Some houses are haunted. Pelhurst Manor hunts.
Psychic investigator Marian West has spent fifteen years clearing the houses other investigators walk away from. When a desperate buyer hires her to cleanse a crumbling Virginia estate with a long list of dead and missing owners, she expects a difficult job.
Within an hour of her arrival, the house tries to kill her.
Edmund and Eleanor Pelhurst were murderers in life, and death has only made them better at it. They’ve had nearly two hundred years to learn every trap their home can hold. They also know what Marian is, and what she might be able to do to them.
To survive, she’ll have to end them first.
Pelhurst Manor is a standalone haunted-house horror novella.
The GPS gave up two miles past the last gas station, and Marian West drove the rest of Pelhurst Road by the directions Thomas Avery had emailed her. The road narrowed until the oaks on both sides met overhead. Wet leaves slid across the asphalt in front of her Subaru, and the ditches along each shoulder held black water from a week of November rain.
She almost missed the turn. A rusted mailbox leaned on its post at the mouth of a gravel drive, PELHURST painted down its side in letters faded to the color of weak tea. Someone had nailed a newer sign beneath it: PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. AVERY HOLDINGS LLC.
Brambles scraped the passenger door as she turned in. The drive curved through a stand of pines and opened onto a clearing, and the house waited at the far end with the low afternoon sun behind its chimneys.
Marian stopped the car and sat with the engine running.
Pelhurst Manor was red brick gone dark with two hundred years of weather, two full stories with a row of dormers set into the roof. Tall windows flanked a center door, five across on each floor, every line of the front laid out with a ruler. Someone had painted the shutters black within the last decade. Several panes of glass were too clear and too flat beside the wavy old ones around them, and the ivy on the east wall had been hacked back to bare stems at the second floor.
From the driveway, the house looked neglected but sound. The roof ran straight. The chimneys stood plumb. Nothing sagged.
Fresh tire tracks cut through the mud in front of the porch, and a silver pickup sat at the end of them, its engine ticking as it cooled.
Thomas Avery climbed out of the truck before Marian had her door all the way open. He was a heavy man in his fifties, in a quilted vest over a golf shirt, with creases from the dry cleaner still sharp in his khakis. He had a leather folder tucked under one arm and his phone in his other hand.
“Ms. West.” He shook her hand once, hard, and let go fast. “Thanks for coming all this way.”
“Three hours from Roanoke isn’t bad.” Marian shut the car door and hitched her canvas bag higher on her shoulder. It settled against her hip with a familiar weight: salt, iron nails, candles, Gran’s ritual book wrapped in a dish towel. “The last half mile of your road is bad.”
“The county won’t grade it. I’ve asked.” He glanced past her at the house, then back to her face, quick, as if it might have moved while he wasn’t watching. “So. This is it.”
“This is it,” she agreed.
He opened the folder against his forearm. “I pulled together what I could. Deed history, county records, the inspection reports. Most of what happened out here was ruled accidental. A fall. A storage cabinet somebody didn’t anchor right. Old houses have problems.”
“Most,” Marian said.
Thomas stopped with a page half turned.
She held out her hand, and after a second he gave her the folder. The wind pushed at the papers while she read. Ten transfers since the spring of 2021. An investment group out of Charlotte that had held the place for four months. A couple from Fairfax who’d bought it to restore, pulled permits, and sold at a loss eight months later without ever spending a night. A foreclosure. A bank auction. A man named Dale Prentiss, dead in 2022 after a fall from the upstairs landing. A woman named Linda Garrow, dead in 2025 in the cellar.
Between those two, a sale had closed in the spring of 2024, and nothing followed it until a county notice declared the property abandoned.
Marian tapped the gap. “What happened here?”
Thomas rubbed his jaw. A bird called somewhere in the pines, and he flinched at it, then pretended he hadn’t.
“That was the Moores,” he said. “Young couple. They moved in that April, and in June their families reported them missing. Their car was still in the driveway. Clothes in the closets, milk in the refrigerator. The sheriff’s office searched the house and the woods for a week and never found anything.”
“You didn’t mention a disappearance when we talked.”
“No.”
“Or that the house sold ten times in five years.”
“I told you it had a reputation.” He winced, hearing himself. “I was afraid you’d turn it down. You’re the fifth person I’ve called. Two hung up on me. One drove out here, walked the porch, and left without taking a check. The fourth said he’d come and never showed.”
Marian studied him. Sweat beaded at his hairline even in the cold, and he’d checked his phone twice since he’d climbed out of the truck without reading anything on the screen.
“What did you pay for it?” she asked.
“A hundred and forty thousand, at auction.” He got it out fast, eager to be past it. “It’s assessed at over a million. One clean year with a family living in it, and I can sell it for what it’s worth. Otherwise I’m holding a property nobody will insure.”
“So you need it quiet.”
“I need it to stop killing people.”
