From the Archives

Several years ago, I began a series of short horror stories that all took place in a fictional small town and county, based upon the small Ohio hometowns of both me and my father. There were many ghost stories that both of us heard growing up in Germantown and Bluffton, Ohio: some of them came from our own family, and some of them we heard through the years. Of this series, two stories are finished: "Helen," which was published in installments back when I had social media, and "A Sympathy Arrangement," which is available on this site in its entirety. This series is ongoing, and I plan on writing more stories in the future.

In this same fictional "universe," I began a short story based upon ghost stories and experiences that I had as a child living in New Salem, North Dakota. This is the first page of the unedited short story that I started writing in the summer of 2023 but never finished. I may finish it in the future, but for now, enjoy this small remnant. (For what it's worth, I'm completely aware that posting only the first page leaves you at a small cliff-hanger, but it's really all I wrote. Sorry.)
✦✦✦✦ LARSON [WORKING TITLE]
Milstad, North Dakota is home to sixty-seven residents, all of whom make up the majority of the congregation of the town’s one remaining church, and fill the only other business in town—a bar open since the 1960s—late into the evening. At its peak in the early twentieth century it boasted nearly three hundred residents, the names of whom fill not a small section of the graveyard of the long-abandoned Milstad Lutheran Church, an ominous structure locked inside of a chain link fence which appeared sometime after the rotting roof finally collapsed in the late 1980s. Its official purpose is to keep people out of what remains of the ominous structure, but there’s a well-known hole that was cut in through the poison ivy patch that fills the graveyard, and anyone brave enough to venture through the bramble can easily get in.

A gravel road that is more dirt than gravel runs the length of the parcel of land, edged in dandelions that return every year, one of the only signs of new life in this part of the county. Looming in the background is a crumbling cinder block structure, long ago painted white—or perhaps eggshell, no one really remembers; springing up among the milkweed and tansy like an afterthought. Rusted farm equipment surrounds the structure, in a wild garden where long-forgotten bolts and nails grow like flowers among bits of gravel. A staircase-shaped crack runs up the wall of the building, framing a window which, like the others, is covered in a half-painted, half-rusted metal grill, the only remnant of the once-valuable farm equipment inside, now sitting in pieces among cans of oil and formalin. The air smelled like gasoline and decay.

Through one of the windows, past the lace veil of cobwebs, Nat Larson stood in cut-offs and a faded shirt, sweeping piles of old bottles and oil-soaked rags. It wasn’t the most exciting job, but it beat spending the summer getting boulders out of the fields, and his uncle had promised him a fair amount of pay for the chore, plus any money he made off of the recycling of old scrap. The aging building had once been the hub of his grandfather’s dairy farm nearly half a century prior, a proud family business that was one of the most prosperous in Granby County. But once his grandfather retired from farming to concentrate on his funeral home down the road in the county seat, all that remained now of the business lay scattered about in boxes, relegated to the cinder block building like an afterthought, the labels of embalming powders and bottles of formaldehyde sun-bleached and peeling in the window sills.

Nat paused for a moment and stared out the grainy window pane, past the desiccated remains of a box elder bug which lay on its back, drying in the sun, its legs curled up, frozen in time. Beyond the silhouette of the church up the hill lay the treeless plains of Granby County, broken up only by the occasional gravel road dotted with rusting mailboxes. In the summers the stillness seemed to settle ominously in the mostly-abandoned towns. He squinted in the dusty air. Somewhere under the graveyard of tools was the workbench where he used to sit and watch his Uncle Nels work on old farming equipment; it had always been just the two of them.

The sound of breaking glass startled him. A bottle lay in pieces at his feet. NATURE-GLO. COSMETIC EMBALMING FLUID. COMPOUNDED ONLY BY HYDROL CHEMICAL CO. PHILADELPHIA, PA.