This story comes from a good friend from my college days who has since moved to California. It shows how evil can enter into our lives by the simple act of wishing someone ill by the use of spells. Be careful what you wish for – as when it’s negative, it does come back to haunt you tenfold.
In a little town in New Hampshire, a teenage girl whom I will call Delia, lived with her parents at the edge of a forest near the White Mountains. Their street was a dead end and the home the little family lived in was at the very end of this street. In fact, it wasn’t even technically a street as it was unnamed and unpaved. It can get very dusty in the dry heat of summer. In the winter and spring, the road gets slushy after some water has leached down from springs which come from the mountain beyond. In the fall, leaves provide cover for the bare ground and can get slippery if someone comes by or drives in to visit with the family. Those visits were rare.
The house, a two-bedroom Cape Cod, was unpretentious and simple, an inheritance from the father’s family who were loggers at one time. It sat a bare few yards from the edge of the vast forest and Mount Adams can be seen from the back porch of the modest home. Around them, trees canopied the house on all sides, with only a small clearing for the path that led to the unpaved road just several yards nearby. There was only one neighbor, about two miles closer towards the little town, but aside from that, the house was nestled right at the edge of remoteness with the vast wilderness as their backyard.
Delia was an unusual child whose previous home was replete with conflict. Small in stature and born with one club foot which caused her to limp. She grew up in a suburb of Boston where she lived with her mother Brenda and her grandmother. At that home, strange occurrences in the form of orbs would manifest in the upper story of the colonial house as well as a shadow being that appeared to neighbors standing outside looking up at the house. Her father, Josh worked at a local mill and lived separately, estranged from the in-laws who felt their own daughter had married below her social status. A constant feud between Delia’s mother and grandmother were reported by neighbors, including the friend who lived next door, Dawn whose account this story is from.
After Josh’s own parents passed, the couple decided to renovate the house that he inherited from his parents in New Hampshire. Though smaller than they would have liked, the couple craved privacy and a change to start again as a family. Josh took a position as a stonemason in the local town and a few months later, the couple rejoined and moved to the little house with their only daughter.
Several months later, Josh and his wife Brenda were ready to show off their new home, renovated with a stone fireplace and other small luxuries like a powder room on the first floor and a new cabinets in the small kitchen. They invited both their couple friends and single ones. Brenda chose to invite the neighbors who were kind to them when she and Delia lived in Medway, including Dawn and her then boyfriend, Rich. It was during this time that the guests noticed that Delia, who had to be uprooted to attend the local public school was sitting in the backyard by herself. Delia who was very sweet and had many friends in her school while living in Medway, presented as aloof and even cold. She reportedly came home straight from school every afternoon and spent a lot of time roaming the woods beyond. She was wearing a lot of make up but appeared unkempt, her hair in tangles.
Friends of the family shrugged off their observations of Delia’s behaviour as that of a teen who was predictably trying to adjust to her new surroundings. She missed her friends and told her mother so, but feeling powerless to change the situation as it was their only chance of staying together, Brenda ignored her daughter’s concerns. She kept encouraging Delia to seek a sport of interest and join a club or two. Eventually Delia stopped talking to her mother about it and became withdrawn.
One afternoon, Delia strayed further than usual and crossed a few creeks and discovered an abandoned well of sorts. She discovered that when she looked into the well, there were all sorts of strange objects in it and planned on lowering herself into the well to check out what was there. Upon returning home one afternoon from the well, Brenda scolded Delia for getting leaves in her hair and what appeared as cobwebs on her clothes. Delia decided to be more mindful and start taking an old shirt of her father’s with her to cover herself up to protect her clothes from being soiled. One day, she found a mirror and connected it to stick, improvising a way to look down into the well to further check the contents down below.
END of Part 1 of THE WISHING WELL. Subscribe to continue reading the new entries every week!
