Making a Haunted House out of a Haunted House - a "I hoe em, you grow em" start

Mikey Sortino wandered through the house, wondering at how new everything looked. Haunted houses were supposed to be dusty, covered with cobwebs, and everything was supposed to be covered in sheets that spooks could rise out of...at least according to the Three Stooges. He still got a weird vibe from the place, and that did not sit well with him. Mikey did not like losing, and that included losing to ghosts. He'd keep an eye out even if he really didn't believe in spirits.

This was going to be a hell of a payout. The marketing had already been done by the newspapers, and that dopey reporter at The Tribune had both a murder fetish AND a Halloween fetish; a guaranteed story every week without a dime on advertising. The structure, an Antebellum mansion, was sound and the house had been completely refinished, including wiring for central control via the electrical outlets. This was going to be the best haunted house there was, regardless of whether any ghoulies showed their faces or not.

The two women accompanying him both had scared looks on their own faces. His girlfriend Gloria, a Tejana dressed in her usual goth outfit had finally given up on the silly extreme of makeup after some determined bullying on his part. She still powered her face, but more in a vamp noir style that worked for him. The other woman, Margie, was the psychic he had hired both as a living prop and as a hedge against the possibility that the spirits actually existed. She claimed to be the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter in a long line of witches. She had impressed him with her knowledge of who he was even as he had intentionally fed her wrong leads on what he assumed was a cold reading. Maybe she was a fraud, but if she was, she thought quick on her feet.

Both women had warned against his plan, more specifically this part of it, and both women were as worried by the lupara he wore over his shoulder on a well aged leather sling as they were by the fear of the supernatural. The gun was a family heirloom, although nobody in the family had been Cosa Nostra since fleeing Sicily in the 20s. The sawed off shotgun had been meticulously cared for in the meantime. Hell, the family wasn't even pura Sicilian any more. The fact that he had special loads with silver pellets custom made didn't seem to comfort them at all. He considered those pellets to be another selling point in his marketing.

They started the final round of the house. Mikey started banging the triangle and yelling. He was going to herd the ghosts into the living room for a little introductory session. Mikey used his best impression of the drill instructors from boot camp.
"Let's go, let's go, let's go"
"Roll call downstairs"
"Move it! Move it!"
"Drop your sheets and move your feets!"
"FIVE FOUR TWO ONNNNNNNE!"

Mikey finally stood at the podium had placed in the living room. He began haranguing the ghosts. He didn't even consider it silly to be addressing an empty room. There had been so much evil committed in this house he assumed there was something wrong with it. As a former intel Marine, he knew there was no such thing as coincidence.

"OK ghosts, let's get started with this fact, right off the start. If you're here, that means you're dead. End of story."

"Two, I know that most of you were killed in some horrific ways, and most of you didn't deserve that. That doesn't give you the right to mess with me or my guests. Deal with it."

"Three, if you want to mess with me or anybody else, this shotgun has been loaded with silver pellets, blessed by priests, and electromagnetically charged. I will get you on one level or another if you screw around. You live here, and same as me, you don't want the walls blasted with holes."

"Four, there are going to be a lot of people coming through this house. Some will be respectful, some will not. Deal with it. No throwing them down the stairs. Remember the shotgun."

"Five, Margie here will listen to you if want to get your bones moved or whatever. Tell her, don't bother me with it. I have a business to run. If you give me bad dreams trying to tell me, or out of spite, I am going to ignore what you want"

"OK, let's move on. I'm going to run down what has happened in this house. Maybe you will recognize your own story here. Maybe that will get you some peace"

"First off, this was the center of a plantation at one point. Two slaves were murdered here. God knows what other atrocities happened. Families were ripped apart"

"To add injury to insult, two former slaves were killed by the Klan right in the front yard"

"So it's 1870 now, and there are already four dead. The first ghosts start being seen, people start complaining about noises as well. The newspaper had at least a story a month about this place."

"The new owners, relatives of the slave owners, have a tragedy of their own. Their little girl falls down the big stairway and snap goes her neck. Her mother goes to the nuthouse after claiming she saw the little girl was pushed down the stairs. That family moves out"

"The next owner is some kind of an occult freak. He has a priest come out to bless the place. Wakes up to find the priest has committed suicide the next morning in the guest room. He gets a voodoo priestess to come out to cleanse the place. Next morning, she has killed herself with a poison of some sort. Three strikes and your out, the new owner commits suicide the next month"

"That makes it 1875 now, and eight dead here. Keeping up? Maybe one of you killed some of the others?"

"A 'professional skeptic' moves in. For the next six years, his guests complain about noises, cold breezes, and moving shadows. He sees nada. Two of his houseguests go missing in that time. He assumes they have just rudely left without saying goodbye, but their families come looking for them. The 'professional skeptic' is shot down by a hysterical relation of one of the missing after denying that this relative saw the family member looking through the window at him...on the third floor."

"We are in 1881, and the count is at nine, or eleven, depending on how you count it. New owners move in, and within a month move out after the elderly matron falls down the stairs...supposedly landing in the same spot the little girl had."

"No one lives in the house until 1890. The local newspaper owner buys the house. He documents every last noise and every last shadow. A fairly paranoid journal, it is almost useless to prove or disprove anything because he seems to have documented the house shifting or mice running in the walls. This owner gets shotgunned in his front lawn by an irate reader over some minor political point"

"1893 and the max number is at thirteen. An out of state family moves in. What happens over the next two years is unrecorded, but in 1895 the entire family is murdered when escaped prisoners invade the house. Add another six, including the servant, to the total."

"From 1896 until 1903, the house sits abandoned. Supposedly, the local children do not vandalize the place, or use it for dares. In 1903, an investor buys the house to demolish and rebuild. He disappears, again, supposedly while inspecting the house"

"That brings our count up to what, twenty, maybe? To this point, no one has died of natural causes in the house."

"The house sits in contested probate for another two years. It ends up in the hands of the investor's senile mother. She is moved in with her helper and her helper's husband. Looking through the legal records, it appears that the husband may have been the moving force behind the mother's acquisition of the house. The local paper does a mocking story on the mother, who in her senility claims that her missing son visits her at the house. The writer of that story fails to note even a single death or missing person other than the investor in that story. In any case, the mother dies of a heart attack within a year, and...surprisingly enough...the helper is murdered by the husband in an apparent murder/suicide."

"From there, the family of the investor's wife takes the house. It is a large family with several branches. It looks like every branch of the family moved in, and then out of the house, each within about a month of residence. I was unable to obtain any information on why this was, and there were no recorded deaths during this period"

"So in 1907, and after a possible twenty-three unnatural deaths, the house is sold again. The owner apparently never sets foot in it, but has it rebuilt. Two workers on the site end a rather inane argument by going after each other with hammers. Both die of their wounds in the house."

"The local diocese buys the house in 1908, and sells it in 1909. I thought this would be a good story, but the Church either did not record it's interest in the place, or simply doesn't want anything known about that. The house sits empty until 1913"

"Using the euphemisms of the time, a local crime lord buys the house in that year. He was pretty popular with the press, a favorite subject. Evidently, per the paper, he committed every murder in the city from 1910 until he commits suicide, in the house, of course, in 1923. According to local researchers, he knew the history of the place and that intrigued him. Also according to these researchers he did a lot of ...ahem...disposal at the house. Their sources are a bit shaky, but I suppose that if you are one of the victims you know all about that."

"In the 1920s, seances are all the rage in America. The house is again bought by an occultist. The local paper is full of stories of seances gone wrong at the house, of ritual sacrifice, and of horrors in the attic and the basement. The problem is that the house has no basement, and these stories are full of other hyperbole, making them unreliable. Even so, one of the seances devolves into a brawl, and one socialite, her lover, and her jealous husband all killed. This story was collaborated by the police records."

"According to the local legends, Houdini visits the house during the period and leaves the house after ten minutes of inspection. going straight to the sheriff's office. None of this verifiable, except that it appears there is a gap in Houdinis' public schedule during this period. In any case, the occultist disappears soon after Houdini does. The county seizes the property and builds a fence around it with a stout locked gate. That last part is recorded."

"If the sheriff's office seized the property to forestall the Apocalypse, or whatever, they soon forget about it. The house is sold to the US Army in 1943 as a convalescent hospital for officers. Out of forty two officers that are hospitalized, twelve desert and are never seen again...even the ones with perfect service records and the ones with no legs. One Army doctor also deserts and never pops back up. Finally, one officer falls down the stairs and dies. The duty logs are unavailable, but I was able to track down a set of orders referring to the hospital detailing that the telling of 'ghost stories' would be punishable as an offense against 'good order'."

"One of the officers hospitalized there during the war bought the place afterwards. The house was closed as far as I could tell, and he didn't leave any information about it. He left the house to his son in 1967, with the instructions in his will stipulating that the house was not to be lived in. Even though the property was secured, a pair of teen vandals broke into the house in 1969, and for some strange reason decided to strangle each other after a short bout of destruction in the house"

"I guess that was the last straw for the son, so he put the house up for market. It stayed on the market until 1974, when a coven of Satanists bought the place. I don't suppose that it surprises anyone here to find out that the Satanists all disappeared in 1976 after a couple of years of pissing off the neighbors. The Satanists left behind a room which had been converted into some kind of altar...in this room, they also left behind a thick layer of dried blood. This dried blood did turn out to be human blood."

"The particular Satanist that had bought the place had made an airtight will, although there were some strange and inappropriate passages in it. The house was willed to the local Catholic diocese, who had owned it seventy years before, and if they didn't want it, to a cousin of his. The Church apparently passed on this great offer, so the house went to the cousin. Once again, the local church was unhelpful on any reference to this property."

"In 1977, the cousin moves in. He is as a bad of a nut as his Satanist kin. He opens the house up to the public as a shrine to murder. There aren't really enough pyscho families at this point in time...before the internet...to make a murder vacation resort a profitable venture. The cousin sends in lurid letter after letter detailing the haunting of the place to the paper, which publishes them with glee. While this was good for the paper, it didn't really help the bottom line for the cousin. It doesn't really matter, as the cousin falls down the stairs in 1979...breaking his neck."

"Again the house goes into probate, and after a long stay on the market. In 1983, a prominent investigator of the supernatural buys the house, with the intent on writing a book about it's history. The book is well researched, and I have found no discrepancies within his documentation . He notes that he has had encounters with the spirits of the house, but provides no details. He also notes that he brought a medium in to gain her perspective, but provides no further detail than that. These are some strange things to leave out about in a book about a haunted house you are living in."

"In 1989, he finishes the book and the publisher has accepted the final version. Before the book is published, a serial killer groupie ( a woman who has corresponded with several imprisoned serial killers), breaks into the house and murders him with a knife. The house is left to his sister, who wants nothing to do with the place."

"By this time, no normal people have lived in the house since 1944; there are a documented twenty three murders, multiple suicides, and over thirty missing people associated with the house, not to mention that people seem to have a habit of falling down the stairs and dying. So what happens? An investor's group buys the house and manages to sell it to normal folk before the writer's book gets published. The book sparks another home invasion, but this time the father of the family catches the invader with a pistol. Score one for the normals. The father and his family leave the house that night, and stay with his brother until the house is out of their hands."

"However, a national TV show does a documentary about the family's experience. Their crew claims to have filmed a ghost in the house, and although the video is 'ruined' by a technical glitch, the family tells a compelling story of unexplained events, noises, and feelings that left them in constant fear before the home invasion even occurred. None of the family would even return to the hose to do the interviews."

"The family sues the investors group for failure to disclose. The case was settled, and the group took back the house as part of the settlement. They should burn it down, lamented the father in a follow up story. The group decided to sit on the house, and maintained a guard on the outside of the property. That was twenty something years ago. Now I own this place."

"I am going to turn this place into a commercial haunted house, and I am going to succeed. If you interfere, you will be ghostbusted. I won't tolerate murder in my house. You best go and be in peace. Margie will help with that. If you want to stay here and rattle your chains and be spooky, fine by me, but don't fuck with me, or you'll be eating these..."

With this, Mikey rolled a handful of the silver pellets across the floor.

Mikey stepped away from the podium with a sense of victory. The sense of doom he had felt earlier had been replaced with a sense of uncertainty. Gloria was hanging off his arm with pride radiating out of her. Margie just had a look of astonishment on her face as she said
"I think that worked...I don't know why...it shouldn't have"

Mikey grinned and replied
"We shall see. In the meantime, we've got a show to put on"

With that, he went to the truck and started unloading his tricks, humming "Grimm Grinning Ghosts" from Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.

.........................................................................................
This is a "I hoe em, you grow em" story. Feel free to run with this and write as you'd like as long as I am given some credit for my part in your work.
See The "I hoe em, you grow em" series - Need a story idea? Look here: howemngrowem