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Haunting and Scares Collection
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Hauntings and Scares Collection
11 Haunted Stories
Rosemary Cullen
Brent Spears
Hope Jameson
Copyright © 2019 by Rosemary Cullen
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
Publisher’s Note: Every story is a work of fiction any resemblance to people is purely coincidence. All places, names, events, businesses, etc. are used in a fictional manner. All characters are from the imagination of the author.
Dedication
These stories are dedicated to everyone who has been standing behind me as I have worked to finally get it out. My friends and loved ones have tirelessly cheered me on even if they may not be horror fans. And cheers to everyone who is a “bump in the night” fan!
Table of Contents
Hauntings and Scares Collection
Table of Contents
The Haunting of BarBar Asylum
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
The Haunting of Abbott House
Prologue - Death
Chapter One – Separation
Chapter Two – Danger
Chapter Three – Frugality
Chapter Four – Remembrance
Chapter Five – Heavenly Confidence
Chapter Six – Regret
Chapter Seven – Revelation
Chapter Eight – Think of Me
Chapter Nine - Helplessness
Chapter Ten - Salvation
The Haunting of Clanbourne House
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
The Haunting of Westbridge Mansion
Prologue
Chapter One – The Splendor of Westbridge Mansion
Chapter Two – Cecil Hamilton
Chapter Three – The Darkness
Chapter Four – The Tragedy of Baron FitzWalter
Chapter Five – Father Abbott’s Visit
Chapter Six – The Face in the Glass
Chapter Seven – Mary Chambers
The Haunting of Monroe Manor
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
The Haunting of Deer Park House
Prologue
Chapter One A New Home
Chapter Two Mischief Maker
Chapter Three Dolly
Chapter Four Lily
Chapter Five Bumps in the Night
Chapter Six A Terrible Mother
Chapter Seven Tea and a Story
Chapter Eight An Unwelcome Visit
Chapter Nine Final Showdown
Epilogue
The Haunting of Witches Manor
Prologue
Chapter One Exodus
Chapter Two Ghosts of Selves Past
Chapter Three The Rococo Painting
Chapter Four Home by the Weir
Chapter Five Cassius of Many Trades
Chapter Six Optical Illusion
Chapter Seven The Miracle Girl
Chapter Eight Warkwickshire
Chapter Nine Message From Beyond
The Haunting of Fenton House
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
The Haunting of Hillcrest House
Prologue - Sing No More
Chapter One The Rain It Raineth Everyday
Chapter Two Perchance to Dream
Chapter Three The Vexed Winds Do Sorely Ruffle
Chapter Four I Am Not in my Perfect Mind
Chapter Five Screw Your Courage to the Sticking Place
Chapter Six Sad Stories of the Death
Chapter Seven No Breath at All
Chapter Eight Where Should This Music Be?
Chapter Nine All is Mended
The Haunting of Primrose House
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
The Haunting of Falcon Manor
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Connect with Rosemary
The Haunting of BarBar Asylum
Rosemary Cullen
Hope Jameson
Copyright © 2019
All Rights Reserved
Prologue
Barbar Mental Hospital, Waynesboro, Virginia; 1952
Doctor Joseph Dixon was the undisputed head of the institution. All staff and all patients were governed by this man. He chose who to hire. He chose who to fire. He chose who to treat and how they would be treated. His word was definitive. His word was unquestionable. His word was law.
The corridor echoed with the tapping of shoes on the clean and uncluttered floor. Dixon walked ahead of his nursing assistants, a cloud of smoke from his fat cigar trailing in his wake. He stopped and waited at the entrance to the next ward and waited for his team to catch up.
The ward was brightly lit by the sunlight pouring in through the tall windows. Beds lined the walls on either side of the ward. Some had mobile screens standing about them providing a tiny degree of privacy for the patients.
Dr. Dixon flung aside the screens and took a long look at each patient as a nurse gave him a summary of each patient’s latest update. A brief tour of the ward and the doctor was striding off towards the corridor.
The next ward was much the same as previous one. Dixon made his rounds quickly. He marched off again along the maze of corridors that he knew so well. Following the tour of the wards, the doctor considered the patients in confinement. Some patients required an extra level of care and a higher level of security. He turned into a corridor of the secure rooms.
The moaning, whimpering, crying and screaming was a constant noise here. Dr. Dixon stopped at the first door. He peered into the window and observed the occupant. The patient was constrained in a straitjacket and tethered to the floor. He sat silent and motionless.
The next patient was straining at his restraints. He struggled and he grunted with the effort. Dixon paused as the nurse read out a list of the patient’s symptoms and behaviour since his last visit the day before. He studied the patient for a moment more before moving on. “No, this isn’t what I was here for. We’ll move on.”
The next patient grabbed his attention. He watched the wild eyes darting this way and that. He noted her squirming and sudden jerking.
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br /> “Open the door.” He held up his keys on their large metal hoop. A nurse took the keys and unlocked the door.
Dr. Dixon entered the small padded cell and stood next to the patient. She was a young woman. Strands of her dark hair clung to her sweat soaked brow and face. Dixon took her wrist and checked the young woman’s pulse.
“She complains about spiders, Doctor,” the nurse said.
“Elevated heart rate. Pupils dilated. Heightened state of extreme anxiousness.” Dixon turned to his nurses. “Take her to my laboratory.”
The young woman jerked suddenly. She looked up at Dixon, her eyes wide and wilder than before. “No,” she said. “Please, Doctor, no. I feel much better. I’m feeling much, much better now.”
Dixon walked out of the room and let the nurses take the young patient. Her screams echoing along the corridor as Dixon walked ahead to prepare his work. It was going to be a busy afternoon.
~~~~~
Dixon had conducted the procedure many times. He had refined the process to his own satisfaction and believed the results were improving with every session. However, no case was quite like any other and so he took care to make his preparations with the correct amount of care.
The first step was to review the patient’s files. He sat in his corner office on the top floor of Barbar Hospital. The afternoon sun washing everything with a bright golden glow. On the horizon a dark sky filled with towering clouds.
The patient’s file was thin but contained all the information Dr. Dixon would need. He’d interviewed the patient himself and made an assessment of her condition. At this point, she was at her weakest mentally. She was also at her weakest physically. Now Dixon could conduct his real work. This was the reason Dixon was here. His experiments. They were his life blood.
This patient would provide Dixon with answers to the questions he’d asked all his professional life. Dixon needed to know what life was. He wanted to know about the human spirit. He needed to know what the human soul was. Thanks to the sacrifice of this patient and previous ones, Dixon would discover more about the human soul than thousands of years of theology had ever managed. He was certain of this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
The notes on this patient contained the usual sorry tale of a life turned sour. It told of unhappiness. It told of a life unfulfilled. But the one piece of information that Dixon could use above all others. Spiders. It was simple. It was common. It was what he needed. It was a fear he could use.
He’d spent much of the afternoon reading, reviewing, and planning. Now the sun was dipping to the horizon and the warm glow of his office faded. The dark night sky filled with dark and heavy clouds.
The doctor folded away the charts and papers. He tucked them away in the large filing cabinet. In the bottom draw Dixon pulled out the large bunch of keys hanging from their large shining steel hoop. He picked through the set and found the small key for his laboratory before heading off.
The stairway down from his office to the first floor took a few minutes and Dixon grew impatient with every step. He was eager to get to work. The stairs came out in the main entrance hall. He walked briskly across the polished tiled floor, his heels tapping out his steps. An orderly standing in front of the large double doors waved.
“Is that door shut?” Dixon asked as he stood in the hallway.
“Yes, sir, Dr. Dixon,” the orderly replied with a nod.
Dixon stepped across to the stairway that led down to his private laboratory.
Outside the lab was a large bare room, occupied only by two orderlies and his patient strapped to a gurney. “Leave,” Dixon said as he walked towards the locked laboratory.
The two orderlies looked at each other and then hurried out of the room.
“What are you going to do?” the patient asked, her voice quivering.
Dixon looked down at the patient, her face wet with tears.
“We are going to unlock the mysteries of existence,” Dixon said. “You are going to show me the secrets of the hereafter.” Dixon leaned in close to the shivering patient. “You are the last piece of the puzzle.”
She started crying even harder and had trouble catching her breath. The doctor seemed to not notice her distress.
He picked out the key for the laboratory and held it up for the patient to see. “Let’s get started, shall we.”
Dixon unlocked the laboratory door and flung the door open wide. He wheeled the gurney inside.
The walls of the laboratory were covered with diagrams of the human body. Here hung a chart of musculature, there a chart on the nervous system. One wall was dominated by a series of charts and diagrams of the human brain. The various centers of thought were highlighted. The one Dixon found most useful was the thought center responsible for fear.
Dixon began arranging his equipment. A simple set of props and a film projector were vital but would be nothing without his psychoactive concoction, refined over a long series of tests and trails.
Dixon drew a syringe of the mysterious black liquid. He brought it out to the patient who was still trying to resist. Her eyes widened at the sight of the large syringe. She strained at her restraints and twisted away from Dixon as he closed in.
The fear in the eyes of the patient filled Dixon with excitement and he felt it rise through his body. She was reacting just as he needed her to. Everything was going as planned. He stuck the needle hard into the patient’s arm.
“You are well on your way now,” he growled, grinning through his teeth at the woman as she writhed on the gurney.
Dixon flashed a light in the eyes of the patient. The pupils were dilated to their fullest, ready for the whole horrifying ordeal to be channelled directly into her terrified brain. Dixon closed the doors as the experiment had begun in earnest.
He attached the heart rate monitors to the patient’s chest. Her heart rate was elevated, pounding, in fact. Her life force threatening to burst from her body. The projector was running a film that lit the ceiling with a swarm of spiders. The room was enveloped with the scratching of a million tiny advancing feet.
The images in the woman’s tormented and drugged brain became a frighteningly real hoard of spiders of all shapes and sizes. Some were small enough to crawl in her hair, in her ears and into her nostrils. Other larger spiders appeared with huge mandibles dripping with slime and venom.
Dixon turned his back on the screaming patient. He knelt down and unlocked the door to a small cupboard. A set of crystals in a crate were jiggling about in their case. He selected one that sat still. The terrified soul of the patient scared to the point of death would be captured within. Dixon brought it carefully to the screaming patient.
“Spiders. So common. So uninteresting.” Dixon brought the crystal close. “There are so many more interesting phobias and hidden dark fears.”
The patient screamed and writhed as the fearful images danced before her and penetrated the deepest darkest recesses of her frightened mind.
“Heights, snakes, open spaces, closed spaces,” Dixon said, balancing the crystal on the patients sweat covered chest. He brought he face close to hers, her terrified eyes darting this way and that.
“I’ve even worked on patients who were terrified of the dark and mirrors. Quite interesting. But if spiders are what gets your juices flowing, then that’s what I’ll give you.”
Dixon saw the same terror he’d seen in patients before. The heart rate monitor sounded out the elevated beat of the utterly terrified before it finally gave out. The machine then sounded with the long tone indicating heart failure.
“What’s there? What can you see?” Dixon spoke to the patient. He held the crystal over the body. It began to jiggle about in his hand as her soul was being captured.
The lights from the projector flickered and the lights in the ceiling surged in brightness. A rumble of thunder rolled in over the roofs of Barbar Hospital. Then the lighting flashed. The light flickered through the cracks in the laboratory door. Another boom of thunder shook the room.<
br />
The doctor looked down into the open, empty eyes of the patient. Another flash of lightning followed by more thunder filled the laboratory. Life came back into the woman’s eyes as she began to pull free from the restraints. The power of the storm mirrored the patient’s sudden burst of strength as she tore the straps away that held her to the gurney.
Dixon felt the sudden flash of fear. The patient grabbed him and pulled him to her.
“You won’t do this again,” she growled. She pulled Dixon closer and sunk her teeth into his sweating neck. She pulled away at his flesh, rupturing the artery. Blood pulsed out of the doctor’s neck.
“You won’t do this again!”
A rumble of thunder and then another flash came through the cracks in the door.
Dixon felt his life fade and he grew dizzy as his blood pumped from his body. The patient pushed him away from her to the floor and he died there in a heap. The laboratory had absorbed the last death.
Chapter 1
Baltimore, Maryland; Present Day
Bria hadn’t run away from home planning to join a street gang. She had thought she wanted to be alone but a few scary nights sleeping in doorways and behind bushes in the park had changed her mind. She needed the security of a group.
The problem was that no group would have her. Not until she met the young boy in the park. He’d brought her to meet his friends who were other youngsters alone in the city. She’d been taken to a warm house in a rundown corner of an industrial zone. They had taken her cell phone from her. That had bought her one meal. Now she had to earn her keep.
That’s how she ended up on the corner across the street from a liquor store. The young boy she’d met just the day before whispered encouragement. An older boy pressed a knife into her hand while an old guy stared at her with hard, cold eyes. Then Bria was told how to rob the old lady who was currently working in the store.
“Walk behind the counter,” the old guy told her, his sour breath on her face. “Put the blade right up to her eye and tell the old hag to open the register. Got it?”
“She’s an easy mark. It’ll be no big deal,” said the younger boy.
Bria nodded. She crossed the street and walked up to the open door of the liquor store. She glanced inside to make sure it was free of customers.
Haunting and Scares Collection