“Promise? I’ll return the favor,” Erik teased.
“Cross my heart,” Ben replied with a lascivious grin.
THREE
ERIK
“Forecast says more storms coming in,” Erik announced when he came up from the store to check in with Ben after breakfast the next morning.
“Figures. The comment boards are jumping with people swearing they’ve seen strange things.” Ben pushed away from the table and stretched. “No woman in white. We might have taken care of Lila. But the latest is the ghost train on those tracks where the sand washed away.”
For nearly eighty years, the beach covered a stretch of private railroad tracks that once carried train cars full of sand taken elsewhere for industrial use. Erosion exposed the iron rails and wooden crossbars that everyone had forgotten about, resurrecting its ghosts in the process.
“If I remember right, that was never a passenger line,” Erik replied.
Ben nodded. “Crazy that they thought it was okay to take sand away from a beach, but that was back in the twenties and thirties. During the Second World War, the government used the tracks in their munitions testing. The tracks still appear and disappear in the sand depending on the tides and erosion. Butright now, the storms have exposed them, and that brought back the ghosts as well.”
“Did you figure out the backstory on the ghosts?” Erik asked.
“There’s not much to go on, but what I could find suggests they’re probably workers from the sand company who got killed on the job. That squares with what people are posting on social media, about seeing ghostly men in bloody worker’s clothing near the tracks.” Ben looked up from his screen.
“There was another large magnesite mining operation that ran during World War II, and ended up being a Superfund site for pollution,” Ben added. “Any big operation like that usually has some worker deaths from machinery or getting sick from the conditions.”
“We should be able to check with Monty and Jon about the tracks, since they’re always at the beach,” Erik replied. “Anything else?”
“A couple of urban explorers posted about ghosts where the old World War I camp used to be,” Ben told him. “There’s not much left of the original Camp Wissahickon except some abandoned concrete bunkers. Everything else is overgrown. They went legend tripping to check out the bunkers and ran into some children’s spirits and ghosts in military uniforms that the explorers claim ran them off.”
“Huh. Kids?”
“Yeah. I found this.” Ben pointed to his screen. “Before the government built the camp, there used to be an amusement park on that property with a skating rink, a stage, and a few rides. They repurposed all that, and later on, most of the original buildings burned down. There’s still an active Coast Guard Training Center on some of the same land.”
“You think the children’s ghosts were probably from the amusement park?”
“That’s my guess. Those old-time rides weren’t just scary, they were actually dangerous.”
“Any military ghosts?” Erik asked.
“Not as many as I’d have expected,” Ben replied. “But a few.”
“I don’t remember hearing about active ghosts or problems at those locations,” Erik said.
“We haven’t. I’m blaming the storms. Plenty of legends say that all that energy in the atmosphere rouses ghosts,” Ben said.
Erik started to pace. “Okay, so right now there’s no situation we need to fix with the weird tracks, and the ghosts at the bunker and military camp aren’t hurting anyone. That’s good, but it could change depending on how the spirits react to the storm energy.”
“We can’t be everywhere at once,” Ben pointed out. “We’ll keep looking for reports, decide what needs action, and go from there. We can get help if we need it from Haley, Monty, or Alessia.”
“I’ve been digging up more on Tiffany domes.” Erik turned a chair around and straddled it to face Ben. “There’s a huge one in Chicago at a museum. The others I’ve found are in hotels or public buildings. I also turned up a lot of references to the dome at the Commodore Wilson. It was a popular place over the years for wedding ceremonies and photos, and in the years that the hotel was run by a fire-breathing minister, he gave sermons under the dome.”
“Interesting,” Ben replied. “I imagine it shows up in a lot of people’s vacation pictures, from when the Commodore Wilson was a ritzy resort.”
“That, too. But so far, I haven’t found much about the dome’s background except that it was there from the opening day, and considered an artistic gem,” Erik said. “But I think maybe there’s some dark magic—or at least bad luck—that goes along with certain Tiffany windows.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ben sipped his coffee.
“Some of the smaller panels Tiffany made for other locations got stolen. People fought over privately commissioned pieces during divorces or inheritance squabbles,” Erik replied. “A couple of owners were murdered, and a few owners just disappeared, with or without their windows.”
“If they were mobsters or corrupt robber baron types, they might have had it coming, and the windows didn’t actually cause the bad luck,” Ben pointed out. “There’s a pretty small sliver of the population who can afford Tiffany windows, and most didn’t earn their money by being saints.”
