Page 19 of The Haunting of Lockton
“Back to the point.” I lightly flicked his cheek. “You said you wanted to interview locals, and he seems to know about Lockton. Who better to interview than the biggest fanboy of them all?”
“Taylor’s not a fanboy,” Julian said. “He’s just passionate.”
“About the paranormal world or about you?”
“Shut your face.” He bopped me on the top of the head with his fist. Hitting each other was clearly our love language. “I’ll get him. Make yourself useful and set up the camera.”
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled, grabbing the phone stand from his bag. When we were on location and investigating at night, we used better cameras. But for in-town shooting and smaller interviews like this, we often used our phones.
After situating my phone on the stand, I sipped my pumpkin spice latte and waited for my brother. He showed up with Taylor not even a minute later. Didn’t look like it had taken much convincing. The fanboy puppy was all too eager to help with our investigation.
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked him. “I’ll buy.”
“Oh.” Taylor perked up. “Don’t laugh at me, but I’m kinda a slut for pumpkin spice.”
I liked him more already. “Coming right up,” I said before returning to the counter to order.
Once we all had a drink and were seated, Julian tinkered with the phone stand and angled it to where all three of us were on the screen. A big step for him that made me proud—he normally pointed the cameraawayfrom himself.
He hit Record and sat back in his chair, nodding to Taylor. “It’s not live, so don’t feel rushed or anything. I’ll edit it later and string together the parts we’ll use.”
“Okay, cool.” Taylor bounced his knee and placed his arms on the table. “Ask me anything, and I’ll help however I can.”
“To start, can you tell us about some of the haunted spots around town?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Taylor ran a hand over the top of his hair and bit the edge of his bottom lip, a nervous habit that would have a strong effect on the viewers. Taylor was a good-looking guy: dark lashes, pouty lips, and a strong jawline. “Other than Redwood and Lockton, there’s Bellview Cemetery, an old train station, a boarding house, and various manors with grim histories, like Blackwell Manor and the Glass house.”
“Damn.” I blew out a breath. “This place really is like a ghost hunter gold mine.”
“There’s nowhere else like Ivy Grove. Our town is… different.”
“How so?” Julian asked.
“It’s hard to explain.” Taylor shifted forward in his chair. “The town is like a living, breathing thing that defies all logic. Ghosts. Magic. Supernatural beings. Those things may be fairy tales elsewhere, but here? They’re threaded into our reality. The dead come back to life, and the line between fact and fiction is blurred. Nothing’s impossible. Some say Ivy Grove is cursed, but I don’t think it is. In a world that’s forgotten magic, Ivy Grove keeps it alive.”
I blinked at him, not having expected all of that to come tumbling out of his mouth. I’d misjudged him. He wasn’t a dimwitted frat boy like I’d initially assumed.
“The dead come back to life,” Julian repeated. “Do you mean ghosts?”
Taylor nodded. “Nothing stays dead here. Not really. But like all things in life, there’s a balance. It’s why there’s so much tragedy, I think. Magic can be light or dark. Same with ghosts. Some souls become dark while others stay as they were in life.”
“Dark souls,” I said, tapping my index finger on the side of my cup. “Like the ones at Lockton Asylum?”
A decent segue into the real part of the interview, if I did say so myself.
“Yeah.” Taylor sipped his coffee. “I don’t know a lot about asylums, but I’ve heard many of them were horrible back in the day. Vile living conditions with patients left unattended because of staff shortages and all that. Starvation, sickness, and neglect. Lockton was different than those, but certainly not better. The patients were tortured and experimented on.”
“Have you ever been there?” Julian asked.
“A few times,” Taylor answered. “I’ve never gone inside, but I’ve looked around. It’s pretty creepy. The place just feels heavy, you know?”
In my experience, that heavy feeling he described usually only happened because you were already unsettled. It was psychological. High EMF—electromagnetic field—readings could cause it too.
“It’s as if all the bad things done there have thickened the air,” Taylor continued. “Tainted it. My uncle Charlie, well, he died before I was born, so I never knew him, but anyway, he was a writer. Murder mysteries, that sort of thing. Kind of an amateur investigative journalist too. He researched true crime, like cold cases and mysteries and stuff, and tried to find answers. I found one of his journals where he’d written about Lockton, so I went to do some investigating of my own. I was in the courtyard behind the asylum when I felt this crushing wave of grief that made me weak in the knees. That’s when I saw him.”
“Him?” Julian asked.
“One of the doctors said to haunt the place.” A small tremor passed through Taylor’s body. “He was staring down at me from a window on the second floor, and his features were… wrong. Distorted. His neck was bent too, like it was broken. My heart started racing, and I got chills. The kind of feeling you get when you’re in a dangerous situation. My flight response kicked in, and I hopped in my truck and got the hell outta there. Haven’t been back since.”
