Chapter 1: Of Hapscomb and Bula

Some said that Bula Manor was haunted. Of course, the thought was ridiculous; the house had been built not even 10 years ago, and being that it had been a bonafide mansion being built in the middle of as quaint an Appalachian town as one could possibly find, it definitely attracted the attention of the bored, bemused residents, to the point where watching the gradual construction of the place had soon replaced Uncle Fink's Moon Diner as the de facto activity to do on quiet evenings when it was still cool enough to keep the mosquitos at bay. So how could it have been haunted? Ghosts surely didn't just move into a newly built hotel-sized home on their own accord, and seeing as how no one had ever taken up residence there, that seemed to close the matter. Still, even the most logical, season weathered residents of Hapscomb Kentucky couldn't deny that there was just something funny about ol' Bula; it would have been described as just having an enigmatic aura surrounding the place, had the more earthy townsfolk known what that phrase even meant.

The rumors and stories could most likely be attributed to how and why the manor came into being in the first place. About a decade ago, a young man (his name had been widely spread at one time, but most of the townsfolk couldn't be bothered with remembering the name of their out of town relatives, let alone someone they had and seemingly never would meet) had won some kind of grand lottery jackpot - something in the lines of 500 million dollars, give or take. Though the people of Hapscomb didn't know the man, in their hearts they knew one thing; he must have been one of those eccentric people to have won such a large sum of money and wasted so much of it building a mansion he never used in a town in the middle of nowhere with a population of exactly 937 people. Whether he had been that odd before he won the money was another topic of discussion entirely, though most figured he had at the very least been slightly goofy, money or no.

Perhaps the strangest bit of all is what was whispered within the close knit community. Of how one week after the mansion had been completed, the owner himself actually had made an appearance, albeit an extremely brief one at an obscene hour of the night to visit the local gas station, asking advice on scaling the nearby mountains. That some "reech citeh boyh", as most of the men referred to him as, thought he would even stand a chance in the wilderness outside Hapscomb was not just laughable, but flatly absurd. Surely if this tale was true, the reason he had never been heard of was that he had died within an hour of reaching the town limit. Still, no one could rightly explain that shortly after that story was said to have taken place, odd things could sometimes be heard coming from deep within the forest. Most of the time it was an acoustic guitar, accompanied by a nigh angelic voice singing a song about guessing at numbers and figures. But some residents said that on nights when the moon is full and the air clear, you can hear the cries of "Elemonjonis! Elemonjooooooonis!" And no one, not even the teenaged residents who had home made meth labs in the basement of their parents' house, could explain what that was about.

Regardless of everything, even the hard evidence, most of these stories were seen as just that - stories. Over the years it had just become a matter of fact that there was a mansion on top of the old hill at the edge of town larger than the entirety of Hapscomb's main street that no one had ever lived in; a kind of joke, and an interesting tale to tell around camp fires and pool tables. On this day, however, those stories were about to become an undeniable reality, and nobody was ready. Not even the world.