all those years ago..

A Story by Kristen

ok its not good but my idea cam after reading edgar allen poes storys tell tale heart and the fall of the house of usher...it suposed to be kinda creepy but im planning on rewritting it in a totaly different style so if you dont like it i agree. I just wa

On the shores of Lake Superior there was a small town named Mead. The town was small having only about three thousand people living there, and that was when the college campus was full. It was a beautiful place perched upon hills and nestled between a forest and the lake shore. In the summer people from all over the country would come to boat on the calm waters and eat ice cream on the beach. Tourists in polka dotted swim suits and wide brimmed hats could be seen walking the friendly sidewalks taking pictures of everything from the cars on the street to the little kids plying hopscotch in the distance. The tall buildings that lined the street always looked, to me, like something you would see in a country western movie, with their bright paint and false fronts. Animals and birds of all kinds could be seen even during the hottest days.

In 1960 I turned twelve, a big new adventure for a little girl. I was so proud, I was finally granted permission to walk around town without an adult. Around this same time a local man named Pete Jimkey opened a small hotel on the beach. He picked a good spot. From the porch you could see the lake and the beach. In the summer people would oooh and ahh to see the swans glide around the lake, and to see the herrings walk fixedly along the beach. From the back of the place, you could see deep into the forest, the many trees growing together in natures calming dance. The hotel was immediately a hit, and so apparently was Mr. Jimkey. Some nights, after my parents thought I was deep in sleep, I would walk down the stairs in our house where I could hear my mother and her friends talking about him. Mama’s friends thought he was a very good looking and “very nice” gentleman. They also talked about his money; mama’s friends liked his money. Mama told her friends they were ridiculous and if they found him so attractive why didn’t they talk to him. Her friends would laugh at her and say that because she was married she didn’t know about these things. After listening to these talks, I would sneak myself back into my bed and think about what the adults had said. That same year Mr. Jimkey surprised everyone when he married Holly Neven, a shy quiet woman. She was very pretty and everyone liked her, but she was the opposite of Jimkey’s loud and booming personality. For a few months after their wedding that’s all mama’s friends would talk about, but slowly Mr. and Mrs. Jimkey faded from their nighttime chats and they returned to other matters.

The biggest shock of the town came two years later, when a woman was found dead in one of Mr. Jimkey’s hotel rooms. The police called it a homicide and immediately took Mr. Jimkey in for questioning, but in an even bigger scandal, little Mrs. Holly Jimkey was arrested for the murder. The town was shocked. The story that was told was she found out her husband was having an affair with a woman from out of town. When the other woman came to the hotel Mrs. Jimkey lured her to a room where she stabbed her six times. After Mrs. Jimkey was sent to jail, Mr. Jimkey was later released from custody, and to everyone’s surprise, went back to managing his hotel. Mama’s friends would talk about him and how it was strange of him to want to go back to that place, then Mama would start saying about how his hotel wouldn’t last. Nobody would want to stay there anymore. She was wrong. Mr.Jimkey’s hotel became even more famous. Everybody wanted to stay in the “haunted hotel.” And the hotel was indeed haunted.

After being in jail for only a month, Mrs. Jimkey had hung herself using the sheets from her bed. It was said that she had written on a sticky note, “I couldn’t stop it from happening.” This caused many people to sympathize with her. She knew that her husband would cheat on her and yet she was powerless to stop it. This theory made the haunted ghost stories appear. It was said that both the spirit of Mrs. Jimkey and her husband’s mistress haunted the hotel room, and at night if you listened, you could hear a faint frantic scratching coming from the walls; Mrs. Jimkey and her foe fighting for Pete’s love.

The summer I turned sixteen, the biggest dare anyone could do was to spend the night in the haunted room. This was how I first came to believe in the ghosts. The night I spent the night was the worst night of my life, from the moment I entered the room I could hear the scratching coming from the walls. I told myself it was mice, but the sound didn’t go away. It sounded like someone was scratching their fingers up and down the wall without stop. Even when I turned up the TV as loud as it would go I could still hear it, it was almost like it intensified when there was noise; like the ghost didn’t want to be disturbed. It is obvious that I didn’t sleep at all that night. I sat on the bed with my hand over my ears starring at the wall opposite of the bed waiting for the ghost to appear and take my life. To my utter surprise and relief I lived through the night. That night has never left my memories and now that I know the true story, I will have nightmares the rest of my life.

The summer after I graduated high school, is one of the most vivid memories of my life. I was walking home from my job at the local McDonalds when, like every day, I passed in front of the old Hotel. But unlike any other day I had passed, the hotel was swarming with police. I arrived just in time to see Mr. Jimkey be escorted into an awaiting police car. Although I was one of the only civilians on the scene I still had to wait until six day later when we found out what happened.

That day, as I had been passing out countless numbers of Big Macs, and dripping cartons of French fries, a woman had been found on the side walk across from the hotel. Her head had been shaved and her fingernails missing and her hands bloody. She seemed to have escaped from some horribleimprissonment. It wasn’t until later at the hospital when investigators were able to get her story. It was horrible.

She had been held as a prisoner in the hotel for more than a week. Her prison had been in the very walls of the hotel. The walls of none other than what we had all called the haunted room. The very room I had spent the night in years prior. When police went to investigate they were appalled. In the walls was something like a harness. It had four leather straps for holding the user in, plus another two for holding the user back. The positioning of the harness was unusual until investigator examined the wall across from the harness. Cris-crossing the wood like some deadly game of tick-tack–toe were deep bloody scratches. There were thousands of them covering the small space of wall, and among the dried blood, fingernails were found; countless number of broken and ripped fingernails. It was then everybody realized the true horror of the haunted hotel. How many countless women had been trapped just beyond the wall of the hotel room? How many had ripped their fingers to the bone hoping someone on the other side would realize what was happening. How many women had died listening to the amused laughing or screaming on the other side of the wall? How many tears had been shed in hope and panic as person after person came in and out of the room? Only then, after months of investigations did the meaning of Mrs. Jimkeys suicide note became clear, she had found out about her husband’s torture chamber and couldn’t do anything to stop him.I thought back to my stay in the hotel. What girl was bound and gagged behind that wall I had been near? How many lives could have been saved if just one person had tried to figure out what was going on?

Years later, when I revisited the hotel for closure, I looked out the window to the shore of Lake Superior, and saw what many a tourist had seen. I saw a swans’ nests on the beach be scavenged by a hungry coyote, I saw the herrings dipping their long beaks into the water only to emerge with struggling fish clamed tightly in their jaws. I looked away and walked slowly to the wall where the long remembered sounds of pain a death had come from. I slowly dragged my nails across the wooden paneling, imagining the horror of the women who had been there. After looking around I began to leave the room when suddenly, as if out of my imagination, I heard the sound, the sound of fingernails being drug across the wall, exactly as I had all those years ago.