Chapter 11
The Old Mill
Amy visits a mill where workers died in a fire. The spirits reenact the event nightly, but one figure seems to watch Amy specifically.
The old mill sat at the edge of a forgotten hollow, its bones blackened by time and fire. I had heard of it from a dozen sources—local historians, ghost hunters, a woman at a gas station who swore she’d seen flames lick the sky seventy years after the last ember died. But it was Aunt Mae’s confession that brought me here.
She had told me, her voice low and brittle as dried corn husks, that my great-grandfather worked that mill the night it burned. He survived, she said, but he never spoke of it. Never spoke of the men who didn’t. And when she said the name of the mill—Beauchamp’s Mill—my blood ran cold. It was the same place the Whispering Willow Ghost had tried to show me, the same place Elias Thorne’s final journal entry had mentioned in a shaky hand: I saw her face in the smoke. She was trying to warn us.
Now I stood at the rusted gate, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and old sorrow. The mill rose three stories above the creek, its walls cracked and leaning, the great wheel frozen mid-turn, choked with moss. No one had worked this land in half a century, but the locals knew to stay away after dark. They said the mill still ground its ghostly grain, and the men who died inside still ran from the flames.
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