October 22 Plot Background

“What do you mean this place is haunted?” the young blond woman asked the older man in glasses. “I wasn’t expecting to find this out now.”

Natasha Christiaensen had accompanied her grandfather, former American Literature professor Henrik IV, to the ancestral home of the family. Formerly a flourishing dairy farm in the late 17th to mid-18th century now was just empty fields of wildflowers and grasses, the ruins of the farmhouse and barns overtaken by thickets of ashes and birches. The two came armed with cameras, were going to document their return to the farm and share with the rest of the family at a reunion later in the summer. She had taken several pictures of what should have been buildings and notated them in a journal when her grandfather told her of the hauntings.

Grandfather Henrik smiled at her and touched her shoulder in an effort to calm the young woman. “Not here, not where we’re standing is haunted. Well not so much.” He pointed across to the burned out remains of a large building, overgrown with weeds. “The Inn,” he added.

She patted his hand and began to walk towards the ruins. She stopped when they crossed the dirt road separating the two properties. “What do you mean not so much?”

He smiled. “When I was a kid, we came up here, the cousins and I with our parents, to check the place. The Inn had burned down a few years earlier and was a dangerous place, so we were told not to go over there. We were out playing tag in the meadow when a couple of locals came up to us and asked if we knew about the ghosts.

“Of course, none of us knew about them, since we had never been told much about the old farm. An old man sat us down and told us the stories about the unsolved murders at the Inn and the ghosts of the victims haunting the place. He added that the reason it burned down was due to the anger of the victims not being in peace.

“We all laughed, but his wife told us to stop, that it was disrespectful. We asked her if she had seen the ghosts. She shook her head and told us that her sister had, when she worked as a maid.

“Your great-aunt Caroline asked if the old farm was haunted. The old man told us that there were stories of an old farmer’s ghost calling for his cattle, but that he felt it was more Halloween and campfire stories.”

The two walked to the ruins, Natasha taking pictures as they walked. In the distance, they heard heavy equipment at work. They both knew that the state had purchased most of the Inn’s old property, to construct family campgrounds.

She began to feel cold, in spite of the sun being out and the temperature being hotter than had been expected for early June. “Do you feel that?” she asked.

“Yes, like someone left the door to an ice box open.”

She took a few pictures of the ruins before pointing the camera to the lake. Morrisania Lake was more of a large pond than lake, a spring-fed body of water that was cold, even during the hottest of summer Dog Days. Natasha closed her eyes to imagine what it would have been like to awaken early in the morning as a guest of the Inn. She opened her eyes quickly and grabbed her grandfather.

“I saw someone,” she started, trying to express her waking dream.

He took her hand and held it tight. “Was she wearing bloody night clothes?”

Shocked, she could not speak: she nodded slowly. He pulled her back towards the dirt road, back to the old family property. They quickened their pace once they were on old Christiaensen property.



Safety in the Ford truck and on their way back to Albany, she finally asked, “How did you know I saw a woman in bloody clothes?”

He stared out the windshield and answered softly, “I saw her walking to us. She disappeared as you opened your eyes.”

Natasha had so many questions she left unanswered. She wanted to know who the woman was, was she one of the murder victims, why did she appear to them. She just turned her head and looked out the window.