“Excellent question, Mario!” Joel said. “According to the experts, there are many reasons a spirit might remainearthbound instead of transitioning beyond the veil. But—alas!—as with all experts, they never seem to agree on a single cause.”
The tour group snickered, and Harper found herself paying more attention.
“What the various theories do have in common is the idea that the person who passed had unfinished business and cannot move on to the next plane of existence until that business is in some way resolved.”
“Resolved by the ghost or by someone else?” the teenager asked.
“Ah,” Joel said. “Perhaps we will discover the answer to that question tonight!”
Harper peered up and down busy Alvarado Street, hoping not to spy any familiar faces. Monterey was not a large town. She had a hard enough time being taken seriously by her academic colleagues; the last thing she needed was for one of them to spot her on a cheesy ghost tour.
“Now if you will all kindly follow me this way,” Joel said.
As the tour meandered down the street, Joel regaled them with ever more dramatic tales of tragic deaths, betrayals, and hauntings, then halted again in front of an incongruously modern convenience store.
“Ladies and gentlemen, what you see before you is a shining example of twentieth-century architecture, no? But it was not always thus. Ah yes, on this very spot once stood the cottage of an old woman who lived here during the typhoid epidemic of 1842. She buried one grandchild after another until, at long last, they were all dead and she herself succumbed to the dreaded scourge. And now from time to time she appears in the corner of the parking lot, there beneath the tree, wailing for her lost grandbabies…Or so some say…”
The tourists peered into the dark corner of the lot, a fewtsking and shaking their heads in sympathy.
“Or so some say,” Harper echoed, annoyed by the vagueness of Joel’s tales of alleged hauntings. She noticed a mud smear on Tariq’s otherwise impeccable shirt. “What have you been doing? Crawling through bushes?”
“Had to help Penny with a feisty otter at the aquarium. But c’mon, Harper, admit it: This is fun.”
“Oh, you betcha. A haunted convenience store parking lot? I live for this sort of thing. I especially liked the ten minutes we spent staring at some invisible footprints. Give that some thought: Invisible. Footprints.”
Making good on her bet wasn’t the only reason Harper had agreed to go on the ghost tour. She also hoped to learn some colorful local history. She was new in town, and though she had gone to graduate school in Berkeley, she had never had the time or the money to visit this area of the California coast. The region had a rich history before the Europeans arrived, but the native peoples had not left grand structures, and much of their story had been lost or destroyed. There remained only a few remnants of Old California; the vast majority had been torn down in favor of convenience stores and strip malls. Still, the traces were there for those who cared to look for them.
California history was not Harper’s specialty, however. She researched the folklore surrounding death and un-death, and the history of witchcraft, which her scholarly articles referred to as “the ultimate othering of peoples through the centuries,” as well as the related field of botanical poisons. But Monterey College’s newest faculty member, Harper Grae, was a jill-of-all-trades, offering history courses ranging from large surveys to small seminars that explored the story of pastpeoples and the choices they made: the good and the bad, the shockingly immoral and the stunningly admirable.
For the next hour, as the tour group visited various sites of alleged hauntings—Colton Hall, Stokes Adobe, the Robert Louis Stevenson House—Harper’s skepticism was reinforced by the lack of specifics in the ghostly tales Joel was spinning. It was all “some say” this and “according to legend” that. Harper was about to suggest to Tariq that they bail and get something to drink when the tour arrived at its final stop: the Perles Mansion.
She perked up.Thiscould be interesting.
Harper had lingered over photographs of the historic home in a volume of local history. Nearly two centuries old, the Perles Mansion was a sprawling two-story house—“mansion” was more of a courtesy title—made of adobe brick and exposed wood.
Adobe bricks, she had read, were a mixture of clay, sand, and straw. The bricks would last for centuries if protected from the elements, but they did not allow for many embellishments or fine details. The Perles Mansion was beautiful in its way, but crude compared to the fairy-tale Victorian cottages and Edwardian manors of San Francisco.
Nonetheless, there was something undeniably intriguing about the place. A high adobe wall surrounded the mansion, whose main facade was partially hidden from the street by the branches of an enormous Monterey cypress. Harper craned her neck to get a better view over the garden wall and spotted a dim golden light emanating from an upstairs room. The silhouette of a person passed by the window.
Harper envied whoever lived in such a home, fairly vibrating with history, supernatural or otherwise.
Just imagine the people it had hosted, and the events it had been witness to over the centuries. If only they had been properly chronicled.Thiswas what Harper loved about history: the tangible relics of those who had gone before, who had unspooled their lives, won and lost loves, and survived in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds.
“They say the Perles Mansion was built on disturbed ground, perhaps to hide the history of the witch hangings that took place on this very spot,” Joel continued. “But the secrets of those trials have been purged from official court records. On the troubled ground where the mansion now stands, a parallel time is said to exist where, if you look closely enough, you might see the vapor of the common folk who once lived along the town’s cobblestone streets a foretime ago, and where the fog rolling in from Monterey Bay adds an otherworldly atmosphere to unveil the eidolon of the undead.”
“What’s an eidolon?” Tariq whispered.
“A spirit in human form,” Harper murmured. She raised her hand.
“Yes?” asked Joel with barely veiled impatience. “Harper, is it?”
“Yes. Dr. Harper Grae. You’re saying there were witch trials here in Monterey?”
Joel smiled and cast his gaze over the crowd. Reveling in their rapt attention, he replied, “Oh yes, indeed, Doctor. People think of Salem, Massachusetts, when they hear about witch trials, but I assure you they were also conducted elsewhere. As a matter of fact, this is known as the ‘Séance Garden,’ and the massive cypress is known locally as the ‘Witch Tree’ because—”
“It’s huge!” the retired woman from Arizona exclaimed. “How old is it?”
“Cypresses can live for centuries,” said Joel. “The famous ‘Lone Cypress’ on nearby 17-Mile Drive is estimated to have sprouted in the mid-1700s, long before anyone arrived in Monterey.”
