into the dim chamber.
My frightened face freezes when I hear an unexplainable sound.
“Clickety, click, tick.”
The doorknob behind me rattles and twists. A heartrending whimper follows.
I stand inside the hellish, cramped room, where someone chose to shelter disabled children. Meg aims the camera, both of us battling our fear and ignoring the gooseflesh that rushes up the backs of our necks to our prickling scalps. The temperature in room 209 is 25 degrees colder than it is in the rest of the hospital. There’s a thin layer of frost on the floor and when I look behind me, I can see my footprints in it.
Meg’s grip on the camera trembles as she scans the cell. Two beds lay parallel to each other at opposite sides of the dimly lit room. Tattered sheets and blankets splotched with black mildew cover them. At the head of each bed sits a filthy pillow.
As I peer into the gloom, I can barely make out the shape of a huddled figure in one dank corner of the miserable cell. I step closer and in the dark, the quivering circle of light from my flashlight reveals something which appears for only a few seconds, but that’s enough.
I hear a husky sob and glimpse a shadow that’s not dark as nature intended, but suffused with a pale incandescence. A quick, sideways glance at Meg’s calm face tells me that only I can see him. The camera isn’t recording this shimmering apparition.
He’s been waiting here, at Wild Wood, for over twenty years, with his boney butt on the cold floor and his skinny knees tucked up under his chin. He has no name and no words, only the sorrow he expresses with his endless crying. As I watch, his closed eyes open and I can see the madness within. The solitude that caused it still haunts him. But he isn’t alone anymore. He has me now.
He’s gone before I can blink my cold-stung eyes. I realize that I’ve just seen the boy who’s been haunting my waking nightmares for seven years. Thankfully, Meg possesses the presence of mind to hold the camera steady and point its lens at one of the cots, because an impression appears on the pillow, as if a heavy headed person is lying on it. We both stand still and watch. As the large, rounded dent on the pillow deepens, we hear the moans and grunts of a struggle. But no one’s there. The noises grow louder and the ratty blanket shifts and tears; the sound of rending fabric terrifies us as we stare silently and listen.
Frozen in place, Meg forgets how to move, but she holds the camera pointed at the wretched cot and films until the sounds fade into silence and the bedding stops moving. We both finally inhale. The freezing air fills our deprived lungs, and we turn, and bolt. I plunge through the darkness toward the stairs, with Meg right behind me.
Her camera tracks the hare-brained path of my escape as she jogs along, struggling to keep up. I glance back a few times to make sure she’s following. Gasping for breath, I listen to Meg’s screams of fright as we race, helter-skelter, toward the car. I’m the faster runner and I keep turning around to make sure my friend is safe. My lips and mouth move frantically, but no sound comes out. We scramble up the chain link fence like chimpanzees on crack. When we land on the other side, we resume our crazy pace. Meg points the camera at my heels kicking up and I flee full speed ahead, aiming myself at the car.
Finally, we reach the safety of the old Chevy, which doesn’t have keyless entry. Panting, I grope for the keys to unlock it. I open the passenger side first and Meg jumps in. Then she turns, points the camera at me and follows my flight around the front of the car, to the driver’s side where I fumble, struggling to unlock the door. I throw it open. Leap inside. Slam it. Lock it. Click the seatbelt into place. Safe! Revving up the engine, I risk a sideways glance at Meg. She aims the lens at my wild eyes and I shift into reverse.
A hoarse gurgle, guttural and crazy, trails through the dark interior. The soft sound of someone crying follows it. Then we hear nothing but silence. Meg didn’t make that noise, and I know I didn’t. My best friend starts to sob, and I shift into drive, flip on the headlights and pull out onto the deserted road. She switches off the camera.
After we arrive home from the old hospital we don’t talk about what happened. I try to resume a normal life and forget about the lonesome boy for awhile. I go back to school and follow my usual routine. The excitement dies down. We meet at Meg’s house to edit our movie and add the soundtrack music which is mostly screeching heavy metal and quiet, morbid emo stuff. We don’t edit the scenes about the lonesome boy. We just stick them in the film at the end. Neither one of us wants to watch those scenes. We avoid reliving the fifteen minutes we spent inside of the asylum.
When we show our film in English class and again in History, both Mr. Finn and our English teacher rave about it until it gets embarrassing. They give us A pluses. Everyone loves it. Kids who aren’t even in our class sneak in to see it. But Meg and I don’t feel very enthusiastic about watching it, especially the ending, the part we filmed at Wild Wood.
I put my copy of the film away on the shelf under the big screen TV in our basement room, where dozens of other DVDs are stored. I don’t open its case to look at it or watch it. I don’t ever want to see the lonesome boy again. I don’t want to hear him either, but I do.
“Clickety, click, tick.”
It’s an unnerving sound. Right around midnight the rattling wakes me up.
Nothing as harmless as a quiet breeze cools my room to crypt-like temperatures. No whiff of fresh night air blows my door open with its easy force. The antique crystal doorknob turns and the door opens, all on its own.
The cold crawls over me and I hear the sound of someone weeping in the darkness. I feel like a Daddy Long-legs, who’s been hanging around in someone’s freezer, is scuttling around on my skin. My uninvited guest lifts the hackles on the back of my neck with his wintry breath. Outside, the night air lies dim and solemn as death. In the moonlight my pale curtains shimmer on either side of the window, framing a deep blue rectangle of midnight sky.
He won’t leave me alone, even when I seize the bed covers in my fists and shove them up to my ears. Grasping my blankets in a death grip, I worry that he’ll touch me. I imagine a cold-blooded hand as damp, dark and slimy as a salamander under a rotting log. What will I do if his chilly fingertips settle weightless and tickly on my throat? I shudder and pull the covers up over my head.
My nerves quiver and prickle.
Huddling under my cocoon of blankets, I yell like a five year old, “Mom….Dad!!!”
My father, who is a light sleeper, comes in to reassure me.
“Annabelle, just keep the door open. I’ll check the hinges again tomorrow when I get home from work, and the doorknob, too.”
My parents and I replay this same scene over and over.
Dad has his own theory about my midnight visitor; it involves one of our Blake ancestors. He explains it to me one night, after I’ve woken him up again because I’m scared to death. He speaks in the patient voice he uses when he’s trying not to sound annoyed because I’m bugging the crap out of him.
“The original part of this house dates back to the sixteen hundreds. For four centuries, our family has lived here in Eastfield. We own fifteen acres of meadow, forest and swampland. Across our backyard and down the path, through the woods is an entrance to the Great Hockamock Swamp. No one’s allowed to build on these wetlands, and they’re too wild to really be owned by anyone.
“Sometime during the mid 1600’s Josiah Blake built a small and humble cabin, on the driest acre of his land. Gradually, through the generations, our ancestors updated and remodeled the existing building and built additions onto the original homestead.
“A few months before you were born, I finished remodeling two of the upstairs bedrooms: the master bedroom and yours. I moved some old doors from another part of the house: the dining room addition, built by Zephyriah Blake in 1885, and used them to give our bedrooms an antique look. I wanted the two newer rooms upstairs, which your Grandpa Blake added in 1958, to fit in better with the rest of the house. Plus, the removal of the old maple doors opened the dining room up to the kitchen, which made your mother happy. She always wanted an open floor plan.”
My dad jokes, “Old Zeph’s annoyed, and wants his doors moved back to the dining room.”
If that’s the case, though, why doesn’t my parents’ bedroom door swing open on its own? Theirs comes from Zeph’s dining room, too. And my father moved the doors upstairs seventeen years ago. Why did Zeph wait so long to make a fuss? And what about the crying? My parents have never heard it, though. So they think I’m dreaming.
I like to sleep in a dark, quiet room with the door closed. But the doorknob in my waking nightmare keeps rattling and the door keeps opening. I’m afraid to fall asleep because I know I’ll wake up in the dark, alone and terrified.
Finally I do the only sensible thing; I leave the stupid door open.
For privacy’s sake I hang a sign from the top of the door frame.
“Do not enter. I might be naked.”
And he leaves me alone, for one night. I decided to take it a night at a time.
I feel a little happier and more relaxed. But only a little, because I have an uncanny feeling that my relationship with the lonesome boy hasn’t ended yet.