Page 13 of The Ghost of Ellwood
“Yeah.” Carter nodded. “Some call him the ghost of Blackwell Manor, but people say they’ve seen him on the land too. Standing on the side of the road, in the woods.” He shifted in his seat and glanced around the room. “Ellwood fits better, I think.”
“Who’shim?”
“No one really knows, honestly. So many people have lived here in the past hundred years. It could be any of the people who’ve died here.”
Again, I nearly spit my cider. “Carter? How many peoplehavedied here? Exactly?”
“Not sure. I don’t knowallof the history.”
“Take a shot in the dark.”
He paused as he thought. “I know of five. But there could totally be more.”
Lovely.
I took a bigger gulp of cider. The whiskey added a nice, slow and spicy burn to it. If this conversation kept going the way it was, I’d need a refill soon.
“Sorry.” Carter’s face flamed red. “We don’t have to talk about this. It wasn’t my intention when coming over.”
“Don’t be sorry.” I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “I’ve been curious about the manor’s history and planned to research it later. You’re just saving me a step. So, about the people who’ve died here… what can you tell me?”
I listened as he talked about a woman who hung herself from the staircase balcony. Her husband had left her for another woman, and a year later, her son died in WWII. People believed that’s what drove her to it.
An older man had a heart attack in the shed fifteen years before and was unresponsive when his granddaughter found him. He was gone by the time the paramedics arrived.
A teenaged girl and her friends had snuck onto the property in the late 70s, and during their drunken night splashing around in the pond, she had passed out and drowned. Her friends had fallen asleep in the field and found her floating face down in the water the next morning.
“Then there’s Paul,” Carter continued. We’d gone through two mugs of cider by this point, and nothing but crumbs was left of the banana bread. “He was only six when he died. Got some kind of flu or something and died in the upstairs bedroom.”
“That’s four so far.” I scratched at my unshaven jaw, bothered by the stubble. I preferred a smooth face. Time had gotten away from me lately. “What about the last one?”
Carter talked about a seventeen year old guy named Rick who killed himself in the second floor bathroom. He’d been big into the metal scene. Kids made fun of him at school, and there was an incident report of jocks dragging him into the football locker room and beating the crap out of him a week before his suicide. He left a note that just said,See you all in Hell.
That one sent shivers down my spine.
Please, God, let them have changed the tub at least.I didn’t like the thought of bathing where some poor kid had slit his wrists. I also hoped the little shitheads who assaulted him had gotten jail time for it.
“Do you think Rick is the ghost everyone sees?”
Carter shook his head. “Doubt it. The people who’ve seen the ghost said he was wearing old-timey clothes. Rick lived in the 90s and probably wore rocker shirts and tapered jeans. Doesn’t sound like him to me.”
After finishing the last of my cider, I pushed the mug away from me.
“Want another?”
“Don’t think I should,” I answered with a laugh. “Probably not the best idea to get drunk at two in the afternoon. On a Sunday.”
“Good. I think we drank it all anyway.” Carter moved his fingers through his hair. The shade was unique; neither red nor blond, but somewhere in between. “You done hearing stories or do you want to keep going?”
“There’s more?”
“That was just the history to give you a background of the house,” he said. “I haven’t talked about the hauntings yet.”
Carter really embellished the stories, adding a bunch of sensory details to set the scene. He’d make a damn good writer one day, if he was ever able to put his mind to it. The kid had a gift for storytelling. That gift also made the few stories he told last for over two hours. The light had changed outside, and the sun would set soon.
“Why did old man Henderson move out after only five months?” I asked, deciding I wanted to hear more regardless of the time.
Wayne Henderson had downright refused to come back to the manor, even to get some of the things he’d left behind. Caroline told me the equipment in the shed was his, as well as stuff in the attic. He had left the house one night and sent his daughter and grandchildren to pack up his necessities days later.
