THE HAUNTED MANSION
A collection of Tales...
Tale One:
The Mansion is built
"This shall make a fine site for my new house," bragged Ub van der Iweks, a Dutch Burgemeister, who had just immigrated to America.
"We have warned you," spoke a voice from the shadows. "We warned you again, and again, and again...but you wouldn't listen to us..." With these words, an old man appeared from the gloom. He had a long, whitish beard and bushy eyebrows. The man had milky white eyes, and an air of mystery about him. He wore black, flowing robes and walked on a limp. "This site you have chosen...it is not safe. It was once the site of burial rituals, conducted by the Savages who once dwelt in this land. You will disturb it!"
"Rubbish!" said Iweks. "These 'sacred' burial rituals were nothing but a bunch of rubbish! If they were so 'sacred', wouldn't they have protected it? Wouldn't they have warned us?"
"That's the point, Iweks! They did warn us! Open your eyes, you fool! If you build here, harm will surely come your way!"
"Rubbish! Kasderaul, remove this imbecile immediately!"
"We warned you, Iweks!" said the man as he was led away by the burly man.
In about two weeks, Iweks had started construction. The landscaping had been completed, and accidents had been avoided...almost. The week before, a worker fell into the river and drowned...but that was just a coincidence, thought Iweks. Right?
Wrong. The casualties continued. Scaffolds snapped, sending workers falling to their death, putting wood through workers' heads, eyes, bodies...
By the time the mansion neared its completion, the workforce was depleted. The burgermeister finished the bricklaying himself, stubbornly seeing the project through to completion. He moved his family in on October 31, 1671. Details of what happened next are sketchy. . .apparently Ub went mad and sealed himself in a tomb in the adjacent graveyard. What is clear is that the van der Iwerks family abandoned the house.
In the decades that followed, the Mansion served as a pirate's hangout, a brothel, and an army barracks. Those buried in the Mansion's graveyard are only a sample of the many that died on the premises.
In 1871, the deed passed to Colonel Ronald Stevens, a wealthy publisher, in the winning from a riverboat card game. The Colonel began an extensive renovation of the Mansion, which was as ill fated as its original construction had been. When Fred, a stonemason, was killed by a falling rock, Colonel Stevens took over the stonecutting himself. He moved his family in on October 31, 1871. Shortly thereafter, the Colonel lost his mind. Neglecting his lithography business, Colonel Ronald Stevens spent his last days carving his name backwards on tombstones. He finally died in a boiler explosion. The remaining bits of him were buried under each of the gravemarkers inscribed SNEVETS NOR.
The Stevens family sold the Mansion to the American Spiritualist Society, which used it as a retreat. The Society converted one of the rooms into a seance circle, which was used nightly to summon departed spirits from far and wide. They had logged over 900 contacts by the time the Society was disbanded in 1914. The trustees then sold the Mansion to Master George Gracey Senior.
George Gracey, Sr., bought the Mansion for use as the Graceys' winter home.