The Haunted Closet

by Susan Archer Weiss

My sister wrote to me that she had taken a house for the summer, “a queer, old-fashioned house”, away down on the lonely Georgian coast, where the children would have the benefit of the sea-breeze and the surf-bathing prescribed for them after a sickly spring season. And she urged me to come at once and join them in their new abode.

Queer and old-fashioned indeed I found it—a jumble of brick and stone and timber, each room of which had the appearance of having been built separately by successive owners with regard only to personal convenience, and in open defiance of all architectural rules. Yet I liked this irregularity and the odd nooks and corners which were forever unexpectedly “turning up” in the most improbable places. The halls were large and airy, and the rooms abundantly supplied with closets, windows and doors—the latter, for the most part, opening upon broad piazzas, or queer little porches stuck here or there, like excrescences upon the walls. Very cold and bleak in the winter, no doubt, but for a summer residence delightful.

At the back of the main building projected a sort of long and narrow wooden gallery, consisting of a row of three or four small rooms–last used, it appeared, as store-… Read More