Thursday, October 30, 2008

159: The Ghostly Rental

This is one of my favorite scary stories.  As you can tell it's about a haunted house which holds a special place in my heart.  Back in my "ghost hunting" days, I went to a couple "haunted" houses but essentially found nothing.  My main haunts were in the Topeka Triangle of Stull, the Devil House and Rochester Cemetery.

We've probably all heard about Stull and it's purported gateway to Hell.  Rochester Cemetery has the albino woman who's wandering the cemetery possibly in search of her dead child.  The Devil House no longer stands but was a huge three story stone house.  Rumor had it that back in the early 20th Century, the daughter of the family that lived there were practising Satanists and the girl rode the family's white horse to Topeka one night and raped and severely beaten.  The girl gave birth and the mother immediately drowned the baby in a pond on the property.  While exploring the land one evening, we actually found a pond which corroborated the story.  The house was dangerous to walk around and about three years after our exploration, the house was torn down and replaced with a modern house.  It was kind of like the end of that time in our lives and while we have tried to recapture it in some form or another, it just hasn't worked out.

Click on the title link to access the story The Ghostly Rental by Henry James.