I graduated from a small ‘girls’ high school in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964. It was a secretarial school which had a wonderful reputation for turning out accomplished secretaries. I was one of a small handful who wanted to go to college. At first I had my sights on Ohio State University (this was before THE was added). At that time there were 26,000 plus students at OSU.
My mother, one other wiser people I would ever know, talked me into abandoning that plan and looking at Nazareth College of Kentucky. Located outside of Bardstown (the bourbon capital of the world), it was known to her because her father was born and bred in Balltown, an even smaller town. The Ball family had relatives who taught at the school (or so Mom said) and one great-aunt was a member of the religious order there. The motherhouse for the order was part of the collegiate campus. The enrollment at that was more in line with my high school.
I opted for Nazareth.
We arrived one fall day, driving down the long road which led into the campus. One of the first things you saw was the cemetery. No, not for failed students, but for all the good Sisters and several priests who had served the community and the region. I didn’t think anything of this unusual first impression.
After settling in and enjoying the college life, I began to hear of the ‘ghosts’ who also inhabited Nazareth. The most famous one, and most feared, was the ‘headless’ nun. There was a tightly curved staircase leading from the main floor up to what was then the music corridor. This nun fell (might have been pushed but that was never proven) down the steps, breaking her neck and dying. Yes, I know your first question and mine as well. Why was she known as headless when obviously she did not lose her head?
Details, details.
This nun haunted the staircase, being seen by several students over the years. I never saw her but I will admit to getting the chills when I walked past the staircase, especially at night.
So there you have the basis for A Haunting at Marianwood. My formative years had a ghost or two lurking in the background.
I had written six Dash Hammond novels before deciding to have him and his family travel to the motherhouse where a dear old friend is currently the president of the order. Sister Miriam Patrice knows something is wrong, and doesn’t necessarily think a ghost is involved, but she knows she needs help in finding the answers.
Every small women’s college in the 1960’s has at least one ghost. Welcome to Marianwood’s own special specter.
Dash Hammond
Book Six
E.M. Munsch
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Mystery and Horror, LLC
Date of Publication: October 18, 2022
ASIN: B0BJ4GYGD2
ISBN-10: 1949281213
ISBN-13: 978-1949281217
Print length: 217 pages
Book Description:
Life is good for Dash Hammond. He's recently remarried his childhood sweetheart, Dr. Maevis Summers, and together they're raising his four-year-old son, T.J. in the Hammond family homestead in Clover Pointe, Ohio. A retired Army colonel, Dash now keeps himself busy fixing everything from a leaky faucet to an unsolved murder.
It is no wonder that his cousin Billy McCafferty calls on Dash for a road trip to Kentucky when his oldest sister is in trouble. The president of a religious order, Sister Miriam Patrice, Miri Pat to those who knew her before she took the veil, has been hearing things, seeing things and misplacing things. A very competent woman, she refuses to accept an unearthly reason for all this.
Marianwood, the motherhouse of the Sisters of the Blessed Mother of God, is located on an old plantation thought to be haunted by its original inhabitant, Miss Victoria Harris, who is rumored to prowl the grounds and cemetery in search of her murdered beau.
When the Ohio contingent arrives, they discover that things are not as simple as your ordinary haunting.
In a battle of wits, will the victor be supernatural or a very corporal retired Army colonel?
Excerpt:
A HAUNTING AT MARIANWOOD
Sister
Miriam Patrice slid back from the kneeler. The quiet of the church soothed her
as it wrapped its velvet cloak of serenity around her. She sat, hands folded,
once in prayer but now to stop the trembling. Glancing at the sunlight
streaming through the stained-glass windows casting a rainbow on the empty
pews, she drew in deep slow breaths. She looked at the watch pinned to her
tunic. Time to get back to work. She rose to leave the church, her place of
refuge, a place free from the distractions of the running the community and the
new retirement home the sisters established to help make ends meet.
The
members of the Sisters of the Blessed Mother of God found their numbers
dwindling. New recruits, as Sister Miriam Patrice called them mimicking her
cousin Dash Hammond’s military jargon, were very rare. The teaching
congregation once had more than a hundred sisters. Vocations, callings to
either the religious or the educational side of the community, had fallen to less
than a handful each year.
As
she walked down the aisle to the back of the church, she heard it again. Tap,
tap, tap. She stopped to listen, making sure she wasn’t mistaken. That sound
sent shivers down her spine. Squaring her shoulders she walked to the doors
next to the church exit. One led up to the choir loft, the other down to the
cellar. In days past she had gone up the stairs; today she would go down.
Pulling
the doorknob, Miriam Patrice met the resistance of a locked door. She pulled
out her keys and unlocked it. She struggled with the door, suggesting to her
that no one had gone to the cellar in a while.
The
stone steps were worn but sturdy. She moved cautiously into the darkness, one
hand on the wall to steady her nervous knees, the other searching for the
handrail. Her hope was that the security guard forgot to close the door one day
and some critter, not two legged, was trapped down here and making the tap,
tap, tap sound. Logically she knew this was wrong, but the alternative could be
worse.
Decades
ago they discovered one of the newer buildings constructed during a period of
rapid expansion had been built on an underground spring. It wasn’t long before
the building tilted, as did their finances. What a waste of time and money.
Fearful that what she would find was a tell-tale pooling or bubbling of water,
she moved forward slowly. She said a silent prayer that she would not stumble
into a puddle, a precursor of the inevitable unwelcome news.
Her
trek seemed unnecessarily slow though reason told Miriam Patrice she should
alert one of her sisters where she was just in case she lost her footing. But
her reasoning had not been the sharpest of late. She blamed her sleepless
nights, not because of an uneasy conscience but an overabundance of concern for
her congregation and its uncertain future, both financially and individually.
After
spending a half an hour poking into the corners, searching for the origin of
the sound, Miriam Patrice gave up. She needed a flashlight if she wanted to do
a proper search. Next time she would be prepared. Next time, she told herself,
she would be less skittish, more confident that she could deal with whatever
sprung up from the tap, tap, tap. After deciding this, she nodded to herself.
At least she didn’t hear a drip, drip, drip.
The sound had stopped so she returned to the
church. As she locked the door behind her, the tap, tap, tap began again,
louder this time. If she permitted herself, she would have said damn.
Elaine Munsch is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, but has spent her adult life in Louisville, Kentucky. She graduated from Nazareth College of Kentucky located outside of Bardstown and attended The Ohio State University for her graduate work. She has been a bookseller for fifty years working in both large and small, chain and independent bookstores. She opened the first Barnes & Noble in Kentucky where she set up a mystery reading group which is still active today. She also taught classes in the mystery genre for the Veritas Society and joined the local chapter of Sisters in Crime.
With Susan Bell, she co-edited MYSTERY WITH A SPLASH OF BOURBON, an anthology of bourbon related stories.
As E.M. Munsch, she writes the Dash Hammond series set on the shores of Lake Erie. The latest title, A HAUNTING AT MARIANWOOD, is set to be released at the end of October.
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