Chapter 7: Always Room for One More

From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Saturday, March 28, 2014, San Jose, CA: It's about 9 pm, and I'm writing from a room in the Dazed Inn. What a day! Our school had a much larger track and field meet here, nearly two dozen schools competing in all. First we ran prelims, where we had to qualify, and I was one of the eight that made the cut.

Then this morning I ran in the hundred-meter and won! First place! That's two I've got now! New time: 10:44, another personal best. Piedmont did great overall, five firsts, six seconds, and nine thirds (boys' and girls' together, I mean). Coach Dinson is, like, over the moon because we're ranked among the five best schools in the association.

Mom and Dad drove down me down and came to the meet and we spent last night and will spend tonight in the motel. Mabel didn't come along, because she's working on a big art project all about her favorite teacher, Mrs. Pepper. I wrote earlier about how Mrs. Pepper passed away all of a sudden and it hit Mabel hard. This is her way of healing, I think.

Anyway, for the weekend Mabel's staying a couple of houses down from us with her friend Esmeralda (Meral to her friends, pronounced mer-RELL), who was in her art class and is also involved in the project.

Mabel told me Meral has a crush on me, but you can't believe Mabel about things like that. She does like to tease me. Anyway, as I told Mabel, my heart belongs to another! She stuck out her tongue and went pffffffbbbbt! So I guess she's her old self again and over Trey Moulter.

So, yeah, I did good in the dash, but what I'm really stoked about is tomorrow! 'Cause right here in San Jose is the Westminster House!

What, gentle reader (if anybody but me ever reads this), is that? Well, I'll tell you: it's just the most mysteriousest, hauntedest house in America, that's what! And tomorrow while Mom and Dad go shopping and sightseeing, they're gonna drop me off for the Grand Tour.

I mean, this is serious! Admission is forty-five bucks! And this isn't the Mystery Shack I'm talking about here! It's the Westminster House!

OK, so the Westminster family were like the Remingtons and the Winchesters and the Colts back in the days of the Old West, right? And they manufactured and sold repeating rifles—hundreds of thousands of them, for the Union Army during the Civil War, and then for the US Cavalry on the frontier, and for any cowboy that wanted one, I guess, and the company got stupid rich. Guns in the 19th century were like oil in the 20th.

The Westminster Arms Company was based in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the owners lived. And Mr. Eben Westminster, the founder of the company, had an elder son named Aloysius, and he inherited the business and married a girl named Minerva, and in 1870 he died at his home in Massachusetts, leaving her ninety million dollars, which was a lot of money back then, and she also continued to receive a portion of the profits from sales of the rifles. Let's say she wasn't hurtin' for moolah, as Grunkle Stan would put it.

So the legend is that after her husband died, Minerva Westminster went to a séance and tried to talk to his spirit, and he came to her through a medium and warned her to go as far west as she could and "build a house big enough for all the ghosts of all those whom our rifles have killed."

Spooky! But she believed it. Grunkle Stan again: "The more dough in the pocket, the fewer brains in the head!"

So anyway, Minerva went all the way to California, bought a great big dairy farm, had every building on it torn down, and sold all the cows, and in 1872 she began to build the biggest mansion you could imagine. She lived to be nearly 100 and died in 1938. And to the day she died, she never stopped building the mansion! There were carpenters at work literally 24-7, every day of the week, Sundays and Christmases included (she did pay overtime, I think). Every time they'd finish one room or fixture or decoration, she'd start them on another!

The house started out on five hundred acres, but later owners sold a lot of the land, and now it stands on twenty acres—still a lot of yard for a city. Since the 1970s, it's been a museum and tourist attraction, something I have a little experience with. It's supposed to have extensive and beautiful gardens, and people come just to tour through them.

But the interior interests ME! Nobody even knows for sure how many rooms the place has! Mrs. Westminster had séances every night, and her husband's spirit supposedly gave her directions for rooms and porches and towers and so on. She never had an architect! She just sketched out what she wanted, and her foreman made the plans and built. Inside, the whole house is supposed to be a maze.

I read that they've counted 54 bedrooms for sure, and the estimate is that the house has about 220 rooms in all (more than this motel!), but they keep finding new ones! Because sometimes Minerva would have a new hallway built and would take out the door into a room, so now the room is sealed up on all four sides is and unreachable, like Grunkle Stan's old wax museum was for years.

There are long winding halls that just end, and when you try to go back, you run into branches of other halls you don't remember seeing. Stairs that go up to a ceiling and stop—no door. On the higher floors, you might open a door and find there's no balcony or steps—you're just standing in a doorway 30 feet off the ground. And people swear they see and hear spooky things all the time.

Dad and Mom say I can have a good four hours there. So I can take the two-hour walking tour and then just wander around myself. I hope I can take my anomaly detector—I slipped it into my backpack before we left home.

Oh, man, I wish Mabel could be here. Or Wendy. Half the fun of ghost hunting is doing it with someone who you know has got your back.

But, hey, I'm experienced. I'm sure nothing will go wrong.

Ugh. I can't believe I even WROTE that. Now I have goosebumps.

The Westminster Mystery House Museum was due to open at nine a.m. Dipper arrived at eight-twenty and still found himself fourth in line to get in. Ahead of him stood a family of three, a mom, dad, and a fourteen-year-old daughter. "Are you going to be all right on your own?" the mom asked.

"Definitely," the girl said. Her voice sounded soft and musical to Dipper. "You guys go on and meet me back here, OK? I'll be fine."

"All right," the mom said. "We're going to take the garden tour at eleven and then go to the automobile exhibit, so we'll met you at the garden entrance at twelve-thirty."

"Make it one," the dad said. "Your mom has to take pictures."

"One o'clock, then." The mother smiled brightly at Dipper. "This looks like a nice young man behind you. Maybe he'll go through with you."

The girl gave him a faintly exasperated look. Dipper found her definitely cute: long, straight, browny-blonde hair, darker arched brows, eyes that looked shy but happy, and when she wasn't exasperated, a big wide white smile. He thought at first she was skinny, but then realized the proper word was toned. She looked like an active girl.

She was sort of pale—reminding Dipper of Wendy—and she wore black jeans, a white top with an open light-blue vest over that and a man's hat, a black fedora. "Sorry, guy," she said. "Mom, dad, I don't need a bodyguard!"

"All right, suit yourself," the mom said. "One o'clock at the gate to the gardens, remember."

"Got it."

The parents strolled away, and the girl gave an exaggerated sigh. "Sorry about that," she said. "Hi. I'm Eloise Niedermeyer. That's a cool hat."

"Thanks, it's a fur trapper's hat. I'm Dipper Pines," he said. "Glad to meet you."

She smiled—she had a cute smile, too, the left side of her mouth ticking up so it was lopsided. "Dipper? Seriously?"

He shrugged. "It's a nickname, but everybody calls me that. It sounds like an insult, I guess, but it isn't, and it's better than my real name, don't ask, so I don't mind."

She laughed this time. "Dipper. OK. I've read about this place. I can't wait to see it!"

"Me, too," Dipper said. "All those legends."

They turned and looked at the sprawling, spreading, rambling mansion—a Victorian gingerbread manor in some ways, a medieval castle in others. The mustard-yellow walls had been shingled and inlaid with strips of dark brown wood. The roof had been tiled with brilliant red slates. Two fat round towers—not symmetrical, though—broke up the façade, and the place seemed to have hundreds of windows, not to mention spires and domes and steeples and even a tall bell tower visible through a forest of chimney. Dipper said, "Oh, man! If ghosts were real, you'd find them in a place like this."

"Ghosts are real," she assured him.

"Have you seen one?"

Eloise looked past him, but the next people in line were a family group, and they were sorting out tickets and paying no attention to the boy and girl ahead of them. "Yeah," she said, lowering her voice. "There's a ghost that stands halfway up our stairs from the basement. Three times I've turned on the light to go down there, and the ghost about scared the pee out of me!" She turned red. "'Scuse me."

"No, I understand! What does it look like?" Dipper asked.

"Uh, well, it's hard to say. Most like a woman wearing a robe or gown, but she's wispy and faint, just all sort of gray. And transparent. You can't see any details because of that. She stands there with her hand on the rail and seems to stare up at you—you can't see any eyes, or any features, really, just a gray blank face. And then she fades away. I know you don't believe me. Nobody ever does."

"Hey, it's OK," Dipper said. "Actually, I do believe you, because I've seen a bunch of ghosts."

Eloise's bluish-gray eyes glittered with interest. "Here?"

Dipper shook his head. "No, different places, at different times. One was a lumberjack who died 150 years ago when he got struck in the head with an axe. The axe is still lodged in his skull. Or the ghost of an axe, I guess. It's not material."

"Shut up!"

"No, straight true," Dipper said.

Eloise had stepped closer to him. She smelled a little like peppermint—toothpaste, Dipper guessed. She asked, "Where was that? Not here at the Westminster House?"

"No, a little town up in Oregon called Gravity Falls. It's totally weird. Well, the whole Gravity Falls Valley is weird, but that weirdness is what really got me hooked on investigating hauntings and ghosts."

She gave him that lopsided skeptical smile and a raised eyebrow. "Investigating. Yeah, right."

"I'm not lying!" Dipper said. "My uncle Stanford Pines is a well-known paranormal investigator. The lumberjack ghost, well, the family that lived in the house he was haunting called me in to exorcise him."

Now she seemed interested. "Did you do it?"

Dipper rubbed the back of his neck. "Um, well, kinda. Me and this girl named Pacifica Northwest between us laid him to rest. She actually finished the job, but earlier I was the one who trapped him in a silver mirror."

Eloise hugged herself and gave a shudder, though she still smiled at him. "Even my parents don't believe me about our ghost. I'd love to see something like that. Heck I wish they'd see it and then they'd know I'm right. What time is it? Five more minutes! C'mon, people, open up! Hey, the 'rents totally embarrassed me, Dipper, but, um, would you mind walking through the tour with me?"

He grinned at her. "No, not at all. It'll be fun to have another believer to talk to. I guess you guys are visiting?"

"Yeah, on vacation, just touring California. How'd you know?"

"Your accents. You sound like you're from the Midwest."

She giggled. "Pretty good! We're from Winnemunka, Minnesota. Nobody's ever heard of it. It barely even shows up on the map. So are you from here?"

He shook his head. "No. I mean, not actually from San Jose, but yes, I was born in California. My folks and I live in Piedmont. That's a town about fifty miles north, near Oakland. Which, you know, is across the bay from San Francisco."

"Oh. Did you come to San Jose just to see the house?"

"Uh, no. I'm kind of on our high school's track team, junior varsity, and we had a match yesterday."

Her eyes widened, and she looked him up and down with what seemed like fresh interest. "Oh, you're an athlete! How'd you do in the meet?"

"OK," Dipper said, trying to sound modest. "I took first place in the hundred-meter dash."

"Cool! I'm on the hockey team at Winnemunka High. I guess not many schools out here have hockey teams, huh?"

"Not many. We don't at ours, anyway."

"I'll bet you've never even seen snow," Eloise told him.

"No, you'd lose that bet." Dipper fished his wallet from his jeans pocket and found the photo he wanted. "See, this was taken up in Gravity Falls, the town that I was talking about, back during Christmas Break." He took out a photo and handed it her.

She looked at it and laughed. "I don't know about Gravity Falls, but your snowmen are definitely weird! I've never seen one in a fez before. Who's this with you? Your girlfriend?

"No, that's my twin sister Mabel. She didn't come with us on this trip because she's busy with something for school."

"Oh, twins! Are you guys, like, identical?"

"Well, we look alike, but no, we're not identical twins. If we were, we'd both be the same gender. We're what they call fraternal twins." He didn't tell her that the odd-looking snowman in the photo was actually Mabel's pretty faithful representation of Grunkle Stan. He put the picture and his wallet away. "I was gonna ask something about hockey. Um, got it, what, uh, position do you play? I mean on your team?"

She laughed. "Yeah, I kind of got that's what you meant. I'm a forward. You know the game?"

"Ice hockey? Uh, that would be a no."

Becoming very animated, Eloise said, "OK, the forwards have the most fun, 'cause they're the ones who try to score and assist other team members with moving the puck. There are three forwards, and three kinda imaginary lanes—"

The crowd behind them murmured and shuffled. Dipper said, "Hey, they're unlocking the doors!"

"Ooh! I'll finish telling you about hockey later!"

"Great. Uh—want to go in together?"

"Yes, please!"

A thin young woman in an antique costume—she looked like a servant girl from the 1890s, with a long black dress, a full white apron, button shoes, and a little lacy white cloth cap—emerged from the big front doors, came to the front-porch steps where they waited, unfastened a velvet rope, and then said, "Welcome to the Westminster Mystery House! In a minute we'll all go inside the reception hall, and from there I'll be your guide through the public rooms. A few announcements: we ask you not to take flash pictures. There are ten places where you can get great photos without using a flash, and I'll point those out. Along the way I'll tell you some interesting stories, and I'll try to answer your questions.

"Keep together with your party! It can get dark and confusing, so hold hands if you don't want to get separated and perhaps remain trapped her for the rest of your life . . . and beyond! Experts estimate that at least a thousand ghosts reside in the Westminster House, but . . . there's always room for one more! Finally, as we go up to the reception desk, I'll ask each one of you to hold his or her own ticket. If you're ready for mystery and the unknown, you're ready for the Westminster Mystery House. Keep a sharp lookout for ghosts—our guests have seen them more than once. Now step inside—if you dare. Whatever you do, though, remember this: Show no fear!"

Dipper nearly jumped out of his skin, but ghosts had nothing to do with that. Eloise had reached to clasp his hand. Hers was a little clammy and sweaty. "Don't let go," she said, and he noticed that the skin of her arms had become prickled with goosebumps.

"I won't," he promised, risking a little hand squeeze, which she returned.

Ghosts? Hah. Bring 'em on!