Dead Of Winter (1986-2026)

It had been a while since I'd been together with my whole family. But they were all gathered at my grandmother's house in Phoenixville, a whole crowd of them, even people I didn't really know.

I walked outside, onto the back steps. I looked around---It was night, and should have been darker than this. But I could see everything clearly; it was almost like daylight.

Then I looked up.

The moon was out. And then I saw it---Another moon. There were two. No---Four. I could see four moons rising in the sky.

What the hell?

Definitely something to be investigated. I went inside to find my outfit, but my pack wasn't anywhere. I started looking around, then asked one of my cousins. She hadn't seen it.

I went back outside. The four moons were still there. I needed to find my equipment, so I could figure out what was going on.

Then I opened my eyes. I rolled over in bed; it was almost seven. It was morning.

"The world is a terrible place," said Paul.

"All I said was you had to get ready for school," I said.

He walked past me in the hallway and into his room, and I followed. "No, it's terrible, Dad," he said,

I said down on his bench. I wasn't sure I'd yet had enough coffee for this conversation. "Parts of it," I admitted. "How so?"

"I just saw a video online about a mother who drowned her daughter," he said. "They had her son in court about it."

"That is sad," I said. "But it's important to remember that the world is full of good people, too. The main thing is to make sure you're one of the good ones, trying to help and make things better. It's a good world worth working on. I'll always believe that."

He nodded. "Thanks, Dad."
"Seven-thirty, buddy. Get yourself ready for school."

I was putting away the Christmas decorations when I discovered the trap door. This wasn't a completely unusual experience for me; I'd had things like it happen before. Taking decorations out of the front window, I looked up, and there it was, a trap door in the ceiling.

"Anybody realize there's a trap door up here?" I asked.

Kelli looked up from her desk. "I've noticed that before," she said. "Some kind of crawlspace, I think."

"Never noticed that before. It's one of the few crevices in the Hecht Building I haven't explored yet," I commented. "I'll have to check it out when I get the chance."

I took the boxes of decorations down to the basement, and spotted a stepladder propped in one alcove. I carried it upstairs.

"Screw it. I'm going up there now."

I climbed up the ladder and pushed open the trapdoor, looking in with a flashlight.

"Find any dead bodies?" asked Sarah.

"Tragically, no," I said. The whole thing was open across the whole front of the building, and empty. "It's a big space. I could stand up in here. And there's another crawlspace, above the crawlspace, going back over the office area. I never knew that before."

I climbed down and replaced the trapdoor. "Now I'm trying to think of what I can hide up there."

"Don't you already have a secret hideout?" asked Kelli.

"You can never have too many secret hideouts."

I went back into the back room and started printing another run of a rabbit-breeders magazine that we were going to be working on all day. As I noted down the date, I realized it was January 13th.

It was forty years since my suicide attempt. My first real adventure. My origin story.

Forty years ago, I'd made an attempt at suicide, explored what I'd thought was a haunted house, and wound up helping out an abused girl instead. I'd been sixteen years old. A lifetime ago.

I walked downstairs to my secret hideout. When I'd first started work, I'd explored the basement thoroughly, and discovered an alcove with a door and electricity in it. I'd moved in a desk, a chair, and then set up a computer, and now I had a fairly workable office down in the basement, where nobody else ever went.

It was haunted, too. The whole building was haunted by a ghost named Shirley, who'd been murdered in my basement during a robbery back in 1962. You get used to that.

I sat down at the computer. I often had messages from Jaydann or Chloe, and I took a few moments in my workday to teach them about historic research and paranormal investigation.

Jaydann was on. I'd been friends with her for like a month, and she'd become one of the people who kept me busy on slow days. There was a message from her.

I wonder if I can find anything on my uncle. He passed away when he was 12. His name was Jake Myers.

Ah, good. Something to keep me busy.

We can find this. Do you know if he's buried around here?

He's buried up at the cemetery by the high school.

Brown Cemetery? Or Sunnyside?

Like a three minute drive past the high school on the left.

That's Sunnyside. 

I’ve seen his grave one time in my life and I’ve never seen his obituary or like any newspaper thing. I don’t even know if my parents had any.

If it's there, we can find it.

Right there at the computer, I tried Findagrave. I came up with a couple of Jake Myers names in Sugar Valley, but nothing that matched what Jaydann was describing. Quite all right....That was only a beginning point.

I walked back upstairs and started another run of the rabbit maagazine. The boss was walking across the floor, and he asked,"Everything going okay?"

"Found a trap door up above the display window."

He grinned. "It's probably been twenty years since I've been up there."
"Just checked it out. We can hide stuff up there."

"Well. Maybe not."

With fifty more copies of the rabbit magazine printing off, I started looking for more information. It;s nice having a boss who doesn't really care what I'm doing all day. The best place to begin looking for Graves in Clinton County is the Genealogical Society's Cemetery records. And guess who printed them, and therefore has extra copies? That's right, the print ship in the Hecht Building.

Those files were kept on a high shelf. I climbed up---I was doing a lot of climbing today---And retrieved the box for the Bald Eagle Township book. Procedure was to keep an extra copy for ourselves in case we needed to refer to it later, but it worked well for my historic research, too. I took out the extra book and looked in the index.

Twi possibles in Sunnyside. The first one was on page twenty-five, and I checked there. It paid off instantly; the times fit. It was him.

I walked back down to message Jaydann.

Found him. James W. Myers, Junior, Sunnyside Cemetery. 1988-2000. Section 1, Row 9, Plot 8. Born March 5, 1988, died February 23, 2000. Picture of a little dog on his grave.

Hmm interesting!!! I’ll have to go up there again sometime.

It;s funny how, in every you g boy friendship, there seems to always be one smart kid and one daredevil idiot. Mine is the smart one, When I got home, Paul had his little friend Nathan over when I got home from work, and they were playing in his room when I checked in.

"Oh, hi, Dad. How was your day?"

"Pretty good. I printed up a rabbit magazine."
"Rabbit magazine?!"
"It's about rabbits; they don't read it."

"Oh. Cool. We were just throwing stuff out my window."
I decided I didn't want more details. "As you were," I said, and walked down to my office. he two of them reminded me of myself and my best friend Kline when I was a kid. We'd come up with stuff like that. Like Paul, I'd been the smart one.

I got on my laptop and messaged Jaydann.

Today was the forthieth anniversary of the day I tried to commit suicide as a teenager. You kept me busy and gave me something to work on, so thanks for that.

Oh my goodness .. 💔💔💔I’m so happy I gave you something to distract yourself. I’m so sorry you had to go through something that painful … 😓

Suicide is always hard on everyone. I’m glad you’re still here ❤️ you are valued !

"Goodnight, little man. I'll see you in the morning."

I kissed Paul on the forehead and left the bedroom. With everyone in bed, I got my KII meter out and took it downstairs. Just like work, my house is haunted. Seventeen-year-old Ida Yost had killed herself on the back porch in 1905. Even for a paranormal investigator, I spent an unbelievable amount of time hanging around haunted places.

I walked around the house a bit, getting nothing. In my place, the haunting tends to come in waves. Sometimes it will be active as hell, and then a couple of weeks ago by without my remembering that there's a ghost here. I sat down on the couch, and it spiked to red. I was interested for a moment, until I realized it was reading the nearby space heater. I'd have to tell the team about that.

I moved it over to the other side of the couch, where it calmed down.

"Hey, Ida," I said softly. Sometimes I do this, when everyone else is in bed. "How you doing? It's my anniversary. Forty years ago today, I tried to commit suicide."

Nothing on the KII. Well, hell. It was my anniversary, not hers.

"I think about it sometimes. You and I have a lot in common. I was sixteen when I tried, just one year younger than you. And mine was 1986; we were eighty-one years apart."

Butters came and settled down on the couch beside me.

"Hope you're doing well, Ida. Hope you're okay."

Just a little flicker on the meter. And then it stopped.

I went and got a snack, then sat back down to relax a bit before I went to sleep. You know what they say. It's the little things that make a haunted house into a haunted home.