Once, long and far in the past, there was a very old and very large home that belonged to an even older and larger family. No one kept the home anymore; the last resident was only a fuzzy-edged memory, and he had been too lazy or too cowardly to leave it to any of his children, or his dozens of cousins or hundreds of grandchildren. After a while the servants grew old and died as well, and the home was left to fall into debris. 

Don’t for a minute think that means the crumbling mansion was empty, however. Since no one owned it, everyone did. When a family member was traveling through, they made themselves at home. Newlyweds used to honeymoon there, and then when they had a spat after three babies had come along one of them might run off to stay there until they had been forgiven. Teenagers ran there when they ran away, and the black sheep branch of the family hid out and hid their loot in the labrynthal halls. As the stone walls cracked and the wooden doors rotted, the family similarly fell from riches. Then whole groups moved in because they had lost their land or their peasants had revolted.

You’d think it would have been like one big happy constant family reunion, but of course you would be wrong again. In the beginning the different factions were angry with each other, each naturally feeling that the home should have been theirs; after centuries had rolled over the land, almost no one knew anyone else at all. And so the dank, filthy halls were silent; and there were so many of them, and they were so tangled, that you could live in the house for weeks and never see any of the dozen other people also there at that time. 

It was at this juncture that those who stayed in the home began to cut their visits short, and many never returned again. There were whispered rumors, vague as the mist at first, of a spirit who roamed the halls at night. Some said she whispered premonitions of tragedy, while others claimed she gazed at you with her soulful eyes until your own heart broke. But between you and I, no one could have actually seen her; for the halls of the old mansion were too dim to make out your own fingers, even at noon on the longest day. And the one thing the rumors all agreed upon was that the spirit walked at night. 

To be continued…