So I know you told me only to get in touch for a âreal emergency,â and I think you might have already left for vacation. But weâve got some ghost trouble here at Chiswick House and we could use a little advice. Just in writing! No need to interrupt your time away! Unless, um, you think it really is an emergency.
Chiswick House is in awful shape in general, so itâs hard to know whatâs a real problem and whatâs just a hundred years of neglect. Other than one small area nobodyâs touched the place since, it seems, the time of Tatiana Blackthorn.
We have some garden gnomes here doing the structural repairs and the big stuff, masonry and framing and so on. I mean, theyâre not actually garden gnomes, I think theyâre brownies, but they have the big pointy hats and the beards and everything. Theyâve been moving pretty slowly, but recently Kieran was here and he had a talk with the foreman (this guy named Round Tom who is not even all that round) and since then things have sped up a lot. And there is a lot less complaining about the work conditions, and a lot less disappearing for the day if the tea runs out for more than five minutes. On the other hand, theyâve started leaving little offerings around intended for âthe Un-Seel Laird,â which I gather is Kieran. Not anything Kieran would want, I donât think. A lot of acorns and pretty rocks, mostly? And the occasional portrait of Kieran in chalk, which let me tell you, itâs a good thing theyâre competent at construction because their portraiture could use some work. Weâve been keeping all the stuff in a box for him just in case.
Iâm rambling, sorry. Itâs just us rattling around in this giant ruin and all we want is for someone to listen to our dull stories about home renovation. But what I actually want to tell you about is the ghost.
Iâm sure there are dozens of random spirits going back centuries that have some kind of faint presence in the houseâRound Tom hinted as much to meâbut thereâs definitely some specific one that is actively haunting the place. Weâve had some poltergeist-y stuff. Mostly harmless pranks: vases overturned, drinks spilled, music faintly playing in the distance but originating from nowhere, weird hot spots, weird cold spots, doors slamming, doors closing very slowly on their own. To clarify, I do NOT mean poltergeist as in the movie Dru made me watch. No one has been sucked into evil dimensions or levitated (yet!). Still, it seems like we ought to try to get out ahead of this, so Emma and I have been trying to communicate with the presence directly. Whoever it is, they havenât responded to us speaking to them, and itâs starting to feel silly to constantly talk in a friendly voice to nobody, like we have an imaginary friend. All that happens is the next morning someone has stacked all the gnomesâ hats into a hat tower and we have to convince the gnomes it wasnât us.
Lest you think we havenât tried smarter things than just yelling âHere ghostie ghostie ghostie,â Tiberius sent us a device heâs been working on, like a Sensor for ghosts. I spent some time walking the halls and eventually found a spot along some random corridor where the Sensor went crazy. I busted the wall open with a sledgehammerâsomehow I feel like you would approve, although the gnomes did notâand behind the plaster, wedged between two of the beams, was a Ouija board that must go back to at least Tatianaâs time, if not before. There was no planchette, so we made our own out of scrap wood and furniture tacks. Maybe there was something bad about using that instead of something that went with the Ouija board, I donât know how it works, but in any event, we tried the board and it went really badly.
We tried to do things officiallyâEmma and I waited until midnight, we got dressed up nicely, and we went down into the cellar. (There are a bunch of rooms down there that are highly spooky and look like theyâve been used for ghost-ish business in the past.) We extinguished witchlights (no electricity down there any more than itâs anywhere else), lit lots of candles. Ghosts love candles, right? We had a bolt of black silk to sit on that Emma found in a trunk somewhere, and we sat on either side of the board and both put our hands on the planchette.
The candles guttered, but most of the windows in the room are smashed, so with the usual draft from outside Iâm not sure we can count that as a response.
We heard a scratching sound coming from one of the walls, and we opened up that wall in great excitement, but it turned out to be a badger. Actually, it was a mother badgers and some badger cubs, which was very cute until the mother starting trying to kill us. So we had to interrupt and go get the gnomes to help us and they relocated the badger family to a glade of some kind. (They also issued us a bill for âbadger decampment.â)
This was all very disappointing. Emma said that maybe it was rude to ask for the ghostâs name before introducing ourselves.
Emma: MYNAMEISEMMACARSTAIRS
Me: ANDMYNAMEISJULIANBLACKTHORN
Well, that got a reaction. As soon as I finished the last âNâ the board leapt off the ground and twisted violently around. The planchette went flying and Emma went to go retrieve it from the other end of the room, but then when she came back the board went flying around in the air and, I am sorry to say, we chased it around for probably two full minutes without catching it. Eventually the ghost got bored, I guess, and the Ouija board stopped in midair and shattered into pieces, which fell to the ground. And all the candles went out. (There were sixteen pieces, if that means anything. Emma says no, I said we should mention it anyway just in case.)
SoâŚany advice? Too much ghostly energy for an old Ouija board? Defective board in the first place? Does the ghost want to be left alone? (If so, why does it keep knocking things over?) Did we offend it? There hasnât been anything like that since, but exploding Ouija board seemed sufficiently threatening that I wanted to get in touch. What do you think is our next step?
Again, Iâm really sorry to bother you, but your help would mean a lot to me. I really want to make Blackthorn Hall a place that the Blackthorns can use again, a place that will feel like a second home for all of us. And it would be nice if people in London associated the Blackthorns with a grand manor house rather than an infamous wreck. Which is not going to happen if visitors wake up with their hair tied to the bedposts, or have their suitcases upended on the staircase. In payment, we promise you as much babysitting as you like, whenever you need. Although maybe once weâre no longer living in a collapsing death-trap.
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