Whodunit Hill: A Short Story

Mr. Greene pointed to the flight of stairs. “That must be where the captain fell and broke his neck. Legend has it his spirit roams the halls, and some have even seen his blue afterglow in the windows.”
I shivered, even though the night was warm.
“That’s enough,” Mustache snapped. “We’re not going to get anywhere talking. Let’s search the ground floor first. Then we’ll head upstairs.”
Staying in a group, with us at the rear, the men moved through the hollow east wing. The rooms were large and empty of furniture. Tangled cobwebs dangled from the ceilings and clung to the walls. Decades of dust lay everywhere.
After we had explored every nook and cranny and found nothing except newspapers gathering in drifts, we moved on to what must have been
Apparently most people in Whodunit Hill now do, especially, after last night’s mysterious sightings of the specter known as Captain McBride.
I read on.
According to officials around midnight, a group of men heard shrieks coming from the historic Thornewood mansion off Spine-Tingling Way. “Someone kicked open the door,” said one man, who refused to identify himself. “Inside it smelled of mold and McBride’s slightly sour aftershave. With one hand on my flashlight, I entered and felt a wave of cold air rush past as I came face-to-face with a figure that was too solid to be a ghost, too blue to be human. He was as decrepit as Methuselah, wearing nothing but scraps of material and an ill-fitting toupee.”
After the incident, the shaken men immediately telephoned the police. Chief Harry Chizelmen drove over, however, he was unable to find any traces of the phantom. Chizelmen described the sighting as “baffling,” though he declined to provide more details.
In the hours following the initial detection, a substantial number of reports from residences inundated the Clandestine Police Department. Most of the calls described lights turning off and on or flickering, indescribable noises, temperature discrepancies, and
Peacock of 2740 North Mockingbird Lane telephoned the police in a panic, saying she heard some unusual groaning sounds. With a lantern, she scrambled outside to investigate and reportedly spotted a “spirit” lingering on her veranda. It vanished when she flipped on the light.
Seconds later, two waitresses working at The Hush-Hush Moon, an all-night café on the corner of Fourth and Clever, said they observed an ethereal form floating beside a car in the parking lot. Allegedly, the two women watched the bluish figure swirl for almost ten minutes.
Finally, at 4:32 in the morning, Clandestine Police Sergeant Sean Sweeney happened to be in the Whodunit Hill Cemetery and he too glimpsed the ghost. “I ducked under a stone archway into the walled graveyard and caught a glimpse of a blue ghoul perched above a headstone. Curls of rotting skin clung to shards of bone, and the lower jaw dangled at an odd angle above its collar. As I approached, the smoky figure sank into the ground and disappeared.”
After further investigation, Sergeant Sweeney discovered the “apparition” had been hovering above the headstone of the ill-fated Chester