Halleran House

Halleran House

My hands have gone numb, so I pull on gloves. A portable heater sits beside me in the van, but I can’t indulge creature comforts. We need all the juice stored in that lithium pack. Given the remoteness of our location, no alternate power sources were available, and this is our most ambitious ghost shoot yet. Outside, in the light of a full moon, snow begins to fall.

Despite Jack’s location – deep inside the Halleran mansion – his helmet cam signal is plenty strong. Bits of fuzz appear on the main monitor, but I’m still recording vodcast-worthy footage. Hours earlier, I placed battery powered LED floods throughout the house. They switched on, automatically, at dusk, to light Jack’s way.

“I’m about to enter the room where the first murder occurred – that of Lillian Halleran. Her husband Peter stabbed her with a butcher knife, then dismembered her body and roasted her left leg for dinner.”

Jack adds just the right trepidation to his voice. A suitable pause between phrases. That deepening of his voice as he “gets visceral” with his descriptions. Frequent dry swallows, followed by a short gasp for air. This is why our vodcast channel, Paranormal Adventures, has 240,000+ subscribers. Jack is a convincing actor and a consummate performer.

“Peter Halleran claimed that tall, huge-eyed demons told him to kill her. That their hypnotic powers, not his own evil nature, was behind the heinous acts of January 3rd, 1910.”

As it happens, today is January 3rd, chosen for dramatic effect.

Every open surface in the mansion is covered with graffiti. I could try using AI to remove it, but Jack likes the real-world, gritty look for our shoot locations. Countless gawkers, ghost hunters, psychics have been here. Everyone claimed to feel some oppressive fear the moment they passed through the front door, but no definitive paranormal events have ever been recorded – not in the 115 years since Halleran’s evil deeds.

But leave it to Jack. With his flair for the dramatic, we’ll create the most unsettling, terrifying video in England’s most infamous haunted house.

Jack is the celebrity, and I’m the flunky tech guy, working hard behind the scenes to help Jack breathe life into every staged paranormal experience we record.

Any second now, according to the script, Jack will step into the parlor entrance and start some heavy breathing, then describe breaking out into a cold sweat. First, however, I tweak several recording settings on the PC.

“Here goes,” he says. He sucks in a breath, takes several steps to his left. The view is anything but frightening – a large empty room with a tattered wing back chair sitting near a far window. Through the night vision camera, everything appears in shades of lime green. Later, in my basement studio – with a large computer desk, three PC’s, and a host of editing and CGI generation software, I’ll dub in surreal veils of ectoplasmic light, floating objects, or a ghoulish face glowing just above the fireplace. Followed by the sound effects, of course.

“God – my skin is simply crawling right now. Just broke out into a cold sweat. I feel a… presence. It weighs upon me. Fills me with a powerful sense of sorrow and dread.”

A brief pause, as he purposely jostles the helmet cam.

“Wait. what’s that?”

He sniffs loudly several times.

“What’s that smell?”

He sniffs again.

“Dear God, it’s blood! I’m smelling fresh blood!’

Here, I’ll insert a flourish of dramatic royalty-free music in post-edit.

Despite our vodcast’s following, I’m anything but a household name. Jack Donnergan – my employer – he’s the famous one. In fact, he’s become a veritable vodcast icon. His trust fund kick-started our venture– for travel, equipment, and my salary. Now, given our vodcast’s incredible success, he’s making a high six figure income, with me in the upper fives. I have to say, my job’s far more interesting than being a systems administrator in some cookie-cutter office environment.

I majored in computer science in college, and later taught myself video recording, as well as audio and video editing, including some pretty snazzy CGI effects. That’s my favorite part – my artistry – of turning a mundane monochrome video into a polished paranormal film segment. One that induces many a dark dream in the minds of our fan base.

A loud thud on the side of the van makes me jump. It happens again – so hard the van rocks to one side. I flip on the van’s external cameras. Nothing but swirling snow. My heart begins to race.

Did pranksters followed us here? To cause mischief and ruin our shoot? I switch on the external heat signature camera. If anyone is nearby, their bodies will glow brightly in shades of red, orange, and yellow. Nothing. Only an ice-cold forest, the swaying trees rendered in deep shades of blue.

Jack has climbed to the second floor hallway, on his way to young daughter Millie’s bedroom, where Peter continued his murderous rampage. Wait a minute. What the hell…

In an open doorway, ahead of Jack and on his right, stands some hideous creature. It’s impossibly tall and thin. Long, spidery arms with slender-fingered hands dangle at its sides. A striped smock hangs loosely on the creature’s frame. Its immense, wrinkled head floats from the doorway and into the camera’s view. Long, thin tufts of hair waft about in a draft. A wide, thin-lipped smile. Bubble-shaped eyes with a thousand tiny lenses. Like… insect eyes…

I slam my fist down on the back-channel mic button, to reach Jack’s earphone.

“Jack, something on your right! In that doorway!”

I can’t see myself in a mirror, but I feel the color draining from my face, as if all the blood is retreating to my feet.

“Millie – sweet innocent Millie – lies asleep in her bed, completely unaware of her father’s madness.”

Then Jack gives me our safety signal – briefly clearing his throat, followed immediately by by a sniff. He pauses in the doorway where that hideous thing arches over him, its huge insect eyes hovering far above Jack’s head and beyond the camera’s view.

“I have to pause here, to fight off a rising sense of dread as I approach the door, that door, at the end of the hall.”

Jack looks briefly to his right, but shows no reaction. Holy shit– he’s staring straight into the faded stripes of that thing's stained, wrinkled smock. What the fuck is he doing? Then I realize – he can’t see the bloody thing. Only the night vision camera is picking it up. Jack’s head swings back to the hallway, Millie’s door ten feet away.

“But now… now, I must go on.”

As Jack resumes his slow pace down the hallway, I spy the white binder resting on a stool. It’s full of background materials we assembled on the Halleran House murders, with newspaper clippings, police reports, photos of the scene taken over a century ago. I flip frantically through, until one page freezes me in terror – a drawing Jack made, while he sat inside a hastily improvised jail cell in a mental asylum. It was Jack’s best rendering of the creatures that “made him do it.” My blood runs ice cold. My whole body stiffens, then begins to shake. The demonic entity in that sketch. It’s now standing just several feet from Jack.

I abandon my console, the video system set to auto record, grab my night vision goggles, and plunge into the night...

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My breath condenses in puffs as I rush through the mansion’s maze of tall, narrow hallways. I bound up the creaking, dust-covered grand staircase to the second floor. Thus far, thank God, I’ve seen nothing unusual through my goggles. I pause at the top of the stairs and listen. I can hear Jack’s distant, muffled words.

I run through the hallway, my creaking footfalls on the splintered hardwood resounding in my ears. Around the next corner, I see Jack, a foot away from Millie’s closed bedroom door. I skid to a stop and watch in horror. Jack has turned to face me, that ghostly monster looming at his side. It bends down low, its face near Jack’s left ear, its spidery hands cupped around its mouth, as if it’s whispering secrets.

Briefly, I pull up my goggles and see only Jack, standing in the illumination of the LED floods perched on tripods to my left and right. I lower the goggles and watch as the creature regains its full height and turns its hideous, misshapen head. It watches me.

“Jack, don’t listen to it! Don’t listen to that fucking thing!”

Jack stands stock still, his face blank, his vacant stare aimed at me. While I continue shouting, he looks to his right, then reaches toward the wall where a long, thin piece of old lumber leans against the wallpaper. It’s about four feet long and two inches square. He takes hold of it it with agonizing slowness, hefts it in both hands, then swivels his gaze back to me, in a jerky, robotic movement.

He takes a step toward me. Pauses. Another step. The house, shifts, creaks around me in the rising wind. Goosebumps rise on my arms, and my left side suddenly feels ice cold. I snap my head toward the sensation, and there – a second creature. It’s bent low, cupping its hands around its wide, sharp toothed mouth. I smell a rotten stench, feel its cold outbreath on my skin.

No time to think. Turn and run – run as fast as I can. I practically tumble down the stairs. Then I’m back out in the storm, shutters on the old house banging behind me in the wind. I reach the van, climb into the driver’s seat, and thank God it starts on the first try.

The wheels spin in the snow, as one of the creatures emerges onto the front porch. I lighten my foot on the accelerator, and at long last the treads grab. I drive in a wide circle, and, just before leaving Halleran House, see Jack emerge from the house. The creature raises a spidery hand and points at me, its long, slender index finger ending with a sharp talon-like spine.

Jack suddenly takes off, dashes toward me. I speed up, drive down the narrow, rutted access road. Jack falls farther behind me in his mad, mindless sprint, the wood plank still in hand.

After that, I don’t look back…