Note: I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them.


Ghost Consultant


Chapter 1: Where the Deer and the Phantasms Roam

(September 24, 2016)

Winnemunka, MN, 7:00 a.m.—That Saturday, Eloise Niedermeyer, seventeen, woke up in the front upstairs bedroom of the house she and her parents shared. It was an old-style house, once a farmhouse, now stripped of its acreage and alone on its own rather small lot.

Without turning on the light, she got out of bed, raised the shade, and gazed out the window. It was a view she had seen every morning since she was about four. Talk about exciting? Well, you weren't talking about that view, then.

Sun was peeking above the horizon. The cornstalks in the big field across the highway were yellowing under a blue sky. Looked like a sunny day. It had been warm lately, and she expected the high might reach the low seventies.

No traffic on the highway, but then it was early on a weekend day. Par for the course, in other words.

In the early sunlight, the trees on the far edge of the cornfield glowed in reds and oranges and yellows, the colors of fall. A skein of geese vee'd over the field, maybe heading south for the winter. On the ground, movement caught her eye, and she carefully knelt by the window, elbow crooked on the sill, chin resting on her hand. What was that out in the cornstalks? Oh.

Two tawny deer, a large one and a smaller one, doe and a growing fawn, came browsing along the strip of grass between the highway and the cornfield. "Don't get run over," Elloise advised them, but softly, not wanting to startle the beautiful animals. On a fall day the previous year the school bus had to swing around a dead deer, lying in a bloody scatter of glinting green headlight glass to show how it had died, and she'd seen it, and—it ruined her whole day. Her stomach crawled just from remembering it.

But this morning, anyway, Mom and Baby Deer were going to be OK. After about a minute, the doe's ears pricked up, and she turned and hurried away down a cornrow, her offspring following. After a moment, she ran, with that rocking-horse grace of a deer in flight, and so did her child, and Eloise watched the white flags of their tails vanish.

She heard a car start up, and knew that was what had disturbed the deer: her dad had opened the garage door and now was off somewhere. Oh, right. He had a consultation somewhere about a hundred miles off. She watched his black BMW turn left and head off toward someplace west.

Her mom hated that he worked on so many Saturdays, but, hey, Ernst Niedermeyer was a bank auditor, and like a hired gun in the Old West, he roamed the prairies rounding up bad nombres, pardner. And sometimes that meant explaining to a branch bank manager exactly why his or her numbers had not added up. He liked to do that face to face, with a briefcase full of documents at his side. Yay, Dad.

God, she felt so bored. Bored and lonely. Bored and lonely and puzzled by the stuff going on at school. Bored and lonely and puzzled and—let's tell the truth here, Eloise—itchy for a boyfriend. A good boyfriend, not a total shit like Jason.

I ought to call Dipper Pines, Eloise thought. It could be a ghost.

She had faced down one ghost before, in their own basement—not that it was a terrible battle or anything, she had simply performed an exorcism ritual that had let the poor thing go on to her reward.

She had looked so peaceful and happy just before she vanished. And now Eloise was sure—well, pretty sure—that she was on the trail of another haunting spirit. She'd read up on them, and she'd even explored the Westminster Mansion when her folks had gone out to California on a vacation.

The rambling old house with its bizarre architecture was rumored to be haunted, and she and Dipper Pines, whom she'd met standing on line waiting for admission to the mansion, had confirmed that he rumors were true.

Boy, were they true. It had been a close call.

However, she knew that Dipper had a lot of experience as a ghost-hunter. And one of his uncles was a paranormalist, he'd told her. And maybe he could advise her. And anyway, she liked talking to him.

"I totally need a boyfriend," she told the window.

Not too good in the romance department, our Eloise, she thought. Damn Jason, anyway. She'd given him one final chance about two times too many. And speaking about two-timing, Jason, you slug, hope you're happy with Cinthia. Cinthia wasn't even very pretty, but . . . she had a reputation around the school.

Oh, yeah, Jason was probably really enjoying Cynthia. As often as possible.

Eloise softly told the window, "And he'll get tired of her in about a month and he'll call me, and it'll be all 'Hey, Ellie, I'm real sorry we had our misunderstanding, I can't stop thinking about you, girl.' Yeah, right. Forget you."

Trouble was, she went to a small rural high school, just 88 seniors, counting her, and everybody had pretty much paired off already. Maybe college would be better, she thought.

She had to get her applications sent in very soon now. Where did Dipper say he was going? Western someplace. Maybe she could even apply there. But no, Dipper had a girlfriend already. Then again, maybe he had some sav California guy friends and he could introduce her to them. Anyway, it would be fun to just hang around with him again. . . .

The floor started to get really hard under her knees, so she climbed back in bed and pulled the covers over herself. She could hear her mother downstairs and knew that in a minute she'd call up the stairs: "Breakfast!"

"Don't even think about boys," Eloise told herself sternly. "Back off, hormones."

Think about something else. The ghost. If it was a ghost. She'd think about that instead. Something was loose in the school, that was for sure.

Principal Kamfer thought it was a vandal, or maybe more than one. He had even had motion-detector security cameras installed. They didn't show anything, except the results.

In the middle of the night, locked lockers opened. The padlocks unshackled and fell off the doors. The doors banged open and shut, a whole row of them at a time. The tropical fish tank in the anteroom to the principal's office boiled, killing all the colorful occupants. The girls' toilets on the first floor overflowed, making a horrible mess that for a week forced the girls to use the girls' room upstairs, leading to overcrowding and potty emergencies.

Just little stuff like that, all recorded without a ghost in sight.

Principal Kamfer looked at the hallway video and said, "They strung monofilament fishing line to make the lockers do that." The goldfish tank, well, "Faulty wiring in the tank heater. Just overheated, that's all." The eruption of the girls' toilets? "Sewer backups happen now and again."

Or, Eloise thought, they just might have themselves a nasty, hateful ghost.

The big catch: Nobody had died in the school, at least not in living memory.

The school had stood there since the 1960s. She could find no record anywhere of a tragedy. Surely the local paper would have reported it if a student had committed suicide because her so-called boyfriend had taken up with some little wh—no, don't think of Jason.

Anyway, even if some unlucky kid had perished of terminal boredom in the middle of Mrs. Allagan's Civics class, well, surely that would have made the news. Local Sophomore Succumbs in Class. Civics Teacher Boasts, "I knew I could do it!"

Hadn't happened, though, and Eloise knew because she had scanned all the back issues of the local paper's online archive, doing a text search for every single mention of East Chestnut County High from 1966, when the school opened, up to 2006, the last year that articles had been archived.

School sports, school graduations, school schedules, school open houses, but no school ghosts. And if anybody had died at school in the last ten years, somebody would have remembered. They still talked about the time some guy had cut his thumb off in shop class, and that was more than ten years ago.

In the newspaper archive, the only pairing of the words death and East Chestnut High was in 1989, when Mr. Warren Kellock, the first principal and by then long retired, had quietly passed away at the age of 81. Murder, suicide, and similar words didn't even show up in any local stories. Winnemunka was a peaceful town.

What was going on at the school, then? A random wandering haunt? A temp?

Dipper would know.

Eloise looked at her clock: 7:22. What time would it be in Piedmont, California? Let's see . . . 5:22. Probably too early to call. She reached for her phone, on the docking station, and texted him instead:

Dipper, pls call me 2day when you get this. Ghost business maybe. Love, Eloise.

"Eloise! Breakfast!"

She yelled, "Coming, Mom!" Hesitated, thumbs poised, about to back up and erase "Love."

Oh, what the hell. It wasn't like they were going to jump in bed together, was it? He was a thousand miles away. Though, remembering the photos he had sent, the way he looked now, he might turn out to be quite a snack . . . oh hell.

Without erasing the word, she pressed send.