Three months ago, Jahi Arondehar was living in a one-bedroom fourth floor apartment over an antique shop on Manhattan's East Side and working eight-hour shifts as the junior chef at Di Enzios, a ritzy Italian gourmet site on New York City's restaurant row. It was a good job, the senior chef, Sandra Oh, was pleasant to work with but a perfectionist. For an Italian place, it was owned by an Jewish businessman and frequented by American yuppies and corporate chills teaching younger employees how to cheat the system and rip off their father was a businessman who had arrived from India and made a fortune in the pool and hot tub business, and his mother excelled in her role as an interior decorator, so when he worked there, they thought it would be a good chance to meet the stepping stones on his way to open his own Hindu gourmet restaurant.

So, why was he now sometimes driving from Manhattan to an old neglected mansion in the Hudson Valley built to resemble a Bavarian fortress a few miles from Ossining, New York in Westchester County?

The reason was he was in love with his wife. Samantha was beautiful, funny and completely charming. She called him Jay like his mother did, and she looked as if she could be a movie star, more Reese Witherspoon than Marilyn Monroe, but she had inherited the old edifice from her great aunt, and her desire was to restore it as a bed and breakfast. The structure was a two-story, twenty room fortress set off in the woodlands near the tiny hamlet of Amelia. He couldn't call it a town; it only consisted of a garage, a small market, a few homes and a church and cemetery backing the borders of the old estate. It had been built by local robber barons from the early Nineteenth Century, and modernized at sometime in the 1940s. It must have been opulent in its time with its fine oak furnishings, high ceilings and broad halls, but despite the erratic plumbing, he was moving forward to make Samantha's dreams to see her ancestral manse come to life. There was just one thing that he was still struggling to accept in the place.

Did he mention it was reportedly haunted?

He had first met Samantha in college when they were both sharing dramatic arts classes. They started out as friends and eventually began sharing the same circles. At first, she thought of him as the brother she never had, but over time, he began feeling jealous about the guys she was dating. Several of them didn't treat her the way he thought she should be treated. He eventually began dating her, and while they were sharing the place off East 68th Street over the antique store, his mother convinced him to marry "that tiny blonde American girl" and make their cohabitation legal. In all that time, Samantha had never said a thing about being psychic or seeing ghosts until her near-death experience from a fall down the Woodstone staircase, but afterward, she was talking about seeing spectral Vikings, ghostly hippies, ghastly Cholera victims and a motley crew of other surviving personalities in the house. In a small part, he thought her fall was a bit his fault. He had argued about her in restoring the place, and it was her frustration from that fight that delivered her into the tumble down the steps and her brush with death. Possibly, it was that touch with the afterlife that had tuned her into piercing the veil between the living world and the spirit world.

Turning onto the drive from Route 134, the intimidating presence of Woodstone Manor reared up in front of him as if it were a giant earthen dinosaur breaking from the earth. Built of stone and mortar and covered in wild honeysuckle vines, he pulled into the circular driveway and stopped his car just before the door. As he emerged, he pressed the newspaper from the passenger seat under his left arm while scanning the windows along the second floor for faces that might be peering back at him. He felt as if he was being watched as he popped the trunk of his car and reached in to grab the two bags of groceries he had purchased in Ossining on his way glance for Viking ghosts and spirits of 60s flower children later, he was trudging over the broken stone driveway to the front entrance ready to swallow him back up once more.

"Sam, I'm home." He called out for his tiny blonde American girl.

"Did you get the groceries?" She called from upstairs.

"Yes, but I couldn't get the…."

"No pizza?" She got a response from somewhere else. "Jay… Sassapis is upset."

"I'm not shopping for people who don't eat." Jay rolled his eyes as he trudged from the back door past the drawing room and parlor to the kitchen in back of the house. The restoration crew had left ladders and tarps around the structure, leaving the museum-style interior looking more like the half-finished set of a high school play. The kitchen itself was still turn of the century, almost modern with the old-fashioned sink, elaborate cabinets on the ride side and a large cast iron stove on the left. Still wondering about the antiquated plumbing system, he lifted the bags up on the small wooden table in the center of the room, whipping out the newspaper from his arm and dropping it to fall open on the bottom page.

The refrigerator was modern but not recent, a needed two-sided convenience that recently required a new circuit breaker to handle the voltage, but it wouldn't hinder his ability to cook his dishes he enjoyed to create. With his cloth grocery bags collapsing from his grasp, two cans and a package of plums fell from it, three of the fruits making a break to escape with the third one rolling from the table and skirting a few feet along the floor.

A brief glance around, his eyes caught it on the ceramic-tiled floor in front of the stove. Picking it up, his eyes glanced over it for dirt, maybe even the point of collision with the floor, but with a light brush of it off his shirt, he took a bite from it and turned to the bags of food on his table. First came the milk, and the rest of the produce. Like a magician before an audience, he swung out the loaf of bread and with it came the yogurt, the eggs and coffee creamer. He was unpacking the rest when his face lit up to his beautiful wife appearing before him in her grey sweatshirt and blue jeans.

"Did you get everything?" She asked curiously.

"I got everything on the list." Jay answered as he unpacked the granola bars and cans of vegetables. "They even had your favorite chocolate-covered…"

"Did you really eat a plum that rolled across the floor?" Her delicate features cringed into a face taken by obvious distaste.

"What…." He felt like a young boy confronted for pulling his sister's hair. "How did you..."

"Hetty saw you."

"I'm getting ratted out by the ghosts?" Jay reacted with stunned shock then went straight to his defense. "Well, maybe I did, but it was clean… There was nothing wrong with it."

"But it hit the floor."

""It was barely on it for five seconds…"

"Trevor said it was at least twelve…."

Trevor was another ghost.

"Come on, guys, give me a break!" Jay turned and cried out to the room. "Look, babe," He turned back to his wife. "I'm a chef. I have a better grasp of what is clean and what isn't. I can't believe you're turning this into a big deal."

She was listening to voices he couldn't hear again.

"You drank out of the milk jug last week?"

"Guys, you're killing me!" Jay realized they must have seen him when the container was mostly empty and he was finishing it off before it turned sour, but Samantha wasn't interested in his reasons. Taking notice of the open refrigerator as Jay was putting away the produce, she took a bottle of water to go back to the bedroom she was painting for Isaac Higgentoot, a ghostly veteran of the Revolutionary War, now bragging on his exploits near Tarrytown.

"I can't believe this." Jay closed the refrigerator and watched her tramp out a bit disgusted by the habits she was learning. "I'm getting ratted on by the ghosts. I'm going to be catching crap for everything…." He sighed and glanced down to the Hudson Valley Courier, the local paper for the county and noticed something that had caught his eye. Scooting the cloth grocery bag aside, he read the title of the article:

'Ghost Hunter Signing Copies of New Book."

He lifted the newspaper and started reading.

"Ghosts, haunted houses and spooky sounds in the night still pervade the public consciousness. Prominent writer and paranormal researcher William Collins is making an appearance at the Book Attic in White Plains to sign copies of his new novel, "Snowbound," for horror fiction fans and book lovers alike. An author of eleven successful horror novels, such as "Inheritance" and "Splintered," the Maine native credits his twenty years of exploring and researching over 500 reputedly haunted locations for his inspiration….."

Raising his head, Jay looked around the room wondering if he was being watched.

"I wonder what he's going to think of this place."