Date Night in the Witch House
A Cthulhu Mythos story set in Arkham, MA 2014
Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” is one of my favorite stand alone stories that draws in quintessential New England folklore and combines it with Cthulhu Mythos elements. In my opinion, the best adaptation of the story has been the Howard Phillips Lovecraft Historical Society’s Dreams in the Witch House Rock Opera, which adapts direct passages down to the phrasing into a full album of awesome songs. When thinking about how the Cthulhu Mythos can be brought into the modern day, especially imagining how fictional towns like Arkham, Massachusetts looks in the 2010s, I like to imagine how the events of Lovecraft’s stories had a bearing on the communities they took place within. Certainly the forces of the Mythos are meant to remain hidden and beyond comprehension, but the lore of something like the Witch House would definitely become something Arkham’s tourism industry might try to capitalize on. My own alma mater was considered the third most haunted campus in the United States, so it is not too difficult to imagine Miskatonic University also using it as a point of attraction for students interested in the occult.
This story features characters from a longer Mythos-related piece I worked on back in 2020. I hope to commit more time to working on that at some point, but think of this month’s yarn as a “prequel” of sorts to introduce them before the events of the longer work.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket. It cut through the numbness brought on by the beer coursing through my veins and skull. I chugged the rest of the can in my hand and slammed it on the pong table.
“I’ll be back, gents,” I said to my brothers, my voice a dull note in the roar of the party rocking the Upsilon Sigma Theta frat house.
“Don’t leave me here, Obi!” Vance tugged at my sleeve. He lay flat across one of the ratty leather sofas. A pair of sorority girls stood by his feet, undoing his shoelaces.
I smirked, patted his hands as I slipped out of his grasp, and said, “I think you’re gonna be fine.”
One of the girls pulled off his shoe and started tickling his sole. “More than fine,” I added. I deftly navigated through the crowd clogging up the hallway to the kitchen. It had a side door leading to a spare lot adjacent to the frat house. Stepping outside, I took a draught of the Arkham night air, laced with the freshness of a budding spring—and the skunky smell of weed—before pulling out my cellphone. It had stopped buzzing, and when I tapped on the power button I cringed at the line of missed calls, all from the same person: Bee.
Cursing, I unlocked my phone and returned the call. I paced down the porch steps and through the gravel lot as it rang. Finally, it ceased, and the husky, Boston-accented voice of my girlfriend came from the other end. “Obadiah Harrow,” she intoned with the same disappointment as a mother brewing up a fierce talking-to.
“Hey, sweetie,” I replied, leaning hard on the social lubricant of the booze.
“Don’t ‘Hey, sweetie’ me.”
“Cutie pie.”
“Try again.”
“Sugar-lips?”
“Call me that again and we’re breaking up.”
“Okay, okay!” Her threat snapped me out of the wise-Alec attitude, making me realize why she had called so many times. “Beatrix, I’m so sorry I missed the study-date. The guys just had a bunch of people come in literally as I was walking out the door.”
Beatrix huffed. “You could’ve just ignored them.”
“They lured me with the Yuenglings, so call me Anakin Skywalker. Which doesn’t really make sense since I’m Obi—”
“Are you serious right now?” Beatrix’s voice stabbed at my ear. “This math final has me at the brink of tears! The least you could do is show up so I’m not suffering alone!”
I chewed my lip, taking a deep breath. “I’m sorry. How can I make this up?” I walked around the frat house to the quieter, darker side by Pickman St. I could see the buildings and lights from the Miskatonic campus over the ancient gambrel rooves of residential dwellings.
Beatrix named her terms: “Help me ace this final for one. Second, take me somewhere nice.”
“Done,” I said. “I will bring index cards, sharpies, highlighters, and bag a nerd from Chi Theta Lambda…” Beatrix giggled. “And we’ll go to Giruman’s and hit their all-you-can-eat sushi—”
“I wanna do something new. Something that doesn’t involve food. Something that’s good for couple stuff.”
I chewed my lower lip and sucked in a few breaths, trying to rack my brain for ideas. Since we started dating around Halloween the semester before, the most I had really done for dates was take Beatrix to the local food joints and walking trails around Arkham—the latter we put on a pause once the snows rolled in. Unless you were into partying with the frats, occult stuff, or the odd hiking trail around the city there wasn’t a whole lot to do. I realized I had been walking away from the frat house, towards the intersection of Garrison and Pickman.
“Well?”
Beatrix’s voice snapped me out of my unproductive mind-wandering, and I answered with a prolonged, “Ah…”
“Any day now.”
I paused at the corner of Pickman. “I don’t know, hike to the old Gardner farm?”
“Eww, everything’s dead there. Not really romantic.”
“Okay, what about…” I looked around, seeing only a strip of businesses closed for the evening and a few houses packed together. My eyes landed on a building at the other side of the street. It stuck out like a wart with its crooked, ancient New England architecture and Halloween-like advertising—the Witch House. It was one of Arkham’s bigger tourist attractions, especially during the summer and Halloween. I had never been inside, and I knew Beatrix hadn’t either, but she had recently gotten hooked on a ghost-hunting show based out of Arkham I couldn’t recall the name of but knew the acronym for the team spelled out something juvenile.
“What about the Witch House?” I asked, jaywalking towards the building.
“The Witch House?” Beatrix echoed.
“Yeah, we can go on the midnight tour.”
“A bit early for Halloween stuff, isn’t it?”
“Nah, this is the best time.” I stepped onto the curb and scrutinized the sandwich board sign advertising a Walpurgis Night tour on April 30th. “We get to avoid the tourists and they’ve got some kind of special tour going on Wednesday for…” My jaw went weak as I looked at the price of tickets—I had spent the last of my pocket change on beer and garlic bread, Beatrix’s favorite snack.
Beatrix sighed. “Okay, sounds like it could be fun. I don’t think they covered it on my show yet; they’re still working on their La Llorona episode.”
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing the back of my head. “You get to investigate it before them.”
“You’ll get the tickets?”
I gulped. “You bet.”
“All right!” Beatrix’s voice squeaked—it usually did when she was happy. “It’s a date! Also, Heather and Maddie are doing an all-nighter with the Sigma Nu Rho girls if you want to come over right now. I need a study break.”
I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. “Be there in fifteen?”
“Sounds good! Love you!”
“You too.” I hung up, eyes still on the sandwich board. I dialed another number and waited for it to pick up. “Hey, dad?” I asked once it did. “I need to borrow eighty dollars—it’s about a woman.”
***
Wednesday evening, the last night of April, rolled in on frigid wings. The winds howled through the streets and alleys, carrying distant echoes of house parties celebrating another end of the year at Miskatonic. I swung by Beatrix’s dorm around 11 o’clock and walked with her across Lich St. and down Parsonage. She wore a frumpy purple sweater and yoga pants. Her face had mouse-like features—a prominent nose and ears with a small chin beneath her thin, smiling lips. She had her dark hair in a ponytail; her big brown eyes stole glances at me as we walked in silence to the Witch House.
A few other patrons were stepping inside as we approached. One older gent held open the door for us. He had a greying Stan Lee moustache and wore a full get-up that looked like an Inspector Gadget costume. He smiled at us and gestured inside with his free hand.
“Thank you,” Beatrix said. I simply nodded as I stepped in behind her.
We gathered with the other tour-goers in a dim foyer. Dark oak planks creaked under our feet as we milled about for space. Electric gas lamps on the walls cast a deep orange glow on the green wallpaper with yellow flower-like designs. A display case stood against the far wall—I initially couldn’t see inside it after stepping in. A set of open doors on the lefthand side led into a small giftshop, its cash register manned by a girl wearing a Miskatonic University sweater flipping through a binder lined with colored sticky notes. A woman, likely in her thirties, dressed in a black puritanical gown stood beside a flight of stairs across from the entrance, lacquered a darker shade than the floor. She smiled and nodded to each of the guests as we filed in and waited for her cue to begin the tour.
After another young couple walked in after me, Beatrix, and the older guy, the woman counted quietly as her eyes flicked about the crowd, then she smiled. “Okay, this should be everyone!” she said, excitement rising. “Good evening, everyone and thank you all for coming here for this special Walpurgis Night tour at the Arkham Witch House! I’m Hazel and will be your guide through this witch-haunted night. Before we begin, I’d like to let everyone know that since this is the midnight tour we’ll be going into some of the more gruesome facts about this house and its history that most of our younger guests don’t get to hear.”
I nudged Beatrix, leaned down, and whispered to her, “Aren’t you glad we didn’t get sushi?”
She snickered and shushed me with a peck on the lips.
Hazel entered her spiel about the house: “So this building is actually a reconstruction of the original ‘Witch House’, which was demolished in March of 1931—”
The older man who had entered behind us raised his hand, cutting Hazel short. She pointed to him and nodded. “That was due to the discovery of some peculiar bones, no?”
Hazel smiled politely. “We’ll be getting to that, but what the workers found behind the walls and under the floorboards certainly made destroying the old house seem favorable to Arkham residents.” She gestured to an oil painting on the wall behind her, depicting a rendition of the Witch House surrounded by older buildings, withered trees, and a dirt road. “The original house was built in the early 17th century shortly after Arkham itself was established. It’s thanks to written records and a few police photographs from the 1900s that the Arkham Historical Society was able to reconstruct this building. The very first occupant was none other than the alleged witch Keziah Mason, an English colonist who had no known or recorded family members in the Old Country or the Colonies. A few accounts from the time speak of her sneaking out into the woods at dusk, strange lights shining from the attic windows, and apparitions of her appearing before townsfolk in the middle of the night. Arkham fell under investigation during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, and Mason was obviously tried and convicted of witchcraft by Judge John Hathorne, the ancestor of writer Nathaniel Hawthorne for any of our New England literature fans…”
Some of the older guests nodded and made mildly intrigued murmurs. The other couple glanced around the room, bored expressions growing on their faces.
“After she was jailed and sentenced to death by hanging, she disappeared the night before her execution. Cotton Mather described her cell as having bizarre geometric designs scribed in what could have been blood on the stone walls.
“Even after Mason’s disappearance, the locals still feared the reputation of her old house. It changed owners many times over the years and sat vacant for most of the 19th century until it was purchased by a Polish immigrant in 1889 and restored as a boarding house. Most of the renters included itinerant workers, a few novelists, and a handful of Miskatonic University students—do we have any current students with us tonight?”
Beatrix and I and the other couple raised our hands.
“Great!” Hazel said, smiling. “Thank you all so much for coming! And in the middle of finals too! What are you all studying?”
“Business,” murmured the guy.
“Sociology and Psychology,” said the girl, shaking back her blonde hair. “Double major.”
“Geology,” Beatrix answered. She wasn’t a whiz at math but she knew rocks better than her own parents’ birthdays.
“Archeology,” I said. “Concentration in Egyptian studies.”
“Wow, we’ve got a good mix here.” Hazel bobbed her head as she surveyed our faces. “Anyway, have any of you heard of the most famous story involving the Witch House? It comes from a Miskatonic student.”
I had heard varied accounts about the Witch House from students, professors, and local Arkhamites since I enrolled at Miskatonic the year before. Everyone either had their own take or heard it from a friend-of-a-friend, but I never gave it much thought. The campus bookstore had stocked some copies of Ghost Stories of Arkham, which I think featured it, but again, never read it—I was too busy learning my frat’s traditions to focus on the town’s.
Each of us students shook our heads at Hazel’s question. “As the story goes, Frank Elwood and his friend Walter Gilman rented rooms in the original Witch House around 1927. Gilman was a mathematics student but also had a great interest in folklore. Elwood claimed his friend chose the Witch House specifically for its history, in addition to the rent being cheap by Massachusetts standards.”
A light chuckle rippled through the crowd.
“Soon after moving into the attic room, where Mason was thought to have conducted many of her occult rituals, Gilman had increasingly troubling dreams that affected his ability to study at Miskatonic. There were some nights where Elwood and his neighbors reported screaming coming from Gilman’s room, but when they investigated he was nowhere to be found. He would return, sometimes days later, but had no rational explanation for where he had gone.
“Things came to a head when on this very night in 1928, Gilman allegedly had a dream where he observed a dark Walpurgis Night ritual on Meadow Hill outside of town. He saw Keziah Mason and her rat-like familiar preparing to sacrifice a newborn baby, but managed to strangle Mason with a silver crucifix.”
A middle-aged woman in the crowd with grey-streaked black hair raised her hand, a sleeve of jewelry and beads jangling on her arm. She started speaking before Hazel called on her: “Walpurgis Night rituals aren’t actually so violent. Normally they’re rites to promote fertility and a good summer.” She surveyed the crowd with a pleased look on her face.
“I’m sorry,” Hazel said, “is there a question in there?”
“I was just providing some clarification.” The woman folded her arms over her chest and frowned.
Hazel nodded. “I see. Well, before I get to the gruesome end of Gilman’s story, why don’t we make our way upstairs?”
The crowd murmured in agreement and shuffled behind Hazel as she made her way up the stairs. Bee and I were towards the back along with the older gent. Before we even got on the creaking steps, he struck up a conversation with us.
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said in a low voice.
The both of us paused and looked at him. “Who?” Beatrix asked.
The gent pointed up towards the woman who made the Walpurgis Night comment. “She’s going off that hippy Salem wiccan logic,” he explained. “Sure, they aren’t sacrificing babies or anything, but back in the day, in the witch-haunted Alps of the Old Country, they did some things I wouldn’t dare say in the polite company of a lady.”
Beatrix furrowed her brow. “Uh-huh.”
“Thanks for the tip,” I said, making to mount the stairs.
He thrust his hand in front of me before I could move another inch, a big smile crossing his face. “Maximillian Romanowski, occultist and author from Vermont.”
I shook his hand and introduced myself, “Obadiah Harrow.”
“A strong Puritan name,” he commented, not letting go of my hand. “Is your family from the old stock? Been here since the Mayflower?”
“Even earlier,” I said, trying to break from his grip.
“You know, I took a few classes at Miskatonic,” Maximillian prattled on, “really just audited a few lectures. Been trying to get permission to look at the Necronomicon, but it’s tough when you haven’t donated a zillion dollars to the university.”
“Yeah,” I said, “ah, looks like we’re getting left behind.”
“Oh right!” Maximillian let go finally and tipped his hat. “After you two.”
Beatrix and I hurried up the stairs and assimilated with the crowd on the second floor landing. Several doors in the wall were open to reveal rooms filled with displays of wax figures in clothing from different eras stretching as far back as the early colonial period. Each of the mannequins were in different poses of terror or prayer.
Hazel gestured towards the exhibits as the group settled on the landing. “Here we have some examples of the people who lived in the Witch House following Keziah Mason’s disappearance. Although most of the major ‘spiritual activity’ took place in the attic room, there were reported cases of hauntings on other floors of the building. Some occupants described hearing crying children, seeing apparitions of Mason, and witnessing a large, rat-like creature with a human face scurrying in and out of the walls.”
She stepped off to the side, clearing the path to the nearest door. “This is one of our more interactive exhibits. Feel free to step inside the room and take a look at some of the furniture and art pieces the historical society recovered and donated, take as many pictures as you’d like, but please refrain from touching the mannequins.”
Beatrix and I milled through the rooms, giggling at some of the expressions on the mannequins. I glanced around at a few of the plaques on the walls or in front of some furniture or art pieces describing the provenance of each one. In one of the rooms furthest from the stairs, Beatrix and I found ourselves alone in it. The mannequin in this one depicted a middle-aged man in a sleeping gown laid across an old wood-framed bed. His eyes were open and his mouth contorted in an expression of terror. His gaze locked upon another mannequin at the foot of the bed, this one having an immense amount of detail on it—the figure resembled an old woman dressed in heavy black robes. She grinned at the man in the bed, hunched over with eyes locked on his.
“Whoa,” Beatrix said, eying the witch figure. “Here, let’s get a pic.” She brought me right in front of the old woman and pulled up the camera app on her phone. We sidled up to each other, cheeks touching with the old hag’s face over my shoulder. As Beatrix took the photo, a young woman’s scream ripped down the hall. We broke out of our pose and rushed out of the room. Most of the other guests congregated around the threshold on the opposite side of the landing as the two other Miskatonic students rushed out. The girl flapped her hands in distress as she staggered over to the stairs. Her boyfriend followed, now seeming somewhat more alert than he had been.
“A rat! A rat!” she shouted, pointed back at the room. “It was massive.”
Hazel approached her. “Oh my gosh. Er, everyone please stay out of there. We’ll close the room and have pest control handle it in the morning.”
One of the guests, an older burly guy, rolled up the sleeves on his fleece jacket. “Just get me a sock and a hammer and I’ll take care of it.” He chuckled as he moved towards the threshold.
“Please, sir,” Hazel said, firmly. “The museum will handle it.” She stepped through the crowd, pulled the door shut, and locked it with a key. “Let’s move upstairs,” she announced.
We followed her up the next set of stairs. The other couple from Miskatonic hung back as the boyfriend consoled the young woman. We ascended to a smaller landing with mannequins staged around a door on the far wall. The illumination up there was dimmer than on the second floor, giving emphasis to a violet light pulsing through the cracks around the doorframe. White fog billowed through the space under the door.
“So now we’re standing before the room where it all happened,” explained Hazel. “On Walpurgis Night of 1928, Frank Elwood, along with one of his neighbors and the landlord heard a struggle happening in Walter Gilman’s attic room, the very same that Keziah Mason inhabited all those years before.” A sly smile formed on her lips as she set one hand on the black iron doorknob.
The guests tightened around the mannequins and the door as Hazel opened it, swinging inward and creaking. More fog swirled and danced through the opened threshold. Beams of the violet light glimmered through the pale wisps. Hazel gestured for us to enter the dim space beyond. We funneled through a labyrinth of black walls like the kind used in black box theaters. Some of them opened on scenes showing a mannequin of a wiry-framed young man in increasingly dreadful situations. The eerie pall of the violet light shown over all of them. One showed him kneeling in front of a tall figure in a concealing black cloak holding out a large tome, opened to pages filled with names written in red ink. Another had him on an altar alongside an old woman in ragged puritanical garb raising a knife above a wicker cradle. I thought of the other witch-like mannequin on the second floor and how that one looked a little more detailed compared to the one in this display. The scene following showed the young man strangling the witch with the chain of a crucifix.
The narrow hall opened to a small room with a slanted ceiling covered with weird symbols and ritual circles painted on with a dark red substance. An antique writing desk with papers strewn all over it sat beneath one of the circular windows on the far left side. Opposite that laid a bed occupied by another mannequin of the young man. Sight of this one caused Beatrix to jump and squeeze my arm; several other guests gasped as they looked upon the grisly final scene. The mannequin had a gory hole formed in its chest, his hands feebly reaching for the wound. A brown, furry thing covered in fake blood sat in the wound. The creature looked like a cross between a large rat and a monkey, though its face was uncannily human-like.
Hazel’s voice sounded behind the group as we looked upon the display: “Gilman was tempted in his dreams by Keziah Mason to pledge his soul to the Devil and finalize his initiation through a blood sacrifice. Gilman refused to partake and killed Keziah. Her familiar, however, was witnessed by Elwood to have somehow clawed its way out of Gilman’s chest. The thing escaped and was never seen again until—”
Beatrix screamed suddenly and practically jumped on me. “Something ran past my leg,” she said.
“Oh, well…” Hazel tried to resume her speech as the other guests started murmuring and looking around their feet. The lights started flickering, then went out entirely.
“This isn’t part of the tour,” I heard Hazel say amidst the cussing and shouts from the crowd.
“Hang on! Hang on!” rumbled an older guy’s voice—I recognized it as the man who was so eager to take care of the rat on the second floor. Something clicked and a bright beam shone on the room. The man chuckled. “Always prepare—” He swung the beam over the mannequin and shouted, “What the hell is that?”
A shape flitted under the bed. Small, with a long body and tail, it scurried across the floorboards out of the flashlight beam’s range towards the crowd. The man tried to catch it in the light, but it moved too quick. He started babbling, the flashlight beam shook before it clattered to the floor. A heavy thud followed and several people by him gasped.
“He’s having a heart attack!” a woman shouted.
“Everyone please leave the room!” Hazel announced. “Please make your way down to the lobby.”
Beatrix pulled me back through the hall to the stairs as far ahead of everyone else as she could. We rushed down to the lobby and she led me further out into the chilly spring night.
“Jeez,” I said as we stepped onto the sidewalk. “Don’t you even want to—”
Beatrix waved a hand. “I don’t want to spend another minute in there. Take me home, please.”
I shrugged and looked up at the top floor of the Witch House. “All right.” Hopefully they do refunds online, I thought as we started walking back towards Miskatonic.
On the way, Beatrix decided she was actually hungry so we made a detour around campus and stopped by a 24-hour deli on Main St. While I ordered our food she sat down in a booth and flipped through the photos she took on the tour. When I came back with our drinks she stared frozen at her phone, jaw slackening.
I smirked at her expression and asked, “What’s up?”
She set the phone down on its back and slid it towards me. I looked down on the photo we had taken in front of that witch mannequin on the second floor. Instead of the old woman looking towards the man on the bed, her face and eyes were turned towards the camera. A crooked smile played on her thin lips.
I looked up at Beatrix and we stared at each other without blinking for a few moments. We didn’t even speak when our food came out or when I walked her back to her dorm and kissed her goodnight. She passed all her exams, made it on the dean’s list, and we kept our relationship solid. To this day, neither of us talk about that date night.
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“Date Night in the Witch House” © Ethan Sabatella 2024 – Current Year, All Rights Reserved. Reprinting or replication of this work in its entirety in any form (written, audiovisual, etc.) without express permission of the author is prohibited. Excerpts may be used for review or promotional purposes with credit and acknowledgement of the author. This piece cannot be used for training of Artificial Intelligence programs.
Loved it! I was so creeped out just by the descriptions of the mannequins in the witch house (Marsha!), and the fear of that rat familiar-thing was palpable. I enjoyed the ending - simple, yet chilling. Well done.