Whispers from the Attic

Overview of the Attic Whispers

On the end of a dead-end street, in the quiet and peaceful neighborhood of Maplewood, lay a Victorian house more than a century old. A terrible disaster had struck this home that brought so much joy and happiness. The disaster snatched it and turned it into the fable told by campfires, part of city folklore. This mansion has been abandoned for decades since the family disappeared under a spate of strange happenings. Even if only the most courageous of the curious were drawn to its humming streets, most of them would actually feel that its existence had quite a different effect. The first half of the book involves the character of Sarah, a young lady in her twenties, returning to Maplewood. Local mythology of weird incidents on that haunted home, which came to be known as the Hawthorne home, draws her into it. Despite warnings from neighbors about weird sounds and spooky shadows, she investigates the estate in pursuit of an answer to whether the stories that haunt her dreams are true.

At every turn, Sarah entered a house full of memories and dust. The grandiose entrance had barely ushered the old glory back. Every step she took, some creaky floor moaned, and with every turn, the wallpaper smeared off into the carpet. Still, her main reason was to head up to the attic. Every room told a different story; the murmurs seemed like someone from the past had whispered them-one who did not want to leave that place.

But with a super-natural propulsion of propulsion above all fears, Sarah rushes upstairs and straight to the attic.

Finally, the top door opens, and a small murmur starts to come out from it. She advances inside and opens her heart to swing with its heavy tugs. Piles of rubbish in the attic rise up to the ceiling, sitting menacingly in the low light, waiting for exposure on top of abandoned trunks, toys which no child ever used, and fading portraits of the Hawthorne family. She then started rummaging through her stuff in the house, discarding everything but the shadows made by the white coverings covering antique furniture. It sounds as though someone is saying her name, soft, melodious, in her ear. She thought her brain was playing tricks on her at first, but the voices grew louder and more insistent, and she had to listen. The words were unclear, but the tone-imperative and urgent. She is wrapped in a mantle of hot sadness and longing.

She would spend days in the attic when it would be time for Sarah to find out about the history of the Hawthorne family, knowing what the whispers seek. The existence of this family, so full with love and at the same time so sorrowful, was strongly related to the history of the town and its unspoken secrets. She started to realize that the whispers were murmurs of the family's unsolved wounds, rather than memories of some past.

Darker and darker, the darkness is setting over the attic. Sarah is out of her element yet comfortable with the Hawthornes. Noises are getting louder and louder as they pierce into a room and further into an ancient trunk. Numbers of letters have been recovered between Eliza and her parents, Thomas and Hawthorne. Their pre-calamity existence, struggles, dreams, and concerns are locked within them.

She reads the letters to cope with her loss. The last letter that was mailed only a few days before they disappeared contains a gruesome revelation that will destroy the family. Thomas claims he could do nothing to save his family from this terrible evil taking place in the town. Her heart is gripped by horrible fear as this abruptly comes to an end.

These letters, with the voices in her brain, have engraved in Sarah an obsession to find out what exactly happened with the Hawthorne family. In a way, she was thrown back to times when every important moment of her lucid dream was followed by the shadow of recall over that pained, dedicated, fearful family.

That would be it-after further investigation, the echoes she heard were indeed the ghosts of the Hawthorne family, actually trapped in that attic. They approach her, hoping she can alleviate them of their anxiety. The more she investigates this, the stronger and louder the whisper voice becomes until she has an epiphany.

Shocking to discover that the Hawthorne family was involved in a horrible, bloody affair which would have been buried for decades beneath the lives of locals. Sarah finally goes ahead and forwards the evidence to the local authority that has kept the rumors secret for twenty years.

Epilogue: The souls of the Hawthorne family have finally learnt to lay quiet and the whispers aren't as common nowadays.

Maybe it is in this haven of repair, formerly an attic of tension, that the family can finally sleep. The physical and metaphorical links to the past provide Sarah with a feeling of closure as she leaves the house. Although she may have followed rumors, persistence and insight finally allowed her to fill in the missing piece of the jigsaw and let the Hawthorne Family move on from that terrible period of their lives. Sarah finally agreed to retain their memories should everything else they ever knew disappeared. What used to be a house of terror was being slowly molded by the chances of finding truth in its beauty into a living and breathing symbol of courage and endurance that allowed the rumors to start gradually turning into memories of love and loss.