A Summer of Fear: A True Haunting in New England (2 page)

I
t didn’t take long to get settled into the room. Janet was even a little warmer and sociable once I returned. Maybe she just didn’t take changes in schedules well.

I didn’t have a closet, but I had a clothes rack and hung as much of my stuff on the rack as possible by hanging as many things on one hanger as I could. I’d brought “work” clothes for the office (khaki shorts, button-up shirts, jeans, long dresses) but I’d also brought nice summer clothes for the trips I planned to take on the weekends. To help lighten things up my mother took me shopping at Wal-Mart before I left home and bought me a hot pink bedspread, hot pink and purple throw pillows, and a pink shag carpet. Once I got these unpacked and covered the chest of drawers with framed pictures of my mom and grandmother there was a world of difference. I finished things off by tacking postcards to the wall in place of framed pictures. The old attic was looking homey in no time.

In “town” I found the small store offered a few grocery items and there I bought homemade bread, cheese, and fruit. The house didn’t have a kitchen but it did have a microwave and I had my small, dorm-sized refrigerator. The resort kitchen wasn’t open yet so I was on my own for the time being. I was fine with that. I planned on exploring the area just as soon as I could. I hoped to find some area restaurants. I had saved a little bit of money and brought it with me but it would be a few weeks before my first payday and I’d need to budget wisely. Not only did I need to get through the summer, I’d also need to save money to take to Wales with me.

I made sure to call my mother after I got settled. She wasn’t pleased about the living arrangements. “You’re up there by yourself?” she asked.

I wasn’t too thrilled about that either. “I guess so. I didn’t know I would be. I knew it wasn’t open yet, but I had no idea I’d be in the house alone, much less on the grounds.”

“Just keep your phone on you and lock the doors,” she warned. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the problem with those things yet.

The job itself was easy. I mostly filed documents, answered telephones, and looked up things on the internet for people. Or at least, that’s what I was
supposed
to be doing. In the job I’d just left I’d been an administrative assistant for a very busy nonprofit organization and before that I was the transportation director for a summer camp, responsible for organizing the transportation for thousands of children. For the entire first week of the job at the resort Janet and another woman in the office named Lucy spent almost their entire time training me on how to properly answer the telephone. It was irritating.

“When you answer, make sure you speak slowly and enunciate your words clearly,” Janet ordered.

“And try to smile when you say hello; they can hear it in your voice,” Lucy added.

“I think I’ve got it now, ladies,” I tried to joke.

“Oh, we take our responsibilities
very
seriously,” Janet said. “Our voice is often the first introduction anyone has to us so we have to sound professional.”

I wasn’t sure if she was accusing me of not sounding professional or just assuming I didn’t know how to act it. Either way, they continued to “train” me on how to turn the computer off and on, how to photocopy documents, and (no joke) how to use the three-hole punch. I’d organized charity events in the past, given senators tours around our university, worked in the office of some of the highest administrators in town. Yet there, at the resort, they were training me on the right way to collate papers.

I tried to take it in stride, figuring that at least it was an easy job; I could sit back and relax all summer and enjoy my time in New England before the pressures of grad school set in. And this was just the beginning, after all. They didn’t know me and what I was capable of. Things would get better and they’d give me more opportunities as the summer wore on. But the feisty side of me wanted to rebel. Two months ago I was planning events and running correspondence to board members; now I was being trained on what a search engine was.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t quite what I’d expected it to be. The fog never really let up. It stayed cold and cloudy the entire first week. And then there was the heat, or lack thereof. The farm house just couldn’t get warm at night. I walked around in long pants and a sweater and sometimes my bathrobe over that after everyone went home. I even drove in to Hampstead (not its real name) and purchased fleece-lined jeans from an LL Bean store. Even with my flannel pajamas, space heater, and comforter my attic bedroom was a veritable freezer. I couldn’t tell where the draft was coming from but the cold air filled the room and found even the smallest openings in my fabric, chilling me to the bone. During the daylight hours it was fine; people even complained about it being hot downstairs. At night, however, I huddled in my bed, my laptop in my lap, trying to take my mind off the cold and dampness that slicked my skin.

During the day, the house was filled with busy noises as the telephones rang, the fax machine sputtered, doors slammed, and people chattered with one another. It was a beehive of activity. But after the last person drove off down the hill, it became quiet. I was left standing in the middle of the room, alone, without a thing to do with myself.

I tried to explore the grounds but the terrain around the pond was thick with mud and there were lots of insects that bit me and left huge welts on my skin. No amount of bug spray could keep them away. I spent more time slapping at them and waving them off then I did enjoying the view. As the wind whipped through my hair and the bugs flew around my face and mud seeped into my boots. It just didn’t feel worth the effort. The weather seemed to change down there, but there was something more than the bugs that made me uncomfortable. Something besides the mosquitoes pricked at my skin and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. The first time I walked away I felt eyes on my back. The second time I visited I heard laughter that sounded so close I was sure someone was standing behind me. When nobody turned out to be there I chalked it up to an echo, someone on the other side with a traveling voice. I didn’t go back down there much after that, though.

Still, the first week went by without much of a hitch. I hadn’t found my groove yet, or really made friends (Kory was friendly but distant), but I was trying. It would get better, I told myself. It would get better.

T
he second week started off alright. I was cold and still feeling slightly uncomfortable with being isolated  up there by myself, but nothing bad had happened. I didn’t feel scared; not yet. That would come soon enough.

Janet and the general manager, Linda, continued to distrust me with the phones and most documents (although Lucy had backed off) so I didn’t have a lot to do, but they didn’t seem to mind if I kept myself busy doing other things. I tried to make myself
look
busy and found that as long as I had Word open on the computer they were generally happy. I don’t know what they thought I was doing, but they didn’t complain. I used my empty hours working on a novel I was trying to finish writing and composing long emails to my mother.

The living arrangements were a little strange and the advantage of living so close to my job soon wore off any luster it had offered. I had an awkward encounter on Tuesday morning when I came out of the shower wrapped in my towel and found a middle-aged man making a photocopy. Unfortunately, my day started an hour later than everyone else’s which meant I could sleep in a little later. I quickly learned this did not mean I could shower later–I’d have to do it the night before or get up extra early and miss my chance to sleep in. I couldn’t go wandering around in front of everyone in my robe.

I also learned that my cell phone didn’t get service anywhere on the grounds. The whole place was a dead zone. I had to drive all the way into Falcon, a town half an hour away, before it got a signal. Even that might have been okay, except for the fact that I was unable to call out on the office phone in the evenings since once everyone left they turned the phones off and routed them to another site. My mother could call me if we set up an arranged time so that I could get to the phone quickly but basically, the only access I had to the outside world, at least communication-wise, after 5:00 pm was through the internet.