As recorded by Dr. Everett Thorne
There are places in England that seem to exist only at dusk, their outlines hazy, their legends more real than their walls. Brackenmoor Grange was one such place—a crumbling estate half-swallowed by the Yorkshire fog and the collective superstition of the nearby village.
We were summoned in the winter of 1897 by a Colonel Horace Copley, retired and recently widowed, who claimed that his home was haunted by the vengeful ghost of his late wife.
“Furniture moves on its own,” he insisted in his letter. “Footsteps echo when no one is present. But most disturbingly… she appears at night at the foot of my bed, her face half-burned, just as it was the day she died in the fire.”
Finch, usually dismissive of spectral claims, raised an eyebrow at that last sentence.
“Interesting,” he said. “Spectres seldom follow forensic patterns.”
We arrived at Brackenmoor to find it shrouded in frost and gloom. The colonel was a tall, stooped man with an ashen look, as though the house itself had drained him.
Finch wasted no time. “When did the first visitation occur?”
“Three weeks ago,” Copley replied. “The anniversary of Margaret’s death. I saw her clearly—her burned dress, her blackened face… and she wept, Doctor. Wept.”
Finch paced the study. “Grief can conjure many things. But if your wife wept, Colonel, it implies motive. Ghosts, in my experience, rarely weep without purpose.”
That night, Finch insisted we remain awake in the drawing room, adjacent to the colonel’s quarters. Just past two o’clock, a soft weeping rose from the hall.
We crept silently to the colonel’s bedroom. Through the keyhole, I saw her—a figure in scorched silk, face obscured in shadow, standing at the foot of his bed.
Copley groaned in his sleep. The figure raised one blackened hand toward his throat.
I reached for the door, but Finch held me back.
“Watch.”
The figure vanished—swept backward, like fog drawn into a vent. When we entered moments later, there was no trace of it.
Come morning, Finch set to work. He measured draughts, tested the glass in the mirror, examined the candle wax left half-melted.
By noon he turned to the colonel and said, “Sir, your ghost is not of the other world—but rather of this one. And likely very much alive.”
He led us to a hidden panel behind a wardrobe in the east wing, which concealed a narrow servant’s corridor—long disused, but recently cleared of dust.
“There is a woman moving through your house at night,” he said. “Wearing what remains of your late wife’s dress. A woman with knowledge of the estate, and access to your bedchamber.”
That night, we set a trap: a pressure bell beneath the rug and a lamp rigged with a shutter to flash on command. At precisely 2:14, the figure returned.
When the trap triggered and the room blazed with sudden light, the spectre shrieked—not in ghostly wail, but in recognisable human terror.
It was Clara Winslow, Margaret’s cousin and former companion. She had been dismissed quietly years ago after an alleged affair with the colonel—one Margaret never forgave.
“She wanted to drive me mad,” Copley said hoarsely. “To punish me.”
Finch nodded. “Ghosts may frighten. But guilt? Guilt invites them in.”
As we departed Brackenmoor, the village fog thinned behind us.
“Well, Finch,” I said, “I daresay that was the most convincing ghost I’ve ever not seen.”
He smirked. “The most dangerous phantoms, Thorne, wear human skin. Always have.”
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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