For the last hundred years, people had
stated that the Donner mansion was haunted. People claimed ghost lived there
and that’s why people never went there anymore. Professor Marcus Stevens and
his assistant Vanessa arrived in town just to check out the mansion, in order
to put to rest the legend of the so-called ghosts. Professor Stevens was not a
believer of the supernatural and was decided, in his spare time; to debunk any
silly beliefs people might still have around the globe. He had chosen the
Donner mansion because it was a very well known place, not only in the region
but nationwide. People talked about how real the experiences there were and the
professor wanted to end all of that.
To be honest, he had personal reasons. Silly
beliefs had left his grandfather helpless. When he was younger, his grandpa was
suffering from a strange disease. He asked his mother and practically everyone
in the family to take him to the hospital but they wouldn’t, saying it was the
will of God and that if He intended grandpa to be cured, it would be done that
way. Even as a child, Marcus was
restless, even trying to sneak into the house a doctor he had picked up from
the phone book. But to no avail, as his parents forbid it and his grandpa died
days later.
When he grew up, he decided to study science
and prove everything, make the world a more realistic place, getting rid of all
the magical creatures, the folk tales and the silly beliefs that took lives
like his grandfather’s every single day around the world. Since he was
eighteen, he had left home and didn’t talk to any family member but he soon
made lots of friends in the scientific circles, so there was no sadness or
longing for the past. He hated his pasts, his family’s beliefs and all that had
to do with that. He decided he could live very well without his parents or
anyone else from his family close to him.
The first thing they did was travelling to the
town of Rensal, where the mansion was locate, and talk to many people there.
The idea was to make something like a survey, in order to better understand the
phenomenon that people claimed happened often in and around the mansion. They
set up their headquarters in a small hotel room and they would interview people
in the lobby. It was an old town in the mountains and now it was a ski paradise
in the winter but it was not yet that season so there were not many people
around.
Many told them that the mansion got “more
active” during the summer, when less people were visiting. This was odd as, in
many other towns, the occurrences happened always in the months when tourists
were in larger numbers. Anyway, that didn’t mean it wasn’t a hoax, it just
meant people in this town were probably not manipulating the events occurring
in the house, or at least not in a large scale. In one week, they had already
interviewed more than one hundred people and that was more than enough to make
a survey that showed which were the most frequent activities inside.
Apparently, people saw lights inside the house
despite the manor being disconnected from the power grid, many people also
testified seen people there wearing old clothes and ignoring them and the small
group of people that had entered the house told him that the walls were covered
in some strange goo, yellow in color and with a terrible smell. Besides that
there was the usual: voices, lights that went in and out, strange sounds, the
feeling of being touched… Marcus and Vanessa knew them all from their other
experiences and were ready to debunk the tales of Donner mansion.
The following week was used to enter the
house. The plan was to go into the mansion every afternoon, three whole hours.
They would carry special equipment to detect metals, radioactivity and other
events that may seem strange but were very normal in a old house. They had done
it a million times. The first day, on Monday, they entered the house with care
as the front porch seemed to be damped and the wood that formed it seemed to be
in the verge of breaking into several pieces. They went along with Xavier, an
old friend of Marcus who loved the whole hunted house experience. He wasn’t a
scientist but gladly helped as he thought it was a very cool thing to do.
The first thing they felt was cold. Despite
very warm temperatures on the outside, the house remained as cold as in the
winter. They measured the temperature, noted it down, and proceeded to another
room, crossing a large hall with care. The place was not dark as the afternoon
light entered the house through the high windows all around the hall but it was
very strange as the glass was not transparent but had various colors. It was
like walking around a circus fair ride.
The first room they entered after that
happened to be the kitchen. It smelled awful, as if someone had left food to
rot there. But that didn’t make sense as no one had lived there for the last
hundred years. Vanessa put on some gloves and took out the food that was rotting
in the fridge. There was a moldy cheese, meat and a chicken breast, all covered
in green and smelling awful. However, Vanessa was able to recover a plastic
covering from behind the food and put that in one of their own plastic bags.
Vanessa had been with Marcus for a long time.
She started as a student of his in a physics class back in the university but
they had formed a nice friendship that had consolidated just after she had
graduated. In the blink of an eye, Marcus had hired her to be his assistant in
the university and proposed her to be his assistant in these trips too. Vanessa
did not hesitate, as she thought it was a very cool thing to do and she
confessed that she had always been bored out of her mind when friends started
talking about the possibilities of life after death, ghosts and all that
supernatural crap. She even had proven to them how the Ouija board was all
about conditioned thinking, a fake in simple terms.
After finding the rotten food, Xavier stepped
on a weak part of the kitchen and the floor broke beneath his feet. He twisted
his ankle and both Marcus and Vanessa had to help him out of the mansion and to
the medical center down in town. It was good that Marcus had asked a local to
be there with a car in case they needed help, so he took Xavier away and they
had to cancel the rest of the exploration for that day. They spent the night in
the hospital waiting for the doctor to tell them about their friend. He was ok
but he was going to have a cast and crutches. So there was no way for him to
join them anymore.
The rest of the week, Marcus and Vanessa would
go into the mansion and test every single apparatus they had inside. They used
the electromagnetic device to prove that the house was actually not fully
disconnected from the power grid and just walking around they found thousands
of small gaps and holes, which were used by the wind to enter and make strange
noises. All very natural. The cold
feeling inside the hosue was explained because of the location of the house,
just in the way a small air current that went down the mountain, covered in
snow all year, towards the valley were the town was located.
The only thing that hadn’t been able to prove
wrong was the presence of unknown people inside the house; even some wearing
old robes, from the times when the mansion was built. They decided to plant
several cameras all around the house and stay one more week. Marcus wanted to
go away as soon as possible because, although he found it all to be very
interesting and even funny, he also wanted to properly rest this summer before
the classes began again. He didn’t have much time to spare and this time he
wanted to think more about himself than about work or others.
However, the cameras didn’t show anything. She
stayed in front of the monitors for hours, even falling asleep in front of them
but they had not picked up anything, not a real person, not a floating person,
nothing. On the last day, the moment they were packing, something happened. One
of the cameras picked up kind of a shade crossing the front side of the house,
apparently entering the mansion. Back in his home, Marcus checked the video
various times. He could explain the shadow; it was probably the sun and the
surrounding trees. But there was a moment when a face seemed to appear and the
door opened a bit, and it was a heavy wooden door.
For the first time ever, Marcus decided he
didn’t care. He didn’t believe he was a ghost and he knew there was an
explanation to everything that happened in that place and in places like that
all over the world. But the truth was he was tired, growing fed up with filling
his life with meaningless things. He had to admit he still resented their
family but that, however, he was in need of someone to hug and that feeling appeared
to him, like a ghost, every single morning.
There was nothing supernatural in Donner
mansion but there was something missing, something rather natural, from Marcus’s life and he didn’t know
exactly what it was or how to get it.
