Welcome back to Nighty Night, Bedtime stories to keep you awake. I'm your host,

Rabiachadri. And in this week's episode, we learned

that the shadows that haunt us, whether real or imagined, often have real life consequences. The Shadow in the Corner by Mary Elizabeth Braden

Wild Heath Grange stood a little way back from the road

with a barren stretch of heath behind it and a few tall fur trees

with straggling wind-tossed heads for its only shelter. It was a lonely house on a

lonely road, little better than a lane, leading across a desolate waste of sandy fields to the seashore.

And it was a house that bore a bad name among the natives of the village of Hullcroft, which was the nearest place where humanity might be found.

It was a good old house nevertheless, substantially built in the days when there was no

stint of stone and timber, a good old gray stone house with many gables, deep window seats,

and a wide staircase, long dark passages, hidden doors in queer corners, closets as large as some modern rooms,

and sellers in which a company of soldiers might have lain Purdue.

This spacious old mansion was given over to rats and mice, loneliness, echoes, and the occupation of three elderly people.

Michael Baskam, whose forebears had been landowners of importance in the neighborhood,

and his two servants, Daniel Skegg and his wife,

who had served the owner of that grim old house ever since he left the

university where he had lived 15 years of his life, five as student, and 10 as professor of natural science.

At 3 and 30, Michael Baskam had seemed a middle-aged man. At 56 he looked and moved and spoke like an old man.

During that interval of 23 years,

he had lived alone in Wild Heath Grange,

and the country people told each other that the house had made him what he was.

This was a fanciful and superstitious notion on their part, doubtless.

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