Ghost Story

The story jumps back to October of the year after Don’s uncle, Edward Wanderley, died, it is two weeks before the anniversary of his death. Edward’s friend, Frederick “Ricky” Hawthorne, makes his way across town on foot. He observes the changing of the leaves as fall begins to turn to winter. He ponders Milburn, the town in which he has lived for most of his life. He practices law with his friend Sears James.

Ricky sits in Sears’s library for their regular meeting of the Chowder Society. The Society consists of Ricky and Sears as well as their friends from youth, John Jaffrey, Lewis Benedikt. Edward Wanderley was the group’s fifth member. Edward died almost a year ago at John’s party in honor of Ann-Veronica Moore, an actor whom Edward was interviewing for a ghost-writing project. John, the town doctor, looks close to death, frail and thin skinned. Lewis, a handsome investor, is the youngest of the group. Lewis’s late wife gave the group its name, and Lewis is suspected to have killed her. As Ricky ruminates, John interrupts to ask if they should carry on with their meetings. Telling the group that he wants to stop sharing ghost stories, he says that he feels like Edward’s death was his fault. John wants to reach out to Don, Edward’s nephew. Don is a writer, and the group assumes he must have done research into the supernatural for his last novel, The Nightwatcher. The men vote, and all are in favor except Ricky, who argues that all change is bad. Then Ricky tells his story, but the narrator does not include it.

Two weeks later at John’s house for the next meeting of the Chowder Society marks the anniversary of Edward’s death. Sears tells the group about a time long ago when he accepted a teaching position in rural New York for two years. He boarded with a family and taught in a one room schoolhouse. Sears’s first day was marred by an aggressive boy, Fenny Bate, arguing that nothing exists outside of the United States. He fought a classmate over it, and Sears saw Fenny’s older brother watching Sears talk to Fenny from the road. Though Sears’s boarding family told him Fenny was bad, Sears became determined to save the town’s scapegoat. He confronted Fenny and his older sister, Constance, about their brother, saying that he could protect them. The children went pale and ran.

Sears confronted the community pastor about the Bate children, asking about the older brother and where they lived. The pastor first asked Sears to describe the older brother, Gregory. Once he did, the pastor told him that Gregory was abusive, both physically and sexually, to his siblings. Fenny and Constance knocked over Gregory’s ladder when he was repairing the schoolhouse, causing his death. Shocked, Sears set out to save Fenny from his brother’s ghost. He traveled through the woods in search of the Bate house, and when he found the children, he begged them to return to school so he could help them. They told him that Gregory did not want them to go.

The Bate children attended only sporadically after the confrontation. When they did come to school, they looked exhausted and emaciated. Their condition continued to deteriorate over the course of the year. Sears returned to the pastor’s office, asking for advice. When the pastor confessed that he moved from Germany to research the occult in the American Northeast, Sears told him the whole story, asking if it was possible to save Fenny and Constance. The pastor believed Sears, telling him that Gregory corrupted Fenny. Gregory was trying to pull Constance and Fenny into evil with him. Sears did not see the Bate children for some time, but he caught a glimpse of Gregory at a community event. When the Bate children returned to school, Sears questioned them about Gregory. The children told him they had not seen him, but that they had been “going over.” Sears convinced the children to stay at the schoolhouse for the night.

Fenny went into a trance, telling Sears that Gregory did not die, he went over. Sears continued to question him, trying to get him to confess to Gregory’s death. They were overcome with fear and they saw Gregory in the window. Fenny’s heart stopped. Sears ends his story, telling the Chowder Society that Constance went on to marry a local boy after the community took her in. Sears finished his teaching contract and enrolled in law school.

The narrative returns to Ricky’s perspective as he walks home from the meeting. It begins to snow as he ponders the terrible story he just heard. He wonders if he should have left town; he believes something is going to happen to the whole town. He feels cold eyes staring at him as he heads into his home, but shrugs the feelings off, changes clothes, and crawls into bed with his wife, Stella.

The narrative shifts to Anna Mostyn watching the snow fall outside of her hotel window while smoking a cigarette. She thinks about choosing tonight or tomorrow and settles on tonight.

Ricky has a terrible dream in which he is immobilized in a bed as he hears something come through the house looking for him. As the thing approaches, Ricky becomes convinced it is a spider with many legs. When his bedroom door opens, three shadows separate and Sears, Lewis, and John appear. They are all dead and he wakes screaming.

Stella calms him down, and after they have sex, and Ricky falls back asleep. They wake again around seven in the morning, and as they begin to talk, they are interrupted by a call from Sears saying he and Sears are needed at a client’s farm.

Meanwhile, Lewis runs the trails around his property. He ponders his affair with Stella and other married women of Milburn. He continues his run, his thoughts becoming more morbid. He thinks of his wife’s suicide and other dark hidden things, and he thinks he feels a watcher in the trees marking his progress. After he makes it home, he chugs a beer.

Ricky and Sears drive to their client’s farm. They trudge through the snow with the sheriff to four dead sheep in the field. The men find the sheep with slit throats, but there is no blood or no footprints in the snow. The client, Elmer, tells the men that he saw a figure watching him from the field. Shooing his five children and wife upstairs, he describes the man he saw. His description matches Sears’s story of Gregory Bate. The sheriff picks up on Ricky and Sears’s recognition of the description and invites them to the bar to discuss the matter further.

While Ricky and Sears are in the field with the sheriff, John wakes from his nightmare in the apartment above his office. He feels disconnected from the room and from Milly, his housekeeper and lover. The same echoes Sears experiences plague John; he felt something coming for him. He dresses quickly and blindly, grabbing whatever his hands find first. John goes down to his office to give himself a shot of insulin, followed by a shot of morphine, placing both needles in the bottom of the trashcan. He thinks about how no one knows he was diagnosed with diabetes or how he developed an addiction to morphine shortly after. He hears a voice calling him as he pulls on his coat and walks out the door. He looks across the street to Eva Galli’s old house and sees a face smiling down at him. He feels as if the house follows him as he rushes through the streets.

Townsfolk see John careen down the street in an odd assortment of clothing and they think he must be off to see a patient. One man, who sees John’s face in utter terror, John sees as a “dead girl ginning redly at him” (155). John tells his vision that he is on his way. He makes his way to a bridge, drawn by the voice in his head. He climbs a ladder to the top, losing a slipper, and cutting his foot on the journey. The cold sears him, but he keeps going until he reaches the top. He tells the voice he cannot walk off the bridge. He then sees Edward Wanderley dressed as he was at John’s party. Edward tells him to take the step and he does.

The timeline jumps back to one year before at the infamous party featuring the actress Ann-Veronica Moore. At the end of the Chowder Society’s golden age, Ricky and Stella ride to John’s house, discussing how strange it is for John to throw a party and for Milly to let him. Stella suspects that John drugs himself and thinks about his and Milly’s covert intimate relationship. It appears all of Milburn came to the party. The party’s guest of honor is Ann-Veronica Moore, the young actress whom Edward has been interviewing as a ghostwriter. When Stella and Ricky arrive, they are greeted by the owner of the house across the street who chats about how exciting it is to meet a movie star. The couple head into the main floor of the house to see the youth of Milburn dancing. Peter Barnes, a son of an acquaintance of Ricky, approaches them to complain about how he only got to see Ann-Veronica in passing.

Stella and Ricky head upstairs to the adult party. Stella expresses her amazement that Milly let all of this come to pass. John greets them as they make it to the top of the stairs where the rooms are crowded, and he says he feels younger than he has in 10 years, though Milly is not pleased. John tells them that Edward is entranced with the actress and expresses his sheer joy in the evening.

John conflates the fascination with Ms. Moore to an admiration of Milburn and an understanding of the evolution of the town. Ricky worries about John’s blood pressure as he has never seen his friend so excited. When Anne-Veronica Moore floats through the room, Ricky compares her to a golden age screen icon from the movie Pandora’s Box. The actress captivates John and Edward; Ricky comments that they have caught her like a virus.

As Edward anxiously searches for Anne-Veronica, Ricky leaves to find some peace in a quieter part of John’s house. After Ricky refuses Stella’s request to dance, she begins dancing with other men. John, looking for Edward, finds Ricky, who helps him open the door to the bedroom in which Edward and Anne-Veronica were last seen entering. Edward lay dead on the floor, his face distorted, “rigid muscles, mouth drawn open as if to yell, empty eyes. The face of a man being tortured, flayed alive” (176). John’s party ended, and no one was able to find Ann-Veronica.

As Ricky processes the night on the way home, he asks Stella what Ann-Veronica said to her during the party that made Stella’s expression seem surprised. Stella tells Ricky that Ann-Veronica told her that she had seen her husband, and that Ricky would make a good enemy. A week later, the first ghost story is told at the Chowder Society.