*Ding*
He rang the bell on the counter inside the faux-wood paneled motel lobby. Faded tourism brochures were messily stuffed into a wall rack, and the smell of day-old complimentary coffee hung in the air.
"Hello?" asked Ivan, dropping his backpack and equipment case.
"Hold on, hold on," croaked an old woman as she hobbled out from the office, the look of profound annoyance on her face. "What do you want?"
"Erm, a room I suppose."
"Englishman, huh," she deduced, to which Ivan smiled and raised his eyebrows in concurrence. "Don't get too many of your kind out here," she said dismissively.
He had been planning this trip for some time, and after considerable research, put together an itinerary of America's most haunted places, taking care to avoid the most popular and instead focusing on the more obscure. So here he was, in a town on the edge of the wilderness, nestled in the hills of western Pennsylvania, hoping to capture quality video and EVP's for his nascent YouTube channel. Specifically what brought him here was the abandoned Kleinfelter mansion.
Now, the stories he heard varied somewhat, but all followed a similar arc. Amos Kleinfelter made a killing in the coal mining business. But then his first wife died during childbirth, causing him to sink into a deep depression. His spirits brightened, according to friends and family, when he found a new love. Oddly, he never introduced this new woman to anybody as lore would have it. But rather abruptly, Kleinfelter appeared to fall ill, seeming chronically drained and lacking in vigor. His corpse was found in bed, a servant kicking the door down (though one version has him going through a window). It had been nailed shut from the inside, yet there were no signs of suicide. His face was twisted as if frozen in time by sheer terror. Next to his body was a note which simply read: "It came from deep within the mines. It followed me. Burn this place to the ground." Nobody could find this mystery lover of his, and nobody burned it down, but after family legal squabbles, the mansion was abandoned and was swallowed up by the woods, disappearing into history like steel mill smoke into a black, starless, sky.
"Know anything about the old mansion in the valley?" Ivan asked the lady. "I suppose this is the part where you tell me not to go and that nobody comes back the same, mmm?" he asked cheekily, taking the piss out of the old horror movie cliche.
"I don't give a damn
what
you do," she snapped back, unaware of her presumed role as the cautioning stranger who always seems to know more than they ought to.
"Ohhh-kay then," he concluded, before taking his room key and retiring to the spartan, if not dreary, accommodations for the night.
~
The next morning he ventured a down steep, winding road to a narrow dirt one, which eventually became impassible. Abandoning his rental, he grabbed his equipment case and walked. True to rumor, he found the mansion to carry a disturbing vibe - something about the way way vines and trees twisted against it as if trying to pull it back into the earth. It was silent; no bird song graced the air, which felt cooler than elsewhere on this warm late summer morning.
And so Ivan went about exploring every room, setting up video cameras, audio recorders, and a device called a "spirit box" which spat bleeps and static from a tiny speaker. He didn't really understand how it worked and frankly, felt like he may have overpaid for it. He also tried to walk the property, which was a tangled mess of thorns and brush. Ivan found nothing more than a dilapidated building in the middle of nowhere. No paranormal action, no "holy grail" video footage or anything worthwhile.
That night, for lack of entertainment options, he rested in his room. Nearly lulled to sleep by the monotone drone of the local TV news anchor, Ivan reached to turn off his bedside lamp, and it was then that he heard a clunk from the room next door.
"Great...noisy neighbors," he lamented. A few more bangs later, he considered banging back on the wall to let them know he was being disturbed. He got up, raised his fist to knock, but was interrupted by a voice. It was coming from a vent in the wall in the corner of the room, grey paint bubbling up with rust.
He froze, now fully awake, ears focused. It spoke again. "I saw you..."
"I'm....I'm sorry?" said Ivan with surprise, creeping towards the vent.
"Today at the house. I saw you there." It was a female voice.
"Well I, I, didn't see any-," he stammered. Perhaps she was another paranormal investigator, it occurred to him. "How did you know where I'd be staying?"
Silence.
"Hello?" he said into the vent with more urgency.
