revised 6/19/2024
The mid-August air still has the same sweaty, groggy feel as it did in early June. The heat makes me think of hot summers at my grandma's — nearly feral children running up and down the unpaved drive scraping our knees. I blink, suddenly overwhelmed with the memory.
There’s a long stone pathway to the front door. The entryway was just as I remembered— rustic red brick framing two large French doors. The doorbell was still the same cast-iron, still too heavy to knock. My arms were shaking by the second bang against the door. I was about to knock again, just as I heard someone shuffling on the other side.
Mama didn’t take well to unannounced visitors. I thought about calling, almost did, 30 minutes outside of city limits, but I couldn’t bring myself to call the landline. There was also a secret hint of embarrassment—I didn’t even know if I had the right phone number.
Mrs. Claudette opened the door. One of mama’s friends later on in life, in the neighborhood. “Call me Mrs. C,” she always said, always with a smile as bright as the sun beaming. Mama didn’t know many people from the area, uppity is what we called them growing up. Now she sits in her home— a manor really— with her friends and her assorted wines and her new husband.
The drive up to the manor on the ridge— gated off with metal fencing and a heaving feeling from the front gate to the door— was always the worst. Now that I was inside, I felt the same. Everything looked as it did the last time I was here, four years ago. Same eerie feeling looking at dark wood paneling and thick, heavy curtains cloaking off the evening light. Same dark rugs from the early 1900s, when people like us wouldn’t be able to walk freely in this manor, let alone own it. Yet here my mother is, in all her glory, now married into the family she used to work for. If it weren’t so damn convoluted, it might be considered ironic.
The historic manor was built on bloody, war-torn grounds. The Battle at Missionary Ridge is splayed throughout the neighborhood, through plaques and large monuments complete with statues of both Union and Confederate soldiers. A historic place on the ridge of a mountain. It’d be a beautiful and scenic place to retire, like in my mama’s case, if it weren’t so sinister.
I noticed long before mama eloped with Mr. Hutcheson, Will, I remembered a touch too late. His wife had died of cancer a decade before, and my daddy had been missing for almost four years. The detectives want to scrap the file altogether and say he ran away from us. From his family. But I know he's missing. He wouldn't have left us after the accident on Tibbs Rd, with the deputy officer and my little brother Kelan.
Mama didn't take Will's name, she went back to her maiden name because she knew it’d be easier for her family to understand. Mama and my daddy were together for 34 years, eight years longer than I've been alive. A long time for a marriage, a long time for a lot to happen. I never changed mine, kept the name Cook, same as my daddy. That’s how I found out the manor was haunted in the first place, I thought I heard someone calling my name down the hall as I was bringing in a box of old vinyl records my mama still bothered to own.
It was a cloudy day in the spring, it had rained so much the night before some of the roads up the ridge were blocked off from flooding. I was exhausted, drove six hours from North Carolina to the valley at the southern border of East Tennessee. Mama moved from North Carolina too, but she had already been at the manor, arranging boxes or perfumes or something in the suite on the other side of the home.
I was in the foyer, and there was a rustling sound to the right of me, and just outside the corner of my eye I thought I saw… something… shuffle past. That’s when I heard my name.
“Katherine A. Cook.”
The only person to ever call me by my name was Daddy. Always Katherine J, never my middle name, Arianna. My daddy always called me that. Why is my daddy calling my name at Mr. Hutcheson’s house?
I walk over to the stairs, a windy affair, complete with marble steps and deep maroon carpeting. I look around to see if anyone’s could’ve called my name in passing—
No one. Not a single soul. Was I imagining it?
After a beat, I begin to walk back to the doorway, but something stops me in my tracks. I felt a cold, icy breath just over my right shoulder, as if someone was standing next to me in a blizzard. I turn to see… no one, yet again.
I ran out of the house.
Now I only come to my mama’s new home once a year, to check on her and Will and show them my latest projects from the design company. She likes the company, and I think Will likes that I keep her busy for a day.
I, on the other hand, just try to stay as far away from the stairs as possible.
I never heard my name or felt a presence again, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something I’m missing whenever I go into the manor. It’s a vacant feeling, like if the Louvre was missing its artwork. There’s no life in that house, it feels devoid of feeling.
Maybe that’s why something haunts the place. To fill the void, to bring an air of feeling to a feeling-less home. My mama knows this is true, and I know she feels it, too. I know she’s heard the same voice, felt the same breath. She doesn’t say a word about it to me, though. Maybe she and Will discuss under the guise of the night, where things like ghosts and spirits are allowed to live and roam free.
