Samantha deleted the email without reading it. The police had cleared Matthew of connection to Sylvia Rowan’s disappearance. The young woman had shifted into another identity, was working on destroying someone else’s life, they’d all surmised.
“It’s hard to catch a good con artist. Even their crimes are very slippery, layered,” the police detective on the case had told her. “They don’t take, rob, or steal as much as they convince people to give, often by giving people what they want first. They’re good at slipping away when they’ve gotten all they can. We may never find Sylvia Rowan, or whatever her name really is.”
It was one of the things you learned the hard way in life. Sometimes bad people got away with it. For a moment, curiosity almost got the better of her, and she thought to fish it from the trash. But no. If that detective wanted more from them, let him come looking. She deleted it from the trash file too. The email disappeared with the little electronic sound of paper being crunched.
She opened the web browser and stared at the blinking cursor.
What did she want to know? She didn’t even know where to start. The missing girl? Mason Brandt? The abandoned structure supposedly on the Merle property? All things her husband had kept from her.
She took a breath and started with Amelia March. She found a smattering of articles about the girl, her disappearance, the subsequent search, the final conclusion of the police that she ran away.
Samantha scrolled through images—the beautiful young Avery and Amelia, stunning, dark-haired twins. There was an image of Mason Brandt—a painfully thin, sad-eyed young man with dark curls—an article about his being questioned as a suspect. She was down the rabbit hole then. His father’s suspicious death—a fall from the roof that might have been a push, Mason’s history of violence and rages. Now, apparently, Mason Brandt was a pastor at a Unitarian church. The man she saw on the church website didn’t resemble the boy, except for those very sad eyes.
She sat a moment, looking out the window. A woman pushed a baby past in a stroller; a young man chatted on a cell phone, sitting on a park bench.
Finally she entered “Merle House.”
There was very little—articles about Justice Merle, Matthew’s grandfather; his philanthropy and contributions to the town, like the school, and firehouse, the restoration of city hall; about Merle Construction, sold decades ago when the old man retired. There was a picture of the house, by far the grandest in the area, in the local paper, accompanying a story about its renovation. The original house was built in the forties, restored, updated, and expanded by Justice Merle in the eighties. But the land, more than a hundred acres, had been in the family for generations.
Finally, she reread Old Man Merle’s obituary, which Matthew had written.
Samantha kept scrolling, thinking she’d reached the end of the line. Then she entered “Havenwood.” She clicked through the listings: a rehabilitation center in California, a retirement community in Pennsylvania, a wellness retreat in Sedona. Honestly, it didn’t seem possible that there was anything like that out behind the house. It sounded like an urban legend, a childish myth—just like the Dark Man. Then as she was about to click off, something down at the bottom of the third page caught her eye. A blog called This Haunted Land, written by a self-described “haunted historian,” Clay Ritter.
Samantha clicked and started reading.
When most people think of hauntings, they think of dwellings—creaking doors, cold spots, moaning in the night, pacing footsteps, shades disappearing around corners. But often it’s the acres upon which the dwelling are built that are seeking to make themselves known. The earth beneath our feet can hold dark, trapped energies, and like any living organism, it has memories, can be traumatized and damaged. Here is a list of the most haunted land in America.
Samantha scrolled through a list of burial grounds and battlefields, prisons and insane asylums and poison gardens, and the stories of hauntings there—the usual ghostly fare. All creepy, but nothing she hadn’t read before, and nothing to do with her search.
Then finally she arrived at Havenwood Reform School.
She clicked on the aerial photograph.
Oh my God, she thought. It’s right there, not a mile from Merle House. She stared at the image of the large white structure with a clay-tile roof, surrounded completely by trees, then started to read.
There are no roads to Havenwood Reform School. After the school’s closure, roads to the institution were torn up and the forest all around it was allowed to grow back, with the help of some reforestation. Built in the late 1930s, Havenwood was considered a last chance for troubled and criminal young people. Unfortunately, many families who sent their children there never saw them again. Some were declared runaways, others suicides. It wasn’t until 1947 that an investigation was opened into the actions of the school’s headmaster, Dr. Archibald Arkmann, and his terrible sadism was revealed.
As the investigation unfolded, stories of his terrible deeds were revealed by staff and the remaining children, and bodies of alleged runaways—identified by personal items—were found buried on the grounds. Rather than face his fate, Dr. Arkmann committed suicide in his study at home.
The staff and children at the school referred to him as the Dark Man, a play on his name, the black suit he always wore, and the shadow of his form in the doorway when he came for you. Dr. Arkmann would apparently grant favors to a child—an extra portion of food, a longer recess in the yard, access to letters from home—then come for that child in the night, asking for payment on the favor. He
