Horror at the Haunted House by Peg Kehret Read Free Book Online Page A

language was hard to understand. Ellen hadn’t known the English language had changed so much. After an hour of straining her eyes and her brain, Ellen closed the first volume and paged through the others, feeling discouraged.
    She had hoped that the diaries would be personal accounts of life at Clayton House, perhaps written by Lydia herself. Instead, most of the diary entries were about the interior of the house and the furniture. All were signed by someone named Franklin Haller. Since Mr. Haller included details of cost and shipping arrangements for the furniture, the diaries read more like a designer’s ledger than a personal history. Ellen wished she had gone for a bike ride with Caitlin instead of coming here.
    “Did you find what you were looking for?” asked the woman who worked in the library.
    Ellen shook her head. “I wanted to read about Lydia Clayton,” she said.
    The woman’s eyes twinkled. “Do you like ghost stories?” she said, and then laughed at Ellen’s surprised look. “You aren’t the first to be fascinated by the reports of Lydia’s antics,” she said. She walked to a shelf of books, reached up, and removed one. Handing it to Ellen, she said, “Try this. It’s a short biography of Lydia Clayton and includes the stories about her ghost.”
    “Thank you.”
    As she read, Ellen was fascinated by the woman who had lived so long ago. Lydia was only sixteen in 1866 when she married Samuel Clayton and went to live in his grand mansion. A spoiled girl who was used to having her own way, she threw a fierce temper tantrum the first time her husband went to England on a business trip. To placate her, he brought her a gift—a set of creamy white dishes with a hand-painted green androse border design. The dishes were creamware, made by Wedgwood, and Lydia fell completely in love with them.
    After that, the only gift she ever wanted was more Wedgwood and she devoted much of her time to her collection. She studied the old pieces and cataloged her new ones. “Her Wedgwood,” according to the biographer, “was her passion and her delight.”
    Lydia and Samuel Clayton had a son they named Josiah, after Josiah Wedgwood. Lydia adored her baby and spent every waking moment with him. When little Josiah died of whooping cough at the age of four months, Lydia was inconsolable and never fully recovered from her grief. She became a recluse, spending all of her time with her beloved Wedgwood.
    A year after Josiah’s death, another son, Paul, was born. It was a difficult birth which left Lydia weak and ill. When Paul was only six weeks old, Lydia got pneumonia and died. On her death bed, she made her husband promise that he would always keep her Wedgwood.
    Ellen pitied Lydia Clayton. She lost her first baby and didn’t live to raise her second one. The unfortunate girl lived in the mansion only five years, and died when she was just twenty-one.
    Ellen continued to read. Two years after Lydia’s death, Samuel Clayton remarried. The union turned out to be an unhappy one. His new wife, Caroline, desiring to decorate the mansion to her own tastes, sold the Wedgwood collection, without her husband’s knowledge, to a wealthy land baron who intended to give it to his daughter as a dowry.
    When the land baron’s workman arrived to pack the Wedgwood, he was forced out of the room by what he described as “a cold hurricane of such force that I thought the roof would fly off the house.”
    Once outside, the weather was calm and sunny but the worker refused to go back inside and try again. Insisting that supernatural forces were at work in the Clayton mansion, he believed he had been given a clear mandate not to pack the Wedgwood.
    The land baron cancelled the deal, and Samuel Clayton found out what had happened. He forbade Caroline to sell the Wedgwood and he continued to add to the collection until his own death.
    The incident with the land baron’s workman was the first of what would be many reports of cold