HOUSE OF GHOSTS
by Maxwell Grant
As originally published in "The Shadow Magazine," September 1943.
Stanbridge Manor was haunted - but whether by real ghosts or by humans was
the question, and The Shadow had the aid of Joe Dunninger, world's greatest
"ghost-breaker," in this battle against supernatural crime.
CHAPTER I
GHOST MANSION
CROUCHED like a monster awaiting human prey, Stanbridge Manor loomed
ominously in the gathering night. The tower above the two-story mansion gave the
effect of a watching head, while the wings of the wide-sprawled building had the
look of mammoth arms, ready to close upon wayfarers with a deadly embrace.
On the slope that fronted the manor stood a wide stone gateway, yawning a
welcome to hapless visitors. The Stygian gloom of that cavity defeated its
greeting, at least by night. As a rule, cars that came along the hill road shied
from those gates like frightened things.
There was good reason to shun Stanbridge Manor. It was known as a house of
ghosts.
The place was a proper haunt for spirits of the dead. Not only did the
giant trees behind the mansion form a weaving background of weird fantastic
figures; beneath those trees dwelt the dead themselves. They were the members of
the Stanbridge family, generations of them, interred in the graves of their own
private cemetery. In that graveyard, a presiding figure among the congress of
tombstones stood the whitened bulk of a mausoleum, which served as a temporary
shelter for each new addition to the Stanbridge list of dead.
Forbidding as the mansion was to strangers, the mausoleum was equally so to
dwellers in the house. For there were members of the Stanbridge clan still
living in the mansion, amid an atmosphere of whispering ghosts that constantly
reminded them of their awaiting fate.
As the fortunes of the Stanbridge family had shrunk, so had the size of the
grounds surrounding the manor. In recent years, the great iron fence that formed
the boundary had been shortened and its remnants sold for junk. No longer did
the Stanbridge estate include the home of Wiggam, the old caretaker. It was well
outside the fence, still standing only because Wiggam himself had bought it with
his life's savings. Other houses had been built along the rising slope on ground
that once was Stanbridge property, but they had stopped just short of Wiggam's
cottage.
Wiggam's place was the final landmark. After that came the gates through
which only Stanbridges passed, except for Wiggam and Dr. Torrance, who was still
the Stanbridge family physician despite his more taxing duties as county
coroner.
