The specter roamed the grounds for years and did no harm. Unless you count attracting tourists. Mary loved the apparition, its ghostly white beauty that floated through the night, and she hated those who came to stare at it.

Particularly Peter Wool. He had bought the local inn and shortly thereafter announced he knew the identity of the ghost. A countess, he declared, who had been buried in the local cemetery. She died waiting for her husband to return from one of the country’s many civil wars and waited ever since. 

He even began to lead tours to an ancient cemetery outside of town. A clearing studded with gravestones whose engravings had long been washed away by time and the elements, he pointed to one of them as the countess’s.

The story only brought more tourists, which Mary suspected was Peter’s plan all along. What she hated more than that, though, was she knew it was a lie. Mary’s possessive love had, after all, created the ghost. And, one day very soon, Peter would learn where her body was really buried.

See the author’s published work here.

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