The house wasn’t very old. It sat at the end of town across the road from a stagecoach stop of nearly two hundred years ago. A portion of the stagecoach building had been rooms for overnight travelers and remained a motel as late as the 1950s. It was bought and sold, remodeled many times and now sat empty.
No one ever thought about the large tree across the road from it until the most recent buyer of the property decided it should come down. For days it was processed, logs, mulch and afterward for weeks the new property owner could be seen sitting at a table with a large sifter, working at a circle of grass less soil. My curiosity peaked and I decided to welcome him to the neighborhood.
He didn’t want that. He wanted to be left alone. “I saw you working and wondered what’s the draw,” I said despite feeling like I was prying.
He sighed, looked me in the eye and decided to tell me. Not really me but anyone, I guessed. “I found several things but not yet what I was hoping for,” he said. He started walking away and expected me to follow. He didn’t say so but waited until I caught up to enter a shed.
There were old coins laying on a table. He picked one up and showed me. “Wow, it’s a gold coin,” I said.
“1652, French,” he boasted. I continued to look at it and he said, “I found six of them beneath that old tree. They entice me to keep digging.” He didn’t mean the coins.
“That’s amazing, what luck,” I said. I remembered him saying that he hadn’t found what he was looking for.
“This place is haunted. I knew it when I bought it but I never imagined the extent of things,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Every Saturday night an apparition of a woman stands over my bed. I once dared to ask her what she wants and now she screams, “Give me my ring. I want my ring!”
I didn’t know what to say, I never believed in ghosts. It didn’t explain his obsession with sifting dirt but like he knew it was on my mind he said, “She told me to look beneath the tree. That a stage coach manager in the 1700s robbed and killed more than a few overnight guests.”
“I never heard that before and lived in this town for twenty years,” I said.
“I’m not making it up, she is horrifying with her skull split open,” he said wearily. For the next few months we enjoyed a relationship and weary was who he was. Every Saturday night the apparition still returns he’d sometimes say. It seemed like he was leaving something out.
I hadn’t seen him for weeks and coming home from work I noticed a for sale sign. I stopped to ask if things were okay. He said,
“I started finding bones. I found a woman’s hand and a ring. I put the ring on my dresser and the apparition returned the next Saturday night. It wasn’t her ring, it belonged to a different woman. She returned the next Saturday with another woman, the ring’s owner. She took it. Now the first woman returns with another woman every Saturday. They’re angry and want their rings. I found four but they’re never the right ones. I’m tired of looking for rings.”
DAGilberthorrorwriter 