Night at the Mansion

Christopher Macauley

“Do it!” they said, “It’ll be fun”, they exclaimed, while daring me to enter that forbidden mansion. I
thought it would be fine, just a night at a stupid, so called “haunted mansion”, oh how wrong I was.

I packed a few necessary things, and set off. I arrived at the avenue that lead to the mansion at
around 5:30 pm. It was the middle of October, so the ground was laden with dead leaves and branches,
and the trees, all of which were dead, were barren and eerie, almost as if they had talons. Every step I
took sent up a small cloud of dust from the dry dirt, and after around 10 minutes I got to the mansion. It
was a pretty big building, two stories, and it had some old gargoyles on the top, some were broken and
shipped, and some were not there altogether, but nevertheless they looked creepy. Moss covered all
four sides. The grounds, too, were also laden with dead leaves that crunched under my feet, and dead
grass. The only alive thing I saw, besides the moss, was a sizable circle of mushrooms in the center of
the courtyard. Looking at the mansion, it had around 20 windows on the front of the house, all of which
were broken or boarded up, except one, the window directly above the door. It was an untouched
window, with a yellow glow emanating from behind it, not that this turn of events wasn’t odd at all, but
that’s not what caught my attention. There in the window stood a silhouette of a woman I’d guessed,
and “her” head was tipped to one side drastically. I couldn’t seem to tear my eyes away, what seemed
like minutes passed by, with no movement from either of us, until I heard a snap in the trees behind me,
and turned to look. When I looked back, the window was broken just like the rest, no silhouette, and no
lantern.

I passed all that off as my imagination or a hallucination, anything but truth, and headed for the main
door. I stepped on the old porch made of wood, it seemed like it would have broken had I been walking
on it longer. The main door seemed to be stuck, so I tried shoving it a bit, and it worked. I entered the
house to find furniture with drapes over each piece, dust on everything. It smelled of decaying wood
and dust, a bit musty, and also a different smell, one I just couldn’t identify. Small footprints covered
the floor, imprints in the dust, I assumed from mice. I stood there for awhile, taking in everything that
I saw. Pictures of the previous owners covered the walls, Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy. Cobwebs covered the
corners of each room. The previous owners, Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, are responsible for the “haunting”
of this house. Yes, I did my research before I came. Mr. Kennedy made a bad business transaction with
a member of the mob in Chicago, Illinois. The mob leader found out, and sent his best men after Mr.
Kennedy, followed him all the way to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and murdered him in cold blood after he
bought this mansion. The wife, Mrs. Kennedy, or Margarete, eventually went mad and hanged herself in
her own room. Me, I don’t believe in all that hokey pokey ghost stuff, a bunch of baloney if you ask me,
which is why I accepted this dare for my 21st birthday.

I decided to first search the house, and then decide from there which room I would sleep in. It was
starting to get dark, and the temperature was starting to drop, so I had to search now. I explored the
kitchen, which was full of broken bottles and rotten food cans, the library which had dusty books, the
master bedroom, and every room upstairs. Nothing to report but dust, at least until I came to the room

above the door, where I saw the silhouette. Upon opening the door, I found a room completely torn
apart, things thrown around the room, broken glass, drapes everywhere. One drape laid in the very
center of the room, covering something. The shape was almost like a body. That smell from before, the
one I couldn’t place, was the strongest here. I concluded that I didn’t want to know what was under the
drape, so I returned to the room I chose to sleep in, the library. I retrieved my flashlight from my bag,
with new batteries, laid out my sleeping bag, and tried to fall asleep. By now it was 9:38 pm, and I had
nothing else to do anyway. Tomorrow I will search the back yard.

I finally fell asleep, but was abruptly awoken at 12:00 pm exactly by a very loud grandfather clock
with condescending chimes. I got up with my flashlight and started searching for the source, and the
clock kept chiming. I tracked it to the upstairs room, just above the main door, but I don’t remember
a clock in there. I opened the door, but nothing was there, and the chiming stopped. I examined the
contents of the room thoroughly, avoiding the drape in the middle of the room, but found nothing, so
I decided to go back to sleep. After turning to walk out the door, I heard a noise behind me, sort of a
groan. I turned to come face to face with Mrs. Margarette Kennedy. She was hanging from the ceiling
with a noose around her neck, her head cocked to one side, her body was decaying, and maggots
were inside one of her eyes. Her face appeared to be sliding off from decay, her clothes were tattered,
and her hair was ratty and dirty. Then she opened her mouth to show terribly decayed teeth, and she
started screaming. I was filled with fear, screaming, and ran for my life, running down the stairs, and
tripping to smack into the wooden planked floor. I got up, remembering what was behind me, and burst
through the front doors, my nose was bleeding. There, in front of me, stood, or rather floated, Mrs.
Kennedy, the rope around her neck came straight down from the sky, with no apparent end point. She
screamed again, and still I ran, tripping once again, and smacking my head on a blunt rock, and blacking
out.

I woke to find myself with my arms tied behind my back, a noose around my neck, and standing on
a crate. Margarette, I figured it would be okay to call her that, noting all that we’ve been through, was
standing in front of me, foot on the crate under me, about to push it away and let me fall. With demonic
strength she kicked the crate. It went flying and broke on the wall behind me. I fell and abruptly stopped
and bounced when the rope hit its end. She then screamed, and rushed towards me, almost flying, and
burst into a cloud of who knows what, and disappeared. I looked up and noticed that my rope wasn’t
attached to anything in particular, it just went through the roof. I was choking and wheezing from lack of
air now, everything going black. I wasn’t even struggling, I knew I was going to die.

I woke up in a white room, it looked like a hospital, but the lack of sharp objects and pictures and
even television suggested otherwise.

A nurse came in and said “Oh, you’re finally awake. How was your sleep, Mr. Hobbs?”

“Oh, your at Saint Quincy’s psychiatric center”, she said, “Funny, you’ve been here how long and this
is the first time you’ve asked that.”

“What do you mean I’ve been here awhile?” I asked.

“You’ve been here for 5 years, we found you at the old mansion, in the room just above the window,
lying on the ground with a red mark around your neck, than mark is still there. You wake up every day
asking what’s going on, and everyday we tell you the whole story. You relapse every night and revert to
thinking it’s the day after the incident at the mansion. The nearest we can figure, you suffered damage
to your memory section due to suffocation” She replied.

So now I’m writing myself this, to keep my sanity as much as possible, and to keep a full memory
of that day. The strangest thing is, every day I remember dreaming of roaming that house once again,
every night I get further and further from there. One of these nights, I just might wander into someone
else’s home. For the next person that reads this, beware the chimes.