Chapter Twelve

In 1975, Mr. Birch decided to remodel his fourth-floor residence. He hired a crew to tear out the wall between the parlor and the Blue Room, expanding the size of the parlor and reducing the size of the Blue Room. None of the crew had ever been in the house before, but they had heard stories about it.

Of course, none of these stories were substantiated. People in small towns talked, especially about things they didn’t fully understand. Silverwood Manor was a very expensive hotel, and most of the townspeople were too poor to ever stay there. The ones who did visit were only privy to the offices on the first two floors, but most people never had occasion to go there at all.

With the mansion’s outer stone facade, especially at night or on a dreary day, it looked spooky. And since it looked spooky, it naturally must have been haunted. And so, the stories began.

Justin Evans grew up hearing the stories. He knew they were all rumors, made up stories to scare people. But that didn’t stop him from listening to them, and even sharing them himself. He loved a good ghost story, and Silverwood Manor was a good setting for a ghost story.

Justin was hired on the crew to remodel the fourth floor in April of 1975. At the age of 45, he was the oldest man on the crew. He was working with a bunch of young bucks, mostly under the age of twenty.

He listened to their teenage bravado and bragging about their sexual exploits, sometimes laughing as he realized just how young and immature his co-workers were. He understood that they had been hired because they had strong backs and weak minds.

The job was simple: tear out a wall and build a new one. It could be accomplished in a day under normal circumstances, but great care had to be taken to preserve the elegant woodwork. Only after a panel had been carefully cut loose from the wall frame could it be moved to the new wall and installed.

Justin was cutting the wall along the ceiling when he heard one of the other men shout. He stopped what he was doing and climbed down from the ladder. The other boys had gathered around a large hole where a panel had just been removed.

Lying there, between the boards supporting the wall, was the skeleton of human child. No, not a child. The head was the size of a full-grown man. The body was the size of child. The charred skeleton of a dog lay beside him.

“Well, I’ll be damned. The stories were true,” Justin said out loud.

“What stories?” one of the boys demanded to know.

“The stories about Tiny.”

“Who was Tiny?” another asked.

Justin turned over an empty bucket and sat on it. The boys all gathered around to hear the story, some glancing over at the skeleton lying inside the wall.

“Well, this all happened back in the 1800s, when the house was built. Tiny was a dwarf that worked with the construction crew, helping to build the house. Tiny was bullied mercilessly by the other builders. They played all kinds of pranks on him. One time, Tiny was working on the second floor, and one of the men snuck up behind him and shoved him off the scaffolding, right into a wheelbarrow full of wet concrete.”

Justin paused before continuing, “Another time, they all decided to have a knife-throwing contest. They grabbed Tiny and tied him up, throwing their knives at him to see who could get the closest without hitting him.”

He paused again, then said, “One of the worst pranks they played was with the dog. There was an old, stray dog hanging around the site. This dog took a liking to Tiny. He would feed it from his lunch and pet and play with it. One day, one of the workers threw turpentine on the dog and lit it on fire. That dog ran all over the site, trying to outrun the fire on its tail.”

The boys were all listening intently now. “Well, the dog died. It burned up. Tiny was devastated. He’d had enough. He was going to go to the sheriff. The men couldn’t have that. The sheriff meant there would be trouble for all of them. They had to keep Tiny quiet. They grabbed him and stuffed him inside the wall and boarded it up. The idea was to go back the next day and let him out, try to reason with him after he’d had some time to cool down. But when they went back, Tiny was dead. They put the dog in the wall with him and boarded it back up. Legend has it, Tiny’s ghost came back and killed every single one of those men, drove them mad until they killed themselves. And to this day, if you look in a mirror inside the house, you’ll sometimes see Tiny, standing behind you,” Justin finished the story with a grin, then yelled “Boo!”

Several of the boys jumped backwards. Justin laughed. “Relax, boys, it’s just an old ghost story. But it looks like there was some truth to it.” Justin looked at the skeletal remains inside the wall.

“I guess we’d better call the sheriff,” one of them said.

When the sheriff arrived, he ruled the death an unsolvable homicide. The culprits would all be dead of old age by now. The local funeral home came and collected the remains, which would be cremated when no one came to collect them.

The sheriff left right after the funeral home carried out the remains. The boys got back to work, but it was several hours before they noticed that Justin was no longer with them. They searched and searched, but there was no trace of him. It was as if he had never been there at all.