Chapter 1

It happened because we moved into a haunted house.

You probably don’t believe in ghosts. We didn’t, either, back then. We do, now, though.

It happened because Dad sold his company for a lot of money and we moved to Morganville, where there was this old house that Mom fell in love with one time when we saw it as we drove through the town on our way to Grandma and Grandpa Bunter’s house. They were my mom’s parents and they lived in Ohio. We lived in Nebraska, in Lincoln, where Dad started his own business after college.

We’d driven through Morganville dozens of times, but always just through it. Then, one time, it happened to be lunchtime when we got there and Mom said we should find a park to eat in. We always packed our own food for trips back then. So Dad turned off the highway, looking for a park, and Mom saw the house. We were ten, at the time.

“We” is my sister Emily and me. We’re twins. We’re the kind of twins you hear about and see in pictures. We always knew what the other one was thinking and we liked the same things. Our mother dressed us alike until we were seven or eight. She still makes us matching shirts and stuff like that. She’s a sewer, or seamstress or whatever you call it. When we were first born and Dad’s business was just getting off the ground, she made all our clothes because they couldn’t afford to buy them.

Anyway, Emily and I were ten when we first saw the house. It looked cool and spooky, back then. It was three stories tall and old. When you’re ten you don’t think about how old stuff is, but it had to be a hundred years old when we first saw it. It was faded, with almost no paint left on it, and was surrounded by a tall, rusting old fence. Even as kids we could tell it had been the crown jewel of the town once upon a time. But the crown jewel was all run down, and it was obvious nobody lived there. The lawn was mowed, but around the edges the weeds had been allowed to grow up. Little trees, too.

I remember seeing a little octagonal window in the wall, high up on the top floor. I wondered what the world would look like if I could lean out that window and look around.

Mom oohed and aahed over the house and made Dad stop the car so she could look at it some more. We didn’t get out, though. Just looked. And then we went on and found a park and had our picnic and I thought the house was just another semi-interesting piece of architecture I’d seen in my life.

But every time we went to see Grandma and Grandpa after that, she told Dad to drive by the house. She called it “her” house. She’d say, “Drive past my house, Paul,” and he’d detour to the old thing.

It never changed. Nobody ever lived in it and it just sat there. It looked like it was ... waiting for something. Or someone.

Then, when Emily and I were thirteen, Dad sold his business for a ton of money and, suddenly, he could retire. Mom had always worked for his company, so she could retire, too.

When they told us we were going to move, I had this premonition that I somehow knew where we were moving to. I was right.

Dad bought Mom’s house for her.

We didn’t move in right away. It took them a year to fix the place up. Dad said it cost as much as if we’d built a brand new house, and Mom kissed him and said, “This one is better than a new one.”

We were still living in Lincoln when Dad dropped the bomb shell. It was at supper and he’d just gotten back from inspecting the progress on our new/old house.

“Guess what?” he said, grinning with relish. “Our new house is officially haunted.”

“What do you mean, officially haunted?” asked Mom.

“I went to the library to see if I could find out more about the house. I ran into an interesting lady there named Gertrude. She’s in her nineties and she’s lived in Morganville all her life. She told me the story about how our house is haunted. That’s why nobody has lived there since 1968, and that’s why we got it so cheap.”

“Nobody said anything like that when we were trying to buy it,” observed Mom.

“Of course they didn’t. They were afraid we’d back out of the deal if we knew,” said Dad. He thought this was all great fun.

Of course to a couple of thirteen-year-olds, this was all fascinating stuff. We didn’t believe in ghosts, but it was still fascinating.

As the story goes, the house was built in 1850 by a man who was in the mining business. Morganville was just a little farming community back then. His son died in the Civil War and his wife died of a broken heart. He married again and had a bunch of kids, but something bad seemed to happen to them all. Some got sick and died, and one was trampled by a horse. Different people owned it in 1917 when the US entered WW I, and their sons went off to war and were killed. It changed owners again before WW II and the same thing happened. The sons went off to war and never came home. It skipped Korea, but then, the older of two sons went to Vietnam and was killed.

The family moved out, and that was the last time anyone had lived there.

Gertrude said that it was haunted by the souls of all those boys who had been killed in conflict. She said they had unfinished business. They hadn’t gotten to get married and have families and grow old with someone they loved. And, because they had lived in that house when their business became unfinished, they haunted the place.

Mom laughed and said this was silliness. She said the reason nobody had lived there since 1968 was because it needed so many repairs and was so expensive to heat and cool and all that. That was one of the things Dad was having them do during the renovations. The workmen had removed all the lath and plaster to facilitate rewiring everything, and before they put sheetrock up they were also putting in insulation. Mom and Dad only planned on using the lower two stories. There were two bedrooms on the main floor and three bedrooms on the second floor. One of those was going to be Mom’s new sewing room. The other two were for me and Emily. The bedroom at the back of the house on the main floor was reserved for when Grandma and Grandpa came to live with us in their old age. That’s one reason Mom wanted this place. It was big enough to handle all her future plans.

The third story wasn’t very big, in terms of usable space. It consisted of one long room with sloping sides that were the underneath of the roof. It was maybe ten feet wide at shoulder level and twenty-five feet long. That octagonal window I mentioned was at one end and that was the only natural light source up there. It was bigger than it looked from the ground. It was four feet tall and had stained glass in it, in the shape of a rose. It made the attic, as Mom and Dad called it, look hot with all the red light it cast on everything. It didn’t open, though, so I never got to see the world from that vantage point.

When they started the work Dad told them not to worry about the third floor, except to rewire and insulate it. The board floor was left alone. You could tell it had been plain, rough boards when they were new, but they’d been worn smooth over the years by whoever had lived up there. It was full of broken furniture and boxes of old things and junk. Dad said that, when we moved in, it would be Emily’s and my job to clean it out. He said that would be our “sweat equity” in the new house.

We moved in during August of the summer before we started 9th grade. We hadn’t wanted to leave all our friends in Lincoln, but Mom said we’d make new friends. Starting high school was a good time to make new friends, she said.

She was right. We did make new friends. We were the talk of the town before we showed up for school on the first day. We had moved into the haunted mansion. We were twins. Everybody was interested in us. Morganville’s population was around six thousand. It had been that number for the last two censuses and would probably be the same for the next two. The local industry supported agriculture and the town was surrounded by farmers for fifty miles in all directions. Morganville wasn’t a destination. It was a place you drove through on your way to somewhere else.

Unless you were my mother and fell in love with a haunted old house.

Of course we didn’t believe it was haunted when we moved in. It creaked a lot, but that was to be expected. Our rooms were new and smelled of fresh paint. We were starting high school and, while we weren’t excited about moving there, we were resigned to make a go of it. After all, it would only be for four years, and then we’d go to college and go off to start our own lives as adults.

There were no omens or harbingers. What happened did so suddenly and without any warning. Emily and I were engaged in clearing stuff out of the attic and we found this old trunk, buried under other stuff. Inside it was clothing. It looked like it was from styles popular in the twenties. There was a flapper dress that was all silver and glittery, with lots of fringe on it, and a man’s outfit that included spats and a broad-brimmed hat in a hat box.