Today’s Blog-o-ween 2023 post feels like returning to visit an old friend. We’ve got a haunted house to explore on Halloween, a group of enthusiastic young ghost-breakers to follow, and a spooky old urban legend to prove true. We’re also dipping back into what has quickly become one of my favorite collections of creepy tales, Stephen Jones’s Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night: 10 Scary Stories to Give you Nightmares! So without further ado, let’s go trick-or-treating with author Lynda E. Rucker, then once we get our fill of fun-size Charleston Chews and Almond Joys, we can all head on over to the Beaumont House and see if we can’t have a chat with...“The Sideways Lady.”
“A family vanished, sixty years after the house’s previous occupants died under mysterious circumstances. An old house of ancient, unknown, and perhaps evil provenance. A specter known only, enigmatically, as ‘The Sideways Lady,’ and a small town, caught in the grip of terror for more than a hundred years...’
“Toby said, ‘We aren’t gripped by terror.’
“‘Shut up,’ Stevie said. She went on reading...”
It’s Halloween, and young Stevie is determined to explore the ruins of the local haunted abode, the Beaumont House, so that she can share it with her favorite website, True Hauntings. Her little brother, Toby, is less determined, but along for the ride, nonetheless. The children have recently moved with their father to a new town after their mother’s death. It was their mother who had instilled in them a love for all things creepy and weird. Their father, still grieving, doesn’t seem to notice them much, and so he just tells them not to stay out too late.
Once trick-or-treating has run its course, Stevie and Toby, joined by two other kids from school, Taylor and Tristan, enter the Beaumont House. Taylor and Tristan consider themselves to be “urbexers,” or urban explorers, and they claim that their grandmother grew up with Kathleen Beaumont, a girl whose family owned the house years before. The house had once stood in England, but a rich man had it moved to America, because his wife always wanted to live in a castle. The two of them were found in the house, dead of unknown causes. The house stood empty for sixty years, until the Beaumonts moved in, mother, father, and three teenaged children. And that’s when, so the tale that Taylor and Tristan tell goes, young Kathleen claimed that someone called “The Sideways Lady” had come to live in her house and kept her up all night trying to crawl into bed with her. Soon thereafter, the Beaumonts pulled Kathleen out of school. Friends of the girl claimed that she had summoned a demon and needed to be exorcized. Then, on Halloween night in 1969, the Beaumonts, like their predecessors, all went missing. People say that Kathleen’s spirit still walks the halls of the house, trying to lure people inside to share her fate.
So who’s ready to do a little exploring?
A little exploring is just what our fearsome foursome do. They may come to regret the decision. What do they find in the Beaumont House? Who is the old woman who offers them cakes? Who is the woman Stevie sees in the moonlight pouring through one of the windows? What is the true history of the house?
“The Sideways Lady” ticks a lot of boxes for me. It has a young protagonist from whose perspective we experience the events of the story. It’s a story about an urban legend, so there are multiple versions of the “truth” being passed around. It uses excerpts from other sources in its telling — newspaper and internet sites. All in all, Lynda E. Rucker has put together a great little tale that moves from beginning to end very well.
As I mentioned above, this is another story I discovered thanks to Stephen Jones’s Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night. Alas, it is to be the last story from that wonderful collection for this Blog-o-ween season, but what a story to go out on! I urge you all to track Jones’s anthology down. There are plenty of other stories in it to send a shiver down your spine - “Click-Clack the Rattlebag” by Neil Gaiman, “The Chemistry of Ghosts” by Lisa Morton, and “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” (not to be confused with that other Are You Afraid of the Dark?) by Charles L. Grant to name but a few. And like the other stories we’ve talked about, all of these tales are accompanied by the excellent artwork of Randy Broecker. I mean...just look at that picture of the Sideways Lady up above and tell me it isn’t creepy as all get out!
Lynda E. Rucker was born in rural Georgia in the United States. After graduating from college, she moved to Oregon and then, later, to Dublin, Ireland. She has several short story collections to her name, the latest being Now It’s Dark from Swan River Press. She’s written She was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award from Best Short Story in 2015 for her tale “The Dying Season.”
So far as I can make out, “The Sideways Lady” was written for Terrifying Tales to Tell in the Dark. It hasn’t been collected anywhere else, not even in one of Rucker’s own books, and that’s a shame, I think. It’s a great story that deserves to be placed elsewhere.
That’s all for today. Be sure to stop back tomorrow to find out what spooky story we’ll be talking about. And be sure to stop over at the Beaumont House on your way home this evening. There’s a lonely woman who lives there, and from what I hear, she’s not...half bad looking...heh-heh-heh!
One more thing...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm?
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