In the book (WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU? Conversations on Traum…

January 18, 2026 / fgsjr2015 / Leave a comment

In the book (WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing) he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Bruce D. Perry (M.D., Ph.D.) writes in regards to self-medicating trauma, substance abuse and addiction:

“For people who are pretty well-regulated, whose basic needs have been met, who have other healthy forms of reward, taking a drug will have some impact, but the pull to come back and use again and again is not as powerful. It may be a pleasurable feeling, but you’re not necessarily going to become addicted. Addiction is complex. But I believe that many people who struggle with drug and alcohol abuse are actually trying to self-medicate due to their developmental histories of adversity and trauma.”

In fact, when it comes to high school students experimenting with drugs, “only 18 or 20 percent will end up having trouble with recurrent use.” With those who do reuse repeatedly, “very high percentages of them are the ones who have had developmental adversities. Among the children who don’t [repeatedly reuse], fewer have had developmental adversities.”

The greater the induced euphoria or escape one attains from it, the more one wants to repeat the experience; and the more intolerable one finds their non-self-medicating reality, the more pleasurable that escape will likely be perceived. In other words: the greater one’s mental pain or trauma while not self-medicating, the greater the need for escape from one’s reality — all the more addictive the euphoric escape-form will likely be.

… Especially when the substance abuse is due to past formidable mental trauma, the lasting solitarily-suffered turmoil can readily make each day an ordeal unless the traumatized mind is medicated. And too often the worth(lessness) of the substance abuser is measured basically by their ‘productivity’ or lack thereof. Aware of this, they may then begin perceiving themselves as worthless and accordingly live and self-medicate their daily lives more haphazardly.

“The key point is that all of us tend to gravitate to the…

January 18, 2026 / fgsjr2015 / Leave a comment

“The key point is that all of us tend to gravitate to the familiar, even when the familiar is unhealthy or destructive. We are drawn to what we were raised with. As I’ve said before, when we are young and our brain is beginning to make sense of our experiences, it creates our ‘working model’ of the world. The brain organizes around the tone and tension of our first experiences.

“So if, early on, you have safe, nurturing care, you think that people are essentially good. … But if a child experienced chaos, threat, or trauma, your brain organizes according to a view that the world is not safe and people cannot be trusted. Think about James. He didn’t feel ‘safe’ when he was close to people. Intimacy made him feel threatened.

“Here is the confusing part: James felt most comfortable when the world was in line with his worldview. Being rejected or treated poorly validated this view. The most destabilizing thing for anyone is to have their core beliefs challenged. … Good or bad, we are attracted to things that are familiar.”

― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

Insatiable Corporate-Human Greed Nature Has Predictably Become Morally Hopeless with Irresistible Deadly Sting

November 21, 2025 / fgsjr2015 / Leave a comment

Regardless of who runs and gets elected — especially when it’s through the first-past-the-post ballot system — we live in a virtual corpocracy that masquerades as a real democracy. While the FPTP may technically qualify as democratic within the democracy spectrum, it’s still particularly democratically weak.

But FPTP does seem to serve corporate and money-power-politics lobbyists well. Perhaps it’s why such powerful interests generally resist (albeit likely clandestinely) grassroots-supported attempts at changing from FPTP to more proportionally representative electoral systems of governance, the latter which dilutes corporate influence on government policy and decisions.

Low-representation FPTP-elected governments, in which a relatively small portion of the country’s populace is actually electorally represented, are the easiest for lobbyists to manipulate or ‘buy’. It’s largely an insidiously covert rule by way of potently manipulative and persuasive corporate and big-monied lobbyists.

Those lobbyists can also write bills for our governing representatives to vote for and have implemented, supposedly to save the elected officials their own time writing them. The practice may have become so systematic that those who are aware of it, including mainstream news-media political writers, don’t find reason to publicly discuss or write about it.

‘We are a capitalist nation, after all,’ the morally lame self-justification typically goes.

… A few social/labor uprisings or revolutions notwithstanding, the superfluously rich and powerful have always had the police and military ready to foremost protect their big-money/-power interests, even over the basic needs of the masses.

Even today, the police and military can, and probably would, claim [using euphemistic or political terminology, of course] they had to bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority during major demonstrations, especially those against economic injustices.

Indirectly supported by a complacent or compliant corporate news-media, which is virtually all mainstream news-media, the absurdly unjust inequities/inequalities can persist.

Therefore, I can imagine there were/are lessons learned from those successful social/labor uprisings — a figurative How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101, maybe? — with the clarity of hindsight by the big power/money interests in order to avoid any repeat of such great wealth/power losses.

And the more they make, all the more they want — nay, have — to make next quarterly. It’s never enough, and an increasingly corrupt corporate news-media will implicitly or even explicitly celebrate them.

Perhaps ‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine, in the film Our Brand Is Crisis, is correct in stating: “If voting changed anything [in favor of the poor and disenfranchised] they’d have made it illegal.”

Must One’s Suffering Be for Nothing?

November 13, 2025 / fgsjr2015 / Leave a comment

Largely like my (now deceased) father, I’ve been a chronic worrier and negative thinker almost my entire life. It would be appropriate to have stated on my grave/urn marker someday that, “He spent his life worrying sick about things that never happened.” I find that this curse essentially prevents me from meeting that special lady. Most notably, I’ll start talking to a woman I find attractive but then mentally freeze up with anticipations of, among other disasters, a potential relationship’s inevitable failure, right up to signing divorce papers a few years later.

I cannot recall much of my half-century-plus life, and almost nothing positive, probably because I spend my ‘present’ anxious about my future and depressed over my past. For me, that includes a fear of how badly I will emotionally deal with the negative or horrible event — which usually doesn’t occur — and especially if I’ll also conclude that I’m at fault. It would therefore be great if there could be some valuable academic or clinical use from it all — to create or extract from it some practical positivity and purpose — so that all of the suffering will not have been in vain.

Throughout my life, I’ve occasionally been told with a tone of surprise and sometimes even a you-look-okay-to-me facial expression of doubt: “But you’re so smart”. Today, I would reply with frustration: “But for every ‘gift’ I have, there are a corresponding three or four deficits.” It really is crippling, especially on a social level that affects employability.

While I don’t know the precise/entire cause-and-effect of my chronic anxiety and clinical depression, my daily cerebral turmoil mostly consists of a formidable combination of adverse childhood experience trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, with the ACE trauma in large part the result of my ASD and high sensitivity. [To clarify: I’m not sufficiently unambiguously symptomatic to be perceived by the general public as having an ASD, yet I’m also not functional enough to be normally employable and sociable. Thus, I’ve seemingly always been largely seen and even (mal)treated as being inexplicably incompetent or, in more frank terminology, fucked up.]

More recently, I’ve discovered yet another and perhaps even more consequential coexistent psychological condition — “core shame” — that’s seriously complicating an already bad and borderline bearable cerebral-disorder combination. A core shame diagnosis would help explain why, among its other debilitating traits, I’ve always felt oddly uncomfortable sharing my accomplishments with others, including those closest to me. And maybe explain my otherwise inexplicable almost-painful inability to accept compliments, which I had always simply attributed to a ridiculous degree of modesty.

It would also help explain why I have consistently felt unlovable. Largely due to ASD traits that rubbed against the grain of social normality thus were clearly unappreciated by others, my unlikability was for me confirmed. My avoidance of social interaction and even simple smiles at seemingly-interested females was undoubtedly misperceived as snobbery. The bitter irony was that I was actually feeling the opposite of conceit or even healthy self-image/-esteem. …

Such coexistent conditions are real and cause great suffering. ACE abuse thus trauma, for example, is often inflicted upon ASD and/or highly sensitive children and teens by their normal or ‘neurotypical’ peers — thus resulting in immense and even debilitating self-hatred and shame — so why not at least acknowledge that consequential fact in a meaningfully constructive way? It could be very helpful to have books written about such or similar coexistent cerebrally-based conditions.

As it currently is, The Autistic Brain fails to mention the real potential for additional challenges created by an autism spectrum disorder coexisting with thus exacerbated by high sensitivity and/or adverse childhood experience trauma. The book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal, on adverse childhood experience trauma, fails to mention high sensitivity or ASD. And The Highly Sensitive Man has no mention of ASD or ACE trauma.

Dr. Joseph Burgo’s book SHAME: Free Yourself, Find Joy and Build True Self-Esteem — on the various forms/degrees of shame, including the emotionally and mentally crippling “core shame” life curse — also fails on this front. It mentions little or nothing about ASD, ACE trauma or high sensitivity, let alone including any of them as potentially complicating conditions that can coexistent with and even be exacerbated by core shame.

It is, nonetheless, quite revelatory on other matters. Dr. Burgo writes:

“When brain development goes awry, the baby senses on the deepest level of his being that something is terribly wrong — with his world and with himself. As the psychoanalyst James Grotstein has described it, ‘These damaged children seem to sense that there is something neurodevelopmentally wrong with them, and they feel a deep sense of shame about themselves as a result.’

“Throughout my work I have referred to this experience as ‘core shame.’ It is both intense and global. Under conditions that depart widely from the norm, shame also becomes structural, an integral part of developing child’s felt self. Rather than feeling beautiful and worthy of love, these children come to feel defective, ugly, broken, and unlovable.”

I’m currently reading the book WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing, by Dr. Bruce D. Perry (M.D., Ph.D.) and Oprah Winfrey. It is exceptionally enlightening, although I’ve thus far not come across any mention of the complications caused by coexistent conditions.

In summarization, my problem is that I don’t know whether my additional, coexisting conditions will render the information and/or assigned exercises from each [not cheap] book useless, or close to it, in my efforts to live less miserably. While many/most people in my shoes would work with the books nonetheless, I cannot; I simply need to know if I’m wasting my time and, most importantly, mental efforts.

What, Me Worry? Don’t Have To!

November 5, 2025November 12, 2025 / fgsjr2015 / Leave a comment

[The following italicized/bold text within quotation marks is from the book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal. The intervening sarcasm in regular text is mine.]

“When the brain can’t moderate our biological stress response, it goes into a state of constant hyperarousal and reactivity. Inflammatory hormones and chemicals keep coursing through the body at the slightest provocation.

In other words, when a child is young and his brain is still developing, if he is repeatedly thrust into a state of fight or flight, this chronic stress state causes these small, chemical markers to disable the genes that regulate the stress response – preventing the brain from properly regulating its response for the rest of his life.”

I didn’t know that. But then I didn’t need to, since I was already sedated via pharmaceuticals.

“The children who’d been maltreated and separated from their parents showed epigenetic changes in specific sites on the human genome that determine how appropriately and effectively they will later respond to life’s stressors.

Seth Pollak, PhD, professor of psychology and director of the Child Emotion Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, found that fifty children with a history of adversity and trauma showed changes in a gene that helps to manage stress by signaling the cortisol response to quiet down so that the body can return to a calm state after a stressor. But because this gene was damaged, the body couldn’t rein in its heightened stress response. Says Pollak, ‘A crucial set of brakes are off’.”

Really? No one told me that. I could really use some psychotherapy, but I cannot afford it. Still, I should feel better when taking my tranquilizers.

“When the HPA stress axis is overloaded in childhood or the teenage years, it leads to long-lasting side effects – not just because of the impact stress has on us at that time in our lives, but also because early chronic stress biologically reprograms how we will react to stressful events for our entire lives. That long-term change creates a new physiological set point for how actively our endocrine and immune function will churn out a damaging cocktail of stress neurochemicals that barrage our bodies and cells when we’re thirty, forty, fifty, and beyond.

Once the stress system is damaged, we overrespond to stress and our ability to recover naturally from that reactive response mode is impaired. We’re always responding. …

Imagine for a moment that your body receives its stress hormones and chemicals through an IV drip that’s turned on high when needed, and when the crisis passes, it’s switched off again. Now think of it this way: kids whose brains have undergone epigenetic changes because of early adversity have an inflammation-promoting drip of fight-or-flight hormones turned on high every day – and there is no off switch.

When the HPA stress system is turned on and revved to go all the time, we are always caught in that first half of the stress cycle. We unwittingly marinate in those inflammatory chemicals for decades, which sets the stage for symptoms to be at full throttle years down the road – in the form of irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, fibroid tumors, ulcers, heart disease, migraines, asthma, and cancer.”

What, me worry? Don’t need to, thanks to Big Pharma’s convenient chemical sedation of symptoms!

Loving the Cat, Dreading the Inevitable Great Heartbreak

October 30, 2025 / fgsjr2015 / 2 Comments

I grew up around cats and sometimes their kittens, including feral/stray felines, and developed a life-long appreciation and affection for cats in general. I’ve long felt that God’s lovingly graceful and artistic side definitely went into the feline creation. So, as a young boy, finding them slaughtered the first thing in the morning — they were lost to larger predators, perhaps even a cat-hating human — was quite traumatizing and bewildering.

I too-often see Missing Cat posters around town with a photo of a different beautiful pet feline that is most likely already deceased. Every one really makes my heart sad. … If making one’s feline an indoors-only pet is simply not doable, one should try keeping it on a chest-harness leash while walking with it. Please do it for your very-vulnerable cat’s sake. Notably, the average lifespan of indoor felines is about three times that of outdoor felines, not to mention the notable absence of outdoor-related injury.

Of course, completely denying one’s pet cat outdoors access should be compensated by giving it additional attention/affection. I did so with my indoors-only feline of 15 years, Mr. Simon, until losing him to illness on March 5. It’s a very painful loss. Even when he was healthy, the anticipation of that inevitable, indeed potentially imminent, dreadful pain of such loss has left me convinced I should not have another cat. I feel it may not always be ‘better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all’.

Call me a wuss, but cats indeed are beautiful animals — perhaps more precious and innocent than humanity collectively deserves. Nevertheless, human apathy, the throwaway mentality/culture and even a bit of public hostility toward them typically result in population explosions thus their inevitable neglect and suffering, including severe illness and starvation. With the mindset of feline disposability, it might be: ‘Oh, there’s a lot more whence they came’.

It’s likely that only when their over-abundance is greatly reduced in number through consistent publicly-funded spay/neuter programs, might these beautiful animals’ potentially soothing, even therapeutic, presence be truly appreciated — especially for the symbiotic-like healthy relationships they offer their loving owners — rather than taken for granted or even resented. Until then, cats likely will remain beautiful yet often misunderstood, prejudged and unjustly despised animals.

Many, if not most, people cannot relate to cat owners finding preciousness and other qualities in their beloved pets, including a non-humanly innocence, that make losing them someday such a horrible heartbreak. Even when the innocent animal has been made to greatly suffer needlessly, perhaps before finally being murdered, many people will instead think and maybe mutter, ‘It was just a cat’.

And many non-cat-fans don’t care for the innate resistance by cats to heeling at their masters’ command. And their reptile-like vertical-slit pupils and Hollywood-cliché fanged hiss when confronted, in a world mostly hostile toward snakes, cause cats to have a seemingly permanent PR problem, despite their Internet adorable-pet dominance.

As for the human species, along with our ‘intelligence’ comes a proportionate reprehensible potential for evil behavior, e.g. malice for malice’s sake. With our four-legged friends, however, there definitely is a beautiful absence of that undesirable distinctly human trait. While animals, including cats, can react violently, it is typically due to reactive distrust/dislike or necessity/sustenance. But leave it to us humans, with our higher capacity for intelligence, to commit a spiteful act, even if only because we can.

Perhaps such human nature may help explain why the city (Surrey, B.C.) neighboring mine, as but one seriously shameful example, allowed/s an estimated 36,000 feral/stray/homeless cats to fester, very many of which suffer severe malnourishment, debilitating injury and/or infection. That number was about six years ago. I was informed four years later by the local cat charity that, if anything, their “numbers would have increased, not decreased” since then.

Their trap/neuter/release program is/was the only charity to which I’ve ever donated, in no small part because of the plentiful human callousness towards the plight of those cats and the countless others elsewhere. Thus, I was greatly saddened when told by the non-profit Surrey Community Cat Foundation via email that, “Our TNR program is not operating. There are no volunteers that are interested in trapping and there is no place to recover the cats after surgery until they can be returned to a site with a feeding station. … Our spay/neuter program is operating and the need for funding is always needed to keep the program running. Always more need than funding available.”

The city’s municipal government as well as too many uncaring residents have done little or nothing to help with the non-profit cat charity. And then leave it to classically cruel human hypocrisy to despise and even shoot or poison those same suffering cats for naturally feeding on smaller prey while municipal governments and many area residents largely permit the feral cat populations to explode — along with the resultant feline suffering within.

Something In This House: A Ghost Story

October 21, 2025October 21, 2025 / fgsjr2015 / Leave a comment

“It really is a beautiful house; nowhere near a mansion, but elegant nonetheless,” Vera reassured her husband, turning her head to him.

Though Steven focused his attention on the road ahead, his wife noticed how the bright, late-morning, November sunlight was cutting through the crisp, cold air outside and piercing the driver’s side window. The sunlight landing on Steven somewhat illuminated his earlobe-length, chestnut hair, leaving Vera to relish how nice he’d look with a moustache of the same color.

She also noticed the sunlight flickering off of the thick, 24K-gold chain and Christ-bearing crucifix around his neck; she also felt that such pure gold would look far better on a black T-shirt instead of the white one he was wearing, with his worn Levi’s denim jeans.

“Why hasn’t your sister sold it to somebody else, by now?” Steven asked, anxiousness in his voice. “Plus why so cheap? And even so much cheaper to us?”

“I already told you,” she firmly yet patiently replied, “Mom and Dad made Alley promise that she’d somehow keep the house in the family.”

Neither said anything more after that, until they reached Charlottetown.

Although Vera didn’t mind leaving Toronto, Steven did. His psychiatrist told him to either get away from the stressful urban setting or eventually be admitted to a hospital psyche-ward. He’d studied for and earned an advanced degree in structural engineering, and now it seemed that he didn’t have the nerves to cope with the stress-load of designing, mostly, large bridges — i.e. with many lives depending on his competence — throughout Canada and the United States.

(He did, however, feel good and particular pride in having played a large role in the construction of the longest bridge in the Western hemisphere: the 13-kilometer Confederation Bridge, which he’d likely be crossing fairly often while living in the ‘Garden Province.’) He felt even worse knowing that Vera had sold her small seamstress business to have more time for her on-the-edge husband.

Regardless, both intended to try to make the best of their big move from Ontario to Prince Edward Island.

“Make a left here, on Hemlock,” she instructed, while pointing. “There it is — #476 — the one with the old oak in the backyard. The place hasn’t changed a bit.”

Getting out of the car, Vera walked towards the front door while gazing at the three-leveled structure (including the attic floor but not the basement). Despite its considerable age, the house’s recent white coat of paint gave it a respectable appearance, somewhat like a brand-new three-piece suit and snazzy tie on an old man. Perhaps most noticeable was the double-door, front entrance being preceded by a small portico.

Her hand shading her eyes from the sunlight, Vera was hypnotically-like fixated on the house, penetrating its walls with her memories.

“C’mon, Steve; let’s go in!” she enthused, spinning around to lead him in by the hand. “Steve?”

Vera looked to her right and left, then made a full rotation: “Steve?” she called out, making her way towards one end of the house, then the other. “Where are you?”

Becoming a bit impatient, she peeked around the corner, where she found him squatting and staring down into the house’s basement, past the opened root-cellar shutter doors.

“Steve? Didn’t you hear me call? … Steve!?”

Vera insisted on receiving a reply from hubby, though before looking up to the house’s two attic dormer windows. It was as though she’d been mentally beckoned to acknowledge a presence beyond from those windows. Staring into them, a blank expression on her face, she thought how those windows, each sectioned into quarters by perpendicular wood strips, looked to her like angry eyes; and the root cellar entrance, through which Steven was still looking down, looked like an angry mouth. She recalled how twenty-eight years earlier (especially around Halloween), she, a little five-year-old, and her sister Alley would pretend that the house was indeed possessed by an aggressive spirit, which expressed its displeasure through those angry eyes and mouth.

Inhaling deeply, Steven looked up to his seemingly entranced wife. “Look at these doors,” he said, breaking Vera from her hypnotic gaze at the windows. “They must be at least a couple hundred years old.”

Vera, ignoring the old shutter doors themselves, peered down the stairway leading into stark darkness. As she gazed, her straight, chest-length, thick, blond hair — indeed so shiny clean and smooth that one could tell she meticulously grooms it — slipped onto her light-brown brows, somewhat covering her baby-blue eyes. Pulling her hair back, she said, “It’s so bright out here, you can’t see a single thing down there.” Shutting the root-cellar doors, she asked Steven, “How did you unlock them? Weren’t they locked?”

“Ahhh, no, they were unlocked.”

“Alley must’ve left them unlocked — I can’t believe it!” Vera incredulously assumed, without hesitation. “Figures; she never did give a damn about my security … Whatever; let’s get inside.”

They went back around to the front of the house, to its main entrance door, where Vera futilely searched her purse for the house key she was sure Alley gave her before they’d left Toronto.

“Where’s that damn key?” she muttered with frustration. “I know I didn’t leave it behind at Alley’s.” And Steven standing right behind her, though not saying anything, seemed to only agitate her somewhat over the matter.

“I can’t find the damn key Alley gave us!” she snapped, pulling her hand from her purse, shrugging her shoulders in angered bewilderment. “I must’ve gotten it from her.”

“Calm down, hon. We’ll get a locksmith over,” he reassured her as he, perhaps out of instinct to ensure that it was in fact locked, grasped the doorknob and turned it. “Hey, look — it’s unlocked.”

Vera stood there rather stunned. “I don’t believe it,” she said, exasperated, looking at her husband, “That bitch! How could she be so careless and inconsiderate?!”

“Well, we might as well go inside,” Steven suggested, pushing open the door.

Inside, the house was left waiting for them indeed the way promised by Alley. All of the furnishings were covered with plain-white, cotton sheets; and everything expected was there: the carpeting, beds, cleaned bathrooms, electricity and water works. Directly ahead from where they stood, across the living room, was the kitchen entrance, an opening in the shape of a stereotypical gravestone.

The kitchen had checkered, light-orange and dark-brown linoleum floor tiles, on which stood the General Electric appliances, all eggshell white. However, the walls, which had the same orange color of the floor tiles, were bare of any paintings, pictures, portraits or ornaments, etcetera.

Adjacent to the kitchen entrance by about two meters was a plain, solid-wood door to the stairwell leading to the completely-below-ground-level basement. And adjacent to that door was the beginning of the rather-extensive hallway, which itself led towards one side of the house but then made a 90-degree left turn towards the rear of the residence, ending near a sliding-glass, back door.

On the other side of the kitchen entrance, again by about two metres, was the ground floor’s sole washroom, with all of its contents (including the walls) of a uniformly, bright peach pink colour. The hallway, like the rest of the house (except the kitchen and attic), was covered with crimson-red carpeting; and its walling, from which hung an old family portrait, was painted beige.

The living-room was unremarkable, with its all-maple furniture consisting of a leg-less coffee table (with a beverage-cup ring stain at one end), a dominating compartment at its mid-section, a long black-leather couch which appeared quite comfortable, two lamp tables (basically looking much like the coffee table though holding atypically plain-looking lamps), one at either end of the couch, and a twenty-four-inch Electrohome color television set.

The living-room walls were an off-white color with another though more recent family portrait (the subjects of which were all about five years older than they were in the first portrait) hanging a meter above the TV set; a large sliding-glass door faced the street, its curtains, not surprising, crimson red quite like the residence’s dominating carpeting color.

Opposite of the basement stairwell door, at the hallway’s entrance near the kitchen entrance, was the stairwell leading up to the second floor — a stairwell followed up on both sides by the fancy, Cherry-wood railings. The second floor’s three sole bedrooms and one bathroom, to fulfill the wishes of Vera’s mother (while alive), were all painted sky blue. Just past the third and final bedroom, at the end of the hall, was the stairwell (albeit relatively short) to the attic, and except for its two dormer windows and the cardboard boxes brimming with old things and outgrown clothes, everything sat Oak-wooden and vacant.

Vera wasted no time in going through the house, ASAP, to pull off all of the covers from whatever they were covering and opening every closed set of curtains. The curtains opened, bright daylight burst into each room, illuminating all of the disturbed films of dust. Man, look at that dust! she thought, deciding that the house’s every orifice should be opened for much-needed ventilation, though she settled for a couple windows.

On her way to the kitchen to check on the appliances, Vera recalled her sister telling her that the refrigerator would be freshly stocked the day before they were to arrive. It was all so convenient — until she opened the refrigerator door and was greeted by a blast of foul, rotting odor. All perishable foods inside (the meat, vegetables and fruit) were of the ghoulish, gray-green color of mould. It’s as though they’ve been sitting in a dead fridge for months, she noted to herself. “My God! How!? … Oh, shit!”

Pulling suitcases from the car, Steven mentally experienced an irresistible compulsion to gaze up at the second-floor bedroom window. His chestnut-brown eyes stared through the window as though he might see his wife up there looking back down at him. “Hmmm … ,” he hummed before getting back to business, grabbing the last suitcase. Locking the car doors, his arms full, he made his way back to the house; and that’s when everything in his head began to spin.

Instantly dropping the suitcases, he closed his eyes for a moment then slowly opened them. Rather than subsiding as he’d hoped, the spinning decided to suddenly

move to his stomach, which he covered with his arms. It was like there was a rodent down in there, racing along the walls of his stomach, causing the organ to rapidly rotate. He was sure he would vomit.

“Steve?” The sudden sound of his wife’s gentle voice seemed to release his whirling gut. Steven inhaled deeply, then picked up the suitcases lying all around him on the gravel driveway.

“I must’ve gotten up too quickly,” he mumbled to himself, making his way back to the house.

Closing the door after him and leaving the suitcases on the living room floor, Steven’s attention was attracted to the sudden activation of the television set. He stared at the set with mystified eyes as the stations changed, one by one, about a second between changes.

There must be a crossing of remote signals with one of the neighbors who are watching TV, he thought, dismissively. That thought, however, was just before he noticed that the TV-set channel knob was turning by itself. And this isn’t even a remote-controlled set, he realized. “What in the hell is going on?” he quietly demanded, just prior to being startled by a tap on the basement stairwell door behind him.

“Steve?” came the muffled voice from the other side of the door.

“Oh; it’s Vera,” he said, with considerable relief, and opened the door for her.

“What’re you watching, Steve? Babewatch?” Vera snickered, knowing full well that her husband did not in the least like her suggesting that he watched such carnal programming (“I was only checking out the boat they’re driving,” he would claim when caught watching Baywatch).

“No, I’m not watching ‘Babewatch’,” he snapped, sarcastically. “The TV’s going crazy. Look,” he said, turning his head to the television set.

“What? What’s wrong with it?” she asked, peering around Steven’s five-foot-eleven-inch frame, and at the set. “It’s not even on.”

Steven was quite perplexed and very much looked it. “A second ago, it was … ,” he explained, but paused, “ … it was changing channels by itself. I’m telling you.”

Vera was too enthralled by being back, after so many years, in her childhood residence to worry about the crossed wires, or whatever, of a television set. She turned around and looked down at the knob of the basement stairwell door. “Oh, yeah; that’s right — it locks from this side,” she realized. “We’ve got to change the doorknob or something.”

Steven was still left mesmerized by the mystery of the changing channels but nevertheless turned his attention away from the set and onto his wife. “What were you doing down there, anyway?” he questioned her.

“I went to see if there’s any unspoiled food in the deep freeze, but the lid’s jammed.” She shrugged her shoulders, before realizing that she still hadn’t informed her husband of the rotten food. “We were left with a fridge full of moldy food, you know.”

“What do you mean, ‘full of moldy food’?” Steven asked. “All of it? What, isn’t the fridge working?”

“Yup,” Vera returned, shaking her head, “and I called the power company; they said this area hasn’t had an outage in over six months.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to go to the store, then; though I’m not at all hungry,” he reluctantly volunteered, recalling the recent urge to throw up onto the driveway. “But I still want to try and pry open the deep freeze … ” He then smiled and interlocked his fingers onto the back of his head: “Actually, I think I’ll take a nap first; do you mind?”

“Not at all,” his wife replied, sympathetically. “You do look tired.”

As Steven hauled the suitcases upstairs and helped himself to one of the beds, Vera emptied the spoiled food from the refrigerator into a Glad garbage bag and dumped it into the waste can outside.

Although he slept well the night before, Steven was sleepy and felt that he needed a daytime nap, as though he was four years old rather than his thirty-four years. He didn’t even think about exploring what may be for him and Vera the rooms of a house in which they would live for quite some time. Right now all I need is a bed, he thought, turning into the closest bedroom. It was only one-thirty in the afternoon, but he nonetheless needed some decent shut-eye.

Unlike Steven, though, Vera was hungry; and, not feeling like making the trip into town to the grocery store, she decided to whip up a batch of pancakes from the Aunt Jemima dry mix she’d found in the cupboard. The mix, and the adjacent preservative-filled pancake syrup, didn’t appear to be too old for human consumption.

As Vera poured the mix into a bowl — “at least Alley didn’t screw me up in the dish department,” she mumbled — an uncontrollable stream of memories and thoughts flooded her mind. She went into such deep memory and thought that all she could see were the images in her mind’s eye — a mental plane on which she was simultaneously conscious and lost in a trance.

Vera found herself standing before a heart-shaped mirror in the bathroom of what appeared to her to be a hotel honeymoon suite. She donned nothing but a purple, thigh-length nightie (the one her new husband had just bought for her), and she was slowly brushing her just-washed hair. In the mirror, she could see, through the open bathroom doorway, Steven standing by the double bed and releasing a few drops of Old Spice onto his hands; he rubbed his palms over his bare, muscular stomach and neck before running his fingers through his hair.

Turning to his fresh bride, he smiled at her reflected face, pulling and snapping the elastic waist band on the front of his poppy-red boxer shorts (the ones his new wife had just bought for him). She smiled back at him as he tiptoed up behind her, pretending that she couldn’t see him. She looked back at her own reflection as she made one last brush stroke.

She then looked back at the man — for he now was some stranger she’d never seen before — who wrapped his brawny, tanned arms around her neck and passionately kissed her neck, while sliding his hands onto her breasts. His arms and hands were chilly, which somewhat puzzled Vera, for she didn’t feel the environment’s temperature to be any less than comfortable.

He looked up into her reflected face, his dark brown eyes piercing her eyes, and he gave her a mischievous grin. His hair was thick, intensely feathered and as dark as his heavy moustache. Who is he? Vera thought; however, her feelings toward him were the same feelings she felt for Steven and, hence, felt no reason to resist. In fact, she was quite turned on. The coldness of his hands caused goose pimples to erect on her skin, yet Vera — for some reason, she hadn’t a clue as to why — did not at all mind, but in fact rather liked it.

The coldness seemed to her to make her feel ever more alive. His hands then slid down the front of her nightie as she closed her eyes and titled her head to one side to allow her lover’s face as much room as possible. With his hands on the front of Vera’s bare thighs, he slowly ran his hands up under her nightie and up onto her firm belly; he began sliding his hands onto her waist, then back onto her belly, making ever so sure that he caressed her smooth skin without tickling her.

“Mmmm,” she moaned with pleasure, as his hands slowly moved up onto her breasts, pressing her nipples.

The image of their lovemaking in the heart-shaped mirror grew fainter, with the effect of some sort of worsening tunnel vision. The kitchen counter suddenly appeared to her, but she still felt the hands.

“Steven — come on, I’m busy.” But the hands continued. “Steven, I’m not into it right now,” she blurted and broke free of the engulfing arms and hands. However, the groping was instantly replaced by what felt to her like an abrupt rush of blood up into her head; and she supported herself by leaning onto the counter while taking deep breaths.

“Steven?” she asked, between breaths, gradually regaining her composure. “Steven, where are you? … Steven, you’re acting like a clown, you know.”

Finally able to stand on her own, Vera turned and started towards the living room. Just when she was walking through the tombstone-shaped kitchen entrance, she quite clearly heard heavy footsteps racing up the stairs and into the bedroom, in which Steven was napping, followed by the door shutting. Looking up the stairwell, Vera grinned; she dismissed the entire event as an erotic daydream resulting from a very spontaneous urge for sex and her husband’s great timing. “Stevie, you prankster,” she said, and went back into the kitchen to her pancake mix.

Steven awoke into darkness. He thought about the nightmare he had just endured and rubbed the back of his hand on his lower back. It felt sore, as though he had been poked. Although he couldn’t really understand why, he felt rushes of fear, like alternating hot and cold flushes, surging through his entire body. “That is weird,” he mumbled. And why can’t I remember even coming in here? Man, I must’ve been really sleepy.

Again, Steven thought about his bad dream — one unlike anything he’d had before: In it, he was laying on an inflatable mattress floating about what seemed to him to be a mile up in the air. As he lay there, something — it was like a bony finger, he recalled hypothesizing while in his dream — was jabbing him up into his lower back; something which must have been inside the mattress, he thought. He recalled freaking out in the dream at the very idea of there being something alive in the inflatable mattress.

Steven began to feel quite on edge; and he also felt like he was starting to dislike the house. “Get a hold of yourself, Steve,” he demanded of himself, turning on his watch’s night light to check the time, then getting up out of bed. It was ten-nineteen at night. “And get that freezer opened so you might not have to go to the store.”

Opening the bedroom door and starting down the stairs, he could hear the sound of stations changing on the television set. The channels are turning again, he mentally alerted himself.

“Oh, shit, not again,” Steven groaned, loud enough for Vera to hear him.

“Steve? Is that you?”

“Vera?” he returned, very much relieved. He continued down the stairs, and he bit by bit could see his wife kneeling on the carpet with her hand on the TV set’s knob; her head was slightly turned facing Steven.

“So, did you have a good snooze? Or are your hands still tired?” she asked, insinuatingly, with grinning lips.

“What do you mean ‘tired’ hands?” he returned, rubbing his still-sore back. But ignoring her query, he inquired, “Did you try the deep freeze again?”

“No; I thought you were going to,” Vera innocently replied. “The flashlight is on the kitchen table.”

With reluctance, Steven made his way below with flashlight in hand (he never did like going down a flight of stairs into a basement, especially a basement so new to him). He could hear the light buzzing of the freezer’s motor and moved the light beam towards the noise until the light connected with the cream-colored, cubical appliance. He hesitantly made his way towards the machine.

It was then that his heart stopped. The icy thing that ran up along his forehead and into his hair was not what Steven was at all expecting. His arms went out of his immediate control and spastically thrashed at the light bulb and the on/off chain, both hanging from the ceiling, breaking the bulb in the process. With pieces of bulb glass raining down on him, Steven instinctively shielded his head with his arms. For a couple of seconds, he didn’t know what the hell had happened.

Back in control of his senses, he stepped up to the freezer and pulled up on the lid’s handle. It wouldn’t budge, and yet there was no keyhole or apparent locking mechanism.

Then came a mental voice in his mind saying that the problem may be located behind the deep freeze. He illuminated the sides of the freezer and moved himself around to one side where he could feel the rear of the lid. Stretching his fingers, he could decipher that there was about twelve inches between the freezer and the brick wall behind it. The root cellar must be on the other side, he figured. He moved into a position in which he could shine the light behind the freezer to get some sort of clue as to what might possibly be holding down the lid — the little bit of effort couldn’t really hurt, he thought.

“What the Hell’s that?”

The dimmer outer edges of the ring of light caught the object wedged between the wall and freezer. Shifting the flashlight to his left hand, he reached down, grabbed the book-shaped object and pulled it out from its hiding spot. “It’s a photo album,” he said, shining light on it.

Steven was too curious to bother dusting off the album’s vinyl surface. He opened it and held the light to it. The first page held four photographs: one was of a baby; two were of Vera’s younger sister, Alley, in her mid teens; and the fourth photo, taken at about the same time as the previous two pictures, was of Alley and Vera. Vera being only one year older, they could have passed as childhood friends. Steven anxiously flipped a clump of pages, which led him near the album’s end; there, he found another photo of Alley (again in her mid teens) standing outside the house, adjacent to the front door. Also on the page, below the photo, was a yellowed newspaper clipping which read:

CHARLOTTETOWN, October 14, 1967 — The bodies of two men and a woman, all appearing to be in their late twenties, were discovered yesterday morning inside a residence at the north end of town. The deaths have been classified as a double homicide and suicide or, according to police Constable Jeff O’Hagal, “possibly a homicide and double suicide”. The two deceased males, each of whom had a gunshot wound on the right side of his head, were known to be good friends.

The bodies were discovered by a neighbor who had heard gun shots in the early morning hours. The neighbor, who wishes to remain anonymous, minutes later went next door where he found the female laying in the open doorway of the residence’s rear entrance, bleeding from a bullet wound to the back of her head. Police, who were immediately called to the scene at 476 Hemlock Drive, believe she was trying to flee the scene when she was shot.

“Oh, Jesus, that’s right here,” murmured Steven. “This must’ve happened just a couple years before Vera’s family moved in.”

Upon entering the basement of the residence, the story went on, police discovered the two deceased males, one of which tightly held a handgun. Police found identification on the bodies but would not release their names until the notification of next of kin. The residence is owned by the currently vacationing parents of one of the deceased males.

Police did however disclose that the female was a local Sunday school teacher whose husband had reported her missing the night before; and the two males were known to authorities and some area residents as having been involved in occult activity. “They [dead men] often referred to themselves as ‘Beelzebub’s Boys’,” said O’Hagal.

Steven stood there quite stunned. Nonetheless, he immediately felt compelled to turn the page, where he found another yellowed newspaper clipping:

CHARLOTTETOWN, October 18, 1967 — Police investigators have discovered that finger prints gathered at the scene of a grisly Island murder in June, 1965, match those of the two men found shot dead along with a woman last week at 476 Hemlock Drive. “They’re definitely a match,” said police Constable Jeff O’Hagal.

The two deceased males have been identified as life-long Charlottetown residents Billy Snarden and Lorne Pettersberg, aged 27 and 29, respectively; the deceased female, a city resident who appears to have been raped before her murder, has been identified as 26-year-old Susan McPhelson.

The June, 1965, murder of drifter Thomas Parks, whose carcass was discovered in downtown St. Peters with its skin completely removed, had until now been unsolved.

“That bitch,” Steven grumbled. “No wonder she has this place so cheap on the market.”

He snapped the album shut, with intent to whirl around and run to and up the stairs. But he was violently foiled: Steven found himself falling hard onto the cement floor and gasping for breath; it felt to him like a fist had smashed into the mid section of his back. The flashlight was history, and he knew it, for it was launched out from Steven’s grip and into some dark corner of the basement, its small bulb shattered.

“Oh, God,” he groaned in pain, desperately gasping for air. Gradually, he collected himself up onto his hands and knees, but only to receive a swift kick up into his gut. It took a good thirty seconds for Steven to get back up on his feet and twice turn around. “Where the hell are you, you son of a bitch?!” he screamed into mostly darkness. His left arm was embracing his battered abdomen as he held up his clenched right fist. “Where the Hell are you?!”

The only light leaking into the basement’s darkness was that coming down the stairwell from the living room.

But no one was there. He looked up at the stairwell door and decided to make a run for it. He thought he was going to make it; however, when he reached the top of the stairs and the open doorway, it was as though he’d run hard head first into an invisible wall. ….

[Continued]

Something In This House: A Ghost Story [Continued]

October 21, 2025October 21, 2025 / fgsjr2015 / Leave a comment

It was at the bottom of the stairwell that Steven regained consciousness. He gave his head a slight shake and noticed that daylight from the now overcast sky was illuminating the light-brown curtains covering the two basement windows. Looking at his watch, he saw it was nine-fourteen in the morning.

The creep must be long gone, Steven concluded. However, it was ever so much occurring to him that perhaps nobody — at least not in physical form — was there.

It was during that thought that Steven suddenly felt a deep cold all around him, accompanied by a very foul odor, which reminded him of those rotten-egg-like farts that reek up the entire room when released. With the chill and stink, which were getting even worse, came two shoves to Steven’s chest — not hard enough to knock him down but enough to (he would later say) knock a little dose of reality into him.

Having observed that the shoves originated out of nothingness, Steven decided that’s it, I’m getting the Hell out of this house.

He looked up the stairwell and went for it, thinking that if he very soon did not get out of that basement he might not live to greet noon. He made it up the stairs, through the doorway and into the living room. Surprised that he wasn’t intercepted by whatever had attacked him, Steven turned around to look down the stairs to see if he was followed by anything receivable by the eye’s retina. Nothing. Except for that coldness and stench, which had become even more intense.

Then came the convincing sign of what he had most feared: On its own accord the basement stairwell door slammed shut with such great force that the house shook as though hit by an earth tremor.

“Why did you slam the door?” came the inquisitive voice from behind him. Vera, who had just awoken on the couch, stood there with an innocent and bewildered facial expression. “What’s the matter? Were you down there all night?”

“Vera, we have to get out of here — out of this house!” Steven insisted, still breathing heavily. “There’s something very wrong with this place. My God, this can’t be happening.” He now seemed to be addressing only himself.

“What do you mean, get out of here?” she asked, incredulously, “we just got here.”

“Vera, let’s go!” he frantically ordered her. “I’ll explain in the car.” He gripped her arm and started gently pulling her towards the front door.

“Steven, what’s with you? Let go!” she shouted, yanking her arm out from his grip.

“Vera, come … ,” he began to say but was interrupted by thumping — then becoming loud banging — within the hallway wall. The banging, a couple seconds apart, moved down the hall and around the bend, a ninety-degree right turn towards the back door. There, near the back door, a last thunderous slam inside the wall reverberated throughout the entire house.

The two looked into each other’s wide-open eyes. Steven, with his wife right behind him, crept down the hallway. He flicked on the hall light and clenched his slightly raised fists. Reaching the bend, he poked his head forward to peek around the corner.

Nothing was there (visible, anyhow); except for the back door, which held a twenty-square-inch window and led out to a small patio. Steven was just turning his head to look at Vera when the gold chain around his neck instantaneously, and firmly, tightened. Whatever had Steven’s necklace strangling his throat also pushed him back against the wall and held him there.

“Vera,” he gasped, trying desperately but unsuccessfully to slide his fingers between the constricting gold chain and his choked neck. The small amount of air he managed to inhale through his nose revealed that familiar cold, foul stench. “Vera, help me.”

Steven was beginning to feel the consequences of a brain almost completely deprived of oxygen. A cynical voice in his dying mind reminded him that he wouldn’t be in this deadly mess had he not been so materialistic and vain in his insistence on acquiring a thick and very strong gold chain to go with the gold Christ-bearing crucifix; and, added the cynical — the evil — mental voice, was it not bitterly ironic that this symbol of Jesus Christ the Savior, rather than ‘saving’ him, was going to kill him.

Starting to black out, Steven, realizing that this was his very last chance at sustaining his life, allocated all of his remaining strength in finally getting his fingers underneath the constricted gold chain and lunged his upper body forward.

The gold chain snapped, and he was left on his hands and knees. His neck gradually allowed more and more air into his lungs. Following a head rush, his vision and cerebral capacity slowly normalized.

“Vera?” He turned his head to look at his wife. “Why didn’t you … ,” Steven said before drifting off.

His eyes met the broken gold chain and crucifix lying on the carpeted floor, and he slowly reached out his shaky hand to retrieve the gold. But he was beaten to it. The broken trinket appeared to throw itself up, on about a 45-degree angle, into the air and around the hallway bend.

“What the … ,” he muttered in utter disbelief. He saw it but still couldn’t really comprehend what was happening — his human instinct wanted to deny anything that was unnatural. And what to him was almost as unnatural as a self-propelling inanimate object was the sight of his stone-faced wife appearing from around the bend. Both of her arms hung at her sides, but one of her hands held his broken jewelry. Then her blank stare at Steven, who could once again sense that cold stench, became bold, yet quite unwarranted, rage.

“Why are you playing these head games with me, Steve?!” Vera demanded. “Either you settle down in this damned house or leave!”

Steven was astonished by what he was hearing. Can’t she see that something very wrong is happening here? he thought.

“There’s something in this house,” he told Vera. “I’m going to leave, but I am not going to leave you here.”

“I want you to leave, now,” she replied bluntly. “You never did want to live here. This is where I’m going to live forever.”

“What’s got into you, Vera? Why are you talking like this?”

“Leave, now, Steve.”

“I’m not leaving you behind,” he insisted, gripping her arm.

“Let go!” she yelled, pulling her arm free. “Now get the hell out!”

Though completely stunned, Steven realized that his wife, in her current state of mind, was not about to leave the house willingly, and he wasn’t about to physically force her. He knew that he had to leave, immediately, on his feet, or else he would be leaving in a body bag. And maybe when she comes back to her senses, he thought, she’ll see the proverbial light and then want to leave.

“If you don’t come back to me,” he solemnly promised, “I will come back for you, hon.”

Steven turned, and, before he could reach for the doorknob, something twisted the knob and slammed the door open, barely missing him as he jumped back. The force of the door slamming open drove a pocket of cold outdoors air accompanied by that rotting stench into his face.

He marched through the doorway and onto the patio. There he saw what he always had thought was only seen in movies like Poltergeist. And he finally saw what had been viciously assaulting him almost to death.

The four entities — and Steven was sure they were indeed ghosts — stood (or, more accurately, floated) on the lawn only about two meters from the Oak tree. Although they were translucent — like holograms which were devoid of color and seemed to fade into nothingness just below the knees — Steven could discern that two of them were male; both stared at Steven and were approximately his own build and height. The third entity was female, and the fourth was but a complete blur. One of the male spirits was standing to the fore, and he beheld a facial expression — and only their faces could be made out — which a living, decent human being could only describe as malevolent and sinister.

The second, adjacent male entity stood about three feet to the left and two feet behind the first entity (as though he was somehow subservient to the first); the look on his face was one of somewhat subdued contempt and malice. The female spirit, which stood at a height of around five foot six and about three feet behind the second male ghost (they could not be called men), had a pitifully sad expression that stared down at the grass.

My God. Could these be … ? Steven asked himself, could these be the three people that … ? He then looked at the fourth entity. But who — what — is that?

It was then that the female and two male spirits drifted, one behind the other, over the lawn toward the house. Gradually, each sunk into the ground as he or she approached the side of the house; and, one by one, each was absorbed into the wall and down into the basement where, some three decades earlier, each left the physical world for eternity.

“Holy shit,” Steven whispered. He then looked back at the remaining entity, which had until then been faceless. The spirit drifted towards Steven and revealed its nature. Its face, becoming clearer, was one from a hairless and frightening being: its eyes were small, black and completely circular like coat buttons; its nose and mouth appeared to be somewhat humanoid but were definitely non-human, and the lips on what must have been its mouth were very thin and expressed unconditional malice.

The entity — a demon? Steven thought — moved forward up to the two stairs of the patio, only a couple meters from Steven. There, it simultaneously screamed and groaned — Steven was sure it was communicating its hatred of him — before bolting away at high speed, following the path of the three human spirits down into the basement.

For some seconds, Steven stood there feeling a mixture of utter astonishment and enlightenment. He then looked at his car and went for it. Starting the engine, he put it into reverse and floored the pedal, leaving behind a trail of airborne gravel dust.

On the highway out of Charlottetown, Steven recalled how he first met Vera, courted her — loving every second spent with her — and then married her, until death would them part. He clearly remembered all of the great times they had together. But then he chastised himself for recalling such great times as though they’d be the very last.

If you don’t come back to me, then I’ll come back for you, he insisted of himself. You can count on it.^■

KitchenWareWorld, A Temporal Haunting

October 14, 2025October 14, 2025 / fgsjr2015 / Leave a comment

“HOW it went missing, nobody knows — it seemed to simply vanish. Though some say that a police officer took it home as a grim memento.”

After Jimmy (Likkenson) made this revelation, he added, “And that’s supposedly why ‘the curse remains’ — because the knife that killed them has to be thrown down into the well, holy water mixed within it, to rid the grounds of McCurry’s foul spirit and free the ‘trapped souls’ of his victims.”

Total silence then fell upon the four, young college students, who were just coming into view of the old, abandoned factory.

“I guess that’s it,” said Melanie (Smart), who nervously, reluctantly agreed to spend the early October evening at the non-functional plant. “So they made spoons, forks, knives and stuff like that?”

“Yeah, and a few other kitchenware items,” replied Ezekial (Bowman). “Most of the machinery is still in there, but they’re pretty much all seized up, from lack of use for so long. That’s one reason they’re demolishing it tomorrow, before developing a small memorial park.”

The factory, KitchenWareWorld, had closed down permanently in late 1957, right after declaring bankruptcy; it had four floors and a basement: Its ground floor was elevated by two feet to allow for the structure’s basement’s horizontally narrow though long windows, just slightly below the ceiling, thus giving the basement access to much needed daylight should there be a power outage. Though utilized as factory goods storage space, a protruding, stone cemented well orifice was situated at the basement’s southwest corner.

The well, just over 109 meters deep when measured with sonar, was repeatedly scheduled to be dismantled, drained then filled with cement; however, the job was continuously delayed, until it was finally decided to leave it be altogether. Initially, the well held clean water, but by 1970 the well’s base water entrance and exit were clogged firmly shut — first with dense dirt from the farm yard which had stood in place of the factory grounds until 1953, and then with factory refuse dumped during the many years of an absence of water polluting laws; thus, the very same well content, liquids and all, occupied the deep pit ever since. Then finally, in early 2006, after a young girl fell into the well and drowned, the city’s council and mayor voted unanimously in favor of demolishing the factory and recycling its contents.

“They like to say that the ‘poor economy’ closed it down,” said Candace (Florance), sarcastically, “though only the fools and tourists don’t know, or simply don’t believe, that it was because of the killings.”

“Where’s the guy, now; I mean, where’s he buried?” Melanie queried, again with nerves on edge.

“At the asylum cemetery … ,” Ezekial answered before adding, “by way of suicide. The townsfolk didn’t want him in the regular cemetery, and his own relatives wanted nothing to do with his remains. His grave is amongst the unmarked stones, so his bones won’t be disturbed by twisted Satanists and other souvenir orientated people, if you know what I mean because … ”

“Does anyone here know the names of his victims?” Candace interrupted, without intended inconsideration.

“Uh, yeah … ,” Ezekial spoke up, again: “Rebecca Timms, Robert Stevens, Sandra MacDonald and, uh, Nick Johnson.”

“You’ve read up on this a bit, huh,” she noted.

According to all accounts and the killer’s own open confession to police, Andrew

McCurry — a.k.a. Madman McCurry or the Lanky Lunatic — was one of the managers at KitchenWareWorld who’d totally lost his composure when he’d lost his grasp on reality after being informed by the CEOs at headquarters that he’d “very soon be laid off for budgetary reasons.” Following the grisly killings, corporate financial matters significantly worsened, with the horrific deaths being a formidable liability, especially in the field of advertising and retail.

McCurry, with less than three years left before he could retire at 65, decided that some factory staffers hated him — though he had no realistic idea of their identities, because his stern hand managed all of the “labourers below me in rank” — and a few had “even conspired, and succeeded, to get me fired!” Thus, as his final act as a manager there, McCurry selected four employees (all in their early twenties) and told each to stay an extra (overtime paid) two hour period following their morning shift, at 11:30 a.m., to assist him with “a task.”

That day at the factory, there was to be a “Dead Period” for two and a half hours, from noon until 2:30 p.m., during which building electrical adjustments were to be made involving the main power juncture box just outside of the factory (and McCurry, unlike the four staffers, knew that power to the factory’s two, large elevators would thus be cut off). When the morning shift ended and the whistle blew, all of the factory’s morning shift staff, except for the four, began to leave.

McCurry was aware that it took half an hour for the morning and afternoon shift employees to exchange places but that the latter employees, on that day, would not begin showing up until 2:30 p.m.; and McCurry discreetly remained behind as the four, all stationed on the second and third floors, were individually told that he or she “need not worry about the electrical work being done — the bosses are just being overly precautious” and to “keep working till I come get you, O.K. I won’t be too long.”

Conveniently for McCurry, the factory machines the four operated were noisy and also required them to wear ear protection gear. When the opportunity came, McCurry (who married at twenty-nine but divorced at forty-two, with no children) firmly rigged the fourth floor’s stairwell doors to lock-in onto that floor anyone who’d enter. Then, taking in a deep breath, he went to each of the four employees and told him or her (of which the other three were oblivious) to come to his fourth floor office.

There, he closed the door (which he’d long ago found could only be locked from the outside of the office) behind the staff member, and, rather than tell the employee what he’d like him or her to do for the extra hour, he then began to pace around his office, erratically. He worked himself into a frenzy, ranting about his “evil” bosses; he also went on about how some of his employee underlings really hated him and a few even conspired “to have me canned!”

That’s when matters would turn, for the employee, into a horrific nightmare: McCurry suddenly went quiet, opened his desk drawer and pulled out a large, black handled, KitchenWareWorld knife — the largest the factory produced — and chased the screaming employee out of his office and (eventually, at least) to the locked shut stairwell doors.

The only exception to McCurry’s detailed plan was the first of his victims, Rebecca Timms, who fled to the stairwell doors and found one door barely ajar (due to McCurry’s incompetence), allowing her to run down to the basement and eventually hide behind the well. But it all was to no avail: McCurry was close enough behind and came across her lost shoe just a dozen feet from the well, behind which came her audible whimpering. “I then killed her and dragged her back up the stairs, to my office.”

The remaining targeted employees, attentively at work, could not hear their colleague’s desperate screams from up above, then below, and therefore did not act upon them. It was on public record that he callously admitted, at police headquarters, to laying “a curse on each of them, just before I stabbed them, no more than ten minutes of each other — ‘may your soul be trapped in your horror for eternity,’ I told them.”

Police got McCurry when they were called in by an electrician working on a connector wire site situated just below a fourth floor window who’d noticed McCurry calmly looking down upon the four, neatly aligned corpses lying face down. McCurry was charged, tried and convicted of the four first-degree murders after having reluctantly pleaded guilty at his court appointed lawyer’s behest (though he was spared the death penalty, for having been found “criminally insane”).

After only three weeks of incarceration, though, he escaped from the asylum one night, fled back to KitchenWareWorld and easily broke his way into his former office, after first breaking into the basement and its hazardous chemicals storage room. Sitting in the office desk’s chair, he pulled out a bottle of scotch whiskey he’d been saving for retirement day, carefully poured into it a package of powder form cyanide and drank as much as he could before falling over and giving up the ghost.

In the spring of 1983, in an attempt to cleanse the abandoned factory of McCurry’s corrupted spirit, as well as free the four victims’ trapped spirits, a young though confident priest dropped his blessing kit, consisting of a crucifix, three one-litre bottles of holy water and one small bottle of blessed red wine, and ran off after an unseen “force — like some cold stench blasting into me — shoved me back, very hard, three times.”

Two and a half years later, five otherwise bored teens found the dusty kit, took it with them down into the basement, to the well, and there they smoked marijuana; then, one teen drank the wine and carelessly poured the blessed water down into the well, into its mixture of mostly unhealthy elements.

“The doors are just over there,” said Jimmy, pointing.

“They’re locked,” Ezekial moaned, jerking on the two entrance door handles until his second attempt, with greater effort, popped one open.

“Okay,” said Jimmy, pressing the light button on his Swatch. “Let’s say we meet back here at … eleven. Alright?”

“I say we all stay together,” Melanie strongly though meekly suggested, then added in an unconvincing tone. “It could be dangerous.”

“Nah,” blurted Candace, brazenly, “we’ll cover more ground if we spread out.”

Each went his or her way (though Melanie was the last to budge) with a large flashlight in hand.

Jimmy readily found his way to and up the stairwell, skipping the second floor and climbing right up onto the third floor. There, flashing his light around the machinery, he took only three steps to his right before finding himself standing next to the aged shift card puncher; with it were about three dozen metal pockets, in which almost all of the former employees’ shift cards still sat, collecting dust.

Wow, he marveled. Why are they still here? Hey, maybe the victims’ cards are still here.

With his illuminating flashlight, he visually scrolled down each row of cards, hoping to locate at least one of the victims’ cards. They’d sell for a bundle — no problem! However, his prospects of finding such dimmed in his mind as he approached the very last of the cards. Nada … Damn!

But then, wham! — scored, and on the very last card: There it is! “Robert Stevens, Unit #308.” Come to poppa!

Brushing off the card’s thin film of dust, Jimmy felt inexplicably strange. And it was in an instant that the world completely changed for him: Jimmy found himself in an unmanned

though humming factory, well lit by a midday sun, whereas he and his college mates had entered the premises at just past a darkening 8 p.m. In this new ‘reality,’ Jimmy was in what must have been one of the factory’s few offices; and, soon enough, he was confronted by a graying, tall, lanky man, looking to be in his late fifties or early sixties. The man had just stepped in behind Jimmy, shut the door, walked past him, stood behind a varnished oak wood desk and glared at him.

What the … What is this?! Where am I?! Jimmy thought loudly in his mind’s ear, while quite stunned and bewildered. And where’s that bright light coming from? He looked through the office’s side window, to one of the fourth floor’s large, southward windows, through which the lowering autumn sun’s light shone; he then looked back to the man, who just began to ramble on about something. And who in the hell is he?! It took a few moments before Jimmy could adequately focus on, and thus fully listen to, what the rather wiry man was saying.

“ … was you who helped con my bosses into firing me — you, Robert, and your cohorts hate me, and … ”

The man’s rant drifted off as Jimmy tilted his head to one side, looked past the man’s aging head and into the office wall’s small mirror. In it, Jimmy saw, of course, no one but the reflection of his own deeply puzzled facial expression. Who’s he calling “Bob”?

Jimmy then looked down at the cotton cloth nametag sewn onto the man’s white dress shirt’s left breast … This all has to be a joke — it has to be!!

“Bob? … Bob?! … What are you … ?! Robert Stevens!! Look at my face when I’m addressing you!!”

But Jimmy had soon enough bleakly realized who the man was and who the man thought Jimmy was.

“You’re … ,” Jimmy choked out, barely, “you’re McCurry — Andrew McCurry.”

“Yeah?” the frustrated Lanky Lunatic responded, “your brilliant point being … ?”

“Hey, McCurry — I mean, Mr. McCurry — I’m really not the guy you’re … ”

“Oh, bullshit!” McCurry blasted back, instantly, while opening his desk’s drawer and pulling out a huge kitchen knife, with a shiny, foot-long blade. “I’ve really had enough!”

“Oh, God!!” Jimmy yelped, spinning around and slamming face first into the office door’s window, leaving it severely cracked. “Oh, shit!!”

“You’re not getting away, Bob!”

“But I’m not Bob, damn it!!” Jimmy squealed, grabbing and turning the doorknob, slamming the door open as hard as he could before bolting out. He ran between sparkling clean, operational machinery units, all the while looking around for any way out. Spotting the elevator doors at the floor’s east end, he immediately went to them, futilely repeatedly and forcefully pressing the elevator retrieval button. When about ten seconds had lapsed and no elevator car, light or sound came about, Jimmy realized he was in real trouble, and he was experiencing terror like nothing ever before. God, oh, God! Please let this just be a nightmare!!

“Sorry, Bob — no way out!” came the yell from the knife wielding Madman McCurry, only 50 feet behind Jimmy. “No way out!”

Where the hell is everybody?! Jimmy looked all around at the large, lifeless floor. It’s all fucking empty! There’s just the damn machines!! He then wondered about the other three floors, not to mention the basement, though it usually was unmanned, anyway. And where’s that buzzing coming from? Are there workers there?

Eventually, though, he cut through the scramble within his mind to remember: The stairs, the stairs! The stairs have to be working! That’s how I got here in the first place!

He spun around to look all along the walling. Now, where the hell were they? … There! Again, he bolted, this time towards the floor’s mid-west-side wall, as directly as possible.

“There’s nowhere to run away to, Bobby — you little, fucking rat!” McCurry yelled with apparent glee, taking a short cut to his intended victim, in between the machinery.

When Jimmy, dodging the machine units, arrived at the stairwell doors and pushed the handles, repeatedly in vain, all hope was lost. They’re locked shut! They’re locked solid fucking shut!! he screamed within his mind’s ear, instinctually continuing to pull and push the doors’ handles, to no end. It slowly yet assuredly sank into Jimmy’s beleaguered mind that he was indeed not dreaming but rather, somehow, in a different reality — a different world.

He could then hear, from behind, the slowing running, then shuffle, of the crazed man’s shoes on the floor; the sound was very soon followed by the sharp, cold pierce of McCurry’s knife into Jimmy’s upper back and into his rapidly beating heart.

Slowly falling to the floor, Jimmy’s grip on the door handle loosened, and the life flowed from his body. All the while, he, taking his very last breaths, could hear his tormentor’s whispery victory slur. “There you go, you lousy rat. There you go — though with a final word: May your soul … ”

____

IT was approaching 9:15 p.m., and Candace had just made her way up onto the fourth floor. Now, where’s his office? she thought, directing her flashlight onto parts of the floor, with its litter of various machine parts. Walking along next to the wall, approaching a small room with its windows covered by what appeared to be tar paper, all that really caught her attention was a large entanglement of some aged, discoloured, discarded clothing laying on the floor, in a corner where the wall met that of the small room.

She flashed her light beam throughout the pile of clothing (kicking aside some old, 1950s style jeans, brown dress shirts and knee high skirts) and noticed a slightly torn, white blouse with some nylon stockings wrapped around it. Kicking apart the three pieces of clothing, she decided to pick up the blouse, which was stained with a blotch of what appeared to be dried blood surrounding a two-inch tear in the back.

And then a sudden burst of sunlight fully illuminated the entire floor. She found herself in some office space with a neatly organized desk before her. A door slammed shut behind her, a strange looking man drifted past her from behind and stopped behind the desk to stand there, staring at Candace with a menacing expression. She looked down where the torn blouse had been firmly in her hands, but all was gone.

“Ms. MacDonald,” he addressed her, “do you know why you’re here, right this moment?”

What, what’s going on? Candace was absolutely stunned, while somewhat squinting from the totally unexpected, bright daylight. Where am I?! Who are you?!

“Well?” he asserted. “Talk to me, Sandra!”

What? Who’s Sandra? … and Ms. MacDonald? her thoughts raced. Then, looking down at his shirt’s nametag — What the fu … ?!

Pulling open his desk drawer and retrieving the deadly, bloodied object intensely frightened Candace into grimly muttering, “Oh, Christ — no! … ”

____

SLIGHTLY lifting his left arm, Ezekial flashed some light onto his old style wristwatch and saw that it was 10:34 p.m. Being close to the center of a (to him) boring second floor, standing next to many conveyor belts stretching through various machinery, he wondered where in the large, dead factory his college mates were and what might they have discovered. Probably nothing, he thought, just before illuminating what must have been employee lockers. Hmmm.

Ezekial walked over to the beginning of one of sixteen lines of what were basically identical to high school lockers. He went through a few dozen of them — all containing naught but men’s, brown dress shirts and light orange overcoat uniforms (with empty pockets) — before reaching locker number 213. There was nothing unusual about the overcoat within it, except … What is that? Ezekial, lighting up the locker’s entire interior with his flashlight, noticed a cut, a good six inches long on the coat’s left sleeve; and surrounding the sleeve’s entire cut was something rather brown. Could it? … Could it be blood?

Placing his flashlight into his right hand, he grabbed onto the sleeve’s cuff to get a better look … when everything suddenly lit up with bright daylight.

Ezekial (a backslidden Christian, though his parents were faithful Presbyterians), who believed in the existence of God and His counterpart, the devil, was (as were Jimmy and Candace) stunned at the sudden, supernatural contradiction in both time and space. Where am I? Where’s that light coming from? And who’s that guy?! Ezekial thought, just before reading the full name on McCurry’s shirt’s nametag.

“So, Nick Johnson … you hate me so much you want me canned before I can retire with my goddamned hard earned pension, huh?!”

Who’s Nick!? Ezekial instinctually looked down at his own clothing, for he felt somewhat constricted by his apparel, and noticed that he was wearing something that looked like what he had, just moments before, been examining.

“Don’t say anything if you don’t want to,” sighed McCurry, “but I just wanted to let you know that you failed.”

It was while Madman McCurry was pulling out his bloodied knife that Ezekial could hear within his mind’s ear all of what he’d heard and learned about the knife/well legend. It was enough to engage him to not run for his life but to fight for his life by blatantly challenging history and forcing the knife from the controlling, bony hands of a very twisted and enraged man.

Now, how in the hell do I get to that damned well?! sped Ezekial’s mind, his adrenalin flowing fast after having briskly knocked McCurry to his office floor with a very powerful left hook to his jaw, while Ezekial maintained his tight grip on the bloodied knife in his right hand. He, however, did not manage to come out on top of things without first receiving a formidable slice to his mid, left arm after McCurry successfully swung his knife. Even so, Ezekial wouldn’t get revenge upon McCurry — the law and God can do that — who seemed to be unconscious.

Ezekial turned, opened the office door with his very shaky hand and just began his race to the basement when he noticed it: To his immediate right rested the horrific results of the fate of his two college mates (he suddenly realized that he actually saw them as good friends). Although they both lay dead, facedown, he could still tell that it was the two, very young adults.

Jimmy had fairly fresh blood staining a straight tear in the upper back of the brown dress-shirt he was wearing (I thought he was wearing a white T-shirt when we got here last…). Candace lay wearing a knee high skirt (though she came, in the real world, wearing slacks) and a white bra, with most of its rear straps dark red with blood that had come from the gash almost right in between her small shoulder blades. What did that freak do with her shirt?!

Ezekial, regaining his composure, turned and ran past all of the machinery, towards the stairwell doors, pushing and pulling the door handles once he arrived. Fuck! The asshole must’ve locked them shut! Finding the elevators inoperable, he unsuccessfully searched for anything with which to break open one of the stairwell doors’ very small, wire meshed windows. No choice, he resigned, and walked back towards McCurry’s office, slowing down as he approached, to quietly peer into the office from behind some factory machinery.

He’s still out cold! Ezekial noticed, relieved, before further searching for some sort of very solid metal object. There! That’ll do! he decided, grabbing onto the rubber wrapped handle of a large, steel mallet.

It took him no more than a dozen seconds to fully smash his way through a door window, reach for the handle on the other side and pop it open; and the determined, encouraged, young college student raced down the stairwell to the basement. There, Ezekial scanned the contents until, There it is! While running to the well, he thought about what should I do? Where should I go once I drop it in?

Everything, however, was answered once he reached the well, looked down into its mouth, into the pitch blackness, held the bloodied, KitchenWareWorld production line utensil over the center of the well’s orifice and dropped it in …

Instantly, as though nothing so mindboggling ever had occurred, Ezekial, looking up and through the basement’s windows, found the world once again surrounded by night, the well before him and some source of bright light from the well’s opposite side. From there, amongst the otherwise dead silence, he could hear quiet whimpering. He slowly walked around the well’s circular wall, peered, and it’s Mel! he exclaimed within his weary mind’s ear, extremely relieved to see a squatting, cowering, trembling Melanie. She actually escaped!

“Mel?” he queried quietly, noticing, with the help of the illumination from her flashlight, that no bloodstain marked her clothing.

“Oh, Zeek — thank God, it’s you!” she burst.

“Are you hurt at all, Mel?”

“I don’t think so … All I did was bend over and pick up the, the … ,” she muttered, then began to cry, “ … the shoe, and I was really there, right in his, his office, in the daytime; and he, he — McCurry, himself! — kept calling me Rebecca and Ms. Timms before pulling out a huge, huge knife and, and … ”

“I know, Mel,” Ezekial whispered, slowly wrapping his arms around her until she calmed considerably, “I was really there, too. And he called me Nick Johnson.”

He slowly helped Melanie up, onto her feet, making sure that she stable and could stand on her own.

Although no one but the soured spirit of the mass murderer himself knew it, the well was the only location within the entire factory around which McCurry’s ghost was quite uncomfortable. Besides, the evil entity’s consciousness figured, why would she actually try to hide behind a simple, five foot tall, stone cemented well wall rather than leave the building, altogether?

Ezekial and Melanie ran as though their lives still depended upon it, while not seeming to care that the knife had gone where legend had dictated it must go. Although that extra dimensional world had instantly dissipated back to contemporary reality — in which the factory was old, abandoned and, finally, free of Andrew McCurry’s befouled spiritual presence — they sprinted till they made it out and down the road. They agreed to not relate their horrible ordeal to anyone, lest they’d stand accused of trying to fool the townsfolk.

As for the other two, their remains (probably) lay in some other dimension, some other reality or world, to not ever be recovered in this temporal plane. Hopefully, however, their eternal souls had found infinite peace the very instant that the knife touched the holy water tainted liquid contents of the well.

The next day, Melanie and Ezekial attended the memorial at the old factory just before it was to be demolished. They had expected, as was formally scheduled, that Mayor Rex Rodrigez was going to make the memorial speech. But to their utter amazement, the former factory workers and failed Madman McCurry would-be victims Rebecca Timms and Nick Johnson — the latter, with his shirt sleeve rolled up, having a noticeable six-inch scar on his mid, left arm — gave the speech, both tearful and looking about seventy. They stood side by side as each offered words of condolence for McCurry’s two, long ago deceased victims, their families and for the little girl who had drowned in the well.

The Legend of the Pardonsfield Pit

October 7, 2025 / fgsjr2015 / Leave a comment

“Pardon (noun): the action of forgiving or being forgiven for an error or offense … A remission of the legal consequence of an offense or conviction …”

—The New Oxford Dictionary of English

_______

“I tell you—we’ll burn in Hell, we will, for our part in this crime against God’s great creation!”

“Shut your pie hole, and do what you were well paid to do! Really, now; whining over a lot of foul papists! Really, now!”

“I tell you, we’ll burn for sure … For sure!”

And there were other such men of conscience, although they were but a small minority amongst the two dozen men from the New England township of Pardonsfield. But they felt at least the same amount of fear of God’s wrath as they did guilt, and they weren’t forced to spend the following six nights digging a large pit into increasingly rigid, early November 1767 ground. In fact they rather hastily willingly accepted the five-times the usual pay for such labor during such hours and cold time of year. Once it was wide and deep enough, they began filling the pit with the bodily remains of the ‘undesirables’—some still putrid flesh while others naught but dry skeletons.

The undesirables were torn from their true graves, their supposed ‘final resting place,’ and then callously dumped into the big hole, located just inside of the town’s westernmost boundary. The pit’s location was adjacent to the very small piece of Pardonsfield consisting of the tiny homes of the poorest, unhealthiest segment of the township’s populace.

The human remains were from Pardonsfield Cemetery (the only cemetery within the township’s official boundaries), callously removed and ‘relocated’ because their close proximity there was unwanted by the majority citizenry. They were the contents of the graves of mostly impoverished, sickly, Catholic Irish and Eastern European immigrants who’d sought better lives in the New World, thousands of miles away from their birthplace, for themselves and their descendants.

What they instead received at their new home, however, was mostly hardship and often untimely, difficult death due to various rampant illnesses.

Perhaps needless to mention, all of the graves of non-undesirables were left to rest in peace.

Pardonsfield’s governing council consisted of five elected wealthy, motivated men (one of whom received the four others’ approval to act as council chairman) of good standing—at least amongst the dominant desirable citizens of the township.

A recent council meeting saw the first forwarded motion unanimously passed, resulting in the township immediately initiating the development of a much-needed hospital or ‘sanitarium’ to treat the often-overwhelming number of tuberculosis or Consumption sufferers.

The large structure’s foundation, it was then mentioned, would require that it reach fifteen feet below ground level.

Council Chairman Charles Renfield hastily coldheartedly forwarded a motion that one-third of the structure should be built upon the precise portion of the graveyard collectively occupied by the remains of undesirables. With the exception of the sole nay vote by the emphatically-opposed Councilman Richard Jitens, the council callously passed the motion.

With lightening striking the same spot twice, Renfield forwarded a second motion that again was opposed by Jitens though nevertheless passed, that the headstones crowning the undesirables’ graves be removed and stored for re-sale immediately upon the names and dates engraved on them being chiseled away.

In a third and final four-to-one council vote, it was also decided, according to anonymously worded council meeting minutes, “that the said occupants’ remains be exhumed and relocated to a location yet to be confirmed and then made fully public in the near future.”

But the council majority’s votes and decisions regarding the pit plan remained secret—even with the persistent holdout presence of Councilor Jitens. He reluctantly remained quiet about the council’s immoral pit-plan actions, lest the very small number of living Catholics eventually make their great offense public and thus be conveniently permanently silenced.

However, regardless of being an extremely malicious act, Jitens was aware that it would unlikely meet any resistance worthy of the council majority’s concern. Since pretty much all of those who were related to the grave-robbed-and-relocated papist undesirables were deceased papist undesirables themselves—mass deaths due almost entirely to the great consumption outbreak of twelve years prior—there conveniently was to be no public outrage of any sort.

“But God in Heaven will not overlook such a brazenly sacrilegious act, even if your church elders do,” boldly stated Councilor Jitens, a member of the local Presbyterian denomination, to his fellow councilmen. “It’s plain damn-well wrong!”

Chairman Renfield abrasively commenced his rebuttal by snapping back, “What do you know about ‘God in Heaven’ and what He does or does not condone?! What we do know is that He condemns idolater papists; not us for cleansing our cemetery of such foulness!”

Furthermore, added Renfield, it wasn’t just a matter of cleansing the graveyard of papist undesirables, “who do not even speak our language, at least not properly. But the sanitarium simply has to be built.”

Jitens remained silent as Renfield continued: “What we also know is that a large part of the cemetery land—a third, to be more accurate—is required for the sanitarium, which is already behind schedule. Therefore, the one-third portion sacrificed might as well be the specific third voted for by us; that’s why we’re acquiring the other two-thirds portion from the large MacDormid land just outside of that specific one-third cemetery portion for which we already voted four-to-one in favor of developing.”

His three in-favor fellow councilmen looked at one another, nodding in noble agreement, with pompous frowns on their lips and white brows raised.

As a whole, the council felt compelled to act as a useful tool for the wealthiest citizens in achieving their monetary goals. They even insisted that the council, in the case of the papists’ remains, vote on and pass legislation making Pardonsfield Cemetery officially off-limits as a final resting place for deceased undesirables.

Of course, the men with wealth and influence wholeheartedly agreed with the council majority regarding their four-to-one vote decision as to the most convenient and desirable location for the construction of the new sanitarium.

The pit had originally been planned for a location on territory that had still belonged to local aboriginal peoples, but they were most outraged by what would actually end up filling the large pit. They were greatly offended by just the concept of the white settlers desecrating their dead folks’ graves, regardless of race, as well as where the disturbed human remains would forever be.

When the initially political confrontation turned deadly physical as hired township men forcefully began digging on the native land, seven diggers were brutally killed. They were thus honored for ‘their sacrifice’ and respectfully buried in the majority desirable portion of Pardonsfield Cemetery, with each of all seven plots marked with a magnificent statuesque stone.

A half-dozen years later, however, the pit of human remains would soon include those of a recently deceased reverend of the Protestant faith, who in life had been an overly boisterous fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone preacher. Once well respected, Reverend Michael McPeters was beaten to death by the husband (Sean Murray) of a woman (Sarah) with whom the preacher had been practicing adulterous relations.

When Mr. Murray proved to the townsfolk that the affair did indeed occur, the church’s flock was so shocked and outraged that they demanded the township council outlaw the very mention in public of the disgraced name of the fallen reverend. For all of his continuous loud quoting of Scripture “to my flock, which is righteously free of Satan’s papists,” his former faithful followers felt bitter over his hypocrisy and deceit.

The presence of the zealous preacher’s ghost angered the soured spirits of the pit. They sought retribution against all those who had enabled or even conveniently turned a blind eye away from the outrageous violation of their graves and plunder of their stone markers. To them the reverend was amongst the very worst of offenders, as a supposed Earthly representative of God Almighty.

Upon its production in full, many of the new sanitarium’s attendants immediately began experiencing frightening supernatural phenomena. Notably, every Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the translucent spirits of the preacher and his in-life-and-death followers could be seen in some extra-dimensional state of ‘church service’ within the sanitarium’s integrated house of worship.

It would take hours to calm the nerves of extremely upset observers, some of whom claimed witness to the sanitarium being frequently infested with lost souls who’d blindly follow the preacher’s ghost anywhere (including purgatory, if only they believed in such).

“The reverend was amongst the very few who’d learned of the council majority’s vile intention pretty much from its very inception, yet he was forever completely silent about the awful scheme,” Reverend Patrick O’Connar of Pardonsfield’s sole Presbyterian church told a half dozen of his parishioners as they all attended a local fair, though two and a half centuries later. “As far as he was concerned, the Roman Catholics’ souls were damned anyway, and he seemed perfectly at ease with himself.”

Some of the ghosts devoutly following the corrupted reverend’s spirit even turned physically vindictive. They attacked Sarah Murray—whom they solely blamed for the preacher’s moral decay and violent death—pinning her up flat against her ceiling thus scaring her nearly to death. Then, while Sarah was away, the same angry spirits ensured that husband Sean became trapped within their burning home.

Sarah buried her husband in the newly desirable Pardonsfield Cemetery, purchasing one of the many stolen headstones to mark his resting place. However, some weeks later the stone’s undesirable non-corporeal original occupier retaliated against Sarah. Not long after she’d told close friends about her nightmare in which a specter touched her chest, she was stricken with consumption yet still denied death until after suffering many physically-wasting months of misery.

Following her unattended unceremonious funeral, a Pardonsfield council majority decided to have her emaciated corpse dumped into the pit in order to make a potent example of her adulterous relations with the reverend, who himself had received such punishment for his role in the shameful affair.

Again, frightening translucent manifestations greatly upset sanitarium attendants.

Considered to be the most disturbing of all apparitions reported there were those of grotesque likeness to—and poetically accompanied by the certain putrid odor of—human flesh and bone, certainly belonging to so many undesirables rejected port mortem by their living desirable Pardonsfield counterparts.

Said to be of the most benign specters witnessed would appear in the sanitarium’s largest room, in which consumption patients would either mend or inevitably perish. The ghost of a recognized deceased Irish nun, who had succumbed to influenza decades earlier only to be later added to the pit, would rush from one astonished patient to another, her lips hurriedly moving but not making a sound.

While alive, Sister Maggie tended to the very sick, especially during serious illness outbreaks, at a convent located about a mile outside of the township. It had been converted into a makeshift Catholic church when the actual church, situated less than fifty feet from the convent, flash-fire burned to the ground only an hour after an All Souls Day mass service almost thirty-five years prior.

Then there were those of the most bizarre—manifestations of three dozen spirits lying motionless in neat uniform rows as though each was returned to his or her own individual grave plot. They all were reported to be floating about two feet off of the sanitarium’s icy cold, expansive basement floor.

When it was eventually shutdown and redeveloped (1926) into Pardonsfield’s first city hall, it was inexplicably plagued by electrical and plumbing problems, with every attempt at rectifying any of the problems being unsuccessful. Less than a year before the elected council and mayor unanimously voted in favor of closing down the relatively new city hall structure in 1943, almost all archived records pertaining to Pardonsfield and its past were destroyed on the same night by both fire and flooding.

Although, quite conspicuously the sole and virtually untouched surviving archival record was that regarding the township’s earliest (majority-vote) council’s blatantly discriminatory and ugly conduct in creating and maintaining Pardonsfield’s Pit.

In the spring of 2007, specific ethnic and religious segments of the U.S. organized to strategically vote into power officials willing to open up the centuries-old though still embarrassing matter, even if only as a symbolic gesture.

Immediately following confirmation through delicate excavation that the pit was a shameful ugly fact came an attempt at reconciliation by way of official acts: A formal apology was made by Pardonsfield’s municipal government just before the ceremonious sanctification of the pit site, having been officially designated its own fully guarded graveyard status. Furthermore, the municipality provided funding for a large memorial marker in acknowledgement of the great wrong committed against the Pardonsfield Pit victims.

Just a few months after that, the newly designated graveyard was granted permanent special protection as a location of historical significance and reminder of an immense injustice, regardless of what historical context in which it was committed.

Although few in number, to the present day there are additional testaments of apparitions seen but not heard at the site of the formerly unmarked infamous Pardonsfield Pit. They’re said to be specters of the zealously ranting preacher at what appears to be his ghostly flock.

“I’ve heard some people say that it’s as though his followers in life will revere the man for eternity,” noted Rev. O’Connar in finality. “The same people also feel that the preacher much appears oblivious to his non-corporeal existence. So it’s said.”^■

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