My parents and sister had gone out. That left me alone in the place we called the Coffin House, built by Lemuel Coffin in 1890. It was just a few days before Christmas, and the war was over. This girl named Onion was coming over while my parents were gone. There were rumors about her.We’d been living in the Coffin House only for a couple of years now, and it still didn’t quite feel like home. The people who had lived in the house before us, the Hunts, had left quite a mark on the place. On the third floor, next to my room, there was one room that was kept locked. The ceiling was collapsing in the locked room. My parents used it as a storeroom. At night I’d lie in bed, waiting to hear footsteps on the other side of the wall, a door opening softly.My parents took down the wallpaper in their bedroom and found, beneath the paper, old poems written in pencil on the plaster. One of them was a woman’s lament for a man who had died. She’d signed her name: Mariah Coffin, 1912.There were other stories about the Coffin mansion.
