The Carrington estate is a lonely place. The creaks and groans of its floorboards and foundation resound into moors empty for miles on all sides, its long drive bleeds seamlessly into a dirt road that winds a day’s ride due South before it meets the nearest town. Rumors of the late Lady Carrington’s madness abound; townsfolk and house servants alike whisper of her mortal fear of human faces, how she used to walk about shrouded in a thick white veil to avoid the eyes of strangers, how she had the manor built so that she never again would look upon the face of a neighbor. They whisper that she wasted away in one of the rooms there, but they never say which one.
The widower Lord Carrington and his family, too, are rarely seen in the town. They keep to themselves, and the servants keep the house around them, and if any of them happen to spy a white-shrouded figure shambling the halls late at night, or notice one of their housemates acting odd, they do not speak of it.
The Carrington estate is a lonely place. One rain-soaked night a carriage approaches it as if by mistake and deposits a distant Carrington cousin on the doorstep.
“It’s been a long time since we had a strange face in the house,” croaks old Nanny Watson, the cook, and the smile on her lips isn’t quite pleasant.
The servants whisper that the estate is haunted. They trade stories of the figure that roams the hallways at night, of waking in the middle of the night certain that they are not alone in their rooms, of objects going missing, of furniture sliding across the floor of its own accord, of gas lamps flickering and going out. They say it started when Lady Carrington died. They say it started when the cousin arrived at their door. They say it started with a horrible secret. Old Nanny Watson says “the Berulka is among us,” but she doesn’t say what that means.
But of course, it’s all just whispers. It’s all silliness, the idle gossip of servants. The roaming figure is, of course, a restless sleeper, the eerie noises nothing but the wind in the eaves. There is nothing more strange in the Carrington estate than the people who live there, each with their own private lives and thoughts and secrets waiting to be brought to light.
Or perhaps that is just what the Berulka wants them to think.
Hosted and narrated by:
Maddie Mondeaux (thejackalopegirl)
Started 10/07/17.
Scenes played: 2
License: Community License
image source: Julien Mauve
