The Haunted Church House – Prologue
The church stood empty. Its windows were black, its stones sinking into the earth. No bell rang there, no prayer lifted—only the restless silence of the graves beside it.
Yet the land remembered. Before Coal Town had a name, the trail here carried trappers, merchants, even presidents westward. At its steepest bend, an inn clung to the slope, its hearth a beacon for the weary. Below it, a preacher and his flock raised a small church where children learned, disputes were judged, and the dead were carried out to the hill.
The graveyard swelled. Strangers filled it more than neighbors—travelers who never finished their journeys, laid too far from home for return. When the preacher himself was buried among them, the church fell silent, and silence became its only keeper.
Then the mountain gave up coal. Rails climbed its flank, and a town gathered in the valley below. They called it Coal Town, and at its center the forsaken church rotted, unwanted yet unmoving.
The wealthy vowed to tear it down and raise a grander house of God. But the work was cursed from the first hammer’s strike. Walls collapsed. Scaffolds split. Men whispered of shadows where no men stood. Still, stone by stone, the Gothic edifice rose.
At last its spire pierced the sky. They named it First Church of Coal Town and flung its doors wide—seeking a preacher to claim the pulpit, never knowing the echoes within already belonged to something else.
Over the years, a succession of preachers had come, each one hopeful, each one certain they could breathe life into the hollow nave. Yet one by one they departed—quietly, abruptly, some without even a word of farewell. No one could say why. The doors stayed shut, the pulpit empty, until the day Jonathan arrived, and the church awakened once more.