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The Haunting of Ragleigh Manor


written by:
Chrissie Bentley

My great aunt never impressed me as an especially imaginative woman. For as long as I'd known her, which of course was my entire life, she had very much kept herself to herself, even on those occasions when she threw the old house open for family gatherings. I would be touring those now familiar old hallways and rooms, breathing in the dusty history of so many generations of our family, and invariably I would find her sitting knitting in a far flung corner, happy to "leave all the merry-making to you young people."

And all of that is to explain why the story I am about to tell you still fills me with wonder. Because, if she was not an imaginative woman, that means everything she told me must be true. And, if it is true, then everything the world has taught me about life and death is a lie.

So I lay out her tale exactly as she told me, in her own words as much as I can, and with none of the embellishments and personal opinions with which I normally layer life. Turn your own lights low, then, and make yourself comfortable; and picture the scene, my great aunt a dignified woman in her eighties, seated in an armchair that was even older than she, her face animated by the flickering shadows of firelight; and her niece, myself, visiting for a week or so, and seated on the other side of the fireplace, listening as I always did while she relived her own years as a youth.

I struggle to put an exact date to her story, but I'd place it somewhere around the early 1840s, putting her in her very late teens or just stepping into her twenties, And she, like I, was visiting an elderly relative, a day-long coach ride away from home, in a barely populated corner of western Massachusetts.

She had believed, she told me, that she was the only visitor; that, aside from the servants, she and her relative were alone in the manor house. But several times since her arrival a few days earlier, she had caught the unmistakable odor of pipe tobacco, and seen - always fleetingly, from the corner of her eye - a young man, just leaving a room as she entered it, but always proffering a polite greeting before he left. So now I leave her to tell her strange story in her own voice.

I assumed (she told me) that perhaps another family member was also visiting. Ragleigh Manor was vast enough that a dozen people could mill around it without anyone else knowing they were there. But when I asked the cook, as we discussed that evening's menu, who the young man might be, she simply looked at me for a moment, then crossed herself and changed the subject.

Confounded, I took the same question to one of the other servants, a girl around my own age of 22, but she merely flushed bright red, giggled and told me ‘I'm sure I don't know, ma'am.' Finally, then, I took my question to my relative.

"So you've seen him too," she said softly. "I never have. I hear him and I smell that infernal pipe of his, but it's only the younger staff who actually see him. As for who he is, I'm not sure. The tradition is, he was the oldest son of the fifth Earl, killed in a hunting accident in 17-something. A bit of a rake, according to the stories, always an eye for the women." And she looked at me as she spoke those words and said, "and now he has an eye for you. Make certain that is all he has."

I laughed. "I return home on Saturday, just three nights hence. There is no man alive, in such a short time, who could turn my head in any direction that I do not wish it to turn," and with that, it was my relative's turn to laugh. "He is not alive," she reminded me. "But you are headstrong and sensible. As long as you remember that, you have nothing to fear."

We sat and talked until late, as was our habit every evening, and it was close to 11 before I made my way to my room, up on the second floor above the ballroom, and several closed doors down from my relative's chamber. The house was silent; if I listened very carefully I might hear the occasional scuffle or scratch of mice, or a door closing up in the servant's quarters, but that was all. I readied myself for bed, then settled down to read for a while by the light of a lantern.

My relative's story fascinated me. I had never really thought about ghosts - whether or not they exist, or whether, as Charles Dickens wrote, they are simply the by-product of an unexpected digestive disorder. And now here I was, sleeping in what my very own eyes suggested was a haunted house.

Should I be frightened? Of course not,. This was my fifth night in the house, and each of its predecessors had been completely undisturbed. Why, I asked myself, should tonight be any different? I closed my book, extinguished the lantern and settled down to sleep.

I don't know how long I was asleep, but I awoke to find the room bathed in what I thought was moonlight, and a figure standing by the fireplace, for all the world as though he had every right in the world to be there.

I sat up. "Sir," I said in my most commanding voice. "This room is occupied. By a lady, in case you were unaware of the fact."

He turned to face me, a handsome young man, smartly dressed, but looking so little out of the ordinary that, again, I wondered whether I was indeed sharing the house with an unannounced guest. It was only as he stepped closer that I perceived that there was no substance to his body; that he might have been made from sunlight, or rainbows, for all the difference it would make. Looking towards him, I could see the bedroom door behind him, with just a shimmer of disturbed air to suggest there was anything standing between it and my bed.

"My lady. I apologize." His voice was strong, but friendly. "I am so accustomed to walking this house that I forget, sometimes, that I might not always be alone."

Now my mind was reeling. Not only was I in the presence of a ghost, but the ghost itself had admitted the fact. But I was not frightened. Rather, I was fascinated. Yes, I'd read the newspaper stories of the spiritualists who can manifest lost loved ones at the drop of a muslim cloth, but there was always an element of trickery either implied or revealed.

Could this also be a trick? Perhaps. But played by whom, and for what purpose? "Why are you here?" I asked, pleased that my voice did not waver and my words did not falter, and he turned a radiant smile to me. "Why is anyone anywhere? Why are you in that bed, and the servants in their rooms, and my descendent in her chamber, dreaming of long ago?"

"Because..." I struggled to frame an answer to his question, and my thoughts were in any case derailed he sat on the edge of my bed. I felt nothing more than a slight tremor in the bedclothes but undeniably he was there, and I shifted a little, away from him.

He was watching. "Do not fear. I cannot touch you, you cannot feel my body, even if you wished to."

I thought for a moment. "If you have no physical presence, then how are you able to smoke your pipe?"

"I did not say I have no physical presence. I said you cannot feel my body."

"That makes no sense," I retorted and I heard him sigh. "Every..." he paused. "How do you perceive me? Am I a ghost? A spirit? A disembodied soul?"

"A piece of undigested meat?" I jabbed playfully, but I was certain my reference, to Dickens again, eluded him. "I will call you by the name by which I have already heard you referred - a ghost."

"Then I am a ghost and, as such, I have no body. But that does not mean, should I choose, that I cannot manifest the impression of at least elements of one." He stretched out a hand and loudly rapped the bedside table with a knuckle. Raised a leg and then brought his foot down on the floor with a bang. And then he smiled and looked down at his lap.

I blanched. I know I did, I felt the bloody rush from my face, and the lightheaded swirl of panic and confusion. Rising from between his legs... I could not bring myself to speak its name, nor grasp my emotions firmly enough that I might admonish him. I just stared.

"Your modesty has left you speechless," he said softly. "But fear not, even with this, I cannot touch you. It would be for you to touch me, but I see from your expression that that is the very last thing on your mind."

For some reason, that remark riled me. "I assure you, sir, that my expression conveys no such thing." What harm, after all, could it do if I did? This was not, I thought then, a story that I could ever repeat to another person; neither could anything result from it that might betray the innocence that I was preserving for my wedding bed. Whereas, no more than an arm's length away, sat the incontrovertible answer to a question that has haunted mankind for all eternity. I owed it to myself to pursue the experiment as far as I could.

I reached out an arm, extending one finger and lightly tapped the shaft that rose six, even seven inches from his lap - then withdrew it, as though it had experienced a shock. "It feels so alive," I breathed.

"It is alive. I am alive, just not in the sense that you are familiar with. How this small part of my body feels to you, that is how the rest of my body feels to me, as though the warmest stream, heated by the summer sun, is forever flowing over my skin and through my veins. A sensation that I can only compare..." Another pause. "Forgive my indelicacy, but have you ever experienced an orgasm?"

I opened my mouth, not certain whether to speak or curse, but he continued. "You have no need to answer that. But that is how my body feels to me. And that, I would wager, is how this insignificant piece of it feels to you."

In my own lap, I could feel my right hand squeezing my left wrist. I looked down at it, and for a second my mind's eye disguised my own flesh as his shaft. Panicked again, I released my grip, let my arm fall to my side. One day, in the execution of what my mother termed "my marital duties," perhaps I would touch a man's... a word that I had never before uttered aloud danced on the edge of my consciousness, and I swept it away. Perhaps I would touch a man there. Not however, until then.

Ah, but was this a man? Or was he a dream, inspired by my relative's conversation this evening, and given fresh dimension by something else that my mother liked to say, that it was fast approaching time that I went forth into the world as the loving wifeof a gentleman?

Plus the expression on my visitor's face was - not mocking. But so certain of my emotional delicacy was he that, when I reached out again and, this time, rested my finger on his flesh, I could almost say that it was I who frightened a ghost, as opposed to the usual other way around.

How did it feel? Exactly as he said, warm water and hot sun, a gentle current, a pounding heart. I heard a long, contented sigh and it took me a moment to realize that it was my own. And then my fingers folded around him, pressing his shaft into my palm, and the sensations spread to my wrists, my arms, my shoulders... I thought again of what he asked, if I had ever experienced an orgasm? No. But I knew what one was, and I wondered, was there any other word for the sensations coursing through my body?

His eyes were closed, his lips parted in a smile. I shifted my hand just a little, felt the flesh ripple beneath my grasp, and the shaft... no, not "the shaft." The cock. His cock. It flexed, straining against my fingers, but something else, becoming radiant as if there were a dim light deep within, one whose glow was growing stronger the more I moved my fist.

His flesh was vibrant in my grip, and revealing. As my hand drew down towards the root, I watched in amazement as the folds of skin that reached to the tip rolled back with my movement; clung for a moment to a fleshy ridge I had not even noticed before, then peeled back to reveal the sloping, angled darker flesh beneath - and then rolled forward again as my hand retraced its path.

I pulled again, exposing that meaty bulb once more, only this time, my thrill at watching it emerge was sublimated by another thought entirely. I have touched a ghost, I thought. Dare I kiss a ghost?

I leaned forward, and breathed in his cock... and realized, as I did so, how much I loved that word, how it excited me, how it filled me with such longing as I had never experienced before. And how desperately my mouth wanted to taste the word as I spoke it out loud. Only, and my heart was pounding like a team of laborers, it was not the word alone that it wanted to taste.

"I want to kiss it." The words were out before I even knew I was speaking. And then, with a bold determination such as I had never felt before, "I want to kiss your cock."

Silently, he stood, his cock suddenly inches from my face, angled sharply up but it took no more than the lightest fingertip to press it down, level with my mouth. For the first time, I saw the drops of liquid that seeped from the slit in the tip, and now my imagination was racing even faster, as I fancied them pooling on my tongue.

I leaned in. Just a peck, I told myself, then drew away and glimpsed in his glow the thinnest line of moisture that stretched from his slit to my lip. My tongue lashed out, drawing it in to my mouth; and then again, this time to lick against the source of his juices. So slick, so warm, so sweet. I wanted to swallow but there was not enough, just the teasing tang that tingled on my tongue and I pulled his flesh back again, stretching the loose skin tight as the bulb seemed to expand, grow fatter, rounder.

I parted my lips, folded them around the very end of his cock, then slowly, so slowly, let them drift down its length, filling my mouth but never too full. My lips brushed the hand that was still wrapped around him, and I lowered it to the bed alongside me. In my mouth, his cock bucked. Between my legs, I felt a wetness I had never known before.

He spoke. "Suck it. Suck my cock," and I did not even need to think as my lips tightened and my cheeks sank in; and now I felt myself being pushed backwards, his cock deeper than ever in my mouth as he whispered "lie back."

Again, I did not think, just gave way to the pressure as his shimmering form shifted position, and now he was crouching over me, weightless but forceful, pushing into my mouth then withdrawing again, slowly at first but with increasing urgency.

My hand was wrapped around him again, removing him from my mouth as I searched for another deep breath, then closing my lips again around the bulb, my body begging him to push himself deeper still. And now there was no respite; now he was driving in and out of my mouth as my hands struggled for purchase on his legs, his hips, anything that I could grip and force him to press deeper, fuck faster... another word I had never heard in my life, but I knew it all the same and it felt so good to let it out that I released him again and spoke it aloud. "Fuck my throat."

How many hours passed in that voluptuous tangle? It had been dark when he came to me, but outside the first notes of the dawn chorus were sounding, and he was tireless, relentless - until suddenly he wasn't, and now my mouth was full of wet, more than I could swallow, and I turned my head a little to one side, allowed the excess to flow out onto my hand, before raising it to my mouth and licking it away.

I'm not sure what I expected now. His cock was visibly diminishing now, growing softer, less commanding, sinking down to hang, a shadow of its once mighty self, but proud still and beautiful. I leaned forward to kiss it once more, but my lips met nothing, just a shape that rippled like dust in a sunbeam, and he must have sensed my disappointment because he shifted again to lie beside me, and as he angled his mouth towards my breasts, to the nipples that stood to hard and erect, he whispered "my turn." And then I felt his tongue, as real as his cock had ever been, and lapping down my body to pause between my legs.

"I want to lick your cunt," he said - and he did.

My great aunt fell silent for a moment. "He came to me every night after that. I got up the following morning and suggested to my relative that I stay a little longer. She just looked at me and smiled, and told me to write to my mother to inform her of my change of plans.

"What should I give as a reason?" I asked, feeling I ought to have some explanation, but my relative shook her head. ‘Your mom stayed here a few times when she was younger, back before she met your poppa. And, every time, what was intended to be a fleeting visit turned in to a full vacation. One year, she was here the entire summer, and back again with your grandparents for Thanksgiving.

"I think you'll find that she understands."

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The author of this story: Chrissie Bentley

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