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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Mystery
- Subject: Ghost Stories / Paranormal
- Published: 07/30/2013
THE HAUNTED HOUSE
Born 1969, M, from Herten, NRW, GermanyThe Haunted House
Most of my story ideas are one image inspirations. Here, I had an image of one boy alone in a haunted house meeting a restless ghost that was the victim of a crime. Like the story The Children of the Valley, this tale was written in 1985 with pencil on paper. Again, this is a different one than the tale that emerged in the 1980’s. The idea, however, is the same and it explores the strange connection that a boy feels when he walks into a house alone at night knowing fully well that someone is watching.
I am here to tell you the story of a haunted house. It was on the land that we bought once our family became successful enough to require some concealed juncture away from the public. The haunted house was just another dwelling on our new estate a bit of a way from our main residence. A house no one yet had wanted to or dared to tear down for fear of retribution.
In order to tell you how we came to approaching our new strange habitation, I have to rewind the tape and tell you the account from the start and how dad became what he became after being a bohemian and extraordinary prodigy.
Dad’s success story was a musical one. This was a fact just like mum’s story was one of writing books. Dad’s road from relative obscurity to world fame was as exciting as the saga that later unravelled in the forgotten mansion, whose fate I saved in heaven.
Dad had always been a great violinist. His expertise in Bruch sonatas and Mozart quintets was so renowned that even as a little boy he was asked to join adults in as a performer in concerts. As soon as he came of age, though, it didn’t take long until he started touring the pubs in his off hours from Trinity College. Yes, there were three or four pints of Guinness in his pub tours, but the main thing were the people he met there and the music he played. He became the most well known pub music crawler in Dublin and he could play anyone against the wall.
Not before long, Sean O’Flanagan was teaming up with a range of musicians that played for fun in The Auld Tavern on Grafton Street. They had no name, just a mission: playing great music and having fun. And so, the guests had fun, too.
My dad was extremely active in the pub circuit with his band of merry fiddlers when he met my mother, Rita Winchester. Funnily enough, my father was just working toward finishing his degree at Trinity College as a concert violinist when my mother arrived in Dublin after completing hers at Oxford. She was a full fledged psychologist.
Having Irish relatives living in Killiney, she decided to take on a commission to work as a psychology teacher at Trinity College. In the evenings, she discovered what Dublin had to offer. It was on one of those explorations that she saw the fun redhead with his amazing voice. She asked him what his name was and they went from there. Mum called it “love at first sight”. Dad spoke in Irish tones of romantic prose about “seeing an angel appear before me fiddle and making me weary lad’s heart turn into a great symphony of wee violins”.
The band, whose music she danced to until four in the morning that Friday, just called themselves The Band and that was the only thing that Rita thought was shameful. They could certainly think of a better name than that.
Sean and Rita talked until the morning hours about a name for the ensemble. Originating in Galway just like four other members of the group, Rita suggested the name The Galway Boys.
In the beginning, the ensemble only did consist of boys. After ten years of success, however, the group had grown to become an ensemble of twenty with a total of five women. The women kept joking about being just “one of the boys”, although they all were married. The Galway Boys soon became an institution with multi million dollar contracts at Sony Records.
My mother had the luck that father also had and so I became the son of two immensely popular parents at age four. My siblings Wendy and Peter were ten and twelve at the time when Sean O’Flanagan and his Galway Boys were launched on their first tour around the world. The previous year, their double album Dublin’s Fair City hit the charts with such a spectacular force that even pop charts were playing the songs that were a wonderful mixture of rock, Irish folk music and flamenco.
This had a huge impact on our lives. Instantly, we had a press agent and a manager and my dad’s agent hired a financial advisor that told him what to do with his money.
Well, simultaneously with all of this, my mother received a book contract with the book publisher Henderson & Mayfield to publish her book “The Art of Self-Esteem”.
It was the first of many self help books that she wrote in the following years. Four books in six years made the publishing company as well as us very rich people, indeed. My mother was called “the female Anthony Robbins” and lectured across Europe in order to help boost people’s confidence.
Psychology Today named her “Lovely Rita, Self-Help-Maid”.
At ten years of age, I was the only child left in the O’Flannagan – Winchester household. My siblings had both moved to London to study at Guild Hall. The year I turned ten, my parents bought the big house with the very big expanse of land. My father had been called the “Michael Flatley of Music” and this rich fiddler turned our new estate into a farm of veggie crops. He hired a bunch of agricultural organizers, who all could help them plant potatoes and apples and pears. My father’s dream of also becoming an Irish farmer was coming true.
That summer saw my father touring the world with his “Song of Ireland Tour 2009”. Thus, we were meeting up with him in August to join him for two weeks on the road before I resumed school. In October, he would arrive a couple of times and bring some friends by to play some tunes. The house would be full of tin whistles, Celtic harps, Bodhráns and fiddles. Otherwise, the house was very empty that July before my father came home. My mother was working on her latest book, “How to improve yourself”, and the first draught was due in September.
To my mother’s defence, she spent many days taking me to amusement parks and looking at movies in our private cinema. We met famous friends. I got to invite my friends over and play with them in the west wing of our house, where I had my play rooms. She just made sure that I practiced piano before I had my fun. I often resorted to playing boogie-woogie in my hours instead of my Czerny scales, but mum would stick her head in and make sure that Hanon, Mozart and Bruch got their fill along with Fats Waller. The funny thing was that I later turned into a jazz pianist.
The days that I had nothing to do, I often spent complaining about being bored. My siblings were spending their summer off from school studying music in Tanglewood and I watched movies and ate pop corn. My mother promised me that we would spend dad’s two winter weeks off from the tour in Bermuda.
As for now, I was on my own.
As I said, the haunted house was on the land that we owned. At least, people said it was haunted. None of the owners had ever dared to tear it down. It was rickety and ancient and had once been the centre of immense cultural activity, before it became an vacant gap of misery.
So, we had bought an estate that was haunted. Now what?
I had to find out who the man had been that had built the haunted house. Who was he? I googled the web and I soon found out.
The man that had lived there once had been the Earl of Oxbridge. His family died under mysterious circumstances. As he left no heirs, the expanse was sold to the highest bidder in 1732. It changed owner several times until we bought it in 2006. The Molina family were rich Spanish merchants that finally built a second big house on the grounds in 1740. Their family kept it until the year 1800, when the grandson sold it to a steel tycoon.
In 1956, the founder of a textile empire tore down Molina’s house and built the house that we now live in. His son Rudolph Yates sold it to us, claiming that it was best to stay away from the old haunted house and never ever tear it down. His father had gone into the house and come in white as a sheet.
My dad didn’t want to tear it down. He was a superstitious Irishman with a respect for ghosts. His parents in west Ireland had told him about fairies and tinkers and he wasn’t about to challenge his fate. It seemed as if letting the ghosts be was a good idea. No horrible incidents had really happened to the owners of our land. The only thing was that they all had seen something and they never wanted to come back to the land after seeing what they had seen.
I was fascinated by this house. It lay in the western part of our expanse. As it was ten minute walk there, I felt there was no reason not to go. My mum told me not to go there under any circumstances. I was still fascinated by the place and maintained that I wanted to see what was there. Somehow, I would find out if there was anything to these rumours about the Earl of Oxbridge haunting the place now since almost three hundred years.
I discovered that he had been a very wealthy man with an immense thirst for knowledge. He was like the Irish Faust. His real name had been Kenneth Duke Salisbury of Oxbridge. His library had been so vast that even the most learned men came to borrow books from him. He was a hunter, a fisherman, a musician, a painter, a cook and a baker. He even dabbled with sculpting and it was even rumoured that he dabbled with alchemy. This was a renaissance man of the highest calibre.
His family consisted of a lovely wife named Susan, four sons all named after catholic saints and two daughters named Diana and Hera. Apparently, their lives had been very interesting. At least until 1726, when all hell broke loose on the Oxbridge estate.
A blizzard of apocalyptic magnitude hit the rural area of York that year and literally turned the whole land upside down. Three hundred year old trees got pulled out of the ground and the land looked like a war zone afterwards.
The clean-up was a massive effort. Hard labour was invested in the organization of a new structure. The Earl of Oxbridge even hired locals as workers and became obsessed with restoring the grandeur. Most people understood his obsession.
Some didn’t. Among them were four men who seemed to have developed a grave hate for the man. He was stingy and dire, they claimed, and wanted to kill him for it.
Here, the information was curtailed. The entire family disappeared from records for four years until the Earl himself reappeared in 1732. He drank himself to death and was found in his bathtub, after which the mansion and the land was sold to the Molina family. They quickly understood that the Earl was still there as a ghost and decided to leave the house alone.
No one had yet been able to save the Earl and give him his peace. I thought I could. It almost cost me my sanity, as you shall see.
Before all of that happened, though, I was eager to see the old mansion and any information about the old aristocrat was good enough for me. My mum said that the only way that I was going there was with an adult. My father’s brother, whom I knew as Uncle Frank, was due here with his family in a week and before then my mother promised we would go.
Three days later, we did go. My mother was not very happy about going. I kept asking her why we had avoided the house. After all, it did belong to us. Why ignore it? She said that every owner before had been troubled by the fate of the original owner, the Earl of Oxbridge, and leaving him alone might be a good idea.
As we were approaching the house by way of a long path along a grassy meadow, we talked about the old aristocrat actually being able to experience salvation. Maybe he kept on haunting his mansion, because his soul couldn’t let go of the past and go into the next life.
My mother said she was very religious, but as far superstition was concerned dad was the real fanatic. Well, not fanatic. Maybe passionately interested.
The dwelling loomed over us like some old spooky Usher house in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Its’ two side towers had pointy tops with tin roosters and the house itself had twenty windows. Many of these were broken with frames were hanging loose.
The house was begging to be renovated.
My mother kept saying that dad was trying to find a way to renovate the house and still not get into trouble. He believed that he could somehow communicate with the Earl. Of course, he was too much of a coward to actually go into the house. He was also too busy. In his mind, dad would actually go into the house and talk to the ghost. In reality, he was gone most of the time.
However, he knew that he had to. After all, he had bought the land and it was his responsibility as a land owner. This mansion was, nevertheless, a special issue and no one could blame an owner who did not do anything about the state of the place. The rest of the land was in top condition. My dad loved ghost stories, but hated ghosts.
As we opened the gate, the rust seemed to fall off the handle in sprinkles. The grapevine had spun itself countless times around the wall and spider web’s nearly covered the entire entrance area that lay ahead. There was a long stone pathway that must’ve been beautiful earlier. I could really picture kids playing in the yard among the flowers and the butterflies.
As we entered the stone porch something weird happened. A flock of ravens flew in and landed in the garden. As they did, my mother and I turned around. There were approximately twenty ravens there and they started moving towards us. As we hurried out towards the gate they dispersed, actually letting us pass through. Then, they disappeared. When we approached the mansion a second time, the ravens were back.
My mother had always been adamant not to let anything stand in her way. The incident with the ravens gave her enough reason to actually check the house. This kind of behaviour had led to her actually writing the self-help-books. A rude person would actually put it bluntly: “Don’t MESS with me, man!”
Well, the door was already unlocked when we pushed it ajar. Luckily, we had brought two flashlights. Aside of the daylight streaming in from the windows, there was no light in there at all.
“Jimmy, my boy,” my mother said in a tone I had been unaccustomed to. “Watch your step. Look out for rotten floorboards.”
I nodded and hoped that my mother saw the nod. I was much too scared to speak.
I wanted to run out, but this time my mother was the brave one. She held my hand tight, though. Actually so firm, it began to hurt.
I moaned.
“Sorry,” she said and let go of the clasp a little bit.
The entry vestibule was quite large, maybe 33 feet high and rounded about the size of one half of a soccer field. Its’ chequered pattern told us that we were walking on marble, not wood. There weren’t going to be any rotten floorboards. Falling debris, maybe.
From the looks of the place, there were paintings of ancestors all along the walls and great big chandelier made of bronze hanging from the roof. Obviously, the wax candles in there had been unlit for at least a hundred years or more. If not more.
There were maybe thirty steps covered in something that once had been a red carpet, but now looked like wrapping paper. Spider webs covered the staircase. The window beyond the landing was green lead-glass. There were some written sign that was unreadable from where we were standing.
I found myself in an odd way falling in love with this place.
There was a large mahogany door in the left corner that opened and never could’ve been opened by any breeze. There was a hallway beyond the door with some paintings aligned along the left side. We could make out some lamp and a table. A pair of red eyes appeared in that darkness and a heavy breath swept across the room in the form of a strange and cold breeze.
That is when my mother and I left the house, scattered the ravens and ran as fast as we could back to our own safe haven.
Once we were back in our own house, we made ourselves some milk and cookies and turned on the telly. We watched a rerun of The Flintstones in silence until my mother finally said:
“Something over there is in pain. We should call a medium.”
I looked at my mum and put down my plate of Scottish ginger flavoured cookies.
“I googled information about the owner.”
My mum looked at me and nodded.
“I did, too, Jimmy,” she answered. “We should help him.”
I shook my head. “I am afraid. I mean, that thing over there had red eyes.”
“If we try to communicate with it,” my mum continued, “maybe it will agree to tell us what we can do. I am sure it is just lonely.”
I lifted my glass and drank a bit of my milk. I set the glass down and sighed. “Mum, uhm, this ghost might really be menacing.”
My mum shrugged. “This soul loved his family and his family suffered. Awful things happened. I am sure he just hasn’t found a way to let go of the past. He might really need someone to help him. He is like a wounded horse caught in time. I would like to go back and see if there is a way.”
“To do what?” I asked.
“Talk to him,” my mum said. “Just talk.”
I winced. “Let us find a medium.”
My mum turned down the TV and started searching for a proper medium. She also realized that medium would be good if recommended by someone who had received help. Homepages and Google-searching might get you somewhere, but recommendations might get you further.
Finally, she found an acquaintance in Newark that had actually worked with a medium that was an expert on lost ghosts. She was an old lady that had met many in her lifetime and saved a few.
The lady was tough to contact and so we tried for the full week without luck. By this time, dad had called from his hotel in Paris and we told him the story. It troubled him, to say the least, to hear us meddling with these powers. He also knew that we needed to do something and so he left it in our hands.
Uncle Frank was due two days after the medium arrived and he would find a distraught pair of people that day.
The medium introduced herself as Deirdre Longfellow. She was a very kind and frail looking lady that might’ve been mistaken for a nice Yorkshire retired sewing club president with her green handbag and nylon stockings.
She walked back and forth in the garden before the gates and instantaneously said that there must be something in here that was stuck. It was not evil. It was in fact a very good soul that just couldn’t let go of the thought that its’ family had suffered.
The woman told us that she needed to go in and see for herself. She would find more answers than she was looking for in her quest to save the ghost.
There was one raven sitting on each statue and literally dozens of other ravens making noise.
“Don’t worry about them,” Deirdre said. “They are just concerned spirits. In actual fact, they just come to places where there has been massive spiritual effort.”
Mrs. Longfellow made a large sweeping gesture over the inner garden. In one sweep, the entire entourage of black birds flew away and disappeared into the morning sky.
Then, the medium looked at me.
“You are a smart fellow, lad,” she smiled. “Whatever you see in there, remember that this is a soul in torment.”
Deirdre Longfellow turned around and faced the big mahogany door. She breathed in deeply once. The three of us then walked to the door and opened it.
There was a little bit of light from the windows streaming in, but in the house itself there was night. The medium reached into her green handbag and brought out a flashlight that she swung around.
“We need to search the house,” she said. “You have a spiritual connection here.”
“Connection?” my mother asked.
“Yes,” she responded. “I think you had something to do with the Earl in a former life.”
She looked at me.
“You, too.”
What then happened is hard to describe. I’ve seen in it in a thousand horror films. It must’ve been the Earl of Oxbridge himself. He came from the inner room.
It was obviously a 18th century man we were looking at or his ethereal remains.
Mrs. Longfellow urged us to try to feel love for one another. She said if we try to love this ghost and not discard him, we might eventually reach something. No visitor had ever come beyond the entrance hallway.
The Earl screamed at us to leave.
I was terrified. That is the only expression I have in store to describe my feeling. We remained steadfast, holding on to not only our flashlights. We also held on to each other’s hands.
“Why are you here?” the ghost asked.
The medium answered: “You are in pain. Let us help you.”
“Nooooo!” the ghost shouted.
Down the stairs came the four bandits that had killed his family. They were dressed as poor people would’ve been dressed back then. Leather shoes. Woollen hats. Sheep wool sweaters. Leather vests. Unshaved, unwashed, uncouth, unclean, untidy. A beast on a pretty canvas. Was that better than a beauty on an ugly canvas?
This was a recreation of what had happened. The bandits had cut off each one of the family member’s heads and were holding on to them, two heads an individual. The Earl of Oxbridge, as he had once been, ran down the stairs screaming. The four criminals laughed as he stumbled.
The Earl was desperate. There were spears and lances on the walls. They were heading for the door when one of them saw him jumping up on a table and grabbing the lance from the wall.
It was heavy thing and when it hit the floor there was loud clonking sound. The Earl jumped down and picked it up, one of the men ran up to the aristocrat and subsequently ran right into the spear.
The Earl of Oxbridge pulled out the spear with a swift noise and began to fight off the other three, who had thrown the heads in corners of the room. It was clear that this scene had been replayed for a dozen guests over and over like a broken record, more or less a desperate attempt by the old man himself to find someone, anyone, who one listen.
We were petrified, but we knew at the same time that this scene, as it was unfolding, was like a man telling a psychologist what had happened. He wanted to leave the house, but no one had yet listened to him.
The Earl of Oxbridge started slaying the three bandits, squeezing information from them as to why they had killed his family. Before dying, the last of the four to die said:
“Your family has always lived in bliss and harmony and we poor people have been forced to labour under the oak of tyranny.”
Of course, it was only partly true. The Archduke of York was the one with the influence, but the Earl of Oxbridge was the carrier of the fortune. He got the blame.
The whole thing was like a scene from a movie. It was scary, but it wasn’t menacing. It was like seeing a DVD of events from way back played on the canvas of this huge entrance hall.
About one hundred spectres appeared and they took away the old aristocrat. Had this been the 21st century the whole thing would’ve been coloured in blue and green laser.
The Earl of Oxbridge was pulled into the tunnel. In there we saw him in limbo for four years, neither dead nor alive. He circled the seven levels of hell until was spat out of hell four years later.
By this time, the law inspectors had been there and seen the carnage. There was no one that could explain what had happened or where the Earl was, so the case was closed and the dead were buried in the family cemetery. Some weird story was made up to cover up the real one and the carnage that really happened never ever was displayed.
When the Earl arrived back in our reality, he did start drinking heavily. That part was true. However, the story that was spread about him being found dead in bathtub was not true. He hung himself and was found by the same law inspectors a week later.
The once so happy and great aristocrat was buried by people he did not know in front of a crowd of strangers in the family cemetery. The real story of why it happened never came out.
The case was closed, because no one actually knew the truth. How could they know? No one was alive to tell the story.
We stood there in complete silence, having seen this unpleasant scene unfold before our eyes. Our flashlight gave out a very faint light. There was a hush in this space at present that spoke volumes.
Mrs. Deirdre Longfellow turned to my mum and asked:
“What does the psychologist say?”
“The patient is suffering from post-mortal depression.”
The truth was so obviously clear that we all had to laugh.
At that moment, the ghost himself appeared.
He was a beautiful man, no doubt, but seeing him was a bloodcurdling revelation. He opened his eyes, his clothes stained with blood and his ethereal aura falling apart. We screamed. It was a gut reaction. He was shaking his head.
“No, no, no, no,” he moaned. “Don’t cry. You are the only ones I can turn to.”
Now the medium spoke.
“What can we do for you?”
The ghost flew around the hallway a couple of times and then bunged up before us again.
“Tell my story,” he said. “Tell the story that I have told you.”
He looked at mum and smiled. “You are the reincarnation of my wife, Susan.” He lifted his hand and caressed her cheek soothingly. It was obvious that mum remembered the pain of dying here. She began weeping. Then the ghost turned to me: “Diana and Hera have found their rest as heavenly spirits. Your three brothers Matthew, John and Luke are incarnated as lawyers in Paris. They only remotely know about me, but you are lucky, my Jimmy. You are the reincarnation of my son James.” He caressed me and suddenly I remembered.
Instinctively, I said: “Father!”
I had loved him more than myself back then.
Immediately upon returning to our own house, we contacted my father. He said that he could arrange to return at the end of July. Uncle Frank did arrive with his family, but he found me extremely sad and very distraught. I had horrible nightmares about how I had suffered. Apparently, I had been the child with the slowest death. I cried myself to sleep every night.
My mother spent the remnants of July writing down Kenneth Duke Salisbury of Oxbridge’s story. With a name and fame like hers there was no way she wouldn’t get it published.
She did. Writer’s Digest, Reader’s Digest, New York Times, Psychology Today and even National Geographic were fighting one another who would get to publish the story first. It was astounding what stardom could do.
When my father returned home, we all went to the castle with Frank and his family despite his reluctant attitude to go there.
One can say that the Earl had a special show for us that day and my father, the great supernatural expert, was determined to dedicate an Irish album with The Galway Boys to the old spirit.
That took me out of our depression.
We had a family reunion in Bermuda.
Anyway, when we returned to our estate that fall after the end of dad’s tour we visited the haunted house. The Earl of Oxbridge appeared to us and told us in very modest tones that we had given him his peace on Earth and that he would grant us eternal happiness and love for this.
Three cable channels and a documentary film director signed contracts with us to tell the story of the haunted house that had turned into a happy house. The medium was invited and our estate became exactly what we had never wanted it to be: a media circus.
When the filming was over, we evicted all of the press and decided never to invite any reporters to our estate ever again.
The subsequent fall, I fell in love with an eleven year old girl named Susan. Four years later, at age fifteen, I lost my virginity in the Earl’s old bedroom. I married Susan years later and realized, when my parents were long gone, that we had saved a family from the claws of hell. Not only that, we had also brought a house life again that once had been a manor of dreary depression.
At this time, the haunted house had been renovated and restored to its’ former glamour. There in that house we spent many nights kissing and pretending to be a married couple.
As I pointed out, I am now a renowned jazz pianist and I often spend my weeks off writing the songs in the old mansion I then later record in the studio. It seems to me that the spirit is there to guide me.
I often felt the Earl’s presence. Especially on those dark and romantic nights I can feel him. He returns when the moon dances a strange dance high in the heavens. In the rose garden beyond the gates to paradise the moon the shines on the ravens. They return to the statues in order to remember how we all saved their patron.
THE HAUNTED HOUSE(Charles E.J. Moulton)
The Haunted House
Most of my story ideas are one image inspirations. Here, I had an image of one boy alone in a haunted house meeting a restless ghost that was the victim of a crime. Like the story The Children of the Valley, this tale was written in 1985 with pencil on paper. Again, this is a different one than the tale that emerged in the 1980’s. The idea, however, is the same and it explores the strange connection that a boy feels when he walks into a house alone at night knowing fully well that someone is watching.
I am here to tell you the story of a haunted house. It was on the land that we bought once our family became successful enough to require some concealed juncture away from the public. The haunted house was just another dwelling on our new estate a bit of a way from our main residence. A house no one yet had wanted to or dared to tear down for fear of retribution.
In order to tell you how we came to approaching our new strange habitation, I have to rewind the tape and tell you the account from the start and how dad became what he became after being a bohemian and extraordinary prodigy.
Dad’s success story was a musical one. This was a fact just like mum’s story was one of writing books. Dad’s road from relative obscurity to world fame was as exciting as the saga that later unravelled in the forgotten mansion, whose fate I saved in heaven.
Dad had always been a great violinist. His expertise in Bruch sonatas and Mozart quintets was so renowned that even as a little boy he was asked to join adults in as a performer in concerts. As soon as he came of age, though, it didn’t take long until he started touring the pubs in his off hours from Trinity College. Yes, there were three or four pints of Guinness in his pub tours, but the main thing were the people he met there and the music he played. He became the most well known pub music crawler in Dublin and he could play anyone against the wall.
Not before long, Sean O’Flanagan was teaming up with a range of musicians that played for fun in The Auld Tavern on Grafton Street. They had no name, just a mission: playing great music and having fun. And so, the guests had fun, too.
My dad was extremely active in the pub circuit with his band of merry fiddlers when he met my mother, Rita Winchester. Funnily enough, my father was just working toward finishing his degree at Trinity College as a concert violinist when my mother arrived in Dublin after completing hers at Oxford. She was a full fledged psychologist.
Having Irish relatives living in Killiney, she decided to take on a commission to work as a psychology teacher at Trinity College. In the evenings, she discovered what Dublin had to offer. It was on one of those explorations that she saw the fun redhead with his amazing voice. She asked him what his name was and they went from there. Mum called it “love at first sight”. Dad spoke in Irish tones of romantic prose about “seeing an angel appear before me fiddle and making me weary lad’s heart turn into a great symphony of wee violins”.
The band, whose music she danced to until four in the morning that Friday, just called themselves The Band and that was the only thing that Rita thought was shameful. They could certainly think of a better name than that.
Sean and Rita talked until the morning hours about a name for the ensemble. Originating in Galway just like four other members of the group, Rita suggested the name The Galway Boys.
In the beginning, the ensemble only did consist of boys. After ten years of success, however, the group had grown to become an ensemble of twenty with a total of five women. The women kept joking about being just “one of the boys”, although they all were married. The Galway Boys soon became an institution with multi million dollar contracts at Sony Records.
My mother had the luck that father also had and so I became the son of two immensely popular parents at age four. My siblings Wendy and Peter were ten and twelve at the time when Sean O’Flanagan and his Galway Boys were launched on their first tour around the world. The previous year, their double album Dublin’s Fair City hit the charts with such a spectacular force that even pop charts were playing the songs that were a wonderful mixture of rock, Irish folk music and flamenco.
This had a huge impact on our lives. Instantly, we had a press agent and a manager and my dad’s agent hired a financial advisor that told him what to do with his money.
Well, simultaneously with all of this, my mother received a book contract with the book publisher Henderson & Mayfield to publish her book “The Art of Self-Esteem”.
It was the first of many self help books that she wrote in the following years. Four books in six years made the publishing company as well as us very rich people, indeed. My mother was called “the female Anthony Robbins” and lectured across Europe in order to help boost people’s confidence.
Psychology Today named her “Lovely Rita, Self-Help-Maid”.
At ten years of age, I was the only child left in the O’Flannagan – Winchester household. My siblings had both moved to London to study at Guild Hall. The year I turned ten, my parents bought the big house with the very big expanse of land. My father had been called the “Michael Flatley of Music” and this rich fiddler turned our new estate into a farm of veggie crops. He hired a bunch of agricultural organizers, who all could help them plant potatoes and apples and pears. My father’s dream of also becoming an Irish farmer was coming true.
That summer saw my father touring the world with his “Song of Ireland Tour 2009”. Thus, we were meeting up with him in August to join him for two weeks on the road before I resumed school. In October, he would arrive a couple of times and bring some friends by to play some tunes. The house would be full of tin whistles, Celtic harps, Bodhráns and fiddles. Otherwise, the house was very empty that July before my father came home. My mother was working on her latest book, “How to improve yourself”, and the first draught was due in September.
To my mother’s defence, she spent many days taking me to amusement parks and looking at movies in our private cinema. We met famous friends. I got to invite my friends over and play with them in the west wing of our house, where I had my play rooms. She just made sure that I practiced piano before I had my fun. I often resorted to playing boogie-woogie in my hours instead of my Czerny scales, but mum would stick her head in and make sure that Hanon, Mozart and Bruch got their fill along with Fats Waller. The funny thing was that I later turned into a jazz pianist.
The days that I had nothing to do, I often spent complaining about being bored. My siblings were spending their summer off from school studying music in Tanglewood and I watched movies and ate pop corn. My mother promised me that we would spend dad’s two winter weeks off from the tour in Bermuda.
As for now, I was on my own.
As I said, the haunted house was on the land that we owned. At least, people said it was haunted. None of the owners had ever dared to tear it down. It was rickety and ancient and had once been the centre of immense cultural activity, before it became an vacant gap of misery.
So, we had bought an estate that was haunted. Now what?
I had to find out who the man had been that had built the haunted house. Who was he? I googled the web and I soon found out.
The man that had lived there once had been the Earl of Oxbridge. His family died under mysterious circumstances. As he left no heirs, the expanse was sold to the highest bidder in 1732. It changed owner several times until we bought it in 2006. The Molina family were rich Spanish merchants that finally built a second big house on the grounds in 1740. Their family kept it until the year 1800, when the grandson sold it to a steel tycoon.
In 1956, the founder of a textile empire tore down Molina’s house and built the house that we now live in. His son Rudolph Yates sold it to us, claiming that it was best to stay away from the old haunted house and never ever tear it down. His father had gone into the house and come in white as a sheet.
My dad didn’t want to tear it down. He was a superstitious Irishman with a respect for ghosts. His parents in west Ireland had told him about fairies and tinkers and he wasn’t about to challenge his fate. It seemed as if letting the ghosts be was a good idea. No horrible incidents had really happened to the owners of our land. The only thing was that they all had seen something and they never wanted to come back to the land after seeing what they had seen.
I was fascinated by this house. It lay in the western part of our expanse. As it was ten minute walk there, I felt there was no reason not to go. My mum told me not to go there under any circumstances. I was still fascinated by the place and maintained that I wanted to see what was there. Somehow, I would find out if there was anything to these rumours about the Earl of Oxbridge haunting the place now since almost three hundred years.
I discovered that he had been a very wealthy man with an immense thirst for knowledge. He was like the Irish Faust. His real name had been Kenneth Duke Salisbury of Oxbridge. His library had been so vast that even the most learned men came to borrow books from him. He was a hunter, a fisherman, a musician, a painter, a cook and a baker. He even dabbled with sculpting and it was even rumoured that he dabbled with alchemy. This was a renaissance man of the highest calibre.
His family consisted of a lovely wife named Susan, four sons all named after catholic saints and two daughters named Diana and Hera. Apparently, their lives had been very interesting. At least until 1726, when all hell broke loose on the Oxbridge estate.
A blizzard of apocalyptic magnitude hit the rural area of York that year and literally turned the whole land upside down. Three hundred year old trees got pulled out of the ground and the land looked like a war zone afterwards.
The clean-up was a massive effort. Hard labour was invested in the organization of a new structure. The Earl of Oxbridge even hired locals as workers and became obsessed with restoring the grandeur. Most people understood his obsession.
Some didn’t. Among them were four men who seemed to have developed a grave hate for the man. He was stingy and dire, they claimed, and wanted to kill him for it.
Here, the information was curtailed. The entire family disappeared from records for four years until the Earl himself reappeared in 1732. He drank himself to death and was found in his bathtub, after which the mansion and the land was sold to the Molina family. They quickly understood that the Earl was still there as a ghost and decided to leave the house alone.
No one had yet been able to save the Earl and give him his peace. I thought I could. It almost cost me my sanity, as you shall see.
Before all of that happened, though, I was eager to see the old mansion and any information about the old aristocrat was good enough for me. My mum said that the only way that I was going there was with an adult. My father’s brother, whom I knew as Uncle Frank, was due here with his family in a week and before then my mother promised we would go.
Three days later, we did go. My mother was not very happy about going. I kept asking her why we had avoided the house. After all, it did belong to us. Why ignore it? She said that every owner before had been troubled by the fate of the original owner, the Earl of Oxbridge, and leaving him alone might be a good idea.
As we were approaching the house by way of a long path along a grassy meadow, we talked about the old aristocrat actually being able to experience salvation. Maybe he kept on haunting his mansion, because his soul couldn’t let go of the past and go into the next life.
My mother said she was very religious, but as far superstition was concerned dad was the real fanatic. Well, not fanatic. Maybe passionately interested.
The dwelling loomed over us like some old spooky Usher house in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Its’ two side towers had pointy tops with tin roosters and the house itself had twenty windows. Many of these were broken with frames were hanging loose.
The house was begging to be renovated.
My mother kept saying that dad was trying to find a way to renovate the house and still not get into trouble. He believed that he could somehow communicate with the Earl. Of course, he was too much of a coward to actually go into the house. He was also too busy. In his mind, dad would actually go into the house and talk to the ghost. In reality, he was gone most of the time.
However, he knew that he had to. After all, he had bought the land and it was his responsibility as a land owner. This mansion was, nevertheless, a special issue and no one could blame an owner who did not do anything about the state of the place. The rest of the land was in top condition. My dad loved ghost stories, but hated ghosts.
As we opened the gate, the rust seemed to fall off the handle in sprinkles. The grapevine had spun itself countless times around the wall and spider web’s nearly covered the entire entrance area that lay ahead. There was a long stone pathway that must’ve been beautiful earlier. I could really picture kids playing in the yard among the flowers and the butterflies.
As we entered the stone porch something weird happened. A flock of ravens flew in and landed in the garden. As they did, my mother and I turned around. There were approximately twenty ravens there and they started moving towards us. As we hurried out towards the gate they dispersed, actually letting us pass through. Then, they disappeared. When we approached the mansion a second time, the ravens were back.
My mother had always been adamant not to let anything stand in her way. The incident with the ravens gave her enough reason to actually check the house. This kind of behaviour had led to her actually writing the self-help-books. A rude person would actually put it bluntly: “Don’t MESS with me, man!”
Well, the door was already unlocked when we pushed it ajar. Luckily, we had brought two flashlights. Aside of the daylight streaming in from the windows, there was no light in there at all.
“Jimmy, my boy,” my mother said in a tone I had been unaccustomed to. “Watch your step. Look out for rotten floorboards.”
I nodded and hoped that my mother saw the nod. I was much too scared to speak.
I wanted to run out, but this time my mother was the brave one. She held my hand tight, though. Actually so firm, it began to hurt.
I moaned.
“Sorry,” she said and let go of the clasp a little bit.
The entry vestibule was quite large, maybe 33 feet high and rounded about the size of one half of a soccer field. Its’ chequered pattern told us that we were walking on marble, not wood. There weren’t going to be any rotten floorboards. Falling debris, maybe.
From the looks of the place, there were paintings of ancestors all along the walls and great big chandelier made of bronze hanging from the roof. Obviously, the wax candles in there had been unlit for at least a hundred years or more. If not more.
There were maybe thirty steps covered in something that once had been a red carpet, but now looked like wrapping paper. Spider webs covered the staircase. The window beyond the landing was green lead-glass. There were some written sign that was unreadable from where we were standing.
I found myself in an odd way falling in love with this place.
There was a large mahogany door in the left corner that opened and never could’ve been opened by any breeze. There was a hallway beyond the door with some paintings aligned along the left side. We could make out some lamp and a table. A pair of red eyes appeared in that darkness and a heavy breath swept across the room in the form of a strange and cold breeze.
That is when my mother and I left the house, scattered the ravens and ran as fast as we could back to our own safe haven.
Once we were back in our own house, we made ourselves some milk and cookies and turned on the telly. We watched a rerun of The Flintstones in silence until my mother finally said:
“Something over there is in pain. We should call a medium.”
I looked at my mum and put down my plate of Scottish ginger flavoured cookies.
“I googled information about the owner.”
My mum looked at me and nodded.
“I did, too, Jimmy,” she answered. “We should help him.”
I shook my head. “I am afraid. I mean, that thing over there had red eyes.”
“If we try to communicate with it,” my mum continued, “maybe it will agree to tell us what we can do. I am sure it is just lonely.”
I lifted my glass and drank a bit of my milk. I set the glass down and sighed. “Mum, uhm, this ghost might really be menacing.”
My mum shrugged. “This soul loved his family and his family suffered. Awful things happened. I am sure he just hasn’t found a way to let go of the past. He might really need someone to help him. He is like a wounded horse caught in time. I would like to go back and see if there is a way.”
“To do what?” I asked.
“Talk to him,” my mum said. “Just talk.”
I winced. “Let us find a medium.”
My mum turned down the TV and started searching for a proper medium. She also realized that medium would be good if recommended by someone who had received help. Homepages and Google-searching might get you somewhere, but recommendations might get you further.
Finally, she found an acquaintance in Newark that had actually worked with a medium that was an expert on lost ghosts. She was an old lady that had met many in her lifetime and saved a few.
The lady was tough to contact and so we tried for the full week without luck. By this time, dad had called from his hotel in Paris and we told him the story. It troubled him, to say the least, to hear us meddling with these powers. He also knew that we needed to do something and so he left it in our hands.
Uncle Frank was due two days after the medium arrived and he would find a distraught pair of people that day.
The medium introduced herself as Deirdre Longfellow. She was a very kind and frail looking lady that might’ve been mistaken for a nice Yorkshire retired sewing club president with her green handbag and nylon stockings.
She walked back and forth in the garden before the gates and instantaneously said that there must be something in here that was stuck. It was not evil. It was in fact a very good soul that just couldn’t let go of the thought that its’ family had suffered.
The woman told us that she needed to go in and see for herself. She would find more answers than she was looking for in her quest to save the ghost.
There was one raven sitting on each statue and literally dozens of other ravens making noise.
“Don’t worry about them,” Deirdre said. “They are just concerned spirits. In actual fact, they just come to places where there has been massive spiritual effort.”
Mrs. Longfellow made a large sweeping gesture over the inner garden. In one sweep, the entire entourage of black birds flew away and disappeared into the morning sky.
Then, the medium looked at me.
“You are a smart fellow, lad,” she smiled. “Whatever you see in there, remember that this is a soul in torment.”
Deirdre Longfellow turned around and faced the big mahogany door. She breathed in deeply once. The three of us then walked to the door and opened it.
There was a little bit of light from the windows streaming in, but in the house itself there was night. The medium reached into her green handbag and brought out a flashlight that she swung around.
“We need to search the house,” she said. “You have a spiritual connection here.”
“Connection?” my mother asked.
“Yes,” she responded. “I think you had something to do with the Earl in a former life.”
She looked at me.
“You, too.”
What then happened is hard to describe. I’ve seen in it in a thousand horror films. It must’ve been the Earl of Oxbridge himself. He came from the inner room.
It was obviously a 18th century man we were looking at or his ethereal remains.
Mrs. Longfellow urged us to try to feel love for one another. She said if we try to love this ghost and not discard him, we might eventually reach something. No visitor had ever come beyond the entrance hallway.
The Earl screamed at us to leave.
I was terrified. That is the only expression I have in store to describe my feeling. We remained steadfast, holding on to not only our flashlights. We also held on to each other’s hands.
“Why are you here?” the ghost asked.
The medium answered: “You are in pain. Let us help you.”
“Nooooo!” the ghost shouted.
Down the stairs came the four bandits that had killed his family. They were dressed as poor people would’ve been dressed back then. Leather shoes. Woollen hats. Sheep wool sweaters. Leather vests. Unshaved, unwashed, uncouth, unclean, untidy. A beast on a pretty canvas. Was that better than a beauty on an ugly canvas?
This was a recreation of what had happened. The bandits had cut off each one of the family member’s heads and were holding on to them, two heads an individual. The Earl of Oxbridge, as he had once been, ran down the stairs screaming. The four criminals laughed as he stumbled.
The Earl was desperate. There were spears and lances on the walls. They were heading for the door when one of them saw him jumping up on a table and grabbing the lance from the wall.
It was heavy thing and when it hit the floor there was loud clonking sound. The Earl jumped down and picked it up, one of the men ran up to the aristocrat and subsequently ran right into the spear.
The Earl of Oxbridge pulled out the spear with a swift noise and began to fight off the other three, who had thrown the heads in corners of the room. It was clear that this scene had been replayed for a dozen guests over and over like a broken record, more or less a desperate attempt by the old man himself to find someone, anyone, who one listen.
We were petrified, but we knew at the same time that this scene, as it was unfolding, was like a man telling a psychologist what had happened. He wanted to leave the house, but no one had yet listened to him.
The Earl of Oxbridge started slaying the three bandits, squeezing information from them as to why they had killed his family. Before dying, the last of the four to die said:
“Your family has always lived in bliss and harmony and we poor people have been forced to labour under the oak of tyranny.”
Of course, it was only partly true. The Archduke of York was the one with the influence, but the Earl of Oxbridge was the carrier of the fortune. He got the blame.
The whole thing was like a scene from a movie. It was scary, but it wasn’t menacing. It was like seeing a DVD of events from way back played on the canvas of this huge entrance hall.
About one hundred spectres appeared and they took away the old aristocrat. Had this been the 21st century the whole thing would’ve been coloured in blue and green laser.
The Earl of Oxbridge was pulled into the tunnel. In there we saw him in limbo for four years, neither dead nor alive. He circled the seven levels of hell until was spat out of hell four years later.
By this time, the law inspectors had been there and seen the carnage. There was no one that could explain what had happened or where the Earl was, so the case was closed and the dead were buried in the family cemetery. Some weird story was made up to cover up the real one and the carnage that really happened never ever was displayed.
When the Earl arrived back in our reality, he did start drinking heavily. That part was true. However, the story that was spread about him being found dead in bathtub was not true. He hung himself and was found by the same law inspectors a week later.
The once so happy and great aristocrat was buried by people he did not know in front of a crowd of strangers in the family cemetery. The real story of why it happened never came out.
The case was closed, because no one actually knew the truth. How could they know? No one was alive to tell the story.
We stood there in complete silence, having seen this unpleasant scene unfold before our eyes. Our flashlight gave out a very faint light. There was a hush in this space at present that spoke volumes.
Mrs. Deirdre Longfellow turned to my mum and asked:
“What does the psychologist say?”
“The patient is suffering from post-mortal depression.”
The truth was so obviously clear that we all had to laugh.
At that moment, the ghost himself appeared.
He was a beautiful man, no doubt, but seeing him was a bloodcurdling revelation. He opened his eyes, his clothes stained with blood and his ethereal aura falling apart. We screamed. It was a gut reaction. He was shaking his head.
“No, no, no, no,” he moaned. “Don’t cry. You are the only ones I can turn to.”
Now the medium spoke.
“What can we do for you?”
The ghost flew around the hallway a couple of times and then bunged up before us again.
“Tell my story,” he said. “Tell the story that I have told you.”
He looked at mum and smiled. “You are the reincarnation of my wife, Susan.” He lifted his hand and caressed her cheek soothingly. It was obvious that mum remembered the pain of dying here. She began weeping. Then the ghost turned to me: “Diana and Hera have found their rest as heavenly spirits. Your three brothers Matthew, John and Luke are incarnated as lawyers in Paris. They only remotely know about me, but you are lucky, my Jimmy. You are the reincarnation of my son James.” He caressed me and suddenly I remembered.
Instinctively, I said: “Father!”
I had loved him more than myself back then.
Immediately upon returning to our own house, we contacted my father. He said that he could arrange to return at the end of July. Uncle Frank did arrive with his family, but he found me extremely sad and very distraught. I had horrible nightmares about how I had suffered. Apparently, I had been the child with the slowest death. I cried myself to sleep every night.
My mother spent the remnants of July writing down Kenneth Duke Salisbury of Oxbridge’s story. With a name and fame like hers there was no way she wouldn’t get it published.
She did. Writer’s Digest, Reader’s Digest, New York Times, Psychology Today and even National Geographic were fighting one another who would get to publish the story first. It was astounding what stardom could do.
When my father returned home, we all went to the castle with Frank and his family despite his reluctant attitude to go there.
One can say that the Earl had a special show for us that day and my father, the great supernatural expert, was determined to dedicate an Irish album with The Galway Boys to the old spirit.
That took me out of our depression.
We had a family reunion in Bermuda.
Anyway, when we returned to our estate that fall after the end of dad’s tour we visited the haunted house. The Earl of Oxbridge appeared to us and told us in very modest tones that we had given him his peace on Earth and that he would grant us eternal happiness and love for this.
Three cable channels and a documentary film director signed contracts with us to tell the story of the haunted house that had turned into a happy house. The medium was invited and our estate became exactly what we had never wanted it to be: a media circus.
When the filming was over, we evicted all of the press and decided never to invite any reporters to our estate ever again.
The subsequent fall, I fell in love with an eleven year old girl named Susan. Four years later, at age fifteen, I lost my virginity in the Earl’s old bedroom. I married Susan years later and realized, when my parents were long gone, that we had saved a family from the claws of hell. Not only that, we had also brought a house life again that once had been a manor of dreary depression.
At this time, the haunted house had been renovated and restored to its’ former glamour. There in that house we spent many nights kissing and pretending to be a married couple.
As I pointed out, I am now a renowned jazz pianist and I often spend my weeks off writing the songs in the old mansion I then later record in the studio. It seems to me that the spirit is there to guide me.
I often felt the Earl’s presence. Especially on those dark and romantic nights I can feel him. He returns when the moon dances a strange dance high in the heavens. In the rose garden beyond the gates to paradise the moon the shines on the ravens. They return to the statues in order to remember how we all saved their patron.
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