An Unattractive Vampire by Jim McDoniel Read Free Book Online Page A

Community College (formerly the Mather Institute of Greater Theology, the Northern Massachusetts College of Science and the Arts, the Mather Institute of Revivalist Theology, and the All-Faith Universal University of Greater Enlightenment and Understanding).
    After that initial owner, the house was left empty for nearly fifty years by the nearby Puritans, who were quite happy to leave well enough alone, thank you very much. Then, beginning in 1728, a series of poor Bostonians seeking cheap land occupied the building. This period, marked by a 1,000 percent increase in murders, suicides, and ritual cannibalism, lasted until 1734 when a family of Quakers moved in. Locals started calling the place cursed after that.
    The house saw action in two wars during the eighteenth century. During the French and Indian War, tragedy befell a small scout force of French soldiers who’d taken refuge there during a battle 7 with Shepherd’s Crook’s plucky native sons. The siege that followed lasted exactly one hour and mainly consisted of the local militia drinking tea outside while waiting for the screams to end. Just over a decade later, it was chosen by the British during the War of Independence as the site for the most disastrously unsuccessful battlefield hospital in the history of battlefields, hospitals, or staying alive. Doctors and historians still disagree as to why, despite above-average sanitation for the time, every injured soldier who’d been treated there, whether it be for a bullet hole or a dose of the clap, had died of acute anemia.
    For most of the next century, the house fell into abandonment and disrepair—which was just fine with the citizenry—with occasional bouts of habitation by Irish, German, and Italian immigrants—which was decidedly not. Fortunately, the stays of these foreigners were brief and punctuated by a night when each family ran screaming into the woods, never to be heard from again. This usually warranted a town-wide day of thanksgiving.
    Following the hurried departure of a Norwegian couple in 1855, a group of otherwise well-intentioned abolitionists thought to use the Pink House, at this point a fairly awful shade of ramshackle, as a shelter for runaway slaves. After a single night, the former slaves told the abolitionists exactly what they could do with this particular safe house. When pressed, the escapees spoke of queer dreams in which an old white devil drank from their very souls. The Underground Railroad gave Shepherd’s Crook a wide berth in the future. “We may be desperate,” said one of its conductors, “but we’re not crazy.”
    In 1891, a visiting Boston architect decided to restore the edifice to its former glory, despite the resounding disapproval of the locals. He would spend the next three years and much of his fortune on the renovation, after which he died drunk, destitute, and alone. Though, strictly speaking, this wasn’t the house’s fault. The rebuilt residence then fell into the hands of New York railroad magnate Gerard D. Huff, whose family traveled there seasonally well into the next century. With occultism all the rage among the upper crust, Mrs. Stephanie Huff would often host séances and Sabbaths for her friends and famous guests. At this time, however, the spirits were not very forthcoming. Even the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who could raise a spirit out of a snuffbox, was unable to find a single solitary soul. 8
    Over the next fifty years, very little of interest occurred in the dwelling, except for a dozen deaths by Spanish flu, the murder of an abusive husband, the last stand of a Boston gangster, a War of the Worlds–incited suicide pact, five dismembered pets, and twenty-seven missing children who had entered on a dare—the same as any old house. In fact, when the ’60s and ’70s came around with their own brands of occultism and spiritual interest, the hippies squatting in the building 9 were disappointed that nary a ghostly presence could