The Haunting of Harrow Hall

"The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts." --Italo Calvino

Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind

Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind

Now slip, now slide, now move unseen

Above, beneath, betwixt, between.

--Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

We are going to be writing a spooky, classic Victorian ghost story! I will write the first part of the story, and you will finish it. You are required to write at least two full paragraphs, but you can always write more! As you can guess, for this one, you do not have to cite textual evidence or respond to classmates. This is a creative writing assignment. :)

The Haunting of Harrow Hall

by 6thPeriod

By the time we arrived at Harrow Hall, dark had swallowed the estate and a grey, slow mist had begun to carpet the grounds. The old, vast estate was far out in the English countryside and had been owned by a duke of low standing, a man known to have wasted his wealth on horses and cards. Giving up on the world, he isolated himself behind the stones of Harrow Hall, far from any town or person, locking the iron gates and slowly decaying into a solitary death. It changed hands many times, descending down the generations of Harrow sons and daughters, crumbling in decline with each generation of misuse, neglect, and finally abandon, until at last it ended up mine, a final inheritance from my long-dead ancestry.

As we approached the looming iron gates in our coach, I thought I saw the faintest whisper of a white dress disappearing behind a tree. It startled me -- my heart drummed in my ears and my hands clenched the reins all the tighter -- but my companions claimed to have seen nothing. I dismissed it as fatigue from our long journey, my tired eyes playing tricks. Once the old stone house rose before us, we moved warily up the walk. Suddenly, I felt a chill at my neck, as if thin, cold fingertips brushed by, but when I turned, I saw nothing but the deep darkness and the rising mist. In the house, one window held the flickering light of a candle, the caretaker waiting for our party, and I felt relief at the sight of another living soul. 

The caretaker was an elderly man clothed in a threadbare black suit, a somber ashen face, whose eyes refused to meet our own. "I'll show you to your rooms." He gazed down at the floor, glancing occasionally to the side through creased eyelids to examine us. "What was he avoiding?" I thought. "What doesn't he want to see?"

...