She drowned by accident in 1943—in California.
A sophisticated girl with bright red hair graced the third photo.
Ondine Connor stayed at the mansion in the summer of 1965. She lives in Dublin and thinks the rumors of her death are hilarious.
She says she was bored out of her mind while she stayed at Louth Manor.
The last photo was of a gorgeous girl with long black braids that cascaded over her shoulders.
April Hughes CONFIRMED dead. She stayed at the manor the winter of 1986, and her body was discovered in the woods the next spring.
WTF. I always thought this story was bullshit.
Pasted on the following pages were stories about April Hughes from all the New York papers. She was spending the week after Christmas at the manor with her parents when she vanished without a trace on New Year’s Eve. The police learned that, in the days before her disappearance, April had begged her parents to let her return to Manhattan. They had refused to allow her to go. For months, it was believed that April had run away—despite the fact that she hadn’t taken any of her possessions with her.
The following spring, April’s frozen body was discovered in the forest, still dressed in the nightgown she’d been wearing the night she’d disappeared. No one knew why she’d left the house—or how she’d managed to do so without being seen.
April’s parents reported that their daughter had begun showing signs of paranoia shortly after the family’s arrival in Louth. She’d claimed that someone was watching her inside the manor. Several nights in a row, she had pushed a dresser in front of her bedroom door. The morning she was discovered missing, it had required the strength of three men to push the door open. A psychiatrist interviewed by the New York Times suggested that April’s behavior may have been evidence of a serious mental condition. Even he couldn’t explain how she’d slipped past her own barricade. Confusing the matter even more was the note she’d left behind. There was a picture of it printed in the New York Post. Scribbled on ruled paper ripped out of a small three-hole binder, it said, SOMEONE’S AT THE DOOR.
Lark’s last entry was a police photograph of April Hughes’s body. The girl had crawled under a spruce tree and curled into a ball. The freezing temperatures had preserved her perfectly. She was the most beautiful corpse I’d ever seen.
Alongside the photo were three lines written in Lark’s handwriting. G knows this house. G won’t leave. G wants to hurt me. I couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to mean, though.
The rest of the scrapbook’s pages remained tantalizingly blank. I sat for a while, staring at the last picture ever taken of April. If you believed the stories, three girls had gone mad in the manor. Grace Louth had drowned herself. April Hughes had run out into the night. And Lark Bellinger had jumped from a balcony. No wonder people thought the manor was cursed. Only the house knew for sure what had happened to the girls.
I closed the scrapbook and set it aside. I’d just begun rooting around in another box when I heard something outside in the hall. My eyes shot to the door, where the rug I should have used to hide the light was still propped up against the wall. There was no time to position the rug as Sam had told me, so I dove for the light instead. I flipped the switch, and the bare bulb that lit the room flickered out.
The darkness was absolute. I couldn’t see my own hands in front of me. As the footsteps grew louder, I stood motionless, too terrified to move. I had no idea if the person had spotted the light beneath the door. I wondered if they could hear my lungs pulling in the dusty air, and prayed I wouldn’t feel the urge to sneeze.
Hide, a voice whispered urgently inside my head. What scared me the most was that the voice wasn’t my own. I turned and groped through the darkness until I found the narrow passage between the boxes. I followed it until I reached the space Sam had carved out when he’d removed the first boxes. Then I crawled in and curled up with my knees to my chest. I put my hands over my ears as I had when I was a kid, and counted until it was over.
In the dark, it made no difference if my eyes were open or shut. At some point, I must have fallen asleep, because I found myself back in Manhattan, standing at the front door of my uncle’s old house on the day five years earlier when my life had changed forever. The memory was so clear, it was as if I’d traveled back in time. A winter storm had surprised the city, and school had let out early. The snow was piling up quickly, and though my walk had been short, my feet were frozen.
James and his wife lived two blocks from my school in what they called a town house—and what most people in New York would have recognized as a mansion. I’d been a regular visitor since the day they’d moved in. I adored my handsome, charming uncle and my beautiful, brilliant aunt. But that wasn’t the only reason why I spent so much time at their house. Even back then, I seized any opportunity to avoid my mother. I’d known since I was little which adults were happy to have me around—and which wished I’d just go away. When I was with Sarah, my mother never called and asked me to come home.
While James focused on his business, Sarah and I grew even closer. By the time I was eleven, my uncle would leave town for weeks at a time. Sarah worked from home, and I sensed she was lonely, so I stopped by more often. She always seemed exhausted, as though James’s professional troubles were taking a toll on both of them. He’d lost weight, and dark circles filled the hollows beneath his eyes. When he lost his temper, I barely recognized him at all. Sarah swore the situation was only temporary. James had promised her he would start spending less time at work.
Sarah had given me keys to their house, and I was allowed to come and go whenever I liked. On the day in question, I was paying my first visit in over a week. Sarah had just returned from a desert spa, and James was away on business, as usual. I rang the doorbell and waited. Most of the time Sarah or her housekeeper answered the door. But no one seemed to be home yet. So, I pulled out my keys and let myself in.
The house felt unnaturally still. Sarah’s cat didn’t greet me in the entryway as she usually did. I don’t recall a strange smell in the air. I just remember thinking that the house felt airless and stuffy. But I kept moving, as if on autopilot, toward the kitchen at the back of the house. I was passing the living room when my eyes landed on a shoe next to one of the sofas. It was a woman’s high-heeled pump in a pale flesh tone. I stopped and stared at it. I didn’t know why, but it unnerved me. Nothing else in the room seemed out of place. Just that single shoe, lying there by itself, as if abandoned by an absentminded Cinderella. Strange, I thought. Then I took a step forward and saw the foot.
Sarah had slumped forward on the sofa, her face buried in its cushions. One foot wore only stockings. The other had kept its heel. An arm dangled over the edge of the sofa. The sleeve of its blouse was pushed to the elbow, and the skin of her forearm bore fading purple blotches.