Z2012SITEDTHEADMIRAL



Admiral Gordon Levenfort had wanted kids for as long as he could remember. Even when he was a young man, he had wanted nothing more from life than to look down and see his own features reflected back at him. He pined to teach his son how to throw a baseball, or to build a dollhouse with his daughter. One summer night, Gordon attended a cocktail event for a charity raising money for the local orphanage. It was there that he met a charming blue-eyed blonde from Savannah named Abigail Connahue. He fell for her glowing expressions, and she for his dark and enchanting looks. For days to come, Gordon would dream about the smoothness of Abigail’s porcelain doll complexion and the beautiful way that her southern curls fell around her smiling face. They dated for two years and got married with her wealthy family’s gracious blessing. Gordon was overjoyed and ready to make his dreams of a loving family become a reality.

Upon being located to the Naval Base in Charleston, South Carolina, he and his wife Abigail moved into a large home. It felt awfully empty to them; they longed to fill it with life. Casually, the Admiral brought up the concept of having children one night as they peacefully ate their dinner. Abigail agreed that the house needed a larger family to fill its grand rooms. That night they vowed to start trying. They tried for the next few weeks, then a few months, and then it had become a year that they had been trying and they hadn’t even realized it. Gordon felt as if he was running out of time, and his anxiety began to show in his actions toward Abigail. Their marriage had been placed under immense stress. They often fought over small things like the drab color of the curtains or the excess of ashes that lay in the fire place. It was only because Gordon was so frustrated that he couldn’t do the one thing that seemed possible for almost everybody else. Increasingly, he was growing distant from his wife. They hardly ever talked anymore, simply to avoid the inevitable pointless arguments. Even other officers at the base had noticed how withdrawn and moody the Admiral had become. Unsure of what to do about his situation, he decided to seek some outside help.

On a breezy fall day, Gordon paid a visit to the infirmary. The Admiral had never been a man that was fond of medical practices; since childhood he got woozy at the mere sight of blood. However, he was feeling rather desperate. Hollowness was ballooning inside him, it was aching to be filled with paternal love. That day, Gordon met with a man named Dr. Lionel Ingram. Despite Gordon’s queasy nervousness, he told the doctor of his problem. This Dr. Ingram was a peculiar man, but took great interest in the admiral’s situation. The twig like man raked his fingers through his greasy black hair as he listened, focusing intently on Gordon with beady eyes and a furrowed brow. With surprisingly little deliberation, he told the Admiral that he had just the thing for him. Gordon was surprised when Dr. Ingram told him that a container of pills would be delivered to his house the next day, for he had expected that an operation of some sort would be needed. Thankful of such a simple cure, he paid the doctor a generous amount for his services.

The next morning, on the front doorstep was a small apothecary bottle with powdery white pills. There was a pharmacy note that said “1 x day - Dr. L. Ingram”. All that week the Admiral deliberated over what to do with the medication. He was conflicted on whether to tell his wife about the medicine or to slip it to her secretly. He knew that Abigail was a worrier, and he feared that she might doubt him and refuse to partake in the medical fix. He could picture her lips pinching together in doubt, looking at him with questioning eyes that said “//You can’t be serious, darling.”// Gordon hated to deceive her, but every time he thought of life without children his heart felt as if it would collapse all together. He would close his eyes and remember the nightmares that he had of himself and the now bitter Abigail. They would grow old and their love for each other would be completely lost, and they would have no one to care for them in their wrinkling state. Gordon decided this simply could not happen. So, once a day, Gordon would crush a pill into powder and would slip it into her sweet tea.

Abigail began to change. It was slow at first; simple slip-ups like forgetting plans or dates. Gordon assumed it was a minor side-effect. Things became slightly more askew when she began to look over at him on occasion and stare at him with the most bizarre, distant expression on her face. Her eyes would zero in on Gordon as if she had never seen him before, curious and terrified of his presence. He could almost see little gears in her mind, sifting and sorting through her memory databases, trying to place where this strange man had come from. But Gordon should have been anything but strange to Abigail, and got spooky shivers down his spine every time this happened. This went on for about two weeks, but then these moments became more frequent and peculiar. She would ask him odd questions about his past, seeming disgusted with him and the cloud of mystery that was apparently surrounding him. It was like there was this new person inside of her who didn’t know who he was. This new Abigail seemed to accuse him with every glance that her piercing blue eyes shot at him.

Within a few weeks, Abigail began to have nasty fits daily. She would rampage around the house, screaming and destroying things, like a wild animal trapped in a cage. Her hands twitched and twisted in ways that made the Admiral cringe. Her eyes darted from object to object like a crazed bird daring to dive into the concrete. But sometimes her gaze would be intently focused on a point in the empty distance. It was so eerie that it made Gordon wonder if she was seeing things in a reality that was all her own. She would shriek and scream in high pitched, blood curdling tones that hardly seemed to belong to her anymore, “WHO ARE YOU? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME? WHY?” Once the episodes passed, she would sit down and sob for hours until she fell into a deep sleep, where her body churned restlessly but her eyes remained shut. Gordon treasured the times that Abigail was still normal, but with each passing day she slipped further and further away. Abigail was drowning in a new person; a rash, violent, psychotic version of the woman Gordon had once loved.

The neighbors overheard much of the commotion, but simply didn’t react because they couldn’t picture the charming couple acting in such a way. Eventually, even the most reluctant neighbors became curious and concerned. The screams coming from the mansion made them shudder to the point where they decided something must be done. An elderly woman named Edna Peaberry was the one who finally realized the seriousness of what was happenning and paid a visit to the sheriff’s office downtown. She brought him back to the shaded road guarded by the swaying branches of the weeping cherries that she was proud to live on. Everything seemed normal until they arrived at the mansion and immediately sensed something worse than usual was occurring. They heard stomping, crashing, wails, shrieks and the most spine chilling noise of something metal clanging around the house. At the perfect moment, the sheriff rushed into the house as Abigail held a butcher knife to Gordon’s throat, panting and glaring with hatred. The sheriff grabbed her and shook the knife away, immediately decreeing that she be taken to a psychiatric ward.

Abigail Levenfort died shortly after being deposited in the insane asylum of the annex with an unborn baby inside her. The Admiral was left alone with no child and no wife, no family at all besides the grieved and remote parents of Abigail. He was heartbroken and mentally distraught from the months of living with the psychotic outbursts of his unstable wife. His guilt had ebbed away at him each time he saw her brokenness, so he had forced himself to stay with her. Despite her state, he still had hope that she would become pregnant and everything would be instantly better. Now that Abigail was dead, Gordon spent his days with his head hung low, struggling to accept everything that had happened, wishing he had never given her those terrible pills. He was crushed, but most of all infuriated. He was convinced that Dr. Ingram had given him a medicine to make his wife insane. Gordon spent hours calculating why this would have happened and what the doctor might have had to gain from it but remained puzzled. One melancholy night where the Admiral was drowning his sorrows in whiskey at a local pub, he promised himself that he would stomp over to the infirmary the next day and pound on the door until the nurses let him in. He swore he would go to Dr. Ingram and demand to know what had really happened to his poor, miserable wife.

That week, a local reported the admiral missing. No one had seen him since that night at the pub, and they never would. It is still unknown what happened to him, but many believe that it was a particularly unusual case. Many accusations were made against Dr. Ingram, but nothing was ever confirmed nor denied. It is believed that Old Tom Long Legs must have kept the unfortunate couple’s souls alive, because an alarming number of people have reported hearing screams, shrieks and violent commotion echoing in the empty quarters of the abandoned mansion.