PROLOGUE
1656, Oldetown, Massachusetts
The bitter October wind tore viciously at the remaining scarlet leaves of the twisted old maple tree. A small crowd had gathered to watch an old woman as she stood on a crude wooden box, a gnarled rope looped around her neck.
“Patience Jones!” a tall, thin man with a surprisingly deep voice shouted from the ground below. “You have been tried and found guilty in the murders of Mehitable Thatcher, Annabelle Spalding, and Sophronia Duff. You will be hanged from the neck until you are dead.” The thin man looked around for encouragement and, hearing the appropriate murmurs from the shivering crowd, continued.
“Do you have anything to say before you die?” It was a simple question that ended with brutal finality. There was no question Patience Jones would cease to live in a few moments. And there was no question that the crowd waited eagerly for her death with quiet solemnity.
The old woman looked up at the full orange moon that hung low in the sky. She laughed—a throaty and wicked laugh. “Yes!” she called out joyfully. “I did kill those girls. They meddled where they didn’t belong. And now they are dead.” As if to show she meant those terrible words, the old woman spat loudly on the ground below where her feet would soon swing.
In the crowd, a woman sobbed. The thin man nodded to the hangman, who checked the rope before he kicked the box out from under Patience Jones.
The old woman’s body dropped and bounced in the air with a sickening snap. The thin man checked her pulse to make sure she was dead before the crowd started to disperse. Three couples wept as they made their way home—the parents of the dead girls. The townspeople left Patience Jones’s body hanging from the maple tree with the bloodred leaves as they made their way home in the chilling darkness.
They didn’t see that an hour later, a dark figure wrapped in a rough wool cloak stole up to the dead body and after looking around in all directions, reached up and cut off a lock of the old woman’s hair. The shadowy figure then vanished into the night.
A few years later, after several more murderers met the same fate as Patience Jones, beneath the same old twisted maple with the bloodred leaves, the town’s name was changed to Hanging Tree.
Chapter One
2013, Hanging Tree, Massachusetts
The creaky chair in the dark corner was rocking. What’s interesting about this is that no one was in the chair. And it wasn’t a rocking chair. Yet there it was, rocking back and forth on stumpy, chewed-up legs. Even after a year of investigating paranormal activity, this kind of thing scared the crap out of me. My hands shook a little as I recorded it.
“Where’s the camcorder?” Milton hissed as he slid closer to the chair and waved his arms all around it, checking for wires. When he found none, my throat tightened a little with fear. Even after a year, it was hard to get used to stuff like this.
“I forgot it. I have my iPhone,” I whispered back, refusing to take my eyes off the chair, which was now heaving back and forth on four legs as if we were in some sort of earthquake, which, by the way, we weren’t. We had only the sharp, cold light from my phone illuminating the scene. And even though the heat was on in the house, I could not stop shivering.
“You should have the right equipment!” he snarled in a hushed tone.
That was Milton. Always by the book and never pausing to appreciate the bizarre vision of a true haunting.
