A maid discovered his mangled body in the house’s master bedroom, stuffed inside a cedar linen-chest. At 6’1 and weighing just over two hundred pounds, it would’ve been no easy feat to squeeze Gregory’s considerably large frame into such a relatively small space. This fact was confirmed by his autopsy, which revealed more than a hundred and twenty individual bone fractures, including the entire rib-cage and three sections of his spine.
Stranger still was the fact that several pieces of evidence, such as the traces of cedar found under Gregory’s fingernails, indicated that he had still been alive when he was crammed in there. Several years later, a retired detective who had worked the case and claimed to have read Margo’s dairy as part of the investigation revealed in an interview with the local paper that Gregory would often punish Margo by locking her in that very same linen-chest.
Like anybody who had grown up within the vicinity of the Ellis House, Kate and her friends already knew every gory detail of this story and reciting pieces of the legend to each other got old pretty fast. Kate was starting to worry that her super-special VIP sleepover was in danger of becoming just another boring slumber-party and that’s when she had an idea.
“I know what we can do,” Kate said, waving for Becky and Johanna to follow as she grabbed the chair from her desk and dragged it over to the bedroom closet. Standing on the chair, Kate retrieved a stack of vintage board games from the high shelf above her hanging clothes and handed them to Becky. “Here, hold these please.”
Becky examined the stack of games with an incredulous glare. “Stratego? No offense, Kate, but I don’t speak Spanish. Plus this looks super old and boring.”
“Yeah, they’re my dad’s from when he was a kid. My mom tried to make him throw a bunch of stuff out a while back and he hid these in my closet. But that’s not what I wanna play. THIS is…”
Kate held up a faded rectangular box that read “OUIJA” in a large ornate font and then, below that, “The Mystical Oracle – Wonderful Talking Board!”
Becky’s face lit up with excitement as she said, “No. Freakin’. Way!”
Johanna’s reaction was a bit less positive. “I don’t know. My mom told me those things are bad news. She said my uncle messed with one in college and a demon ended up possessing his roommate.”
“Cool!” was Becky’s immediate response. “How do we do it?”
Johanna glared at her. “Did you hear what I said, Becky? Possessed! Remember that girl in the Exorcist?”
Becky scrunched up her nose. “Ew, the one with the really bad skin?”
“My uncle said his roommate was just like that and he had to drop out of school and his parents eventually ended up putting him in a mental institution.”
Becky rolled her eyes. “But do you seriously believe in that stuff? Ghosts and demons taking over people’s bodies and all that crap?”
“I don’t know. But I DO know I don’t wanna end up puking on people and sticking crosses in my hooha!”
“It’ll be okay if we do it right,” Kate interjected as she crossed to her desk and retrieved a thin stack of paper from the drawer. “I’ve actually done like a butt-load of research on it already and pretty much everywhere says that as long we follow the proper procedures, nothing can harm us.”
