The Haunting of Gillespie House by Darcy Coates

door had been locked; the room was private, special. They hadn’t wanted intruders poking through their missing daughter’s possessions… which was exactly what I’d done. I stood up, feeling ashamed and a little sick. The room held the Gillespies’ private grief, probably the reason their marriage was failing, and a virtual stranger had beaten down the door and riffled through their daughter’s memorabilia. I intended to back out of the room, close the door and never open it again, but something stopped me.
    Did the Gillespies know the room had once belonged to Jonathan Gillespie? Surely not. They would have chosen the room for their daughter because of the beautiful bay window that overlooked the gully. They couldn’t have known their child’s room had once housed such an evil man… no, not a man—a monster.
    I looked back at the photo frames, at Hanna’s infectiously free smile, and my skin crawled. She’d been a descendant of Jonathan Gillespie, a cult leader who believed there was power in darkness and death, and she’d lived in his room.
    The police seemed to think Hanna had woken up early on the morning of her disappearance, gone for a walk, and become lost in the woods. But I had a horrible, sinking idea that Jonathan had somehow been involved.
    “That’s crazy,” I told myself, my eyes darting about the peach-and-white room. “He’s been dead for nearly two hundred years. You’ve lost your marbles, Elle.”
    And yet, I couldn’t summon the willpower to leave. Instead, I knelt back in front of the second box, which held a collection of Hanna’s toys. A leather-bound book was hidden just below a pack of horse stickers.
    “I shouldn’t be doing this,” I said as I gently extracted the diary. “This is so, so wrong.”
    The police had probably already been through the room five times over, I reasoned as I opened the diary to the first pages. As much as I felt as though I was violating the Gillespie’s privacy, I certainly wasn’t the first person to do so.
    The diary was filled with a child’s scrawl. Hanna had been a reasonable speller, but she hadn’t bothered trying to keep the words within the faint lines scored on the paper. Her sentences rolled across the surface in whichever direction they decided to go. It made reading difficult, but I got the gist of the first entry: she’d been given the diary as a present when they moved into their new house.
    New house… this house?
    She wrote about choosing the room with the big window and lining her toy horses on the sill so they could look outside while she slept.
    I flipped through the pages, picking up on bits of trivia while I looked for anything that could correlate with my suspicions. A few months after moving in, Mr Gillespie had hired contractors to build garden beds out the back. Hanna had helped him plant seeds and had watered them every morning. A few entries after that, she’d stumbled on the cemetery, but her parents wouldn’t let her go in. Her parents had plans to repaint the entire house and buy more comfortable furniture—but it looked as though Hanna’s room was the only one that had been spruced up.
    Then I saw something that made me pause. Hanna had written about “little voices” talking to her through the walls. She thought they were fairies that were hiding from her. According to Hanna, they didn’t speak English, but they would sometimes reply when she spoke to them.
    I turned the page, eager for more information, and found it was empty. I flipped farther, searching for more of the winding scrawl, but there was nothing else in the diary. Frustrated, I turned back to the last page and checked the date: January 16th, just two days before she was reported missing.
    It felt as if a bucket of cold water had been poured over my head. Guilt for looking through the lost girl’s possessions drew over me, and I reverently put the diary back in the box then scooted backwards until I could rest my shoulders against the