Roscoe in Argosy
“Ghost on Lonesome Hill” was an Argosy Mystery/Horror piece by Theodore Roscoe from December 27, 1941. (I won’t go on about the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas but that may have been in the editor’s mind when selecting this tale.) The author, Theodore Roscoe, was a big writer in his day, mostly for stories with a military feel like his series about the Foreign Legionnaire, Thibault Corday. He shows his skill in this tale, though while not playing up the atmosphere like some writers, he does tell it well.
“Ghost on Lonesome Hill” takes place in Four Corners, a town in New York State close to the Canadian border. The old Colebaugh House is reportedly haunted and avoided by everyone in town. The house was the scene of a terrible murder seventeen years ago. Shepard (known as “Sheep”) Colebaugh was supposed to have murdered his brother Winthrop for thirty thousand dollars. Since then, people say, Winthrop’s ghost haunts the place. Sheep pleaded self defense and the money was never recovered so he went to jail for manslaughter. After four years he got out, then moved to England. A recent newspaper tells how the penniless man died in a bombing raid.
Johnny Harter, Reporter
It takes two visitors to get us going. The main character is Johnny Harter, a crime reporter from NYC. He has three weeks holiday to do nothing more exciting than fly fishing. The other man staying at Mrs. Briscomb’s boarding house is Stewart J. Ladd, an older man from the Mid-West. Johnny’s spidey senses tell him there is something odd about Mr.Ladd. When the older man goes night fishing, Harter follows him.
Ghost or Rogue?
The trail leads on to Lonesome Hill and the abandoned Colebaugh place. Harter goes inside and watches Ladd use his fishing pole in the kitchen. The older man pulls up something up through a hole with his fishing line. It is a large jug. He breaks the container on the edge of the stove and money pours out. It is Wintrop’s missing fortune. Ladd stuffs the bills into his coat.
The sound of a piano playing causes Ladd to get suspicious. He calls out, “Is that you, Wintrop?” It proves to be a wandering cat but the search gets Harter found out. The two men have an epic fight worthy of Robert E. Howard. (This fight scene alone is worth the time to read this story.) In the end, Ladd proves the stronger and knocks Harter out.
Watery Death
Harter wakes up to find himself in water. Ladd has thrown him into the house’s cistern, which has ten feet of water in it. Ladd, who is, of course, Sheep Colebaugh, closes the lid, knowing no one every comes to the house. He has sealed Harter’s fate. The young man swims around, tries to keep focused by counting, but he knows eventually he will drowned. He almost gives up hope when someone comes. It is the sheriff. He is saved!
Safe again at Mrs. Briscomb’s, Harter learns from Sheriff Dan Whittier what happened to Sheep Colebaugh. The police in England confirmed that the dead man in the bombing was actually a man named Ladd. Seeing his opportunity, Colebaugh returned to Four Corners disguised as the Mid-Westerner. He had stashed the thirty thousand seventeen years ago and had finally come back for it.
Unfortunately for him, he tried to spend it in town. The cafe owner at the train station grows suspicious when Ladd uses a twenty dollar bill that is no longer in circulation. The government had made the greenback smaller in the time between Colebaugh’s disappearance to England. Seeing the jig was up, Sheep throws himself in front of a train. With Sheep dead, the cops decide to search the house, thus rescuing Harter.
Sheriff Dan congratulates Harter on figuring out the mystery, tells him he should stop reporting crimes and start solving them. Harter declines the offer, but explains what made him suspicious in the first place. It was how Ladd ate his meals at Mrs. Briscomb’s. He held his knife and fork like an Englishman, not an American. He admits the only mystery he hasn’t solved is how they get the ships inside the bottles.
Conclusion
The blurb for “Ghost on Lonesome Hill” states: “Every town has its haunted house; but naturally the one in Four Corners was something super, infested as it was by a spectre who roved its fearsome interior in search of bottled ships and a flying fortune. It also had something new in the way of a ghost-breaker: a newspaper johnny who fished for peril at the bottom of a hidden well.” This wonderfully complex jumble does many things all at once: it suggests there is a ghost, as well as a ghostbreaker, but also gives away a rather important element in the cistern. This story is no Lovecraftian Goth-fest. It’s a Mystery story for readers who like a false monster element. Like Manly Wade Wellman’s “Let’s Haunt a House“, there are no prolonged sections of gothic description, mostly just a cliched deserted house. This kind of set-up would become a regular in Mystery magazines like Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine after the Pulps like Thrilling Mystery ended.
