Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House

The Old Messerman Place Maureen Swanson was known among the other children in her neighborhood as a hard slapper, a shouter, a loud laugher, a liar, a trickster, and a stay-after-schooler. Whenever they saw her coming they cried out, "Here comes Old Stinky," and ran away. Sometimes she would pretend she hadn't seen them. She was a good pretender. If she was pretending she was a queen or a movie star or Maureen Messerman, she would not notice. At other times she would chase them, slap the one she caught, then run and hide until the trouble died down. Her mother often said to her father, "How I wish Maureen could be a little lady: sweet, kind, and nice to everyone." He frowned. "She better learn to mind first. She better stop hanging around that Old Messerman Place." The Old Messerman Place, which took up half a city block, was walled in, boarded up, deserted. You couldn't see inside because the brick walls were too high, and the spruce trees growing just inside the walls grew so tall and so close together that even when you threw your head back and looked up, all you could see were four chimneys like four legs on a giant's table turned upside down. In the middle of the wall that faced the boulevard hung a pair of high, wide iron gates across a bricked driveway where once carriages pulled by horses had gone rolling into the grounds. You couldn't see where they had rolled or where they had stopped because just inside the gates tall wooden boards were nailed together and a sign read: Private Property. Keep Out. Trespassers Prosecuted. Some people insisted the Old Messerman Place was haunted, that at night they often saw lights flickering through the trees and in the daytime they heard a tap-tapping kind of sound like someone pounding with a hammer in there. Occasionally the neighbors called the police, who came down the boulevard with sirens screaming, unlocked the gates, pried open the boards, and looked around. A row of pigeons, huddled close together on the roof, would watch with beady eyes as the officers tramped through the garden with flashlights, up and down the stairs, in and out of the rooms in the big empty mansion, never finding anything or anyone. For a few days after these visits the garden would be dark at night and silent in the daytime. Then the lights would flicker again and the tap-tapping sound was heard as before. Boys were always trying to climb over the high walls. One would stand on the shoulders of another and reach high up, straining and straining, only to jump down panting. "Can't make her. She's too high." Maureen Swanson never tried to climb in by straining and reaching high. What she did was talk to herself as she stood by the gates, her fingers holding the iron posts. "I'm Maureen Messerman. That house is my house." One day, two weeks after her ninth birthday, she came home late from school. She had been kept by the teacher to write twenty times on the blackboard: I must not start fights on the schoolground. She was in a bad humor as she picked up the hose lying on the lawn in the Swansons' backyard, turned on the water full force, and sent the dry leaves scurrying across the grass, fastening them up against the side of the house. Then she waved the hose up and down and across the house itself, across the windows of the Moodys' house next door, and then across Mrs. Moody's clean laundry drying on three lines. Mrs. Moody ran out of her house. "Stop that," she screamed. "Stop thatyou brat." "You brat," Maureen shouted loudly, and then she waved the hose up and down and across Mrs. MoodyChase, Mary is the author of 'Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House', published 2003 under ISBN 9780375925726 and ISBN 0375925724.