A Child’s Book of Magical Things
The house loomed near the edge of Greenwood cemetery in Hamilton, Ohio, its Victorian Gothic architecture casting jagged shadows across the graves. The cemetery, ravaged by the infamous flood, bore the scars of its history. Cracked headstones leaned at odd angles, names and dates eroded by time and water, while toppled monuments lay half-buried in the earth. Rusted iron gates hung askew, their intricate patterns now twisted and broken, as if the floodwaters had tried to drag the dead along with the living.
The house itself seemed a mirror to the cemetery’s chaos, its elaborate details tarnished by time. Stained glass windows refracted fractured light onto the overgrown yard, where tree roots twisted like skeletal hands toward the graves. Inside, the grand interiors carried an air of faded grandeur—dusty chandeliers, carved wooden panels warped by dampness, and velvet drapes that clung to their rods like shrouds.
For the little girl who grew up here, the cemetery and the house were intertwined in her memories, both places of haunting whispers and heavy silence. She remembered peering out from the attic window as a child, watching the sun dip below the graveyard, casting the stones in eerie shadows. The house and the cemetery, both wounded by the flood and weathered by time, had felt alive with secrets, as though they shared a buried history she was never meant to uncover. Now, as she crossed the threshold once more, the weight of those memories settled heavily on her shoulders.
