PROLOGUE - A Ghost Chases the Horizon

The Kirkbride Rested

It was 1905 when the state of West Virginia took Henrietta Tidewater’s ovaries. The twenty-year-old pleasured in assembling items from diagrams, reading, and blonde mustaches—the curlier, the better. Henrietta disliked tomatoes and language barriers.

It was 1935 when Eugene J.D. Spangold urinated on the floor of the Floyd Funeral Home. The forty-eight-year-old admired forged glassware, the actress Janet Gaynor, and books read aloud by his wife—the wordier, the better. Eugene disliked alcoholism and the overzealous.

It was 1999 when Brittany Jean Loughry obtained a permanent limp after falling from an unstable ladder. The eighteen-year-old enjoyed fruit juice beverages, post-grunge alternative music, and abandoned buildings—the larger, the better. Brittany disliked early mornings and vintage motorcycles.

It was 2019 when Neil Hutchence stood before a moving train in rural Minnesota. The forty-year-old appreciated manicured lawns, green tea-infused drinks, and solitude—the quieter, the better. He disliked faulty light fixtures and doors with handles.

It was 1905. It was 1935. It was 1999. It was 2019.

It was my curse to see those years all at once.

It was sometime in the years beyond, but I had been so preoccupied with playing with shadows that I had lost account of the true year. The fact I understood numbers at all was impressive enough for a structure never meant to count, or think, or know, or remember.

I was the main administrative building on the campus of the former Weston Hospital. The Kirkbride was my unofficial moniker. In my advanced years, I developed a particular talent for knowing and remembering. Structures of a centennial age develop unexplained sentience, and stone buildings can be chatty when conscious talents mature.

It was raining now. It had rained for days, and the absence of lightning made me deduce it was early spring. Hot and cold currents had yet to irritate the atmosphere. It may have been late autumn. No. The trees had been leaf-barren for a season, and snow blankets were not long removed from Weston lawns.

But what was the year? Neil was old, but still alive for now. He recently uncovered the truth about Henrietta, and news had returned to the campus within the day. An assistant manager remarked about devoting a museum section to her. It may have been hyperbole, though it was not the first instance one of Neil’s discoveries warranted rearranging the ancient items of the hospital museum.

Neil had been inside recently, too, finally allowed access to the property after a decades-long absence for a fight with a tour guide manager. He was nearing middle age in those early days, but was still as young as I had ever known him, far younger than now. What hair resided on his head had gone glassy gray, and wrinkles distorted his features, but he still had those distinct, deep-set eyes.

But this year? It was surely past 2063. West Virginia made a big to-do about its bicentennial. I featured in the celebrations among the most prominent structures still in use. Sections of my edifice had stood longer than the state itself.

It was after 2063, but not more than a decade beyond.

2071? Maybe. It had to be.

That was my final guess. It felt right. It was a sorry statement that time had now eluded the timeless, but in all my battles, the clock remained undefeated.

Whenever the time was, the campus was still considered a foundry for the paranormal. This claim was fair, considering the constant casting of projections in the empty rooms and capillaries of corridors that branched throughout. I felt bewitched, but not by the spirits of those left behind. The elusive answer was my secret, my truth.

It was not the ghosts that haunted, but the moments.

Common misconceptions mistook hauntings as the phantasm’s fault because most observers overlooked what was hidden in the essences. Ghosts did not seek the living. If they did, those sheeted and shackled spirits would find whom they sought with little effort, which was never the case. From my perspective, spirits were indifferent to their worldly counterparts and remained confined to a particular place. A place of tragedy, a place of sentiment, or a place where stone walls could capture a memory of someone once among the living.

No better place filled those requisites than I. The Weston Hospital campus was a large psychiatric complex nestled in the hollows of a small mountain town. It was tragic because of the horrors that had befallen the mentally ill community at any given time in history. It was sentimental in how ingrained my existence was in the history of Weston. My Gothic megastructure cast a long shadow upon the town from across the West Fork River.

Though odd for a hospital, I was also part of the social scene. There were community dances in my auditorium, and the high school football team had exhibitions on the lawn. Elementary classes took field trips to learn about mental illness, but they often devolved into gawking, zoo-like, at those society considered undesirable.

Much of the community’s prosperity and economy took root on the opposite side of the river. When my doors closed, I would have stood as a mausoleum to Weston’s opulence if not for a new facility constructed near the edge of my acreage.

My property had gone by many names in its lifetime. Although first named Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, the name was never uttered during its operating years. It was West Virginia Hospital for the Insane in 1905, Weston State Hospital in 1935, and Weston Hospital by the time it closed in 1994. It remained with the final name until 2007, when my property was auctioned to a family who honored the site for its historical value. Only then was my birth name of Trans-Allegheny restored.

By the time the new owners began hosting tours, it had become clear there was something more notable about the property than its history.

I was the oldest and largest of the dozen buildings gracing the property. Within me was where the bulk of hauntings transpired. Paranormal events were frequent on the hospital grounds as the surrounding buildings also came into sentience.

My nickname, Kirkbride, is derived from the pioneer behind the building’s architectural design. Doctor Thomas Story Kirkbride was an advocate for mental health. He believed that all a mentally ill patient required was sunlight and peace. These hospitals were intended to be like resorts for the mentally disabled. A luxury space where someone at odds with societal norms could relax and repair the broken pieces of their psyche. It was a humane gesture that gained traction, spawning many hospitals with Kirkbride’s roadmap to recovery.

The brown and tan limestone blocks of my four stories grayed as they withstood the seasons. My walls stretched so far from one end to the other that it was difficult to capture the panorama. Additional ground-floor wards ran perpendicular to the face of my compound, forming an inverted comb. An eggshell-white clock tower, trimmed in a flush green, stood as the centerpiece. A spire matching the color climbed above the tower and came to a point at the highest altitude.

Three clock faces gave the hour to the east, north, and south, leaving the rear of the property timeless. The clocks themselves were not keeping correct account when the hospital shuttered. No one was certain if they had been accurate even before. The clock hands moved but operated with a different sense of time, never keeping the correct mark with the rest of the world. By 2019, the three faces were each keeping their own hours of reality.

The new owners decided the clock tower was too treacherous to traverse and affixed a padlock to the entrance. Its interior was the last of my exhaustive restoration, which will be completed in late 2071. Soon, it seems.

A lonely era followed the 1994 closure. Whether age or seclusion, this period was when I felt the most developed in my consciousness. The joys and horrors of past events had scratched moments into the architecture. An unknown system that operated as a rudimentary recording device. When people began visiting again, I had already begun to replay many etched events.

No one ever considered hauntings to be more than one-sided affairs. The projections, the entities on the other side of the veil, were as spooked by their encounter with someone in the present. My old Kirkbride walls would hold onto most of their secrets, save the occasional glimpse. More than a peek could lead to an existential cataclysm, and enough madness had already passed through these halls.

What I could witness once extended far past the current era, but I lacked the discernment to know what type of warning to broadcast from these years beyond.

Replaying projections did not come easily. I tried, failed, toiled in the practice, and got better. I often faltered and sharpened my abilities on lesser events made more profound by the experiment. The era was lonely, and in the suffocating air and constant silence, I began to play back the moments I could recall. I replicated sights, sounds, and smells and put them into reality. Shadows walked down long halls and disappeared into empty rooms still unoccupied. Nodes of light danced in corners of wards and sometimes took the shape of a human who tarried there or had yet to tarry. The retelling was imperfect, never verbatim, and never sure of the time stamp. Still, I tried.

I bent the aether and willed forth the unknown things within the elements. I tried to forget the horrors. I attempted to disregard the lobotomized, the electrocuted, the raped, and the murdered, but they were all there. Their tragedies had bled into the bedrock and refused to fade from memory. For all the good I tried to project, wicked moments permeated the replay. Still, I tried.

I continued, even with my Trans-Allegheny birth name restored, and regular visitors began to frequent my halls again. I had been reborn and had somehow returned to the social circuit. As such, the property’s reputation for hauntings grew stronger. Historians, investigators, and innocent onlookers took notice of the fragmented projections and informed the world. The benign mixed with the malignant, and the darker of the two was more versed in garnering attention. Door slams, screams, and scratches persisted. The scratches were the worst because something was trying to manifest onto the physical plane. I disapproved at first, but could not resist over time. The attention resulted in more people visiting the site. I was again full of people to remember. People who were not as full of terror, people I did not have to dread. I hoped the new visitors could overwrite the old memories after some time. I did not want to forget everything, only the horrors. I had no way of knowing my reputation beyond the grounds would not allow for that. The stains of history would disappear over time, but like blood, they remained bound in the stone and could only be seen when held to the light of a particular spectrum. Still, I tried.

I will recount each story from the perspective of my subject to the best of my knowledge. What did not occur in my presence was assembled later with scraps of details that came to me by various means. Weston speaks to me. The town parrots what they say and do, and I listen. The same is true for the county and state, and I cannot help but listen.

I will start in 1999 when I helped Brittany Jean Loughry experience her first haunting. Though terrified initially, she became fascinated by the occasion and obsessed for a brief time. Despite the fleeting nature of her interest, the moment of first contact and lesser moments that followed continued to haunt Brittany until she passed away. Her son, Joel, and daughter, Della, were present as her last ragged breath broke her spirit free from mortal moorings.

Because life moves in circles, the start and finish of Brittany’s story are not aligned with her purpose. I have discovered from my craft that beginnings and ends have no cohesion to the machinations of a universe meant to cycle eternally. Brittany’s beginning and end are only crucial for setting the boundary of her life and understanding the contents within. The moments where she most contributed to humanity’s cause did not always fall within those parameters. Brittany came from more and begat more, even as she considered the smallness of her life among the rippling ocean of time.

Brittany never got to know her meaning, and neither did Henrietta or Eugene. They knew their purpose was there, like a dark speck within the vastness of the universe. Their reason fluttered in dust particles around their heads at odd hours, shimmering in the light for only a moment and dissipating before they could focus on the infinitesimal answer.

Besides, Brittany never understood how I was the cornerstone for everything her meaning represented. She and I shared a bond in our loneliness. We commiserated, loved, and moved on with the monotonous workaday trudge of life together. We did so with a unique ability to dwell on the past and glimpse snippets of the future. Still, the answers were broadcast on a frequency she could not fully comprehend.

It was the same with Henrietta in 1905 and Eugene in 1935. Neil understood his purpose, though it came late and was borne from what remained to close their story. The quartet otherwise would never know they were completing a rotation of purpose within my walls. Another circular mechanism of the universe, fueled by both the energies of the living and would-be ghosts. I wish I could have told them everything, or anything, but the hour is far too late. Three are gone, and Neil is close. There is no way to arrange a meeting with them now.

Still, I tried.

A GHOST CHASES THE HORIZON RELEASED OCTOBER 3, 2025.

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(Note: This excerpt is from the prerelease edition and may not reflect the final version)