“The building I am standing in front of is the WS Watson Building…” Natalie said, nodding back over her shoulder to the imposing three-story building. “Named for the man who built it in 1904, Mr. William S. Watson. For many years, it was believed that this building is cursed; that evil spirits haunt its halls and that any young lady who spends the night under its roof runs the risk of vanishing without a trace. Indeed, at least 6 women who lodged here when it was a boarding house from 1904 to 1908 are known to have gone missing and many more are suspected but never confirmed to have disappeared in connection to it.” 

The tall, dark-haired 18-year old girl smiled. “Well, my film crew and I will be running that risk and hopefully get to the bottom of this mystery and so lay the curse of the WS Watson house to rest, once and for all!” Natalie waited a moment, then broke character. “Was that good, Sam? Or do you want to do another take while we’ve got the light?” It was late in the evening and the late Autumn sun was setting fast, almost disappearing over the dark, gabled roof of the building. In the growing shadows Natali could easily see how someone could ascribe a curse to the creepy old house. 

“Nah, that was perfect.” The sandy-haired camera girl replied, raising a thumbs up as she quickly played back the footage. There were four of them gathered in front of the house that evening. Natalie, the leader and official spokeswoman for the group, their cameragirl Samantha, cute blonde Betty was running sound while redhead Joan would be handling lights once inside. 

“Okay, let’s film the entrance next.” Natalie said, and the girls got set. For the last year or so, they’d been shooting episodes for their online series “Mysterious Place” where they traveled to locations with local legends, ghost stories or curses and filmed themselves exploring. Something fun to do on the weekends and they hoped it would look good on college applications once they graduated next year. 

Sam filmed Natalie walking up the path to the front door, while Betty and Joan, with less to do for this scene, gathered up their things. Besides cameras, lights and sounds, they had sleeping bags and everything else they’d need to spend the night in this abandoned house. When Natalie reached the porch, she paused, hand on the doorknob. She then waited, letting Sam go in first, then closing the door again so the cameragirl could get a shot of Natalie entering the house from an interior POV. 

Natalie waited as Betty and Joan joined the two of them inside and got started setting up lights and sound. Taking advantage of the pause, she opened a three-ring binder with the script and all of their notes on the location, refreshing her memory on the points she wanted to cover in this part of the video. When Sam signaled her that they were ready to get rolling again, Natalie set the binder down and quickly got back into her ‘documentary hostess’ persona, turning to look at the camera. 

“Put yourselves in the shoes of one Wilhemina Van Allen, in late 1905 she’s only 19 years old, fresh off the boat from Holland and all alone in a big and strange country. Perhaps seeing an advertisement for lodging rooms for young ladies, she enters the front doors of the WS Watson building one foggy evening…never to check out.” Natalie narrated and even she felt a slight chill run up her spine. 

Officially, she knew, none of the WS Watson building disappearances were ever solved. In 1908, with growing attention to the building, Mr. Watson sold his stake in the house and fled the state ahead of angry creditors. No one knew where he’d gone until three years later, in 1911, when a man going by the name of A.J. Potter, later proved to be Watson, was arrested in San Francisco, in connection to the kidnapping of the Seward girls. 

At the trial, it was proved that Mr. Watson, alias AJ Potter, had planned to smuggle the three sisters, discovered tied up and gagged in a crate moments before it was to be loaded aboard a tramp freighter bound for the Far East, abroad and sell them to an unknown buyer there. It was also suspected, though never proved, he’d done the same to at least a dozen other girls and young ladies who’d gone missing during the three year period after his flight from the east coast. 

After a short, sensational trial, Watson was convicted under then then year-old Mann Act, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act and sentenced to life imprisonment. Though questioned extensively over the years before his death in 1919, Watson never revealed what had happened to any of the missing girls, whether in San Francisco or those of his earlier venture, the WS Watson House. In all likelihood, though, they too had been abducted, spirited abroad and sold, spending the rest of their lives in bondage. 

After finishing the scene in the entry hall, the four teens made their way up the stairs, looking for the room in which poor Miss Van Allen had spent her first night in the States only to vanish before dawn, whether the work some supernatural curse or at the more mundane, though no less sinister hands of a ruthless white slaver. The room had been left unfurnished when the last owners of the building abandoned it. It was dark, only a thin beam of moonlight peeping in through window shutters which seemed jammed shut, despite the girls best efforts to open them. 

Natalie waited as lights and sound were once more set up. She stepped in front of Sam, smiled at the camera and got ready to continue her narrative of that fateful night in 1905, only she never got the chance. Just as she was starting, the lights suddenly went out. 

“What the!?!” “Hey!” “What’s going on?” “H-Mmpphh!” 

The girls cried out in shock and alarm as they suddenly found themselves in near total darkness. After a minute, Natalie managed to pull her phone out and turn its flashlight mode on. That allowed the others to find their regular flashlights and switch them on again. 

“What the hell, Joan?” Natalie called. “Why’d the lights go out?” It was as she was saying this, she noticed that there were only two flashlights lit, besides her own. A quick glance at the nervous figures holding them told her that Joan was nowhere to be seen. 

“Joan? Where are you?” Natalie called. 

Sam, meanwhile, had gone to check on the lighting equipment. “Hey girls?” She said, uncertainly. “Look at this!” As the other two stepped over, they saw that the wires connecting the lights to their portable power supply had been cut. 

“Where did Joan go?” Betty asked, nervously. “It’s like she just vanished!” 

“Don’t start that!” Natalie snapped. “Next you’ll be talking about the house being cursed too! Let’s be logical!” She thought for a moment. “She can’t have left through the door or we’d have heard it open.” The door to the room, its hinges unoiled anytime in the last couple decades, had shrieked like all hell when the girls had muscled it open and shut once again. “The window’s out as well…there must be another way in and out of this room!” 

“I heard Joan cry out over there!” Sam pointed to the corner of the room, away from where all the other girls had been standing, leaving their lighting specialist the closest at hand. “It sounded like she was about to say something, then she was cut off!”

The three girls converged, turning their flashlights on this corner of the room. “Hey look!” Natalie pointed. Sticking out of the wall, clashing with the room’s faded wallpaper, was a strip of blue cloth. On close examination, the girls realized it must have been torn off of Joan’s skirt. It was caught between two sections of wall, causing one to stick out, ever so slightly. Had the cloth not gotten stuck, the two pieces would have lain flush with one another, so close as to be indistinguishable. 

The girls got to work, fumbling around for a hidden catch or button or something to open the secret door. Despite her shock at the sudden blackout and her worry for Joan, Natalie couldn’t help but feel a thrill of discovery. “Too bad we aren’t filming this.” She thought. It would have made a great addition to the video, much better than their usual fumbling around boring, mundane old houses or barns or whatnot. 

Eventually, Sam found a button, cunningly worked into the molding of the baseboard. As she pressed it, the secret door popped open with a quiet ‘click.’ As it swung open, the girls saw to their amazement a narrow passage which ran between the inner wall of the room and the outer wall of the house. Natalie peered down it in amazement, seeing more secret doorways, with mechanisms for opening and closing. 

“This must have been how he did it!” She thought, imagining Mr. Watson, creeping through this passage in the dark, finding the right door and slipping silently into the room of one of his unfortunate female lodgers. A sap to the back of the head, or a chloroform soaked rag pressed over her mouth and nose, then he’d carry his latest victim back through the secret door, never to be seen again. 

The trio crept into the secret passage, huddled close together, both in fright and out of necessity in the narrow passage. It was easy to tell which way to go. Dust and cobwebs lay thick on the floor and walls and the light of the girls’ flashlights showed an obvious trail where someone had been dragged along unwillingly. 

“We should get out of here! Go to the police!” Betty whispered. 

Natalie shook her head. “We can’t leave Joan here! We need to find her!” The area the house was in had no cell reception. Who knew how long they’d have to drive to get a signal, how long it would take to call the police and convince them to send someone all the way out here in the middle of the night. “Besides, whoever’s doing this won’t be expecting us to sneak up behind them like this…” But for the happenstance of Joan’s skirt catching on the closing door and ripping, none of the others would have known what had happened to her. It would have been like she just vanished. Another victim of the cursed house. 

At the far end of the passage, they came to a narrow staircase, spiraling up and downwards. Following the footsteps in the dust, the girls descended to the ground floor, where they was another hidden passage, extending out into pitch darkness, while the stairs continued down. The house didn’t have a basement, so far as Natalie knew from the girls’ research, but given the secret passages and staircase, it was hardly surprising it should have a secret basement as well. The walls changed from heavy, dusty wood beams and paneling to heavy, cold stonework as the girls descended underground.