“About three months after Felix Morganson disappeared,” Mr. Garrison answered. “Besides going up there herself once in a while, Mrs. Morganson also rents the place out to sportsmen who go up for the winter season to hunt, and to those that go there in the summer to fish. Well, late in January a group of sportsmen went there, and the understanding was that they would stay about three weeks. But at the end of one week they gave it up and took a smaller place down at the tip of the lake. They complained of ghostly rappings, or knocks on the door and no one there when they opened, and they also complained that some of their things had been stolen.”
“Sounds foolish,” Barry said.
“We thought it was, at first. You see, I handle all of Mrs. Morganson’s business, and I had rented the place to these men, who came from Connecticut. We thought for a while that they were just cranky and let it go at that. But two weeks later another party went in, and it was the same thing over again. Added to that, one of the men had an expensive fur coat stolen, and he wanted to bring suit against us. It seems that they heard about the experience of the former party and claimed that we had rented the lodge to them under false pretenses. We had some trouble getting out of that.”
“It must be just some ordinary thief that lives in the woods near there,” Barry ventured.
“If so, he goes around annoying everybody that puts up in the lodge. Later in the year some fishermen took over the place, and they had similar experiences, and, besides all that, they found their fishing boat scuttled one morning, three holes bored in it. Fortunately we had told them the reputation that the place was getting, but they had just laughed at it. They came away mad as hornets. Well, you can see what it is all doing. No one will rent the lodge now, and it had a long list of prospective renters once. The value of it keeps going down, and since we cannot rent or sell it at a decent price, it is standing idle.”
“Does Mrs. Morganson want to sell it?”
“She does now. We have both become so tired of the place and its problem that we would like nothing better than to get it off our hands. There is only one buyer at present, a man named Brand Curry, but he wants it at a price so low that we won’t even discuss it. The man never comes to me, he always goes directly to Mrs. Morganson.”
“But look here, Dad, did you ever have a detective on the case? Ever have any one go up there?”
“Oh, yes. I have had two private investigators spend some time on the case. One of them didn’t find anything or have any kind of an experience. But the other man did. He was a big, chunky fellow named Riley, and he said he could catch anything he went after. Said he would come home dragging the ghost or spook, or whatever it was, by the neck. He remained there two days and then came back and resigned from the case. The first night he was kept busy investigating thumps all over the place, and the second night his shoes and shirt were mysteriously whisked away somehow and he was in a fix because he hadn’t taken any baggage with him. He had to go to Fox Point and outfit himself there, and he had to go down there without shirt or shoes. He didn’t hear anything that night, and all the time he was there he didn’t see anything. He was a disgusted man when he came back here, and it was his opinion that the National Guard should be ordered up there.”
Barry and his father laughed at the plight of the private detective who had been so sure of victory over the haunting presence at Bluff Lodge. “But of course, Dad, you believe that someone is doing all this for a purpose?”