Stories from the Village of Hawthorne (The town in Snapshots In Time) Volume 3

My knee began to scream by the time I had locked up the shop, the agony beyond anything I had ever felt, but, in my defense, I can be a bit dramatic.  Despite the pain, I was able to make a cup of tea, grab an ice pack and a box of lemon biscuits, and nestle right into my overstuffed sofa. 

I settled in nicely and picked up the book. I read the title out loud. The History of the House with the Cemetery. 

Number 8 The Short Life of Ship-born Sallie

She was born of an indentured servant and the captain of one of the Hawthorne’s Shipping boats. The ship docked for a week during the summer of 1732, and, so happy was the captain not to have missed the birth of his son, he had the fully pregnant woman brought to him.

Amelia Hastings protested bitterly as the sailors practically dragged her out of the house and down towards the dock. Her midwives refused to follow her to the ship, because good women didn’t go down to the docks. Unfortunately for Amelia, she was mistaken as a witch by the sailors. 

The carefully polished tops of her leather slippers dragged on the rocky soil before hitting the dusty sand down the path to the ship. Her water broke as she was being hoisted up onto the deck of the vessel. Amelia’s angry words swiftly turned to frightened sobs. 

“You scrub, you puff-gut lobcock.” Captain Hastings face was the color of an over boiled lobster and his hands were shaking when he grabbed one of the sailors by the collar and threw him towards the wall. “That’s my baby,” he bellowed as he kicked the other sailor out of the room.

“We were told to fetch the witch and bring her.”

“She’s not a witch.” Captain Hastings pushed the shorter of the two sailors out of the way and practically dragged the crying woman to his quarters.

Sometime the next morning, even before the sky started to lighten, Amelia Hastings took her last breath as Sallie Hastings took her first. 

Very shortly after, the Captain buried his wife in the village cemetery, left the baby with a wet nurse, and went back out to sea; after all, it was just a girl. 

Sallie became known as the baby born on a ship. The baby Sallie didn’t make it through the winter,and since she couldn’t be buried until the spring, she was buried in a chest underneath the steps of the home he had built for his Amelia and forgotten there.  To this day, Amelia walks around the cemetery looking for her lost baby, even as the baby cries for its mother from underneath the porch. 

I put down the book and waited for the ghosts to show up, as they had before, but nothing happened.  There were no cries, no moaning, no apparition, nothing.  I took a sip of my tea, now just a bit more than warm, and asked myself if I dared read the next story in this bizarre book.

Opening the book and turning to the next story, I found a piece of newspaper stuck between the pages.

Anita Wentworth: Journalist

1823

Sallie Hasting’s body was exhumed from her resting place at the new sewing shop. The infant’s remains were interred with her mother’s. Reuniting mother and child after almost a century.

“Huh,” I said out loud “That’s different. It must be why I haven’t heard the baby crying or the mother’s searching moans.

Deciding I had had enough for one night, I hobbled off to bed. 

Stay tuned for more stories. 

The morning sun shone on the front porch of the shop as I dragged buckets of flowers outside. 

My knee was swollen and an ugly shade of purple, thankfully I knew it wasn’t broken. I’d had enough fractured bones to know the difference between a nasty bruise and a cracked bone.  Even without my patella being broken, my pain was real, and I was already wondering if I was going to make it through the day. 

Lucky for me, it wasn’t tourist season. I knew I wouldn’t be that busy, so I had brought the book that I had found the night before. The shop was open, and I was sitting on my work stool (really it was an office chair set to its highest level). I had my knee elevated on a stack of crates that were waiting to be picked up by the moving service. I reached over to grab a soda out of the mini-fridge and read the title again.

The History of the House with the Cemetery

By Amelia Hawthorne

On the inside cover was a hand-drawn floor plan of my house and shop. Each room had a little circle dot with a number inside. Some of the rooms had multiple number dots. Then pages for each level of the house and the shop. I shivered and turned the page.

The book was old; it smelled of vanillin and, oddly enough, chocolate. I knew there was a reason why old books smell good, but I couldn’t remember what it was. The table of contents was composed of little dots with numbers and beside each one there a title, like The First Ghost, Clatter in the Kitchen, or The Banging in the Bedroom.  But the numbers weren’t in order as they should be. I turned to the first chapter, and in the dot was the number 16. I searched for the number on the floor plans and it was actually outside of the building. I looked out the window and found the spot on the floor plan that looked to be the building’s front yard was now a road that ran between the village and the cemetery.  My shop was on the side of the road leading to the cliffs. My front door didn’t open to a view of the ocean. It opened to the view of a road and the cemetery.

I sat up straighter and changed the ice pack on my knee to the heating pad, twisted an ice-cold bottle of Diet Pepsi open, and took a drink. My mother would say, “Nobody drinks Diet Pepsi at 9 in the morning.” 

Mom was obviously wrong. But I digress.

I flipped through the first few pages again and settled in to read when I noticed some very faint writing on the inside cover. It had faded, but the pencil writing could be seen if you held the book up to the light, just so.

I, Amelia Hawthorne

Do solemnly swear

That the events in this book,

are true and accurate.

And just underneath that, was her signature in beautiful calligraphy and the year 1896. This book was that old?  I flipped it over in my hands, shrugged, and opened up to the first chapter. This was what I read

 Number 16: The First Ghost.

Our clapboard house sat downhill from the captain’s house on the cliff. The fire from the lighthouse would light up fruit trees that mama planted when the night was clear, but usually, the nights were dark, the fog almost sucking the warmth from the fire that was burning in the hearth. Mother thinks I’m being maudlin or singing a maudlin song, but in truth, this place makes me uneasy, unsettled, and well quite frankly spooked. And here’s why. 

One night, I was lying in my cot, trying to sleep, but the night sounds were keeping me awake. Everything just seemed louder, out of focus. I thought perhaps I was ill or was suffering from some mania. The noises became louder, I looked towards my parents and they were putting a puzzle together under the gas lamp, my mother smiling and touching my father’s arm when he made her giggle. They couldn’t hear what I was hearing. I pulled the pillow up and around my ears, blocking out the sound. Secretly, I was thankful that the sounds were not in my head. You could end up in an asylum for just about anything these days and hearing voices in your head would definitely do just that. 

I squeezed my eyes shut and practically cracked my head like an egg squeezed in a piece of cotton with the tightness of the pillows around my ears, I counted to 100, and when I slowly released the pillow, the sound was gone; the crackling from the fire was no longer booming in my ears. I let out a heavy sigh of relief and opened my eyes. Two inches from my face was the brown visage of an old man with red and green paint on his face. His eyes were black as the night sky, his teeth were grey and rotten, and he smelled of earth and death.  It grinned.

I screamed.

I jumped, slamming the book shut. Did I just hear a scream? I was embarrassed to say that I just stood there with my mouth hanging open for a few seconds before I swore out loud and shoved the book into my bag.

The day went by fast. The book was in my tote bag and hadn’t come out since I finished reading the first chapter this morning. 

I was locking up the shop, and I looked up through the glass window to the cemetery across the street, I shivered slightly. The minute I got upstairs I was going to cleanse my fears by diving headfirst into a rom-com. 

I flipped the sign from open to closed on the door. I looked at the nail jutting out of the door frame above the window that that sign hung from. I would need to find a solution to that little…

The face staring back at me through the glass was not my reflection, it was the reflection of the Native American ghost that I just read about.

I too screamed.
Stay tuned for more stories.

Hawthorne Village is home to more ghosts than people. Everyone has a story, and this is mine.

I’m a floral designer, and my little shop is haunted. It must be! That’s the only  explanation for what has occurred and why I have more white hair than not.. I’m only 32.

I moved to Hawthorne after my marriage imploded, but that’s a whole other story. My shop is on the first floor, and I use the top two floors of the cute colonial as my home. Now, this house has changed and evolved over the years. The only thing that has stayed the same, if you believed the rumors, was the ghost of a little girl in a pink and white dress that looked mournfully out of a second-story window. That window just happens to be my bedroom window, with a beautiful view of the village cemetery.

I tried to ignore the stories and thought I might just use the whole thing as a marketing ploy. “Come get some flowers and say hello to our ghost” sort of thing. But that wouldn’t be a new approach in this village. Everything around here is haunted; even the Hawthorne Manor Inn is supposedly haunted by the owner’s sister.  

My first night there, I chalked up anything that felt weird to my just being in a new place and not knowing its quirks and creaks. Everything was naturally going to feel weird for a while. I slept through that night, mostly because of the exhaustion from moving. Now, after being here for ten years, I can tell when a sound is natural or something else. 

This story is about my second night, long before I knew the ins and outs of this old building or of the many ghosts who reside here.

It started while I was locking up the shop. While my thoughts were still occupied by how I was going to set my floral displays, I stepped through the door to the stairway leading up my living quarters and turned off the light in the shop. It was then that I heard it—a rattle of metal on metal. It was barely there at first, but as I locked the door, the jingling turned into a clank and seemed to grow closer and louder until the sound chased me up the stairs and into my apartment. I opened the door and practically fell inside, bashing my knee against the door as I slammed it shut. I crouched down behind the door, reached up, and locked it. 

I curled into a ball, covering my ears from the cacophony that now shook the whole of the house. Sobbing hysterically, I knew I needed to calm down. I wasn’t sure if I was being haunted, or if one too many ex-husband-induced concussions had finally driven me mad. But the noise was there, and it was relentless. Why would my cute little Victorian colonial be shaken by the near-deafening sound of chains? I shuddered as I recognized the sound—the exact same sound that chains make in a slaughterhouse. This house had never been a slaughterhouse, had it?

Minutes later, after my knee began to swell, and my sobs had sufficiently subsided, I lurched my way to the sofa and plopped down on the overstuffed cushions, placing one underneath my purple-red joint. I laid my head back and closed my eyes. 

What do I do now? Is there something wrong with the house? Are there actually ghosts in the house? 

I knew I needed to learn more about the house that I now called home.

I somehow pulled myself together enough to prepare some food. After an uneventful dinner, my knee packed in ice, I sat on the sofa again, this time with a cup of tea and the TV remote. I had just gotten into a new detective show when a loud bang came from my bedroom. My body jerked so hard that I nearly fell off the couch, but I managed to catch myself before I did further damage to my knee. The hot tea sloshed over the edge of the cup and onto my hand. My skin immediately turned an angry red; I was sure a blister would follow.  

Swearing profusely, I lurched my way to the bedroom—with the thought that one of the yet-to-be-unpacked boxes had fallen over—knowing I needed to get to my bathroom to deal with this burn before I did anything else.

I poked my hand around the corner and flicked the light switch. Nothing happened. I pushed the lever from on to off and then back again. Still, nothing happened. I didn’t know what to do. I certainly wasn’t in any condition to go climbing up on the bed to see if the ceiling light needed a new bulb.  But I was too scared to work my way through the boxes in the bedroom. A thought hit me then. My ex could have found out where I was, snuck in, and been lying in wait to do what he promised so many times…to kill me. 

I needed to get my cell phone immediately and call the police. They would either find some harmless explanation for all those loud noises, discover and arrest my ex, or haul me off to the asylum. If they even had asylums anymore.  

I sat back down in the living room and reached for my phone. As I began to hit 911, the bedroom lights flickered on, then off, then the bathroom light, on and off.  I stared in frozen astonishment,  I mean really, what else could I actually do?  While my apartment put on a light show, I got the police on the line. I told them about my fears and my ex-husband, and they promised to send someone right over.  

The next three hours were a whirlwind as the police searched every nook and cranny of the house and shop and called an ambulance that took me to the emergency room to get my injuries looked at. By the time I got back to my house, all the lights were on, and, other than a few throw pillows being tossed haphazardly on the living room chairs, there was no evidence that the police had ever been there. The officer that had accompanied me to the emergency room and then home again, not that I could remember his name,, told me to get new locks for all the doors. 

At 3 a.m., I finally crawled into bed, tentatively reached over to turn off the light, and huddled under the covers like a child. That was when a sharp bang exploded right beside the bed. With either intense courage or extraordinary stupidity, I jumped up and turned on the light. There, lying harmlessly on the floor, was a book.

The History of the House with the Cemetery

By Amelia Hawthorne

I picked it up and, on closer inspection, realized that the faded photograph on the cover was the house that had tried to scare me to death, the very house I was now living in.

Stay tuned for more stories.
If you liked this little story, let me know in the comments and I’ll keep writing them.