Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY
IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I
generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family
rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to
write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration
(quote, website, podcast, etc) and then a thought or two that came to mind.
These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat,
irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if
anything comes of them.
H Trope: Haunted
Castle/Mansion
“No! Really! I saw
the ghost!” said Enzo Solem. His wild hand waving came more from the passion of
his French forebears than the stolid formality of his Norwegian. First
generation from both sides, he’d been born and raised just north of the Twin
Ports of Duluth and Superior.
He also had a wild
passion for the paranormal.
Weayaya Aguirre
sighed. Enzo was her best friend but sometimes he bugged the living daylights
out of her. Shaking her head, she said, “Why can’t you just accept that the
world is the world and that’s all there is?”
He stared at her
incredulously and exclaimed, “You work here, too! How can you say that? You’ve
seen the apparitions just like I have!”
Shaking her head,
Weayaya – Wee-ah to the rest of the staff at the Glensheen Mansion – said,
“I’ve told you a dozen times that I don’t know what you saw that night. I saw
some kind of heat shimmer from the furnace.”
“And I’ve told you
two dozen times that I talked with Elizabeth Congdon!”
“A woman who’s
been dead for half a century?”
“She’s not
dead...” he scowled. “Exactly. Her spirit is trapped here because her son
suffocated her under a pillow and then banged the night nurse over the head
with a candlestick.” Wee-Ah sucked in her lower lip and bit it gently to keep
from responding how she wanted to respond. He added, “All I’m asking is that
you come with me tonight. It’s the night of June 26...”
“You want to see
her ghost, right?”
“Nope.”
Wee-Ah frowned and
looked at him. This was not the answer she’d expected. “What?”
“I want to see the
ghost of her son. He confessed to her murder and was sent to jail, getting out
five years later. His ex-wife, Elizabeth Congdon’s sociopathic adopted daughter
never gave him any of the money she inherited from her mother’s murder. He
killed himself five years after his release from prison – though I’ve heard
people whispering that Congdon’s daughter did him in.”
“So you want to
see if the ghost of one of Congdon’s ex-son-in-laws comes back here?”
“Yep. Marjorie
died in prison in 2022, five years before the fiftieth anniversary of her
adoptive mother’s murder.”
“And you think that that is significant...how?”
“And you think that that is significant...how?”
“It’s obvious!
Marjorie-originally-Congdon is buried in the family mausoleum.” Wee-Ah nodded.
That much was true. “It’s now half a century after her mother’s murder by her
second ex-husband Roger Caldwell.” Wee-Ah nodded, not even realizing she was
encouraging him. He went on excitedly, “So I figure the psychic energy will be
so powerful that not only will Roger’s ghost appear, so will Velma’s; her third
husband Wally was murdered as well as his
ex-wife; plus some old guy she defrauded of all his money in a nursing home in
Arizona. His same was also Roger,
though his last name was Sammis. Her first husband – with whom she’d had seven
children – was Dick LeRoy and he died the same year she did – 2022. So it’s
2027, fifty years after someone murdered Elizabeth Congdon. I would say that
Marjorie Congdon LeRoy Caldwell Hagen has some serious psychic reckoning coming.”
Wee-Ah found
herself nodding in agreement before she could think things through. That was
how she found herself kneeling in the bushes near the Congdon family stone
marker in the Forest Hill Cemetery on this dark and stormy night, cold summer
rain dribbling down the back of her hastily donned poncho.
Enzo leaned over
to her and whispered, “It’s five minutes to midnight…”
Names: ♀ Sioux, Spanish; ♂ French, Norwegian
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