Whodunit Hill: A Short Story

The man with the limp beckoned Seth and me over. We gathered in front of the fireplace. “We’re not finding anything. We should call the police—” The man in the printed shirt held up one finger to shush us. “Listen . . .” Everyone froze. “I thought I heard something,” he whispered. “It might have just been the old house creaking. But let’s turn off the lights and see if anything moves.” All the lights went out, leaving us in almost total darkness except for the pale platinum moonlight that drifted in through the broken glass. “Look!” one of the men gasped. “There it is, over by the front door!” I turned and saw a luminous apparition twisting by the entrance. It flickered, then solidified into flecks of rotted cloth—a loose, eighteenth-century silk …show more content…
It had an archway of wrought-iron curlicues, stonewalls, a lush Victorian style rose garden off to one side, and hundreds of rows of white gravestones. I read on. Do you believe in ghosts? Apparently most people in Whodunit Hill now do, especially, after last night’s mysterious “sighting” of the apparition known as Captain MacBride. According to police reports, at midnight a group of men heard shrieks coming from the historic mansion off Rosewood Way. While investigating the noise one the men who wouldn’t identify himself said, “As we tiptoed through the halls of the home I noticed a weird smell. It reeked of stale air and rot and MacBride’s sour cologne.” Several of the men felt a cold whoosh of air pass by them as they came face-to- face with a bluish-gray ghost, whose wispy edges warped and coiled into a man-shaped shimmer of mist. After the incident, the shaken men immediately telephoned the police. Chief Harry Chizelmen drove over, however, he was unable to find any traces of the ghost. Chizelmen described the sighting as baffling, though he declined to provide more