Foster's

Culverton House .2

1864

A year after the slaughter of the Jacksons and all their slaves and staff, General Robert E. Lee, his very self, awarded the Culverton house and all it's lands to a friend of the family.

Albert Thompson and his family of five moved in on a sunny July afternoon. They were a tried and true Confederate family, excited to join a town of likeminded people and to start their new life out in the country.

Two of their boys were fighting in the war against the Union, one was very close to General Robert E. Lee himself, and the other had been killed at the battle of Gettysburg.

The son closest to General Lee was the reason they got the house in the first place.

They didn't even mind that a family and all their servants had been lynched there, in their very own garden. They found it to be an interesting and boast worthy piece of history that merely added value to the house.

They were welcomed warmly by their neighbours and everyone else in the town for that matter.

But wasn't long after they moved in that the strange happenings started.

The voices that whispered at night. The creaking of old boards where no feet were treading. The doors that would slam for no reason. The uneasy feeling of something breathing on your neck when you were alone in a room.

At first it was small, Albert would eventually tell his closest neighbour. At first it was things they could explain away as the wind, and the age of the house.

But the house wasn't that old. And the wind was never blowing on the nights in question.

Then it got worse.

Then came the person groaning, or the child crying, or the tapping of long fingernails against the glass. Never at the same time of course, and never was there anything there.

They spoke to their pastor, and he came to the house to bless it.

For a while it worked.

The house quieted down, until it decided not to be quiet anymore.

Albert said the whole family woke up to screaming. Something primal and angry. Of course no one was screaming, no one living anyway.

The pastor came back with his holy waters and prayers. It was a long and tiring session, at the end of it all the windows in the house had cracked, but they figured whatever had been stuck there was finally gone.

For a long while, everything was well. The house was quiet but so was Albert.

The man seemed to change almost overnight.

His wife, Maggie, whispered to the other wives about his sleepless nights. He spent nights pacing about chasing sounds only he could hear. Punching holes into walls, tearing at them to get inside. There was never anything there. He was muttering to himself, barely eating, barely sleeping. She could no longer recognize him as he man she had married.

And the town had started to see it too.

The man had definitely gotten thinner, gaunt even. Many had started likening him to a skeleton. Bags were prominent under his eyes, his beard all about hung off his cheeks. He was more irritable, snapping at everyone, throwing punches when he got too angry.

Everyone assumed that he was hitting the bottle, and when Maggie started wearing long sleeves in the insufferable Texas heat, they realized he was hitting her too. But who were they to step in on a man's disciplining of his family?

So they all ignored the warning signs until it was too late.

On a misty October morning, three gunshots rang out over the plantation. The neighbours merely thought that Albert had gone early morning hunting with his son, home for a few days to visit at the behest of his mother.

She had hoped that seeing their eldest and now only son would lift his spirits and he had sort of warmed over the days that he had been home.

But when, the neighbours hadn't seen any of them by midday they went over to investigate. Maggie always found time to take tea in the garden beneath the willow tree before the sun was too high in the sky. Albert would make a trip to the cotton field to see ensure his slaves were behaving, and since his boy was home, he was accompanying his father.

But no one had seen either of them all day.

The house servants weren't allowed in the rooms without permission and no one had answered the knocks on the door, so they had stayed downstairs in the kitchens waiting to be called.

When someone finally got the door to the master bedroom open they found the three bodies, Albert, Maggie and his son, and he shotgun he had used to kill them still in Albert's hands.

For a long while they spoke of hauntings and demons and ghosts. Of the Jackson's coming back to poison his mind and turn him against his family. But that was a little more fantastical than many were willing to admit.

Eventually they settled on a fever in the brain that drove him to insanity. Maybe even a late outbreak of Scarlet fever which was still around though not as prevalent or common as it was when the epidemic first started.

The neighbours swore that they tried to burn the house down, to protect themselves from the disease, but it refused to burn. Since the house continued to stand, in it's original state, that eventually just became a myth, a pretty story to add on to all the others in it's tragic past.

And the house once again stood silent and foreboding, seemingly another secret to add to the ones it had already collected.